Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Stefano Ercolino and Massimo Fusillo. Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts. Trans. Dylan J. Montanari. New York: Routledge, 2026. 198 pp.

Review by Fredrik Renard

27 August 2026

Pathei mathos: the Greeks knew that art achieves its greatest power through the encounter with negativity. Wrath and longing are the commanding emotions of the Homeric epics, and in the foundational text of the Western poetological tradition, the Poetics, Aristotle paradoxically defined the pleasure proper to tragedy as arising from the evocation of pity and fear. As one might expect, the cathartic effect that Aristotle singles out as the result of experiencing such emotional distress also plays an important role in Stefano Ercolino and Massimo Fusillo’s new monograph Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts. Unlike the Stagirite’s notoriously elusive remarks on the subject, however, Ercolino and Fusillo’s study offers a sustained and wide-ranging investigation of the aesthetic mechanisms through which audiences are made to empathize with characters, actions, and worlds marked by transgression, violence, and moral repugnance.

Such an intervention is highly welcome. From the Frankfurt School to poststructuralism, negativity has held a prominent place within aesthetic reflection as that which frustrates emotional immersion and safeguards a space for critical reflection. By contrast, the more recent turn to empathy within literary studies has emphasized the prosocial and ethically affirmative dimensions of affective aesthetic experience. Ercolino and Fusillo position themselves between these two traditions. Their guiding question is how art and literature employ devices of both attraction and distance to induce empathic alignment with negative phenomena, thereby compelling audiences to reflect on their own affective responses. Crucially, estrangement and distance are here not conceived as the opposites of empathy but as among its constitutive conditions: it is through aesthetic mediation that spectators and readers are able to engage empathically with deeply disturbing figures such as Medea, Macbeth, or Humbert Humbert.

The term negative is used broadly to encompass aesthetic involvement with objects capable of eliciting feelings of strong moral and emotional unease. Rather than seeking a single defining feature of such negativity, Ercolino and Fusillo accentuate its conflicted nature. Expanding upon Theodor Lipps’s original notion of negative Einfühlung as a partial or resisted form of empathy, they propose that an aesthetic experience becomes an instance of negative empathy when emotional participation is sustained together with ethical distance.[1] This simultaneous movement toward and away from the object—reminiscent, in some ways, of the sublime—distinguishes negative empathy from compassion for suffering, on the one hand, and mere fascination with evil, on the other. Thus, according to Ercolino and Fusillo’s argument, neither Oedipus nor Iago would count as candidates for negative empathy. Oedipus’s suffering arises from ignorance rather than from morally conflicted agency, whereas Iago, despite the fascination exerted by his diabolical machinations, remains too psychologically opaque and devoid of inner torment to let the audience empathize with his position. What makes Macbeth a paradigmatic example of negative empathy, by contrast, is the inner struggle that defines his tragic trajectory. Torn between ambition and guilt, he confronts the deed he has committed with debilitating horror, allowing the audience at once to inhabit his harrowed consciousness and to recoil from the crime that occasions it.

How such a divided position is attained varies considerably across the book’s rich case studies. Instead of tracing a historical development, Ercolino and Fusillo organize the chapters by medium, examining how negative empathy is produced through the affordances of the novel, drama, opera, painting, performance art, film, and television series. In Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, for instance, it is not the inner torment of a single consciousness but the compositional ensemble that generates negative empathy. Where the empathic relation in Macbeth arises from the usurper’s psychic disintegration, Caravaggio’s painting deploys the formal arrangement of the scene of execution to implicate the spectator in the represented violence. The twisting body of the executioner, the raised sword, and the grasp of Matthew’s wrist induce an immediate embodied identification with the act of killing, only to then transform that visceral response into a conflicted meditation on violence through the countervailing movements that draw the viewer away from the center of aggression. This result recalls Aristotle’s paradox that negative emotions can become aesthetically pleasurable while shifting the source of catharsis from pity and fear to the simultaneous solicitation and suspension of our most destructive impulses.  

Not all chapters are equally successful in providing close readings that also advance the larger theoretical argument. In part because the book covers so much ground, some discussions lapse into inventories of works and biographical overviews that one feels would be more at home in a textbook than a study of this theoretical ambition. The lack of a concluding chapter further contributes to a certain theoretical diffuseness, leaving the cumulative implications of the individual case studies less fully articulated than they might have been. However, such reservations should in no way overshadow the substantial achievement of this work. By adding the concept of negative empathy to our critical vocabulary, Ercolino and Fusillo offer a new and powerful framework for understanding the enduring role that negativity plays in aesthetic experience.

[1] Theodor Lipps, “Zusätze zur ‘Einfühlung,’” in Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1903): 1:126–41.