Fictions et lectures empathiques dans l’oeuvre fantomatique de Sophie Calle

Often discredited, empathy – linked to pathos, sensibility and affect – is a notion that nevertheless runs through the work of eminent researchers in art history. Such is the case of A. Warburg’s work, from his thesis on Botticelli and mythology to the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. The preliminary remark of the Florentine Essays is a long-running “theoretical program”, the third paragraph of which mentions the necessary “empathetic aptitude” of the art historian and art lover. From the perspective of Sophie Calle’s work – which is both visual and literary – this contribution examines the way in which art works that bring ghosts into play fictionalize an empathetic reading. We show how Sophie Calle creates fictional situations that generate empathy or rely on empathy, rehabilitating a paradigm of mantic (divinatory) reading. The experience of absence and the reading of traces become omens, reactivating theories of indexical reading in which empathy becomes the driving force behind meaning.

Keywords: empathy, ghost, Sophie Calle, fiction, mantic, reading