Excerpts from a work-in-progress

Presented July 6, 2025 at the Haubrok Foundation in Berlin in the framework of the series “Consider Listening”—with Mila Panić, Belia Zanna Geetha Brückner, and Hannah Kruse of the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt

[. . .] The term “empathy” [describes] the physiological trait by which we experience the suffering of others through the same subgroups of neurons firing in the brains of those afflicted—when our bodies actually feel a physical echo of another person’s pain—while “compassion” becomes a conscious moral decision on the part of the observer. Either way, a moment seems to arrive when [. . .] a fear for [our] own fate replaces concern for those experiencing danger directly, when [. . .] a desire to help eventually gives way to an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, and eventually boredom and cynicism. As Susan Sontag observed in Regarding the Pain of Others, “compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Although our horror at distressing events fed to us through the media diminishes over time, and we find ourselves grappling with the moral dimensions of this phenomenon, for the individuals directly affected, the reality of what is happening to them remains, independently of our perception—or the recognition of our own implication in the injustice being perpetrated on them—just as immediate, dire, and deserving of our urgent attention and action. As Sontag explains, we need “to [reflect] on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering [. . .].”

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[. . .] In Problems of Moral Philosophy [. . .], Adorno asks “how the broader operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.” [His] reasoning arrives at the necessity of resistance: “Even the simplest demand for integrity and decency must necessarily lead almost everyone to protest.” This includes the necessity of saying no to “those parts of us that are tempted to join in” and become complicit. But what can this “no” consist in? What will it cost us, and who will hear it?

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[. . .] Pain is a private experience that happens within an individual body; it is internal and essentially invisible. As much as we might commiserate, we cannot “share” another’s pain; we can merely witness the behavior it induces, inquire into the nature of the pain, and try to help alleviate it.

A medical diagnosis depends on a precise description. Is the pain aching, searing, shooting? Does it prick, stab, sting, or throb—or does it gnaw, tingle, cramp, burn? Is it sharp or dull? Asked to evaluate the intensity of their pain on a scale of one to ten, patients often find themselves at a loss. It hurts, they say. It’s unbearable. Pain is one of the least communicable human experiences.

Pain is also a weapon: power is asserted through violence, in other words, through causing pain. War’s objective is to shoot, burn, blast, and otherwise annihilate human flesh and to damage or destroy objects human beings regard as extensions of themselves: their homes, their possessions, photographs of loved ones, the buildings they live in, their religious and cultural institutions—and often entire cities, along with the history preserved in their architecture, in their libraries, museums, archives. War aims to not merely seize territory and take control, but to induce pain—and to make that pain visible to demoralize its victims, rob them of their voice, their individuality, their humanity.

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[. . .] The child, pillow in hand, slips out of bed and unlatches the door to the outside. In a state of deep sleep, it will curl up somewhere in a corner and only wake up the next morning, with no memory of its nocturnal wanderings. Modern psychology views sleepwalking in children as a symptom of trauma or abuse; Sigmund Freud postulated that the adult sleepwalker is trying to find his or her way back home, to the original bed of childhood. But how much of his theory applies when we diagnose an entire society as somnambulant [. . .]?

Like Lady Macbeth, whose troubled conscience despaired over her crimes and the ineradicable odor of blood on her hands and who finally confessed to murder while sleepwalking, it appears that certain realities can only be experienced in a fugue state. For we, too, have blood on our hands; we find ways to rationalize our culpability in a political order that has done and continues to do extraordinary violence, but our reasoning doesn’t hold and we are never fully convinced of our blamelessness. “Out, damned spot!” we cry when our psyche can no longer bear the stain of its own contradictions. Even when power protects us and we need not fear being called to account, guilt seeks its inevitable outlet.

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[. . .] when something makes us nauseous [. . .], we feel sick, compelled to vomit, to prophylactically expel the offending substance from our bodies. In evolutionary terms, disgust is thought to have developed as a physiological reflex to protect the organism against the dangers of disease and contamination. We gag at the sight of things that disgust us, are overcome with revulsion; we recoil from them, physically distance ourselves, take care not to touch the odious, rotten, infectious thing. [. . .]

[But] what do we do when the sources of disgust multiply—how do we interact with the world when disgust overwhelms us, when it transforms into moral horror? There is a point of oversaturation when boundaries blur and the self is indistinguishable from the things that cause it revulsion: when disgust and contempt turn inward and become internalized, when the self absorbs and transforms them into shame and guilt; when it understands, with unmistakable clarity, that it is capable of the very things it so reviles.