L'empatia negativa come problema

This afterword argues that negative empathy should be understood not as a theory offering moral solutions, but as an aesthetic problem that resists interpretive pacification. It describes negative empathy as an unstable oscillation between proximity and distance, attraction and repulsion, produced by historically and medially specific formal devices. Across the volume’s case studies, this experience emerges not as a fixed response but as a situated relation between artistic construction and audience engagement. The afterword therefore defends the case-study method as a way of testing, differentiating, and complicating theory. Negative empathy ultimately appears as a matter of attention because it shifts critical inquiry away from the immediate moral evaluation of affective involvement and toward a close examination of how artworks produce, modulate, and sustain it. It thus requires readers and viewers to attend both to the formal construction of their responses and to the ambivalence those responses reveal.