ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the intra-action between “self” and “other” is apparent in the “human” ability to empathise. I draw on moments in-game of the avatar-gamer experience and read these as an empathic intra-connection. By demonstrating the cognitive-affectiveconnection between the avatar and the gamer, I consider how these moments demonstrate a further destabilising of the notion of us as ontologically separate units. However, this analysis is problematic for certain conceptions of empathy, which impose a strict self/other dichotomy. I therefore propose a version of posthuman empathy, which allows us to view empathy as an entanglement between entities, where each is affected by the “other”. There are links between empathy and acting that I explore at the beginning of this chapter, following from the previous chapter on acting, and this is why the analysis begins to move in this direction. Rather than only viewing the posthuman possibilities within a performative practice, this chapter will consider how we might posthumanise empathy along similar lines. I therefore argue that our empathetic experiences are demonstrative of our posthuman capacity to disrupt the idea of the human as a bounded and fixed self and instead emphasise relationality, intersubjectivity, and entanglement.
