Spotlight on … Anne Dufourmantelle Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living (2013)

‘Anne Dufourmantelle, a leading French philosopher who advocated risk-taking has drowned after attempting to save two children at a beach on the French Riviera. She entered the water after the children got into difficulty in strong winds at Pampelonne beach, near St Tropez, on Friday. The two children were later rescued by lifeguards and were unharmed. The French culture minister, Françoise Nyssen, said Dufourmantelle was a “great philosopher who helped us live”.

‘Witnesses said Dufourmantelle, 53, was bathing 50m from the two children when an orange warning flag at the beach was changed to red, indicating that bathing was prohibited due to dangerous conditions. She immediately tried to reach them but was carried away in a strong current. Attempts to resuscitate her after she was recovered failed, France 3 reported. It was unclear if she knew the children involved in the incident.

‘Dufourmantelle wrote numerous essays on the importance of taking risks and the need to accept that exposure to any number of possible threats is a part of everyday life, including the book Praise of Risk, published in 2011. “A great philosopher, a psychoanalyst, she helped us to live and think about the world today,” Ms Nyssen wrote on Twitter. Fellow French philosopher Raphaël Enthoven tweeted that he was “sad to learn of the death” of Dufourmantelle, adding that she “spoke so well of dreams”.

‘In a 2015 interview with French daily Liberation, where Dufourmantelle later worked as a columnist, she said that the idea of ​ “absolute security – like ‘zero risk’ – is a fantasy. When there really is a danger that must be faced in order to survive, as for example during the Blitz in London, there is a strong incentive for action, dedication, and surpassing oneself,” she said. “It is said: ‘to risk one’s life’, but perhaps one should say ‘to risk life’, [because] being alive is a risk. Life is metamorphosis. It begins with this risk.”

‘Dufourmantelle had argued that fear can be – and is – used “as a political weapon for the control of freedoms”. She said that any offer to the public of increased protection and security can act to reinforce control and diminish life’s freedoms. Security in any visual sense, such as armed officers on streets during heightened terror alerts or threats, she said, can also generate or increase fear. “To imagine an enemy ready to attack from time to time induces a state of paralysis, a feeling of helplessness which calls for a maternal response – supposedly all protective. Today, we desire this overprotection,” she told Liberation.

‘Dufourmantelle earned a doctoral degree in philosophy from Paris-Sorbonne in 1994, but later went on to practise psychoanalysis. She was awarded the Raymond de Boyer Prize of Sainte-Suzanne for philosophy in 1998.’ — BBC

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Further

Anne Dufourmantelle @ Wikipedia
Anne Dufourmantelle @ goodreads
A Gentle Remainder: Anne Dufourmantelle’s Power of Gentleness
‘Fighting Theory’ by Avital Ronell, Anne Dufourmantelle
‘At the risk of bedazzlement’
Re-reading: Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond
The Risk of Believing
Discovering an interesting philosopher by reading her obituary is a definitive case of mixed feelings.

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Extras

Anne Dufourmantelle. On Risking Life. 2011

[PHILO] Hommage à Anne Dufourmantelle

Anne Dufourmantelle // Parole publique, parole privée

Hommage à Anne Dufourmantelle

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Interview

Why a book dedicated to this subject, gentleness?
We live in an increasingly violent world and gentleness gives us the opportunity to talk about what we miss most today. However, we are constantly being sold it by making something cutesy out of it, a “softener” if I may say so. Gentleness therefore deserves to be restored to its greatness, in particular to its warrior greatness because it is a force of resistance, and even a weapon. And it is also a principle of life. Any beginning is necessarily rooted in gentleness: the birth, the beginning of a love story provoke quite violent shocks that need it. It is what allows a vital principle to endure. Etiologists have discovered that a young animal that has not been sufficiently licked by its mother dies for lack of gentleness.

Is it the prerogative of mothers?
Gentleness is not simply a delicate, pleasant contact, it is recognizing and accepting the other in their fragility. Who is more vulnerable than the very small child? This is why sweetness is often associated with mothers, but it is neither their exclusivity nor their systematic attribute. We know that there are mothers without gentleness, possessive or ambivalent… The prerogative of gentleness comes rather from very early childhood.

Is it an emotion?
In reality, it translates into emotion but, for me, it is an instinct of life, a relationship to the world, it allows emotions and feelings, but it is located upstream and affects the very principle of life as deployment. There is a sweetness in the sun that helps to germinate the seed, in the care that allows the infant to grow. Even in times of war, and without a father or mother, a baby must have encountered sweetness to hold on to life. This is why it calls us more particularly in the first and last moments of existence, and also in the blossoming of love. If a caress is experienced as gentle, beyond the delicate, the pleasant, it is because there was a loving intention to carry this caress.

Yet we often associate gentleness with weakness and gentle people with blessings…
It’s because we don’t want it; the contemporary model is strength and narcissism: “I am ambitious and I succeed in my life…” To recognize oneself as vulnerable is experienced as a weakness. The Eastern tradition has long seen that the first step of strength is the recognition of weakness and vulnerability, this is what is highlighted in the martial arts. Gentleness is a resistance, it can accompany an unfailing determination, we can, much more than we think in general, resist and remain loyal to oneself and one’s values ​​by expressing neither violence, nor irony, nor provocation. Men like Mandela or Gandhi showed it very well. Soft and uncompromising… But, let’s face it, success is not guaranteed, there is a risk in being soft, softness is not comfortable, it includes difficult experiences; however, it saves what is crucial: self-esteem.

You say that your patients suffer from a lack of gentleness, what violates them?
The precariousness of couples and work undermines our contemporaries. We make people work in open space, however, we kill spontaneous solidarity and human warmth in companies. At work, everyone is isolated in their problems and anxieties. At home, the man feels precarious and, because both work, there is hardly any space left to stoke the couple’s living fire: transport, outings, children… The load is heavy, but the couples need beaches of sweetness to strengthen their love. At the same time, we feel the lack of gentleness in all human relationships and at the same time it is not that easy to receive. Perhaps because we already have a lot of trouble showing minimal gentleness towards ourselves. We treat each other so badly, we make life hard. Even people who are very narcissistic in appearance get paid a heavy price. We thirst for sweetness, we claim it from others but, when it is lavished on us, we often don’t even see it!

But you also say that it is frightening and can even provoke violence…
Yes, it is frightening because we have no control over it, we can neither submit it nor force it, even if we can turn it off at force of bullying and non-recognition. But there is this force of opposition of the meek which nothing can overcome. We can imprison them, silence them, but not undermine their sweetness. Someone who does not respond to violence with violence may prove intolerable to the violent.

Isn’t there a risk in being gentle?
Definitely. In order not to fall into sacrifice, it is necessary to make the difference between affliction or renunciation, and joy. Gentleness is lavished and received with joy, otherwise we have crossed the red line.

According to you, a falsified sweetness is at work in our society…
Note the modern terminology: “assessment” for notes, “Pôle emploi” for unemployment agency, “employment safeguard plan” for wave of layoffs. These reversals of meaning are perverse. It’s true, we no longer censor people frontally, but we lead them to do it themselves, to erect their own barriers. Under these conditions, no one can hide any longer. If you are told: it is forbidden to go out, you will find a way to escape. But if you’re told that going out is dangerous for you and your children, by telling you to protect yourself, you’re not going to jump the barrier you’ve built yourself. This is formidable for the freedom and autonomy of beings. We are dealing with a censorship that puts on the clothes of the gentleness it fights.

How can parents protect the sweetness of their children?
Not to kill the gentleness of one’s children is not to kill at all, that is to say to favor life. And favoring life means loving and encouraging their difference, not asking them to be good soldiers all the time (good at school, indifferent to our arguments, socially impeccable…), it means letting them have their secret garden, but sometimes invite you to garden with them… Finally, it’s touching them, kissing them, caressing them, saying sweet words to them, we can never do it enough, because it is the earth on which the most beautiful flowers…

Can we learn to be gentle with ourselves?
The first step is to learn to respect one’s emotions without identifying with them: thus, one “isn’t” sad, one is going through sadness, the nuance is important. And then often, when we feel sad, not only are we the prey of our sadness, but of an inner demand that forbids us to be. It’s inflicting a double penalty on yourself and locking in the emotions. A gentle attitude would be to say to yourself “sadness is going through me”. Not denying it, allowing it, that doesn’t make it disappear immediately, but it puts balm on it, it becomes more bearable.

According to you, how can we reconnect with its sweetness?
We can find areas of softness and let them grow in ourselves, of course. At first, it may even hurt. When you’ve spent your life defending yourself against attacks by anesthetizing yourself, when you’ve gotten used to feeling nothing, gentleness is a shock! But yes, it is conquered and worked on. Reconnecting with her may first mean not being afraid of her sensitivity, of her body, listening to her dreams and remembering them, welcoming her emotions, whether positive or negative. Listen to your intuition, encourage it as much as possible. It is also to promote understanding in both senses of the word: listening and agreement.

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Book

Anne Dufourmantelle Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living
Fordham University Press

‘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.

‘Dufourmantelle, a major French philosopher and as a psychoanalyst, recently died while trying to rescue children at the beach, and her death has received an extraordinary outpouring of grief in both the Anglophone and Francophone media.’ — Fordham University Press

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, but I also don’t want to turn into a purist or something. Emojis certainly can be literary devices and add nuance or comedy or something. Witness the escorts’ usage. But, yeah, I keep wanting to at least start with the idea that the words themselves should do all the work. I even stopped letting myself using italicised words in my novels after the first few. I remember some younger writer … Tao Lin (?) … was trying to write a novel using only emojis, but I don’t think he/she/they ever managed to do it. I’ll take you to that restaurant. And order you three of them because, like I said, they’re not big enough (for me). The deadline is next Monday. Of course the unnameable has been trying to wiggle out if it because he hasn’t done his job (even remotely), but we’re not letting him. Hence, the ugliness I referenced. Anyway, hopefully the boring, exhausting fundraising phase will be over on Monday, for better or worse. Go, songbird love! Love making it so that when I search for things for my blog posts attaching the word ‘weird’ to whatever search term I’m using – which surprisingly does a pretty good job of weeding out the boring stuff — I don’t wind up with hundreds of pictures of Weird Al Jankovic because, at the moment, I do, G. ** Misanthrope, I’ve heard that. Maybe she’s also a conceptual artist and tasteless food is her art work, did you ever think about that? My mom’s pineapple upside down cake had way, way, way too much brown sugar in it. I think that was its fatal mistake. Well, you deserve a free week and you had sure better make the most of it. Think big. Think extravagant. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too. That was a good find. Hence its status as the post’s closer. I’m glad you’re holding up and making the progress you need, pal. Any estimate on your actual move-in date? Have you ordered the champagne yet? ** Tosh Berman, Interesting. I wonder what she’s up to? She seems to have totally bailed on Facebook, no doubt for Insta like almost all the other cool kids. ** David Ehrenstein, As you no doubt know by now, he actually didn’t die, but it seems like he’s at the door. The sadder RIP for me in David Warner. So great. And so great in ‘Providence’ which none of the memorialisers I’ve seen have even mentioned. ** John Newton, Hi, John. Oh, I have no doubt you will. I don’t believe in ghosts either but they’re such a terrific construct. Capable of conveying multiple tones. Their visualisation is a guaranteed people pleaser. Good stuff. Mm, that ghost story of John’s does sound familiar. I always want to like fruit based cakes, but I rarely do unless it’s banana which is a fruit but doesn’t seem like it should count. Plantains too. I like fruit pies, though. Boysenberry pie, yum. Laura Albert was just the most horrible possible human being and still is as far as I can tell. I used to read Anything That Moves. I forgot all about it. Big rest of the week to you too, sir. ** Robert, Hi, Robert! Oh, cool, I especially liked Ghost City too. I was hoping someone would mention it. I’m always interested to know why people who are scared by horror movies are. I mean apart from the carefully calculated jump-scare moments that are guaranteed to startle. So, I guess I’m asking if you can say why something that you know is fictional scares you. Do you immediately imagine the fiction taking over reality or something? Or … I don’t know. But I never get scared by horror, I’m weird. Anyway, it’s probably an impossible question there, sorry. Going to see visual art is kind of the main thing I do, or the main entertainment-based thing I do. Going to galleries and stuff. So I think your plan is a good one. And I say feel free to feel superior to the people who breeze by art works ‘cos they’re the ones who are losing out. See anything that really stayed with you? I’m okay, thanks. Hella Wedneasday to ya! ** Okay. I’m not sure how well Anne Dufourmantelle is known outside of France, but she was a very interesting thinker and writer, and, speaking as someone who knew her personally, a highly impressive person. So I’m spotlighting one of her books in hopes you’ll feel intrigued enough to investigate it/her today. See you tomorrow.