Cheap empathy Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask

How can we distinguish genuine empathy from its superficial variants? Understanding this difference necessitates a conceptual analysis. Furthermore, fostering true empathy in a society awash with its diluted versions challenges practices such as art and literature, whereby individuals interconnect meaningfully. In this chapter, I shall present a distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ empathy and identify ‘cheapened’ empathy. I then show how these distinct types are manifested in Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask, in an exploration of the viability of thick connections when neoliberalism systematically erodes their conditions of possibility. As I expect other chapters in this volume to define empathy, I shall confine myself to delineating a broad sketch. Empathy may manifest as a response involving care, pity or compassion. Consequently, the following discussion will include related concepts like sympathy, identification, fellow-feeling, commiseration and compassion. While these are not identical or coextensive with empathy, for this chapter’s purpose, their overlap with empathy is sufficiently substantial to justify employing them interchangeably. The overlap consists in all such concepts representing feeling, thinking or acting for and with another. Compassion, commiseration and pity target suffering; empathy and identification may also embrace joy. Compassion often aims to alleviate suffering; pity might remain a thought (Blum 1994: 178; Snow 1991; Crisp 2008). Empathy involves emotional participation, potentially alongside cognitive engagement or outright advocacy for an other. Identification can mean incorporating another’s well-being into part of one’s own identity, or perceiving another’s state as a possible experience for oneself (Zamir 2020: 42). Responses to ‘empathy claims’ are self-revealing and self-defining. Empathy may be categorized as ‘thick’ or ‘thin’, with each type prone to being trivialized. ‘Thick’ empathy demands a lasting engagement, feels relational (i.e. part of a relationship) and evolves in its depth: feeling for/with gravitates towards acting for/with, and/or thinking for/with. It preserves the agency of those involved by refusing to confine empathic responses to formulas. In contrast, ‘thin’ empathy is temporally brief, limited in scope and does not commit to enduring engagement. What thin empathy invitations solicit is probably generic and not open to individualization. Though restricted, thin empathy is not inherently insincere. Examples include expressing pain before a nurse in order to ask for her assistance by eliciting her empathy or collecting donations for disaster relief….