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Power of gentleness : meditations on the risk of living / Anne Dufourmantelle ; translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé ; foreword by Catherine Malabou.
Van Pelt Library BF575.T43 D8413 2018
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Dufourmantelle, Anne, author.
- Standardized Title:
- Puissance de la douceur. English
- Language:
- English
- French
- Subjects (All):
- Tenderness (Psychology).
- Passivity (Psychology).
- Physical Description:
- xxii, 112 pages ; 20 cm
- Edition:
- First edition.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Fordham University Press, 2018.
- Summary:
- 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, 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. Across Western and Eastern religion, philosophy, literature, and art, gentleness is marked by the complexities and ambivalences characteristic of that which we experience through the senses. Yet 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, sealing 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," 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. Book jacket.
- Contents:
- Approach 5
- Origins 8
- Animality 11
- Taking Care 12
- Intelligence 14
- Potential 17
- The Sensory Celebration (I) 20
- Sales Pitch 24
- Language Sources 27
- Justice and Forgiveness 32
- East 36
- A Silent Transformation 38
- Feeling and Sensibility 41
- The Symbolic Force of Gentleness 43
- Free Form 46
- Pure Gentleness? 48
- Patrolling 53
- Sensory Celebration (II) 55
- Counterfeits 58
- Exhaustion 61
- Penumbra 63
- "Master and Man," by Tolstoy 65
- The Sensory Celebration (III) 67
- Sublimation 70
- Cruelties 72
- In Hell 75
- Listening 78
- Trauma and Creation 85
- Beyond the Confines 87
- Clandestine Gentleness 88
- The Sensory Celebration (IV) 91
- Childhood 95
- Gentleness of Melancholy 97
- Dolce Vita 100
- A Gentle Revolution 103.
- Notes:
- Originally published in French by Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2013.
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [107]-110) and index.
- ISBN:
- 9780823279586
- 0823279588
- 9780823279609
- 082327960X
- OCLC:
- 1002297692
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