Bracha Ettinger: Compassion and Com-passion
I will try to draw the field in which compassion can work. It is surely not the political field of forces. I agree with you that we can't talk on compassion within the context of a nation or a state. I too believe that "the entrance of the term compassion into the mainstream discourse is a neutralizing shibboleth". However, even though every concept can be used by the stronger for political and ideological manipulations, compassion itself is not inherently political and ideological. It is for that reason that to pretend compassion in the name of a nation or a state or even in the name of a community has no meaning, it is therefore a manipulative step. However, Compassion is a term that politicians can (and do) abuse in the same way that they can abuse whatever serves their purpose. I can't stop any politician from using this term, but this is not going to stop me from practicing and articulating compassion.
Compassion is intrapsychic, subjective and transsubjective. It works its way, like art does, by fine attunements that evade the political systems. When I say that the originry event of peace is compassion I address a kind of fragilizing subjective openness which is also a resistance, that the political level can't handle or reach by definition, though there is hope that it will take it into consideration at the long run, and always indirectly.
I am suggesting to articulate the originary com-passion, co-response-ability and wit(h)nessing in and by which pre-subjective primary compassion is manifested, and I start with the becoming-subject, the pre-subject and the partial-subject as we can understand them within the context of psychoanalysis--as coemerging with the mother, or even the archaic m/Other or m/Othernal figure. The pre-subject's compassion and fascinance informs its own emergence with-in a co-birthing (co-naissance) of trans-subjective entities—composed of I(s) and non-I(s)—by way of affective and trans-sensed knowledge. I am talking on compassion as growing within a transsubjective sphere revealed in inter-subjective relationships. It concerns webs of few each time, what I named “severality” to differentiate it from “multiplicity”. It evades “community”, “nations” and “states”. Trans-subjective co-response-ability, inaugurated by and in the primordial matrixial encounter-event—where pre-maternal hospitality, empathy and responsibility encounters prenatal pre-mature response-ability, compassion and fascinance—and inaugurated at the same time also by and in interconnectedness in self-relinquishment and wit(h)nessing, is a primary psycho-aesthetical and psycho-ethical basis upon which creativity and ethical potentiality can evolve all throughout life with-in new matrixial clusters (and not “nations” which are not matrixial custers or webs by definition). The matrixial is a signifier of feminine ethics and feminine aesthetics. My feel-knowing, that prematernal/presubjective experience of encounter-event, is being burnt upon, diluted inside, and is establishing a dimension of subjectivity-as-encounter, had been transmuted from an intimate enigma onto a metapsychological perspective through the ethical working-through of therapy and the aesthetical working-through of painting. The artistic core is a burnt. The experiencing of the artistic core etches the languishing subjectivity.Shareability in a space of the several entails what I named besidedness. In the matrixial sphere, besidedness, like fading-in-transformation, is a metramorphic unconscious mechanism. Besidedness is experienced and registered before substitution and split appear and also beside them. If depressive integration is a dissolving of a split, the joy and sorrow of besidedness is folded within differentiating-in-coemergence and co-fading, before and alongside split and substitution, before and alongside integration. In working-through our besidedness and recognizing it, we are becoming more vulnerable yet we are re-paving a path to the primary compassion. Re-co-birth can occur in hospitality and generosity triggered within com-passion.
I hope that at least to have made clear what is the human sphere I intend by the eventing of compassion and the encounter-event of com-passion. In the same way that we don't reject "love" simply because politicians talk in the name of love, and we don't stop loving our children because politicians talk in the name of "loving the children" , a clear difference will be made, at least in this discussion group, between the idea of compassion and the neutralizing politically abusive use of the term "compassion".
> Bracha Ettinger