Fanaticism of Sympathy

The "fanaticism of sympathy" is a phrase from George Eliot's Middlemarch, spoken by Will Ladislaw as a critique of Dorothea's ethics of radical, expansive redistribution. In the theoretical frame constructed by Kornbluh (slug: kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for), it names a specific psychic-economic posture: the attempt to sustain an unlimited extension of sympathetic identification — one that does not economize, does not streamline, and does not convert fellow-feeling into the calculus of interest. Will's charge is structurally telling: he accuses Dorothea of a logic that would, taken to its limit, demand the subject's own self-undoing (becoming "miserable in your own goodness," turning "evil") so that no differential of advantage remains. This is not mere altruism but the structural insistence on refusing to close the circuit of the psychic economy — a refusal that mirrors, in the moral register, what Lacanian theory calls fidelity to desire beyond the "service of goods."

Theoretically, the concept marks a threshold: the point at which sympathy exceeds the bounds of the Smithian "invisible hand" logic of radiating, self-regulating interest, and thereby becomes legible — from within the emerging ideology of financialization — as pathological excess, as jouissance rather than productive desire. The novel's irony, as Kornbluh reads it, is that Dorothea's fanaticism is ultimately domesticated by her marriage to Will, whose "radiating delight" models the streamlined, individuated psychic economy that financial modernity requires. The "fanaticism of sympathy" is thus the name for the excess that must be expelled — or, more precisely, the remainder that reveals, by its very pathologization, the ideological work being performed by economized affect.

Within Kornbluh's argument (kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for), "fanaticism of sympathy" occupies the negative pole of a structural opposition: it is what must be diagnosed as excessive and dissolved so that the financialized psychic economy — modeled on Will's Smithian "radiating delight" — can establish itself as natural and rational. The concept is therefore an internal critique voiced within the novel, but the novel's irony doubles back on it: Will's dismissal of Dorothea's ethics is precisely the move by which ideology (in the Lacanian-Žižekian sense) does its work, papering over the constitutive antagonism of an economic order that depends on the suppression of redistribution.

The concept cross-references several canonical terms in a productive way. As a form of excessive attachment that refuses the "service of goods," the fanaticism of sympathy brushes against the Ethics of Psychoanalysis — Dorothea's posture resembles the Antigonean fidelity to desire beyond social accounting, though it is articulated in moral-sympathetic rather than libidinal terms. Its pathologization by Will indexes the operation of Ideology: what is labeled "fanatical" is precisely that which exceeds and thereby exposes the fantasy frame sustaining financial modernity. The concept also speaks to Jouissance: Dorothea's sympathy is excessive because it refuses the economy of exchange and pleasure, insisting on a kind of surplus expenditure that the Symbolic order of financialized interest cannot absorb. And insofar as Dorothea's fanaticism is ultimately captured by the marriage plot — converted into domesticated desire — the concept illustrates Fantasy's role as the frame that stabilizes and limits what a subject is permitted to want. The "fanaticism of sympathy" is thus a singularity within the corpus: a Victorian literary coinage that Kornbluh appropriates to name the psychic remainder that financial ideology must metabolize or expel.

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian FormAnna Kornbluh · 2014 (p.85)

'I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,' said Will, impetuously. 'If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others.'

Will's formulation is theoretically loaded because it performs the ideological move it names: by labeling Dorothea's unlimited sympathy a "fanaticism," he pathologizes the refusal to economize affect, and the reductio ad absurdum he offers — "turn evil that you might have no advantage" — reveals that the logic of sympathy, taken seriously, would destroy the very differential of interest (advantage) on which the Smithian economy of desire is organized. The word "advantage" is the hinge: it is both an economic and a libidinal term, marking the point where psychic economy and financial economy are shown to share a common structure.