Empathic Static: Empathy and Conflict, with Simon Baron-Cohen and Virginie Despentes

The concept of ‘empathy’ has attracted a great deal of interest in recent decades, across academic disciplines as well as the broader public sphere, with many identifying in this human capacity the key to a more peaceful future. This article focuses in its first half on one such vision of empathy, proposed by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (2011), which argues for and celebrates empathy’s ability to resolve conflict. I here put pressure on this idea, and in the second half, through a close reading of a chapter in Virginie Despentes’s recent Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015–17), suggest ways in which the experience of empathy might be rife with interference, and might be understood as both conflicted (tearing in opposing directions) and conflictual (staking in and willing on conflict).