Luc Boltanski: Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics (1993/1999)

“Distant Suffering examines the moral and political implications for a spectator of the distant suffering of others as presented through the media. What are the morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering on television, for example, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place? Luc Boltanski argues that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it. Developing ideas in Adam Smith’s moral theory, he examines three rhetorical ‘topics’ available for the expression of the spectator’s response to suffering: the topics of denunciation and of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. The book concludes with a discussion of a ‘crisis of pity’ in relation to modern forms of humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves an emphasis and focus on present suffering.”

Keywords and phrases
Bernard Kouchner, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Marxism, Adam Smith, Hannah Arendt, However, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, mediatisation, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Genealogy of Morality, Marquis de Sade, spectator, Pierre Favre, sentimental literature, Paris, USSR

Originally published in French as La Souffrance à Distance by Editions Métailié, 1993

Translated by Graham D. Burchell
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1999
ISBN 0521659531, 9780521659536
246 pages

Publisher

EPUB (updated on 2019-5-15)