The impossibility of sympathy

Abstract

This article questions the status of sympathy in eighteenth century studies. It argues that sympathy can be seen as an economy of two persistent idealizations: the untouchable—that touches everything. Tracing the genealogy of fellow feeling as a militant Puritan concept of exclusion that is still marked by its theological and political past, the sympathy advocated by Hutcheson, Hume and Smith appears as an idealization confronted by its own impossibility. The eighteenth century is a century in search of an absent and insufficient sympathy, a sympathy that is already preoccupied with its own limitations and excesses: a meta-discourse on sympathy still eludes us.