Unsourced universalizing verbs transform people into objects of a privileged observer.

Evidence

I am not saying that the human sciences emerged from the prison. But, if they have been able to be formed and to produce so many profound changes in the episteme, it is because they have been conveyed by a specific and new modality of power: a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful. This policy required the involvement of definite relations of knowledge in relations of power; it called for a technique of overlapping subjection and objectification; it brought with it new procedures of individualization. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 465 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” written in the early years of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie promotes once more the familiar idea that the novel is almost by definition a bastion of freedom against the narrow exclusivism of religion: “Whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, one text above all others, one set of values above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel.” This is a popular line of argument among writers, generally used to bolster claims about the novel form as a conduit for empathy. Ahdaf Soueif, for instance, sees the writer’s duty as being to create characters who stimulate empathy in readers—“such powerful empathy that they want to reach through the print to help or comfort them.… A work of fiction lives by empathy—the extending of myself into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.” These thoughts are a handy reminder of the basic tasks of fiction, but we need also to distinguish active transcultural empathy from a lazily universalizing notion of shared human experience that can encourage us to respond only to that which is already familiar. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32; Human sciences were conveyed by a bodily discipline that fused subjection with objectification. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 465; Unified human knowing requires one knowing subject (+3 more)

Related

• The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity (similarity 0.82)
• The global novel both exposes and risks reproducing globalization’s assumptions (similarity 0.80)
• Estrangement from one’s own culture enables genuine judgment of it and others (similarity 0.80)
• Representing cultural specificity requires formal invention rather than universal empathy (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity #expands (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32
• Human sciences were conveyed by a bodily discipline that fused subjection with objectification. #corroborates (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 465
• Unified human knowing requires one knowing subject #corroborates (0.75)