14

Sympathy, much like the present workings of affect studies in the acad- emy, has operated as a strategy of engulfment to subordinate non-Western taxonomies and paradigms of affect, emotion, and feeling as mere variations if not to outright invalidate them beyond the threshold of recognition as feeling. In this sense, sympathy functions as the fundamental condition of affective intelligibility for the spectrum of feelings in all degrees of expres- siveness and intensities. To understand the erasures of the unfeeling, we must read the archive in oppositional ways.