Key moments of our lives, especially at the beginning and end, are marked by gentleness--but the simplicity of that concept is misleading. Gentleness is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of resistance within ethics and politics. In this powerful rethinking by a renowned philosopher and psychoanalyst, whose untimely death captured worldwide attention, gentleness becomes a series of embodied paradoxes: power that is also soft, nobility that is also humble, sweetness that is also intelligent, subtlety that is nevertheless striking, fragility that has the potential to subvert the status quo.

In Greek and Christian myth, in the philosophical and religious traditions of China and India, and across Western literature and art, gentleness occurs in moments of tenderness such as birth, care, and mutual love, but also where least expected, amid danger, humiliation, and cruelty. Gentleness, Dufourmantelle shows, is marked above all by our early human connections to the physical world, uncovered and rediscovered primarily through the senses, with all the ambivalences that entails.

Today, we are most familiar with a gentleness sold to us in the diluted form of mawkishness. This is how we try to evade its subtlety--no longer by fighting it, but by enfeebling it. In the name of our highest values--happiness, truth, security--we enforce gentle safeguards against hurt and are persuaded to participate in our era's three divinities: efficiency, speed, and profitability. But in doing so we seal ourselves off from the life-affirming gamble that a true gentleness affords.

True gentleness entails an ethic of desire. Against a society that crushes human beings gently through consumerist logic and the illusion of total transparency, Dufourmantelle celebrates the uncompromising gentleness discovered by Gandhi and other revolutionaries. At the same time, within the despair confided by her patients, she traces the force of resistance and intangible magic that gentleness offers in the lived experience of ordinary women and men who fully embrace the risk of living.

This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

This book, whose original French edition achieved worldwide attention when its author died trying to save two children caught in a riptide, challenges the psychic work the modern world devotes to avoiding risk. Weaving psychoanalytic case studies together with philosophical reflections, Dufourmantelle shows how risk is an essential property of life, one that requires our embrace.

«En aquellos lugares de la sexualidad y el dolor donde occidente entrena el silencio, Anne Dufourmantelle invita al consuelo a través de la acción y la palabra. [...] Quizás la lección más valiosa que nos da su obra es que para vivir hace falta atención amorosa y entrega, también en el dolor . -Sara Torres

Qué hacer en caso de amor? No hay acto más arriesgado que amar y ser amado, el eje en torno al cual gira toda nuestra vida. Desde las historias imaginarias que nos contamos cuando nos enamoramos hasta las ansias de venganza de quien se ha visto abandonado, la mordedura de los celos, la fascinación, la fusión amorosa, el deseo de posesión, el odio, el desapego o la liberación, el acontecimiento de la pasión y sus múltiples figuras están en el centro de este libro.

En la intimidad de la consulta, la psicoanalista escucha con atención y recoge las palabras de sus pacientes, que alimentan a su vez la propia angustia de la autora en torno a un misterio en apariencia irresoluble: por qué, desde el principio de los tiempos, nos lanzamos ciegos al juego del amor y aceptamos una y otra vez el riesgo de amar.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

In those areas of sexuality and pain where western culture trains us to stay silent, Anne Dufourmantelle offers comfort through words and action. [...] Perhaps the most valuable lesson she offers is that giving ourselves over to love, as well as pain, is a necessary part of living. -Sara Torres

What to do in case of love? There is no bigger risk than loving and being loved, the axis around which our lives turn. The dreams we weave when we fall in love, the vengeful impulses we feel when we are betrayed, jealousy, infatuation, romance, possessiveness, hate, falling out of love, passion in its many forms - all are at the center of this book.

The author, a psychoanalyst, listens and chronicles the words of her patients, which inform her own musings on a seemingly irreconcilable mystery: Why, since the beginning of time, have human beings thrown themselves blindly into love and its attendant risks?

Gentleness is an enigma. Taken up in a double movement of welcoming and giving, it appears on the threshold of passages signed off by birth and death. Because it has its degrees of intensity, because it is a symbolic force, and because it has a transformative ability over things and beings, it is a power.

The simplicity of gentleness is misleading. It is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, become central to both ethics and politics. Gentleness is a force of secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients called potentiality.

In our day, gentleness is sold to us under its related form of diluted mawkishness. By infantilizing it our era denies it. This is how we try to overcome the high demands of its subtlety--no longer by fighting it, but by enfeebling it. Language itself is therefore perverted: what our society intends to give the human beings that it crushes gently, it does in the name of the highest values: happiness, truth, security.

From listening to those who come to me and confide their despair, I have heard it expressed in every lived experience. I have felt its force of resistance and its intangible magic. In mediating its relation to the world, it appears that its intelligence carries life, saves and amplifies it.

When Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in a heroic attempt to save two children caught in rough seas, obituaries around the world rarely failed to recall that she was the author of a book entitled In Praise of Risk, implying that her death confirmed the ancient adage that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Now available in English, this magnificent and already much-discussed book indeed offers a trenchant critique of the psychic work the modern world devotes to avoiding risk.

Yet this is not a book on how to die but on how to live. For Dufourmantelle, risk entails an encounter not with an external threat to life but with something hidden in life that conditions our approach to such ordinary risks as disobedience, passion, addiction, leaving family, and solitude

Keeping jargon to a minimum, Dufourmantelle weaves philosophical reflections together with clinical case histories. The everyday fears, traumas, and resistances that therapy addresses brush up against such broader concerns as terrorism, insurance, addiction, artistic creation, and political revolution. Taking up a project than joins the work of many French thinkers, such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hélène Cixous, Giorgio Agamben, and Catherine Malabou, Dufourmantelle works to dislodge Western philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, and politics from the redemptive logic of sacrifice. She discovers the kernel of a future beyond annihilation where one might least expect to find it, hidden in the unconscious.

In an era defined by enhanced security measures, border walls, trigger warnings, and endless litigation, Dufourmantelle's masterwork provides a much-needed celebration of the risks that define what it means to live.

Finalist, French-American Foundation Translation Prize

In an age that prizes political and personal transparency, In Defense of Secrets champions the secret as what permits relation and ensures our humanity.

Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 in an attempt to rescue two children caught in the ocean. Her work lives on, though, in this provocative and necessary book. Through etymologies and case studies, personal history and incisive commentary on contemporary society, In Defense of Secrets returns us to the fundamental psychic scene of the secret. The secret, for Dufourmantelle, is not a code to be cracked or a firewall to be penetrated but a dynamic and powerful entity that permits relation and that ensures our humanity.

Tracking the secret though art and literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology, from the Inquisition to the present, Dufourmantelle's writing spirals around the question of the secret's value. In our age, when political and personal transparency seem to be prized above all--lives posted on the Internet, information leaked, whistles blown, taboos absent except with respect to the secret itself--In Defense of Secrets champions what remains hidden, private, veiled, hushed, just out of sight. The secret is on the side of nature, not science; organic growth, not technology; love's generosity, not knowledge's grasp.

For Dufourmantelle, the secret is a powerful and dynamic thing: deadly if unheard or misused, perhaps, but equally the source of creativity and of ethics. An ethics of the secret, we can hear her say, means listening hard and sensitively, respecting the secret in its secret essence, unafraid of it and open to what it has to say.

Finalist, French-American Foundation Translation Prize

In an age that prizes political and personal transparency, In Defense of Secrets champions the secret as what permits relation and ensures our humanity.

Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 in an attempt to rescue two children caught in the ocean. Her work lives on, though, in this provocative and necessary book. Through etymologies and case studies, personal history and incisive commentary on contemporary society, In Defense of Secrets returns us to the fundamental psychic scene of the secret. The secret, for Dufourmantelle, is not a code to be cracked or a firewall to be penetrated but a dynamic and powerful entity that permits relation and that ensures our humanity.

Tracking the secret though art and literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology, from the Inquisition to the present, Dufourmantelle's writing spirals around the question of the secret's value. In our age, when political and personal transparency seem to be prized above all--lives posted on the Internet, information leaked, whistles blown, taboos absent except with respect to the secret itself--In Defense of Secrets champions what remains hidden, private, veiled, hushed, just out of sight. The secret is on the side of nature, not science; organic growth, not technology; love's generosity, not knowledge's grasp.

For Dufourmantelle, the secret is a powerful and dynamic thing: deadly if unheard or misused, perhaps, but equally the source of creativity and of ethics. An ethics of the secret, we can hear her say, means listening hard and sensitively, respecting the secret in its secret essence, unafraid of it and open to what it has to say.