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This paper was accepted for publication in the journal New Formations and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:89/90.09.2016. ; This article questions the assumption that empathy is a positive, politically beneficial emotion through two examples of poetry about deaths with sensitive political dimensions. I begin by returning to the origins of 'empathy' in English, as written about by Vernon Lee in the earlytwentieth-century, to show how far the word has drifted from Lee's sense of it as an embodied aesthetic response to an artwork. Rob Halpern's book of poems Common Room refuses imaginative empathy with its subject, a dead Guantanamo Bay detainee, and yet, I show, surprisingly aligns with Lee's sense of empathy through the author's erotic and imaginative response to the man's autopsy report. What results in this revivification of Lee's empathy is a violation of the religious beliefs of the detainee. In contrast, Andrea Brady's poem 'Song for Florida 2' takes up a more contemporary sense of empathy in its focus upon the killing of the unarmed teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Brady's poem presents several possibilities for empathising with Martin's mother - by imagining being her, or imagining similarly losing a son - but eventually draws back from this as a limit. Empathy here risks erasing the specificity of the racialized context which led to Martin's unjust death. The white poet's son cannot 'replace', even imaginatively, the black mother's son without effacing the difference which saw Martin targeted in the first place. Brady's poem, I argue, marks how empathy can violate through supplanting the grief and political context for that grief of the person to whom empathy is extended. What is needed instead of empathy is a commitment to political change.

Empathie ist zum Modethema avanciert. Besonders im Bereich des Designs und des Managements wird sie zunehmend als professionelle Strategie und gleichzeitig moralische Kompetenz positioniert. Macht Empathie durch Design unsere Arbeitswelt also zu einem besseren Ort? Und was heißt es, Empathie programmatisch im Unternehmen einzuführen? Eva Köppen zeigt die überraschenden Effekte auf, die mit der Einführung von Empathie-geleiteten Arbeitsweisen wie Design Thinking einhergehen. Nicht nur mehr Freiräume, auch Frust, Dissonanzen sowie neue Kontrollstrukturen und Disziplinierungsformen sind die Konsequenzen. Die Autorin denkt die beiden Traditionen der Arbeits- und Emotionssoziologie zusammen, um die Bedeutung von Empathie als eines hoch aktuellen und kontrovers diskutierten Konzepts zu untersuchen. Durch eine Interviewstudie in einem IT-Unternehmen wird offenbart, welche Folgen Empathie-Anforderungen für Mitarbeiter und die Organisation haben. Dabei wird das aktuelle, positiv aufgeladene Bild von Empathie kritisch hinterfragt und die ambivalente Komplexität des Konstrukts aufgezeigt.

When Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and other ethicists of caring draw
the contrast between supposedly masculine and supposedly feminine moral
thinking, they put such things as justice, autonomy, and rights
together under the first rubric and such things as caring,
responsibility for others, and connection together under the second.
This division naturally leaves caring ethicists with the issue of how
to deal with topics such as justice, autonomy, and rights, but it also
leaves defenders of more traditional moral theories (now dubbed
"masculine") with the problem of how to treat (if at all)
the sorts of issues that ethicists of caring raise.

Positioned at the heart of psychology's theory and practice, as well as at the core of the so-called feminist ethic of care, empathy is nevertheless a matter of ambivalence for feminist psychology. This paper describes two symptoms of a failure of advanced Western-style democracies to get empathy right in terms of gender justice: the first is described here as the phenomenon of 'empathism'; the second as the 'female empathy tax'. Difference feminists (in psychology and elsewhere) have advocated a politics of recognition directed towards the celebration of the superiority of female and maternal empathy. Intended to enhance women's status, this is likely to backfire from the point of view of sexual equality unless complemented by a politics of affective redistribution between the sexes. Relinquishing the feminist attachment to the lopsided 'feminization' of empathy, in favour of its 'androgynization' as a fundamental human capacity, allows for the formulation of a post-patriarchal account of empathy.