Walt Whitman, Jane Bennett, and the Paradox of Antagonistic Sympathy

• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Author: Romand Coles
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912916656458
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium: Walt Whitman (The 2015 Maxwell Lecture)

Political Research Quarterly

2016, Vol. 69(3) 621 –625

© 2016 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912916656458

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Mini-Symposium: Walt Whitman (The 2015 Maxwell Lecture)

In the “Whitman’s Sympathies,” Jane Bennett subtly and

wonderfully illuminates multiple “figures” in Whitman’s

prophetic ecology of sympathies: from trans-body experi-

ences of suffering that move like “atmospheric currents”

across space and difference, to physical tendencies toward

“sympathetic transfers” lodged in body parts like unborn

fetuses in the brain, to the calming impartial solarian accep-

tance of nature, to the pleasure-centric dissolution bodies

undergo in the “erotic currents” through which “all matter,

achingly attracts other matter,” to the “underground cur-

rent” of an indifferent gravitational “it moving inside the I.”

With him, she senses and cultivates a world coursing with

“currents of affectivity” that are “vital forces” softly, par-

tially, yet persistently, engendering affinities that are no

small source of “optimism for the future of humankind.”1

Bennett’s work on sympathy is compelling and impor-

tant in the face of planetary ecological catastrophe and

neoliberal assaults on the most elemental aspects of

democracy. Her speculative ontology leans us toward

possibilities for generating assemblages within selves

and among selves, nonhumans, and things that might

enhance movements of ecological democracy. Bennett

cautions against asking too much of sympathy and seeks,

rather, to make a “modest contribution” that she acknowl-

edges “may not offer enough in time.”2

Bennett’s modesty is radical, insofar as those who ignore

the associated practices of sympathetic “doting”—the mod-

est “slow sensing” that engenders expansive vitality—are

unlikely to become bearers of transformative vision and

vital political possibilities.3 With her, I too seek to become a

studied doter, receiving, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987,

292) put it, the “little detail that starts to swell and carries

you off” and “provokes the extension of a sympathy, the

stretching of a passion beyond a given identitarian

boundary.”

In this spirit, as I dote on Whitman’s poetic words of

and about sympathy, I am carried beyond an identitarian

boundary—between sympathy and antipathy—that lin-

gers in Bennett’s essay and her broader work involving

Whitman. Stretched thus, I sense possibilities that call me

to further “test the limits” of sympathy in ways that fore-

ground and amplify its immanent relations with opposi-

tional forces she takes to be other than and outside of the

vitality of sympathetic currents. If we explore ways to

recuperate these forces as indispensable elements in and

for the vitality of the ecology of sympathies, we will, I

suspect, move toward an even more vibrant speculative

ontology, perhaps more likely to conjure up “enough in

656458PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916656458Political Research QuarterlyColes

research-article2016

1Australian Catholic University, North Sydney, Australia

Corresponding Author:

Romand Coles, Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic

University, Level 2, 7 Mount Street, North Sydney, NSW 2060,

Australia.

Email: romand.coles@acu.edu.au

Walt Whitman, Jane Bennett, and the

Paradox of Antagonistic Sympathy

Romand Coles1

Abstract

This essay critically engages ontological, rhetorical, ethical, and political themes pertinent to the concept of “sympathy”

as it appears in the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman and Jane Bennett’s writing on him. I suggest that antagonism

is immanent in the “ecology of sympathies” that Bennett theorizes, and that this partly explains why one frequently

finds antagonistic articulations deeply intertwined with Whitman’s most sympathetic expressions. I propose that we

use the paradoxical—even oxymoronic sounding—trope antagonistic sympathy to evoke this immanent relationship

between affiliative and antagonistic flows, energies, and conditions for ethical and political cultivation. The concept of

antagonistic sympathy helps us better understand Whitman, the ethical and political qualities, pulls, and implications

of sympathy, and it enables us to theorize entanglements of sympathy and antagonism in ways that avoid the worst

tendencies of each when isolated from the other. Antagonistic sympathy, I argue, is indispensable for radical democratic

and ecological transformation in a time of rapidly intensifying planetary ecological catastrophe.

Keywords

sympathy, antagonism, democracy, ecology, Whitman, Bennett