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INTRODUCTION
Since September n, 2001, a number of critics including Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak have argued for a greater need for empathy, especially from those who were targeted on that day. The logic of this argument is that those who were victimized should use their newfound vulnerability as a means of connecting, or to use Spivak's term, "resonating" with the other (or "all the others," as Levinas might put it). In her introduction to Precarious Life, Butler speaks of an "unbear- able vulnerability" having been exposed on 9/11. Her wish is that this altered state of being-a new sensitivity to the very fragility of individual and communal lives-will lead to a deeper understanding of the value of all lives: "To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unex- pected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways" (J. Butler 2004, xii). The fate of the victims that day, Butler observes, points to the "precarious life of the Other" (xviii). She insists that one should not simply be concerned with one's own vulnerability (and the fear and anxiety elicited by that knowledge), but with that of others who live parallel and equally, if not more, vulnerable lives. For her part, Spivak argues that all proposed solutions to the current crisis are contingent upon one's ability to discover a capacity for empathy: "Unless we are trained into imagining the other, a necessary, impossible, and interminable task, nothing we do through politico-legal calculation will last" (Spivak 2004, 83). She suggests that seeking either revenge or justice necessarily limits one's capacity to know the other. Spivak creates a dialectic between epistemological and ethical ways of knowing, and argues for a move towards the latter:
Epistemological constructions belong to the domain of law, which seeks to know the other, in his or her case, as completely as possible, in order to punish or acquit rationally, reason being defined by the limits set by the law itself. The ethical inter- rupts this imperfectly, to listen to the other as if it were a self, neither to punish or acquit. (Spivak 2004, 83)
But is it possible to "imagine"...