ABSTRACT
If compassion involves a kind of ‘co-suffering’ with those who suffer, it follows that compassion can only be experienced singularly and ‘in the flesh’ (Arendt 1973: 85). In feeling the passion of compassion, not unlike feeling the passion of love, there is little distance between the sufferer and the co-sufferer and consequently, in the case of compassion, its risky, contagious, enfleshed proximity cannot operate politically in the ‘real’ world. Yet what I will explore in this chapter is how we might understand how compassion is exemplary of a risky set of practices associated with an agonistic and affective social imaginary and which operates in an indirect political and ethical way. This affective social imaginary is contained in, but not synonymous with nor antagonistic to, a rights-respecting liberal cosmopolitan imaginary. In this regard, we might understand that a cosmopolitan liberal imaginary is itself agonistically composed of ethicalities, which on the one hand rely on the distancing techniques of practical and purposive reason and on the other on those which are risky and performatively affective. This chapter is a consideration of this agon.
