Priest, doctor, ambassador, former aggressor… they chose to put themselves in the other’s shoes
“Reading a literary text puts us in a position to see through the eyes of others, acquiring a breadth of perspective that broadens our humanity (…). And let’s not forget how dangerous it is to no longer listen to the voice of others who call out to us! » insisted Pope Francis in a text published last spring. And to hammer home the risk of “spiritual deafness” induced by the narrowing of the world to our experience alone.
If this text resonated well beyond the religious or literary sphere, it is undoubtedly no coincidence. Because at a time when fear of others and withdrawal into oneself threaten our societies, a reverse movement is taking shape. On television as in the cinema, documentaries and so-called “immersive” fiction are multiplying to take us in depth to discover lives other than our own. And this momentum of openness has won the support of a wide audience. A million spectators saw the feature film I will always see your faces (2023), signed Jeanne Herry. A resounding success for this documentary-style fiction, which takes us straight into a circle of restorative justice, which consists of establishing a dialogue between perpetrators and victims of crimes. “By attending training, I discovered unique suffering which I wanted to portray in this film. To penetrate these intimacies, as close as possible to the characters, is to immerse the viewer in the cauldron of emotions that are released during the exchanges between victims and condemned people,” the filmmaker confided to us upon the release of this fiction.
An emotional experience
An approach that she linked to that of directors Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano who, in the successful series In therapy, open the doors of a psychiatrist’s office to us, lifting the veil on the inner lives of patients marked by the attacks of 2015. This year, the triumph of the feature film A little something extra, directed by Artus, also highlighted the aspirations of people with mental disabilities playing their own roles. On the airwaves, podcast proposals based on personal testimonies are multiplying. “All these voices talking often move me and sometimes upset me. We share the same humanity! » confides Carole, 53 years old, loyal listener of the show Feet on the ground, on France Culture.
Accessing, for the duration of a film, a podcast or a book, the world of those who do not live like us constitutes an experience of high emotional intensity, which connects us to each other. Listening to the voice of others through an artist, Pope Francis continues in the same letter, “opens man to solidarity, sharing, compassion and mercy.” Formidably human, the need for otherness is thus heard in a society where the violence of words too often dominates the media scene. Against this hubbub, many citizens still believe in the virtues of listening and being present to others, which resolve tensions and conflicts. Public interest in training in non-violent communication and empathy – “empathy courses” have now made their way into secondary schools – expresses a contemporary desire for introspection as well as openness to others.
The six people who agreed to testify in our pages tell us how much this other is both rich and mysterious. Wealth which, by decentering me from myself, opens me to solidarity and sharing. Mystery, because I will never completely penetrate the singularity of others, reminds us the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, he who placed otherness at the heart of his thought and wrote: “God is when one man helps another. » But to be able to reach out to others, must we not, above all, have listened to them in what makes them unique? Some of our witnesses have gone a step further by going so far as to experience in their flesh the experience of others, in the most intimate part of themselves. We let them speak.
