Power of Gentleness
Meditations on the Risk of Living
by Anne Dufourmantelle
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Pub Date 06 Mar 2018 | Archive Date 31 Jan 2018
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Description
Key moments of our lives, especially at the beginning and end, are marked by gentleness—but the simplicity of that concept is misleading. Gentleness is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of resistance within ethics and politics. In this powerful rethinking by a renowned philosopher and psychoanalyst, whose untimely death captured worldwide attention, gentleness becomes a series of embodied paradoxes: power that is also soft, nobility that is also humble, sweetness that is also intelligent, subtlety that is nevertheless striking, fragility that has the potential to subvert the status quo.
In Greek and Christian myth, in the philosophical and religious traditions of China and India, and across Western literature and art, gentleness occurs in moments of tenderness such as birth, care, and mutual love, but also where least expected, amid danger, humiliation, and cruelty. Gentleness, Dufourmantelle shows, is marked above all by our early human connections to the physical world, uncovered and rediscovered primarily through the senses, with all the ambivalences that entails.
Today, we are most familiar with a gentleness sold to us in the diluted form of mawkishness. This is how we try to evade its subtlety—no longer by fighting it, but by enfeebling it. In the name of our highest values—happiness, truth, security—we enforce “gentle” safeguards against hurt and are persuaded to participate in our era’s three divinities: efficiency, speed, and profitability. But in doing so we seal ourselves off from the life-affirming gamble that a true gentleness affords.
True gentleness entails an ethic of desire. Against a society that crushes human beings “gently” through consumerist logic and the illusion of total transparency, Dufourmantelle celebrates the uncompromising gentleness discovered by Gandhi and other revolutionaries. At the same time, within the despair confided by her patients, she traces the force of resistance and intangible magic that gentleness offers in the lived experience of ordinary women and men who fully embrace the risk of living.
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
Advance Praise
“With rigor and charm, Anne Dufourmantelle breaks in an emergent concept--crucial yet unclassifiable--that has been overlooked by the big guns of philosophical discourse. The notion of gentleness resets the hermeneutics of affect and ontology.“—Avital Ronell, New York University
“A profound philosopher and psychoanalyst.“—The New York Times
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780823279609 |
| PRICE | $22.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 152 |
Featured Reviews
Eva L, Educator
A deep and thought provoking book. Needs to be read slowly, with time to digest the ideas held within.
Y. S. S, Reviewer
Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living is an examination of the nature of kindness as well as its relevance in modern world.
WHO WOULD ENJOY READING IT?
The author's approach to examining kindness is neither overly religious nor philosophical (as I understand it) but anthropological. People with a taste for abstract philosophical thinking combined with tolerance for complex language and thought processes should love this book.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT
Kindness is one of those traits that gets dragged in the mud for being more trouble than its worth. There is a perception that being kind opens you up to being scammed, trampled upon, etc. I am happy to see a book that kicks out this view point and defines what kindness is meant to be and what it's not.
WHAT I DO NOT LIKE
Power of Gentleness is translated from French and, though the translators did a good job, I cannot help but think the book flows better in it's original language. This English version is not an entertaining read - it is clunky and struggles to convey some of its ideas coherently.
MEMORABLE PASSAGE
"Gentleness incites violence because it doesn’t offer any possible foothold on authority. Dostoyevsky, Melville, Hugo, Flaubert, or the Tolstoy of “Master and Man” utilize it as the elusive force that opposes injustice. So much so that those who embody gentleness are condemned in the eyes of men....
"In the symbolic order as in certain martial arts, gentleness can drive back and defeat evil better than any other response. Nothing can force it or commit others to it. In our day, gentleness is sold to us under its diluted form of mawkishness. By infantilizing it our era denies it. This is how we try to overcome the high demands of its subtlety—no longer by fighting it, but by enfeebling it. Language itself is therefore perverted: what our society intends for the human beings that it crushes 'gently,' it does in the name of the highest values: happiness, truth, security.
"If love and joy have essential affinities with gentleness, is it because childhood holds the enigma? Gentleness shares with childhood a kind of natural community but also a power. It is the secret lining, or where the imaginary joins the real in a space that contains its own secret, making us feel an astonishment from which we can never entirely return."
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Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle will be available to buy on all major online book stores around March 2018?
Many thanks to Fordham University Press for review copy.
