I Feel Your Pain: Empathy and the Grotesque

Mikhail Bakhtin defines the grotesque body as unfinished, perpetually changing and rough and one which is opposed to the classical body which is finished, complete, smooth and achieved. At the heart of the grotesque is an unstable and always shifting growth defying categorization which threatens anything that is fixed, stable, permanent or ideal. The logic of hybridity serves in many ways as a twin to the possibilities of contestation present within the grotesque.

Like the grotesque, which serves as perpetual agitation or growth, empathy throws fixed boundaries which constitute the self and other into crisis. Empathy is understood as understanding and entering into another's feelings; being able to experience the interior emotions of another person as if they were your own. Recent discoveries of Mirror Neuron Systems have been linked to a biological basis for empathy. Dr. Vittorio Gallese from a paper titled, “Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron System and its Role in Interpersonal Relations” writes about the subject of a study that experiences disgust and then witnesses its simulation through the facial mimicry of another. The other’s emotion is understood by means of an embodied simulation producing a shared body state. This is thought to be achieved through a shared neural mechanism between observer and observed and enables a direct experiential understanding. Moving from science to science fiction, another model of empathy was articulated by the writer Octavia Butler through a protagonist that suffers from the affliction of “hyper-empathy” in her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talent. This character directly experiences the pain and pleasure of another and is frequently incapacitated by the violence unfolding around her. Through the ability or affliction of hyper-empathy, she gains insight into others through a process that threatens the limits of her self.

If the Grotesque can be understood as the center of hybridity, as a space which defies categorization and has the ability to address that which is abject, empathy overlaps it and is understood as exceeding the physical limits of the body and becomes the basis for experiential modes of communication and knowledge production such as intuition and mind reading. Empathy then offers a possibility of knowing without adhering to physical limits and boundaries.