Power of Gentleness

Meditations on the Risk of Living

Anne Dufourmantelle, Katherine Payne, Vincent Sallé, Katherine Payne, Vincent Sallé

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780823279609
  9780823279586
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823279616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Gentleness is an enigma. Taken up in a double movement of welcoming and giving, it appears on the threshold of passages signed off by birth and death. Because it has its degrees of intensity, because it is a symbolic force, and because it has a transformative ability over things and beings, it is a power. The simplicity of gentleness is misleading. It is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, become central to both ethics and politics. Gentleness is a force of secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients called potentiality.In our day, gentleness is sold to us under its related form of diluted 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 to give the human beings that it crushes "gently, " it does in the name of the highest values: happiness, truth, security.From listening to those who come to me and confide their despair, I have heard it expressed in every lived experience. I have felt its force of resistance and its intangible magic. In mediating its relation to the world, it appears that its intelligence carries life, saves and amplifies it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Philosophy in Furs
• Translators’ Note
• Half Title
• Introduction
• Approach
• Origins
• Animality
• Taking Care
• Intelligence
• Potential
• The Sensory Celebration (I)
• Sales Pitch
• Language Sources
• Justice and Forgiveness
• East
• A Silent Transformation
• Feeling and Sensibility
• The Symbolic Force of Gentleness
• Free Form
• Pure Gentleness?
• Patrolling
• Sensory Celebration (II)
• Counterfeits
• Exhaustion
• Penumbra
• “Master and Man,” by Tolstoy
• The Sensory Celebration (III)
• Sublimation
• Cruelties
• In Hell
• Listening
• Trauma and Creation
• Beyond the Confines
• Clandestine Gentleness
• The Sensory Celebration (IV)
• Childhood
• Gentleness of Melancholy
• Dolce Vita
• A Gentle Revolution
• Notes
• Index