Unfamiliarities

Speculative Empathy, SE

Speculative Empathy is a movement within applied, contemporary, continental-inspired  philosophy and performing arts, also, known as post-continental philosophy, that defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical empathy against its interpretation of the dominant  forms of “correlationism”.  The term tries to expand notions such as “speculative realism/ materialism” by repositioning the thinking, sensing and experiencing, thus, philosophising human subject with an interest of highlighting its ability to empathise with a thing x and through the strategic embracing of the unescapable condition of anthropomorphism. Rather than operating on planes, which are suggestive of a certain (or not so certain)  “realism”, SE actively makes use of the joint synergy of both speculative and empathic processes in order to generate tools to converse with (non-)human entities in collectively fictionalised meeting planes, in design specific to each encounter of materialities. Making use of the wide emotional spectrum human beings are equipped with, SE re-purposes the unavoidable miscommunications that are at play in the complex and layered encounter of multi-real and Interspecies planes of conversations. Practitioner of SE boldly accuse their environment of being telepathically interlinked with them and that based on this assumption, they share a common field, where they can exchange, support, understand and emotionally stabilise one another. SE practitioners are very open minded towards exploring and performing dynamic, absurd, sensual and unexplainably emotional labor for a various range of materials, things, other human beings and domestic and non-domestic subobjects.

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