Power of Gentleness
Books | Philosophy / Mind & Body
Anne Dufourmantelle
Gentleness is an enigma. Taken up in a double movement of welcoming and giving, it appears on the threshold of passages signed off by birth and death. Because it has its degrees of intensity, because it is a symbolic force, and because it has a transformative ability over things and beings, it is a power. The simplicity of gentleness is misleading. It is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, become central to both ethics and politics. Gentleness is a force of secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients called potentiality.In our day, gentleness is sold to us under its related form of diluted mawkishness. By infantilizing it our era denies it. This is how we try to overcome the high demands of its subtlety—no longer by fighting it, but by enfeebling it. Language itself is therefore perverted: what our society intends to give the human beings that it crushes “gently,” it does in the name of the highest values: happiness, truth, security.From listening to those who come to me and confide their despair, I have heard it expressed in every lived experience. I have felt its force of resistance and its intangible magic. In mediating its relation to the world, it appears that its intelligence carries life, saves and amplifies it.
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Author
Anne Dufourmantelle
Pages
152
Publisher
Fordham Univ Press
Published Date
2018-03-06
ISBN
0823279618 9780823279616
Community ReviewsSee all
"It's crazy to think that it took me nearly two years to finish such a short book.<br/><br/>Power of Gentleness reads like a long poem. Especially in her chapters titled "The Sensory Celebration", Dufourmantelle's words read like those quiet, slow scenes in film that force you to take a look at the scenery. It's because of this that I spent of lot of time daydreaming about her words instead of continuing to read them. The highlights I have my copy are endless.<br/><br/>My only gripes with this book is that it sometimes feels like a long ramble in which the conclusion is circular. I suspect it may have to do with this book being translated from French to English. Translations can sometimes lack in conveying exact meaning. <br/><br/>Dufourmantelle forces you to expand your understanding gentleness. By the end I went from seeing gentleness as just a descriptor but to an almost physical force in my life with many faces. On the topic of taking care [of others] she writes about how those who take care of premature babies know the power of gentleness and then she later asks "is gentleness sufficient to heal?" That whole passage was so profound to me because it left me with the idea that maybe it is not only the medicine itself that heals the patient, but also the gentleness in which the caregiver may administer it. <br/>In a later chapter, the author says that the lack of gentleness is endemic and it has created a form of isolation as potent as a curse. After reading and understanding what Dufourmantelle defines as gentleness, its lack in the world becomes obvious. How fast-paced we are, how hyper-independent and individualistic we are, how unempathetic we've become. Gentleness, like vulnerability, requires one to wear their heart on their sleeve. However, the benefit to this risk is that it tells the people around us that we are open to community, to love, and to care. I believe this is the risk of living she writes about. <br/><br/>As with the rest of her philosophical writing, Anne Dufourmantelle emphasizes the necessity of risk and danger in our lifetimes and it's something I am continuously trying to implement in my own philosophy. Great book, don't read it in one sitting.<br/><br/>Rest in Peace Dufourmantelle.<br/><br/><br/>"
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