Page 30 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

“Sympathy plays freely in the depths of the world. In one moment, it traverses the vastest spaces; from planet to man whose life it holds sway:
sympathy falls from far away like lightning...
Sympathy is a principle of mobility; it attracts all gross things towards the heaviness of the Sun, and all feathery ones towards the lightness of ether, weightless, it pushes the roots towards the waters and spins, with a solar curve, the great yellow flower of the girasol... it arouses, in secret, an interior motion...
Sympathy is an example of the Same so strong and so urgent that is not happy to be content with similitude; it has the dangerous power to assimilate, of making things identical one to another, of mixing them, making them disappear in their individuality
3⁄4 therefore, making them strange to what they were 3⁄4
Sympathy transforms. It alters, but in the direction of the identical, so that if its power is not counterpoised, the world would be reduced to one point, to one homogeneous mass, to the monotonous figure of the Same.”59
O Byronic Hero whose exuberant, vehement, earnest, tragic disposition is in constant dialogue between mutability and
59 Foucault. Les mots et les choses. Une archeologie des sciences humaines 1966 38-40 trad. Esp. Las Palabras y Las Cosas, 1968.
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