A Hermeneutics of Love for Community-Based,Participatory Action Research

Introduction

I am interested in exploring an epistemological groundwork for a humanistic community psychology program. In what follows, I will define and expound on three interrelated and potential “dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1977) for the community psychology researcher, which establish how to commune, participate, and take action as researchers: communitas (nonrule based and unstructured moments of community amelioration, see Turner, 1969), allopathy (participation as suffering with the Otherness of others), and munificence (resolute action and solicitude). ¹ These dispositions, I argue, provide a productive foundation for community-based, participatory action research (Hacker, 2013) and are existentially grounded, supported, and are experienced through what I will call shared burdens: hospitality, alterity, finitude, and supplementarity.

In consideration of the aforesaid, I am concerned with a way of knowing and being with others that is not contingent on grasping the totality of others or of a given community. I am judiciously avoiding any assertion that we are the same, and that we can come together in our essentialized and reciprocated sameness; after all, how has this proposition worked for us? When we think critically about it, we realize that we are not completely the same, not in terms of ethnicity, gender, or race, not in terms of ideologies, spiritual, and religious beliefs, not in terms of our sexuality and desires, or style and tastes. None of these categories of existence is enough to bind us wholly together. We remain singular and unique and with this truth come our difficulties with one another, even others we imagine are the same as us. Sameness and making the other the same through assimilation and appropriation has let us down and despite all our attempts of essentializing our political and equality movements for civil rights in terms of racial, sexual, and gender identity, we find we cannot fully speak for others, certainly not for all others in our presumed group or community.

Similarly, tolerance has been an ideologically driven way in which to be with one another. But there always seems to be some unexamined, taken-for-granted, centered, and subjective position tolerating others. While it may be true that we tolerate others, and that to be tolerant helps us survive, so to speak, I am interested in thriving, not simply surviving and tolerance only serves to keep us in the status quo of individual and ideological power relations (Martín-Baró, 1994); that is to say, those who get tolerated by those who assumedly do not need to be tolerated.

This then is what community ethics is—the welcoming of all those we find impossible to welcome, all those we find unnatural, unable, and unwilling. In fact, to thrive, it seems one must be steeped in the pathos of the people, where we are challenged by others. To thrive in a community means to welcome those we find intolerable (see Kearney, 1993; Orange, 2011)!

And what of the continual reification of our differences, has this worked for us? Like sameness, it leaves me cold, as if I cannot be with and feel for others different than me; the continual reaffirmation of differences ultimately leaves us with a sense of existential, community apathy; if we are so different, why bother to try to commune? “We are neither the same nor all alone, nor restricted to their balance,” Corlett explains (1989, p. 215). Thus, working with others in a community cannot be based on the essentialized assumptions of sameness or difference (see Sampson, 1993).

Community action research, for example, cannot be simply established in the values of individualism, secular liberalism, or rely only on the constructs of a presumably value-free science or the vagaries of moral belief systems. Nor can community research be solely invested in the status quo or conservatism. Our Western psychology, and its celebration of the self (Sampson, 1993), has perhaps put too little effort in understanding the connection between values, ethics, community, and the interpersonal relationships that contribute to problems in living (see Harrist & Richardson, 2012; Prilleltensky, 2001).

How then can we look at community and our work within communities differently? Is there a way for community researchers to be resolute but not absolute, or to not hold completely, or dearly, to these aforementioned ideologies and yet understand, interpret, act, and help others? I wish to further develop a critical consciousness (concientizaciόn) with regard to community psychology such that community psychology is always returning, with critical reflection, to a “liberation psychology” (Freire, 1971; Martín-Baró, 1994).

I will avoid sameness, tolerance, and difference and instead investigate community, participation, and action in alternative ways and I will look at what we share as community burdens and suggest that these shared burdens yoke us together; this then is a thoroughly existential analysis of community and community work (cf. Bok, 1995). The way of the shared burden, as a methodological stance, will tremble before the existential givens of being alive; it, by necessity, must stay on a shaky foundation, keeping us vigilant and allowing us to attest to and act on behalf of others. Esposito (2010) argues, “Nothing seems more appropriate than thinking community; nothing more necessary, demanded and heralded by a situation that joins in a unique epochal knot the failure of all communisms with the misery of new individualisms” (p. 1).

The Resolute Whisper

For many years, I have used the Pink Floyd (1979) album The Wall as a pedagogical tool in my social psychology class and will use it here as a creative and expressive example of some of the aforementioned theories. ² The album is a thematic work that begins with a whisper “Isn’t this where” and ends with a whisper “ . . . we came in?” Without this enigmatic phrase, I suggest, the story the lyrics tell would merely move through an increasingly alienating and totalitarian society to a utopia of “bleeding hearts and artists” who “really love you” as represented in the last song on the album (Waters, 1979b). But the work is beyond a trite, happy ending and, in fact, The Wall is not simply a dystopian work; if this were the case, it would end with the disruptive forces known and perhaps even a lesson learned.

The primary message of The Wall, I believe, is that of vigilance and resoluteness; it is cyclic and so these whispers are both a promise and demise, whispered over again each time the work is played; the words set the stage as a foretelling of the trembling ground that always exists whenever we attempt to commune with others and, as a result, the inevitable destruction when any such attempt is made a totality (i.e., totalitarian). ³ The Wall is a story of an alienating society and hints toward the possibility of community—a community defined as always already containing the seeds of its own destruction and thus justly undone and reborn by this beginning and ending whisper.

By community, I do not mean a group of like-minded people, or people who agree on actions and values, or any demarcations of properties, ideologies, or utopia-like communes. I also do not wish to infer a community that fits into a society or that complements a society by providing tolerable differences and transgressions, and, by virtue of this, defines the society’s boundaries; more on this later. For now, we note that community is not, as Iris Marion Young (1990) points out “a positive norm” or an “ideal community” (pp. 235-236) for such a concept of community must, inherently, exclude others and others do come along, we will soon see, asking us “Don’t forget me, my rights, my dignity and my belonging.”

And so I offer a phenomenological account of community, which addresses the ways in which community emerges and is lived; to look phenomenologically at community suggests that we may wonder how coming together is meaningful and how meaning is created. This then is a community that endures the tension necessary for suspension, which means both to support and defer as a bridge to others, balanced, tenuously arching but nevertheless traversable. A community so described requires a walk toward another on Buber’s (1966) “narrow bridge,” that is, when we discover together a place to stand about the concerns of oneself and the concerns of others where “genuineness of mutuality” can occur and where we are unsure of whom we will meet and what we might be faced with (p. 72; see also Arnett, 1986). This is a bridging to community that embraces both the impossibility of “living together” and the imperative of living together (Derrida, 2013). Nancy’s (1991) “inoperative community,” Lingis’s (1994) community with “nothing in common,” Corlett’s (1989) “community with no unity,” and Blanchot (1988) “unavowable” community all describe a community that is a happening but has no borders, but one that we can find ourselves within and able to be active, caring; where good things can be done together (maybe!).

The phenomenon that is community is an aporia; it is an impassable passage and an impossible possibility that, I say here, may be attempted by finding the shared and in being in service to it and to others (Derrida, 2013). Societies, with their objective norms, properties, and labels, come and go, as walls are built and torn down, but community holds the possibility of a radical welcoming of all others even when the possibility also exists that those we welcome may bring us suffering (Derrida, 2000; Derrida & Caputo, 1997).

Therefore, the murmured words that bracket the album proclaim that the choice is ours: Do we begin again with a hope to understand and help others, even if our interventions are provisional, trembling, and uncertain or do we become apathetic precisely because we cannot have the total, the complete, and the whole of others and of existence? Furthermore, if we do choose to care, to intervene, will we become totalitarian, absolute, and oppressive with our interpretations and interventions? Can we do our work and allow the deconstructive whisper, “Isn’t this where we came in?” its continual and necessary due course?

Communitas

The anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) noticed that rituals and rites of passage were transitional and transformative thresholds (or liminal activities). He saw these moments and actions as supporting communities. Edith Turner (2012) recently described communitas as “ . . . a group’s pleasure in sharing common experiences” that “overrides psychological and sociological constructs” and that includes “a loss of ego” (pp. 2-3). I suggest that communitas can be defined as an experience of shared burdens with and for one another; it is a moment of recognition of our commonality and it is a positive horizon or threshold that founds community. Communitas is a process and connection, not content. Communitas is not about the other (another person) or about Otherness (an ontological supposition) but is about the relation that is supported by the shared burdens of existence.

My readers know communitas in their everyday lives. These are the moments, always fleeting, where we act with kindness, share in suffering, welcome and forgive and these moments seem to come prior to any ideological, political, religious, or vetting of the other. Note too that these moments are disruptive and uncomfortable; for in the end, we have sometimes acted counter to a certain set of beliefs and we realize, perhaps, that we cannot stay in that moment of choice and action. Communitas, as Esposito (2010) discusses, is not necessarily comforting; it “ . . . doesn’t keep us warm” (p. 140). Communitas “exposes us” and although I think this exposure may be encouraging to some extent, it likewise contains this whisper of both the possible promise of community and the warning of the impossibility of community (p. 140).

Communitas is, I believe, the phenomenological character of community, that is to say, it is a phenomenon that we cocontribute to and make meaning of. We do not passively receive communitas; rather, we wake up to it, if you will, and note it.

Victor Turner’s (1969) “existential” communitas is a balance on the precipice between self and others where we might find a common ground worth nurturing into an ethical dialogue and practice (pp. 132-137; see also Arnett, 1986). It is helpful to define communitas as what it is not: it is not shared property, or shared values and ideologies and it is not a society of like-minded, friendly followers of the same rules, norms, laws, and so on. Community, “ . . . far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us—question, waiting, event, imperative, in the wake of society” (Nancy, 1991, p. 11). Turner (1969) says “Communitas is of the now” and so communitas is an antistructural nowness, whereby we feel a sense of communing with that which is shared (p. 113). I believe that communitas is a disposition that can be practiced.

Communitas is liminal in that it is always about what is to come (preliminary); it is, therefore, related to a utopian potentiality (Benhabib, 1986) or horizon but not a utopia as that which is finished, pure, complete, or totalized. However, Turner (1969) describes a “spontaneous” communitas that might lead to “normative” and “ideological” communitas. This is, as Turner explains, the “fate of all spontaneous communitas” (p. 132). I would like to try, at least, to remain with the spirit of communitas, to push back against such a fate and to remain with the spontaneity, and return to it as a practice and as a way of imagining the potential of any given community. Why not push back? Can we not resist the temptation of the formulaic, manualized, and prescribed rules of community work? I submit that to imaginatively return to the nowness of the shared, of communitas as existentially unstructured, could be an epistemological framework for community researchers. ⁴ I want to elucidate a practiced return.

The etymological root munis found in communitas denotes munificence as a shared sense of service to others (I will explore this further below). Muni signifies service and servitude (municipal) as onus signifies having the burden to return service to others. ⁵ For Esposito (2010), communis is a shared lack meaning that we come together and indeed serve each other because of the shared unknown that is existence itself: “It is the originary munis,” Esposito tells us, “that constitutes us and makes us destitute in our moral finiteness” (p. 8). ⁶ Community as communitas then, for Esposito, “ . . . refers to the singular and plural characteristic of an existence free from every meaning that is presumed, imposed, or postponed . . . ” (p. 149) and so existentially understood, it is the absence of complete meaning whereupon we are compelled to make meaning that might, even if just for a fleeting moment, sustain and nurture us. Esposito tells us:

. . . the community is both impossible and necessary. . . . Not only is it given as a defect (it never is fully realized) but community is defective, in the specific sense that what is held in common is precisely that defect, that default, that debt or also our moral finitude. (pp. 53-54)

But communitas is not desolate nor is it simply relativism. In fact, the shared burdens I will describe below undercut relativism and move us beyond the desolate because “burden” denotes both a willingness to bind together (yoke and servitude) and to bear with. The shared burden may be relied on to guide one’s actions with and on behalf of others. This is precisely why I say that communitas is supported by shared burdens—it is in need of existential grounding.

What will follow will be a structure under erasure (Derrida, 1976), not fully known or concretized. While communitas does not establish and it is, in this way, always deconstructing itself, it is a way of returning and a place to stand. After all, deconstruction is a recurrent critique of all systems of thought (Derrida, 1976); it recognizes the whisper of that which is unthought and unsaid in any given system (Spivak, 1996); for community researchers, deconstruction helps us take the risk of recognizing and welcoming those marginalized but on the condition that those in the center, if you will, change (i.e., not tokenism or assimilation). Caputo (2000) explains “Deconstruction pushes facticity to its limits, radicalizing it, remaining rigorously loyal to our factical limits, ruthlessly, without pity, without appeal, without nostalgia, without a desire for presence, right on up to speaking of an experience of the impossible” (p. 56). But while deconstruction may be a loving process (Derrida & Caputo, 1997) and a necessary supplement to ethical obligation, it is not an ethics itself as it holds no positive ground.

Therefore, if deconstruction is not enough (and yet a necessary whisper!), we will look to Lévinas (1969) and Ricoeur (1992) for a more or less stable place to stand (Bourgeois, 2002). Let us now examine precisely what we share and look at these shared burdens as that which may, in part, constitute communitas and lead us to a community research methodology.

Hospitality

Jacques Derrida is wary of the term community and we may only be able to accept this term if we define it, partially, with Derrida as hospitality or “the welcoming of the other” (Derrida, 1999, 2000; Derrida & Caputo, 1997, p. 110). Hospitality is offered unconditionally as a giving or gift of one’s self before knowing who is coming along and receiving the gift. Hospitality is a before-giving without vetting the other and as such, hospitality resides in the realm of potentiality not a completed reality. So, hospitality is a forgiving in the sense that it is a gift to another without previously set conditions placed on the other. To offer hospitality, for Derrida, means to let go of the simple practice of being a beneficent host and to enact, or attempt the impossibility of being selfless in one’s giving.

Let us note right off that hospitality supports communitas. Do we see now that hospitality is a shared burden? Yes, the potential of hospitality keeps us up at night, as Lévinas (1947/1978) would say; it both threatens and enlivens for we all share the understanding that we can flat out reject others, or certain others, and yet others remain always on our minds. We know that some people need a home, food, psychological support or they simply need a kind word, or a lending of a hand. When we do help, even if occasionally, it may inspirit us and with the shared burden of hospitality, communitas emerges. For Derrida (2013), we must live together not because we are the same but because we are together and we are compelled and may “avow” the impossible possibility of caring with, and for each other.

Hospitality may be a ritual action; a practice that continually forgives. For Lévinas (1969), forgiveness entails a letting go or reversing of the past as if the other did not do or become what assumedly brought said person to the present state. When we encounter someone we imagine is unforgivably destitute and culpable, we tend to not let that person in, if you will; the person is, in essence, marked and blamed for the past. And yet we must know that another’s past is far more complex than our reasoning can easily grasp. This person has come from an intricate array of familial and societal constructions (Gergen, 1985) and although the person did in fact make choices, and perhaps made poor choices (or even acted horribly), can we ever know what we would have done given the same existential circumstances? Or, who would we be if we were born into radically dissimilar social and familial circumstances? With forgiveness comes humility and with hospitality, for Lévinas (1961/1969), the destitute other is given a renewed past.

A community that is hospitable and forgiving is composed of welcoming hosts. Etymologically, hospitality is related to hostis, denoting hostility. If one welcomes the other unconditionally, then the host runs the risk of potential disruption (Onions, 1992); as Caputo (1997) puts it “ . . . there is always a little hostility in all hosting and hospitality” (p. 110). Caputo (1997) goes on to say “ . . . the community must retain its identity while making the stranger at home” (p. 113). We can see clearly the shared burden of a hospitable community; it is our shared recognition of ethical responsibility of one for another (Arnett, 1986; Lévinas, 1986).

In fact, for Derrida, hospitality founds our ethical responsibility; however, hospitality cannot simply be centered on the host who assimilates and is beneficent and charitable (Kumar, 2013). The host must not simply celebrate or tolerate, as I said above; instead, the host trembles and is decentered. In the moment that is communitas, the host gets out of the way, and begs to lend a hand. We can say then, in relation to hospitality, communitas is an immediate moment of recognition and affirmation of the coming of the other person. Let us explore this aspect of hospitality.

Alterity

Lévinas (1947/1978) specifies that hypostasis is that way in which we cope with our “ontological insecurity” (Laing, 1961) of being born into a world, not of our making and not completely within our control. Hypostasis indicates a self-made ego that attempts to draw a line around itself interminably and indubitably (Lévinas, 1969, 1947/1978). According to Lévinas, the ego self-creates and self-instantiates by identifying itself as a solid, bounded, and encapsulated, and itself totalized in relation to, and in similarity with, the world of things (Lévinas, 1947/1978). The ego establishes itself by recurrently identifying itself with itself, which thereby makes itself the origin, be all and end all, and self-evident; if the hypostatic ego wishes to maintain its boundaries (Burggraeve, 2002), it must own (appropriate and assimilate) the mystery of the other person or else, it will feel forever threatened by what is called the other’s alterity. Now, by alterity, we indicate that one cannot know any other person absolutely; here, alterity is that which is inexpressible, irreducible, and irreplaceable in being human. Because each of us are constrained by our unique ways in which we perceive and comprehend, the “Other” (with a capital “O” to denote alterity or otherness), in essence, transcends any of our attempts at what Lévinas calls totalizing a person (Lévinas, 1969).

So, each person we meet is, of course, a knowable human being, but also more than what we can know. ⁷ Even if we have known someone intimately most our lives, that person may very well surprise us because that person is not the sum total of the past. We see at present that the mystery of the Other, the otherness of the other (tout autre), is our shared burden.

For Lévinas, the interiority of our psychological self is not closed off from others; it is constituted and attuned to others (see also Downs, Gantt, & Faulconer, 2012). ⁸ The Other, the otherness of others is a shared burden because the Other is, or brings, that which one cannot have; the Other is that which one is not (Lévinas, 1947/1978). This is not to say that the Other cannot be totalized through various forms of symbolic violence (labeling, diagnosing, and slurs) but that another brings the burden of ethical engagement. To attempt to totalize any singular other person (or groups of persons) would amount to shielding one’s self from the brink-breach, or otherwise put, the unknown that is the other’s presence there before us. To attempt to totalize any other person is an assault on that person’s dignity (see Kateb, 2011).

For Lévinas (1969), the otherness of others manifests as a command to be ethical. It is this mystery itself, the dignified and unique person before, above and beyond us, which opens up the possibility of responsibility for the other. ⁹ Of course, each of us is this Other to another; therefore, oddly within the dissymmetry, we see symmetry as Derrida (1978) explains:

That I am also essentially the other’s other, and that I know I am, is the evidence of a strange symmetry whose trace appears nowhere in Lévinas’ descriptions. Without this evidence, I could not desire (or) respect the other in ethical dissymmetry. (p. 128)

The “strange symmetry,” of which Derrida speaks, emerges as the shared among us; therefore, our alterity signifies a symmetric relation, and as such a commonality in our shared burdens. Accordingly, it is this ethical symmetry and dissymmetry that provides us the possibility of community; the Other is neither the same or different, above or below, but indubitably present before us as a wholly other person intrinsically worthy of confirmation (see also Buber, 1970; Friedman, 1983).

We have examined two dialectically linked shared burdens that open up the risk and prospect of communitas: a hospitable communitas that embraces alterity is a glimpse of the infinite from the place of being finite (Nancy, 1991). We see too that a community researcher is rightly challenged by hospitality in the face of alterity. Let us continue to explore communitas by examining the inevitable and ever-present possibility of death itself as a shared burden; finitude, or being-toward-death (Heidegger, 1927/1996).

Finitude

Finitude, according to Heidegger (1927/1996), is our implicit knowledge that we are finite beings and that we can die at any moment; we are, therefore, always being-toward-death. No appeal to statistics, green tea, blueberries, and exercise will assuage finitude! We remain finite despite our strides in medical science and we know it. Furthermore, each morning when we wake, we are confronted, so to speak, with the presence of others, as we have said, and the presence of death. Death is an everyday possibility and as such, death is not just present as one’s own death but the death of others, which is an ever-present reminder of the eventuality of our own death (Hatab, 2000). We cannot experience death, we can only die. But, we do experience death (vicariously) when others die and “ . . . the death of the other returns us to our death” (Esposito, 2010, p. 123).

Finitude is a lived and resolute reminder of our commonality (cf. “finitude of singularity” Nancy, 1991). Esposito (2010) relates “It is death and not life that holds us within the horizon of the common” (p. 121). When others die, we may affirm our present communing with each other or what Hatab (2000) calls the “finitude of ethical dwelling.” As Lévinas (1999) says “ . . . that face facing me, in its expression—in its mortality—summons me, commands me, demands me, requires me . . . ” (p. 24). Therefore, our finitude may painfully and beautifully reveal the urgency of communing with others in such a way that brings supportive meaning to our lives. Hatab (2000) suggests “Authentic ethical action charged by finitude is far from a loss of direction; it is a deliverance from facile abstractions and convictions toward the complexities of practical situations” (p. 175). We may come together in service to each other because we tremble together on this shaky foundation that is in the face of the shared mystery and burden that is death.

To deny our finitude (Becker, 1973) may offer us a false sense of security, but it comes with a price—our relation with existence and with others, loses its awe (cf., Schneider, 2004). “Death is indissociable from community, for it is through death that the community reveals itself” (Nancy, 1991, p. 14). Finitude is another shared burden that founds communitas; awesome and horrific, it marks our suffering with, and for others.

Complementarity and Supplementarity

Etymologically, “complement” and “compliment” are related to “complete,” as a requirement to make whole and the same by adding on in order to create balance (Onions, 1992). A complement is something added on that “goes along with” and so that which complements, completes. Compliments do not replace. A compliment is a form of tokenism because it appropriates the other as the same. If one gets a compliment, one is likely to continue doing what it is others have affirmed by way of the compliment. To compliment the other with a validation of sameness and to complement the other with an authentication of balance is a form of societal assimilation. Thus, to make others the same, must operationally include the marginalization of others who cannot complement already existing structures and cannot be recognized, or allowed in as the same.

Supplement, as Derrida (1973) understands, is not an additive in order to complete, or to make balanced, or to make universal; “ . . . the supplement adds only to replace” (p. 145). For example, if one takes a vitamin (exterior to the body), the vitamin supplements or adds to replace already existing vitamin nutrients within the body. The nutrients of the body would be said to be lacking in the sense that the natural body is deficient, which then, in turn, denotes that the body needs more. Hence, the supplement always already partly exists within that which it intends to supplement but, at the same time, recognizes a lacking within this existence.

The Other (as alterity) exists before any compliment/complement as sameness and balance (this is to say too that alterity exists as a trace before assimilation and appropriation of another as Other; see Lévinas, 1986). Notice that the marginalized other (person) as a supplement has been and is always already a part of us and comes to fulfill that which we lack. The supplemented Other comes from outside the binary opposition (presence/absence, self/other, natural/unnatural, normal/abnormal) and lets us know that the binary is not complete, balanced, or contained (see Derrida, 1978); the supplement recognizes this lacking or deficiency, while at once recognizes the excess of needing more. The supplement lets us know that there is a trace of self within other, of abnormal within normal and this allows for more possibilities from the margins of existence. As bell hooks (1990) tells us, marginality is a “site of radical possibility” and not simply depravation (p. 149).

Note that if there is a trace of unnatural within natural as well as a trace of abnormal within normal, then supplementarity is the process by which something is added that contains disease and cure; supplementarity, as I am using it here, is the deconstructive whisper that the unbearable Other is coming, again, and such is our thriving and our shared burden. It is not simply an alterity—the Other comes as a necessary contagion!

I will now show that the adding of the supplement of the wholly other acts as an immunization that allows us to not be immune but to potentially commune with others (even others deemed unacceptable, unnatural, and abnormal).

Allopathy

The word allopathy signifies állos, which means “other,” and pátheia, or emotive suffering. ¹⁰ “Allo,” indicates the allowable as well as allowance as approval or letting in of the other. To suffer for the wholly other is to suffer in the presence of the other’s alterity, which I call allopathic or Other-suffering (cf. van Manen, 2007 on pathic practice).

Pathos is the emotive life of others and includes joys and woes, passions and insights, pain and the pursuit of love; pathein denotes to suffer within. We can distinguish pathos as lived and recognized suffering and, in contrast, a-pathos (apathy), which is a deadened response to suffering and, as such, produces a profound lack of em-pathy (Onions, 1992). ¹¹ Ricoeur (1992) tells us suffering “is not defined solely by physical pain, nor even by mental pain, but by the reduction, even the destruction, of the capacity for acting, of being-able-to-act, experienced as a violation of self-integrity” (p. 190). Ricoeur’s elucidation of suffering explains that suffering, physical or mental, is at its worst when we cannot make meaning and act with regard to our suffering. If we feel empathy for others, and suffer within, we need to retain a sense of meaningful self-cohesiveness in order to trust our choices and actions on behalf of others. ¹² Accordingly, apathy is, I suggest, an existential suffering that is most horrific for its meaninglessness and inaction deteriorate our sense of self. When apathetic, we cannot fully recognize ourselves as existentially grounded with one another. Apathy is a community malaise; it is a community mood disorder.

Empathy, em-pathos, is the striving to understand another’s suffering and difference. Apathy, as a-pathos, is indifference to another’s suffering and difference. Recall that complement means to create and maintain balance, for example, between empathy and apathy. Both, we note, are binary opposites of each other: empathy to be “in” feeling (“em” denotes in or into) and apathy to be “out” of, or not feeling for others. Notice too that as a binary one is defined as the absence of the other (Derrida, 1978)—empathy is the absence of apathy and apathy the absence of empathy.

Now, we see the relationship of the binary empathy/apathy to difference/indifference. Perhaps, to some degree empathy fails to understand and feel for the wholly other (difference) or the otherness of others? Empathy may create a same-to-same complementary relation; as a result, to the degree that empathy works to appropriate the otherness of the other, thereby obliterating difference, empathy becomes pathos-like-pathos or, “I will suffer for you, if you are similar to me and your suffering is made similar to my suffering,” or, that one’s empathy makes one the same as the other; if this be the case, to some extent, empathy is in need of a supplement, which is when the wholly “unreconciled,” singular other comes along (Derrida, 2013). The supplement, as an alterity then, deconstructs empathy pushing it to its limits and commanding it, if you will, to discover the ways in which its structural relatedness makes it less authentically ethical (see Hatab, 2000). Strongly put, empathy may be vulnerable to becoming a form of symbolic violence of making the other (i.e., alterity and difference) the same. Empathy runs the danger of becoming merely a complementary relation when it fails to recognize Otherness within self and difference within sameness.

Remember Ricoeur’s elucidation of suffering—a recognition of other in self while maintaining one’s self-cohesiveness. Hatab (2000) explains that empathy “ . . . does not operate as a ‘merging’ of the self with the Other. There is always an awareness of difference” and he writes “Although empathy depends on certain common human experiences (such as pain and loss), its original affective trajectory is an openness to the Other, as other” (p. 154; see also Esposito, 2010). As I will demonstrate below, it is the hermeneutic or interpretive as (by way of) and not like (identical to) that is crucial for us to remain aware of (Heidegger, 1927/1996). Notice the variance between empathizing because one believes another person, or an experience, is the same (i.e., identical) and an empathy that is “ekstatic” in that we stand forth at the liminal and shared burden of alterity (i.e., by way of).

A radicalized empathy is the willingness to stand at the breach, between finite existence and the infinite, where the possibility (and impossibility) to commune exists. This is, what Hatab (2000) calls an “ethical authenticity” of empathic relations (pp. 150-151). We perhaps achieve this ethical authenticity when we recognize empathy’s own “play” and “its supplementary character” such that empathy recognizes that which it lacks (Derrida, 1978, p. 290). To radicalize empathy would mean to help empathy find its Other as its supplement (see Ratcliffe, 2012) and “ . . . empathic circles can be widened, because often it is simply absence or distance that creates indifference” (Hatab, 2000, p. 153).

Medically, allopathy denotes the curing of a disease with a remedy (treatment of symptoms) that produces an opposite effect of the symptom present; unlike homeopathy (same cures same), allopathy signifies the unlike (unacceptable, different, dissimilar) as potentially curative. Thus, the opposite of the symptom of apathy would be meaningful suffering itself. Here, I am designating allopathy as a disposition in the form of suffering for the wholly other at the brink of which empathy may not always traverse.

Allopathy pushes us to our limits, asking us if we can recognize ourselves in others, even those who we imagine are wholly different from ourselves; those we cannot forgive, and those we find unavowable, detestable, and disgusting (Derrida, 2013). Allopathy is more than a radicalized empathy as it is specific to community work—it is not just a singular matter of empathizing for another as a benefit to another. I am suggesting a resolute concern that is dispositional, and an aspect of communitas—communitas continually needs the other as Other to come, to be welcomed, and to remain.

Allopathy is therefore a supplement, not a complement to empathy. The wholly other is a supplement, which is then an immunization—a reconstitution of the self by virtue of the inoculation of the other (Esposito, 2011); it is a community acknowledgment of Others in selves (Ricoeur, 1992). Like an immunization, the allopathic supplement does not cure our disease of apathy, it works to prevent it. We may avoid immunitas, which exists in resistance to the supplementary nature of communitas. Esposito (2013) writes:

. . . the paradigmatic clash between communitas and immunitas. If the former binds individuals to something that pushes them beyond themselves, then the latter reconstructs their identity by protecting them from a risky contiguity with the other, relieving them of every obligation toward the other and enclosing them once again in the shell of their own subjectivity. (p. 49)

Esposito (2010) tells us that immunity shields us, protects us from community as communitas, which would indicate that we could not share the burden of the common. In effect, to be autoimmune, as Derrida (2003) acknowledges, would mean the one cannot fathom one’s own constitutive otherness to such a degree that one’s automatic response to another’s suffering would be to fortify and attack such a foreign disease and presence. ¹³ This autoimmunity, as both interior and exterior, would include a simultaneous deadening of one’s self (as the Other within) as one deadens the disease that is the other as Other. Therefore, our hypostatic (autoimmune) reaction to the coming of the Other (i.e., to reify oneself as bounded, encapsulated, or in dominion to any other person) is the undoing of our hope for community; in contrast, allopathy brings us hope: “ . . . this pathos-with is the broadest form of every conceivable community” (Henry, 2008, p. 134; see also Gantt, 2000 and “suffering-with”).

To willingly suffer for and with others, to allow one’s protective apathy to wane, is the beginning of a suffering practice; namely, to suffer for the insufferable (cf. Orange, 2011). “The malignancy of suffering,” Burggraeve (2002) explains, “manifests itself in a sigh, a cry, or a lamentation, that is to say in an openness outwards . . . ” (p. 112). Supported by the shared burdens outlined above, allopathy is the existential and dispositional foundation to participation in participatory, action research. With regard to participation, Gadamer (1984) tells, “Its dialectic consists of the fact that participation is not taking parts, but in a way taking the whole” such that the researcher’s participation does not remove anything and, in fact, supplements the experience (p. 64; see Orange, 2011).

Beneficence and Munificence

For Ricoeur (1992), solicitude is a “benevolent spontaneity” where we recognize a lack or need within ourselves in relation to others (the other as a supplementary relation) and such appreciation is responded to with care of the other as Other (p. 190). I put forth that we can take Ricoeur’s benevolent spontaneity as an interpersonal relation and turn it toward community work as a “resolute” practice (Heidegger, 1927/1996). Doing this, we find munificence (see Esposito, 2010; cf. Neyrat, 2010) as a disposition and action. Continual and spontaneous good acts toward others must be allopathic, which is to say it is the other’s suffering, and not the host’s beneficence, that is the impetus of action research based on shared burdens and as communitas. Theoretically, beneficence does not suffer the continual and collective presence of the wholly other. I wish to move beyond the individual receiving empathy and benevolence, to the collective practices of communitas, allopathy, and munificence. Munificence then is a methodological rite of passage for community researchers. I am imagining munificent researchers and activists, erudite, thoughtful, and practical, feeling for and suffering with others as an ongoing service to others, all others. In contrast, I reject the beneficent researcher, coming from on high, locating the underprivileged or assumedly at risk. ¹⁴ We realize now that there is not simply an “at risk” community; we are at risk! Remember, communitas “doesn’t keep us warm” (Esposito, 2010, p. 141). ¹⁵

Toward a Hermeneutics of Love

By the end of the album The Wall, Pink is put on trial for suffering (he was “caught red-handed showing feelings . . . of an almost human nature”). In the song “Hey You” (Waters, 1979a, Track 14), Pink turns his love outward to others who are suffering but the metanarrative in the song and album tells us that Pink’s hopeful attempt was “just a fantasy.” Pink’s response to this profound loss of hope is to become “comfortably numb,” which we now understand as a dangerous form of protective apathy. The song “Comfortably Numb” marks a turning point toward utter despair, and the loss of the possibility of community. Yet even as Pink becomes apathetic, he recounts a “fleeting glimpse” (Augenblick; see Ward, 2012)—a remembered moment of possibility (Gilmour & Waters, 1979, Track 19). ¹⁶ The “fleeting glimpse,” I suggest, is an unyielding trace of communitas, which this pathetic character recognizes even while being comfortably numb. My hope is that our researchers can do the same, in theory and in action, as we learn to whisper a “Begin again,” just as the whisper “Isn’t this where we came in?” keeps us vigilant.

Hermeneutics, defined as the inevitability of interpretation and the ethical requirement to do so, is now recast as solicitous, willing, and meaningful suffering for all others. ¹⁷ The whisper illustrates a deconstructive hermeneutics—an interpretive stance that is trembling, suffering, keeping us on our toes, agile, and adept; just as it is lovingly affirmative of another’s dignity. Sandoval (2000), with regard to a hermeneutics of love, redefines love as “ . . . a mode of social and psychic activism” (p. 188). True enough, hermeneutics can be suspicious (Ricoeur, 1970), and I affirm the necessity of understanding that which was previously unknown and the interpretation of excesses and absences in psychological and human science; however, a restorative hermeneutics is most needed in community work. By the aforesaid, I mean that authorities or experts deriving meaning and discovering deeper truths is not of paramount concern in community research. Instead, we need careful listening, humility, and action.

Conclusion

We examined three potential dispositions and actions for the community researcher: communitas, allopathy, and munificence, which we found supported by existential shared burdens. Note again that this work has deliberately addressed the mainstays of a community-based, participatory action research program (Hacker, 2013), namely, community by way of communitas, participation by way of allopathy and resolute solicitude, and action by way of munificence. Similarly, hermeneutics has been transformed for community research as lovingly deconstructive, other-suffering, and munificent in its commitment to action.