Agents of empathy convert sympathy to empathy. Sympathy is a distant identification; empathy is intimate. To move from sympathy to empathy requires a shift from what philosopher Avishai Margalit calls morality, or a general sense of distress at the remote suffering of others you don’t know personally, to ethics, or a call to action in response to injustice and the suffering of those whose faces you see and live with in a direct and immediate sense. To transform a large tableau of misery to an intimate portrait of suffering is the work of agents of empathy, who enable us to move from morality at a safe distance to ethics, understood as an urgent call to direct action in the here and now.
This research project aims to describe the work of agents of empathy in the period of the Second World War as a form of para-politics, the work of an alliance of the stateless and those who join with them in a common struggle. Together they excavate a space of political action occupied by those who have no rights and yet, who perform the rights denied them. Together they crystallize freedom.