My Problems with Empathy

Hanna Wise Heiting’s My Problems With Empathy is a poetic-philosophical dance that burrows deeply into the mind of the moment. Each moment is a universe, a pearl, a microcosm that Heiting explores through the medium of words. Yet, in her hands, words become images, and images become movement. Poetry becomes novel becomes film.

Much of the book traces Hanna’s interrogation of the history of the Holocaust, through an intensely personal and cultural lens. On the way, there are philosophical detours and retours including; explorations of the relationship between the youthful, Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt and her mentor Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s betrayal, by his insistence on enshrining his racism into the very heart of the philosophy of Being, becomes a central motif of the book. Heiting returns continually to the question of how so many, Arendt, Husserl, Edith Stein, and Paul Celan, among others, who might have known better, could have been so deceived, as others continue to be.

There are filmic explorations and there are love scenes, which are not from films, but make you feel you are watching a film. Scenes that make you feel naked as if in love.

These moments of love make the pain of the powerful honesty of Heiting’s gaze bearable. It is love that makes us breathe again after Celan takes his final Atemkristall. It is love that sustains empathy and allows us to spiral, again and again, around the incomprehensible in history without closure.