AAP2010 Abstracts
Use the form below to search abstracts by Author, Institue or Keyword.
| Title | Dr |
| First Name | Joanne |
| Surname | Faulkner |
| Institution | University of New South Wales |
| Title of Paper | Compassion and the Lure of Innocence: Vulnerability in "Bringing Them Home" |
| Select a Stream | European Philosophy |
| Abstract | This paper re-examines the political appeal to compassion through the vista of the "Bringing Them Home" report on removed Australian Aboriginal children. By drawing on the personal testimony of members of the stolen generations, the report relied upon a 'politics of compassion' — in particular, readers’ identification with survivors of removal was supposed to have set a new stage for socio-political relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The paper challenges the idea that compassion is inevitably socially beneficent, however, by way of a confrontation between Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s estimation of compassion as the most natural social virtue, and the Marquis de Sade’s more pessimistic account of the social significance of compassion and pity as a mode of enjoyment of others’ suffering (or what Jacques Lacan calls ‘jouissance’). The paper explores the idea that the rhetorical appeal to victims' suffering can, rather, be a precursor to further violation, by relating political response to the "Bringing Them Home" report to the narrative structure of de Sade’s "Justine, Or Good Conduct Well Chastised." |
