Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 47in our attempts to empathize with the protagonist, he points us to its
practical and conceptual limits.
But at this stage in the discussion, it should also be kept in mind
that definitions of empathy are not restricted solely to emotional
engagements. Indeed, for Kathleen Woodward, empathy rests more
on an intellectual rather than an emotional foundation.^53 S u c h a
conception is echoed by Martha Nussbaum, who also emphasizes
what she describes as the cognitive procedures of empathy that are
to be found in the imagination (although it remains somewhat elu-
sive how this can be entirely separated from “the emotions”), argu-
ing that it necessitates an “ability to imagine what it is like to be
in [another] person’s place.”^54 Following these arguments, we could
conclude that a more appropriate (if effective) method to gain an
understanding of the character is through an intellectual strategy
that reconciles an intimate intellectual appreciation of the historical
context in which she lives, with all its cultural, epistemological and
political peculiarities, with an attentive examination of the way her
narrative illuminates a struggle within that historical context. Once
again, such a vision of subjectivity is aided by Macherey’s frame-
work, which observes individuality during those moments of “rup-
ture” within a social and historical matrix. Its calls for a measured,
self-reflexive form of empathy also dovetail with the critical empa-
thy outlined in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity , in which the sub-
ject faces the “infinite” gulf between self and Other but nonetheless
attempts to bridge the divide. For Levinas, this constitutes a genu-
ine and important empathic experience because the self transcends
the barriers that separate it from the Other.^55 More specifically, this
demands the cultivation of a critical and, crucially, self-conscious
mode of viewing self and Other.
However, linguistic and epistemic barriers are not the only
obstacles to empathy in the novel. Phillips also takes pains to illus-
trate the fact that history itself is not immediately “accessible” in
an empirical sense but is always and necessarily mediated by texts
with particular semiotic systems, ethical codes, and cultural priori-
ties (an aspect of the novel that becomes clearer when its intertextual
quality is examined). It is not enough, Phillips appears to tell us, to
say “know” history and you will “know” the individual who suffers