The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain [Paperback]

Through readings of novels, medical case studies, travelers' reports, photographs, and paintings,The Hypothetical Mandarinshows that in the West the connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called China. Eric Hayot, through keen interpretations of myriad art forms and nonfictional writings, reveals how Western responses to Chinese pain go to the heart of the relationship between language and the body, the social and philosophical experience of modernity, and the definition of a universal human subject. In short, this analysis reveals how four terms--sympathy, suffering, economic exchange, and representational exchange--establish the network that frames the historical discourse on China, sympathy, and modernity. It is a book that opens new possibilities for thinking about the West's relationship to China, past and present, and that establishes a new philosophical vantage from which to consider the question of empathy.Why has the West for so long and in so many different ways expressed the idea that the Chinese have a special relationship to cruelty and to physical pain? What can the history of that idea and its expressions teach us about the politics of the West's contemporary relation to China? And what does it tell us about the philosophy of modernity?The Hypothetical Mandarinis, in some sense, a history of the Western imagination. It is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, of globalization, of human rights, and of the idea of the modern. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the former would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac'sLe Pere Goriot(1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. Hayots wide-ranging discussion draws on lS&