Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle, translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé
The following quotations are meant to offer a small sample of the book. Not included are Dufourmantelle’s discussions of sensuality (with multiple chapters devoted to “Sensory Celebration”), trauma, animality, and psychoanalytic practice. Toward the end of 2025, our reading group devoted several sessions to this book. Recordings of some of those discussions are available on Patreon. If you’d like to support my work and/or join the weekly online reading group, doing so will also give you access to the Patreon community.
“Gentleness does not belong only to the human race. It is a quality whose infinite range extends beyond the realm of the living.” (p.7)
“A person, a stone, a thought, a gesture, a color … can demonstrate gentleness. […] it is risky for those who want to comprehend it. In many ways it has the fierce nobility of a wild beast. The same could be said of a few other rare species: innocence, courage, astonishment, vulnerability.” (p.1)
“We perform acts of gentleness. We demonstrate gentleness. We soften the end of a life, its beginning.” (p.8)
“We cannot possess gentleness. We offer it hospitality.” (p.55)
“Gentleness involves the body, that is to say, the idea and the sensibility of a body that gentleness could have educated, elevated, ennobled. Its power distilled by the senses.” (p.55)
“Aristotle identified power as the ability of a being to grow into his becoming. A seed contains a ‘potential’ tree, although in its material reality nothing would allow us to detect it.” (p.17)
“… gentleness is not only a principle of relation, regardless of the intensity behind it. It makes way for what is most singular in others.” (p. 13)
“It opens in time a quality of presence within the tangible world.” (p.10)
“Being gentle with objects and beings means understanding them in their insufficiency, their precariousness, their immaturity, their stupidity. It means not wanting to add to suffering, to exclusion, to cruelty and inventing space for a sensitive humanity, for a relation to the other that accepts his weakness or how he could disappoint us. And this profound understanding engages a truth.” (p.15)
“Indistinguishable from the range of feelings it accompanies—kindness, protection, compassion. It is bordered because it offers itself as a passage. In diffusing itself it alters. In indulging itself it metamorphoses.” (p.10)
“To attack gentleness is an unnamed crime that our era often commits in the name of its divinities: efficiency, speed, profitability. (p.53)
“Today what we call ‘depression’ is one of the major ways we deny our need for gentleness. With the best intention, we each create for the other a narrative about our own opacity. We have made exchange into a religion, yet we exchange nothing.” (p.62)
“Gentleness is a return to self that invents a future in the image of the spiral. An open revolution. It is a ‘repetition’ in the sense intended by Kierkegaard: reviving the past with a view to a possible opening to the unexpected. If one believes in working with the unconscious, returning to self is not merely remembering. Because memory concerns a past self that no longer exists in the form of a still indeterminate present self. The repetition will be, like the Nietzschean amor fati, a consented return to the past that, by this acquiescence, would find the extent of its secret power. To understand or hear oneself is not without effect. Gentleness is one of the names of this reconciliation with what has been repressed, exiled in the past and therefore ‘repeated’ with indulgence and the courage that it takes to admit that we were there, in conscience.” (p. 104)
“We do not recover from our childhood without choosing life, consciously, a second time. Being born is not enough. The joys, the expectations, the troubles of childhood are events that compose us with an intensity that will set the tone for our entire existence. In that sense childhood is entirely ‘traumatic,’ not because it is tragic but because it reaches psychological realms within us primarily through perception and sensibility. And to be entirely there without remainder is rare and is becoming more rare as our scattered, fragmented self takes over, as absence to ourselves becomes the rule.” (p.96)