Zadie Smith’s novel NW and the ethics of empathy

What is it about?

This essay reads Zadie Smith’s NW as a critical engagement with the ethics of empathy and its role in the moral infrastructure of neoliberal politics. It argues that through a dialogue with George Eliot’s tradition of sympathetic realism and with Jacque Derrida's conceptualization of hospitality, Smith sounds a warning that the ethics of empathy has become a dangerous ideological delusion in contemporary culture. NW develops this critique by pushing the conventions of the realist novel—the form that served as the bastion for the development of notions of empathy— in order to highlight the shortcomings of empathy and its distortions in the context of contemporary neoliberalism. The stories of NW's protagonists, who struggle with social vulnerability, and the formal experimentation of the novel, question the promise of empathy both as a social mechanism that can create solidarity and help vulnerable underclasses, and as an aesthetic mechanism that makes novel-reading an ethical practice.

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Why is it important?

The critical exploration of empathy is highly relevant these days since empathy has become so widely celebrated, discussed in scholarly inquiries, socio-political debates and a vast range of best-selling books. Reading Zadie Smith's critical engagement with empathy highlights how neoliberalism celebrates the humanistic promise of empathy, while it simultaneously works to undercut its realization.