In her short story “Painwise,” the science fiction author James Tiptree, Jr. describes creatures endowed with an excess of empathy. These “empaths” seek to be exclusively in the presence of happiness, since they immediately assume both the pleasurable and the painful feelings of others. They often struggle to distinguish their own thoughts from those of other beings, and they say what their dialogue partner was in fact going to say or wanted to say. There are three kinds of empath: the golden-yellow bushbaby monkey, soft, relaxed, and pliant, like a child in a fur coat too large for it; the butterfly with enormous compound eyes, feathered antennae, and sheer rainbow wings; and the boa constrictor, tightly wound, smooth, and cool, with a wedge-shaped head and ice-gray eyes.

“Touch, taste, feel” is the empaths’ motto. Now and then, three of them come together to organize a “lovepile,” an amorous heaping of a “great palatal-olfactory interplay” in which they blend tastes and smells as well as other unnameable euphoric sensations. The mutual aim is to taste all the contradictory haptic textures and materials of the three heterogeneous partners. At the same time, the reciprocal assumption of feelings engenders a kind of self-pleasure that only processes of empathy allow, and thus an immense increase in desire. For in infinitely spiraling reactions to reactions, a cumulative mise-en-abîme, everyone feels like everybody else, and everyone feels the feelings in everybody else, and everyone feels themselves amidst the feeling of all of these feelings.

James Tiptree, Jr. sounded out various aspects of the phenomenon of empathy, taking them to the telepathic, erotic, and unreal extreme in her story. In reality, empathetic processes are far more ephemeral, and it is generally not hard to distinguish between oneself and another person. But in reality, too – particularly in moments of heightened sensuality and in the reception of works of art – a sort of emotional understanding of another being occurs, and the other being can be of an entirely different composition than oneself. Empathy does not rely on similarity.