Oct. 1st, 2025 05:47 am
(no subject)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toastykittenFrom the Edges of a Broken World, by Joanna Chen - retracted from Guernica
At n+1 mag, editors discuss how they would have handled editing this personal essay about the fraught topic of equal sympathy for both sides.
Chen claims to write about empathy, but stops short of engaging with a fundamental problem of empathy: who draws its perimeter, and who falls outside it? I find Chen’s essay most interesting as a document of complicity—of someone who badly wants to hold onto her self-perception as a good, empathetic person, who experiences turmoil due to the violence committed by her state, but who would also not go so far as to question the need for that violence. It is simply “war.” At the same time, Chen does not share the unabashed anti-Palestinian bloodlust that the Israeli right openly foments.
At n+1 mag, editors discuss how they would have handled editing this personal essay about the fraught topic of equal sympathy for both sides.
Chen claims to write about empathy, but stops short of engaging with a fundamental problem of empathy: who draws its perimeter, and who falls outside it? I find Chen’s essay most interesting as a document of complicity—of someone who badly wants to hold onto her self-perception as a good, empathetic person, who experiences turmoil due to the violence committed by her state, but who would also not go so far as to question the need for that violence. It is simply “war.” At the same time, Chen does not share the unabashed anti-Palestinian bloodlust that the Israeli right openly foments.
Tags: