(Ebook) Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle, Katherine Payne (translation), Vincent Sallé (translation), Catherine Malabou (foreword) ISBN 9780823279623, 0823279626

(Ebook) Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle, Katherine Payne (translation), Vincent Sallé (translation), Catherine Malabou (foreword) ISBN 9780823279623, 0823279626

Key moments of our lives, especially at the beginning & 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 & politics. In this powerful rethinking by a renowned philosopher & 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 & Christian myth, in the philosophical & religious traditions of China & India, & across Western literature & art, gentleness occurs in moments of tenderness such as birth, care, & mutual love, but also where least expected, amid danger, humiliation, & cruelty. Gentleness, Dufourmantelle shows, is marked above all by our early human connections to the physical world, uncovered & 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 & are persuaded to participate in our era’s three divinities: efficiency, speed, & 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 & the illusion of total transparency, Dufourmantelle celebrates the uncompromising gentleness discovered by Gandhi & other revolutionaries. At the same time, within the despair confided by her patients, she traces the force of resistance