novel Blindness; blind to recognition, containment, acceptance?

In Blindness— the 1995 novel by the Portuguese (1998) Nobel laureate for literature Jose Saramago— an epidemic of “white blindness” mysteriously renders all people, save one, blind, and chaos and cruelty ensue. Written without much punctuation the reader must, much like a therapist trying to make sense of the patient’s narrative, discern who is speaking to whom and about what. Blindness teems with allusions to our metaphorical blindness, such as people “behave as if they were afraid of getting to know each other.”  Saramago speaks to the sanctity of reciprocity: “I have no right to look if the others cannot see me,” and to the wrath – “some will hate you for seeing” –  of being the one who sees what all others are blind to (or disavow, like a parent who attacks the seeing child’s reality). There are moments of tenderness, such as when two blind lovers reunite: “how did they recognize each other…love, which people say is blind, also has a voice of its own,” and moments of despair when one’s true self goes unrecognized: “what good would it do her beautiful bright eyes…if there is no one to see them.”

Because all, save one, are blind, there can be no witness, yet some manage to find affective sharing when the blight can “convert strangers into companions in misfortune.” Despair overtakes many in this dark novel for “what meaning do tears have when the world has lost all meaning.” Even the one who is spared this affliction is incredulous to what becomes of those around her: “what shocked her was her disappointment, she had unwittingly believed that…her neighbors would be blind in their eyes, but not in their understanding.”

If blindness is, in part, the blindness to the need of the other, then I am reminded of Stuart Pizer’s 2014 paper The Analyst’s Generous Involvement: Recognition and the “Tension of Tenderness” which eloquently joins with and departs from Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of putting the suffering other above oneself. If one is to lean towards another’s need, one must first see (recognize) the need. Pizer takes Sullivan’s concept of the ‘tension of tenderness’: “the analyst’s recognition of a need or an affect state in the patient evokes an internal tug constituting the analyst’s need to provide for what has been recognized.” He writes, “An instinctual tug toward tenderness, or a spirit of generosity, in response to a recognized state of need in the Other is an inherent feature of our functioning attachment system.”

But how does a blind person see the Levinasian strange, transcendent, unfathomable ‘face’ of the other? Pizer sees generosity as instinctual, but expects Levinas to “reject instinct in favor of a subjectivity open to interruption, surrender, and awakening by an encounter with the Other.” Pizer continues, [we are] “wired to seek community, relational embeddedness, or ‘we-ness.’” Generosity sometimes requires of the analyst, per Corpt, an “unsettling re-evaluation and openness to amending any and all aspects of analytic practice in light of the patient’s forward edge strivings.” Pizer learned from his grandfather the healing power of the affectively resonant, witnessing presence of someone who recognized his need, and accepted him just as he was. Saramago notes its opposite, “Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone.” That is, no hope of being seen, recognized, contained and accepted.

Pizer, S. (2014). The Analyst’s Generous Involvement: Recognition and the “Tension of Tenderness”. Psychoanal. Dial., 24:1-13.