Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ''Death of the Subject''

Feeling in Theory

Feeling in Theory Emotion after the "Death of the Subject"

REI TERADA

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

For Michiko

Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Terada, Rei, 1962Feeling in theory: emotion after the" death of the subject" / Rei Terada. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00493-0 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-01127-9 (pbk) 1. Emotions (Philosophy) 2. Subject (Philosophy) I. Title. B815.T472001 128'.37-dc21

00-054244

Imagine a case in which people ascribed pain only to inanimate things; pitied only dolls! -WITTGENSTEIN, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

§282

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations and Textual Note

xi

Introduction: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject" 1

Cogito and the History of the Passions Philosophy of Emotion 18 Cogito and the History of the Passions Feeling and Phenomena 24 Imaginary Seductions 31 Idea-Signs of Passion 41

2

Pathos (Allegories of Emotion)

16

22

48

Emotion and Figure 55 Safety and the Sublime 63 The Allegory of Emotion 66 Inner Voices, Hostile Strangers: Moral and Social Feelings 72 Emotion Degree Zero 81

3

A Parallel Philosophy Nobody~s Passion:

90

Emotion and the Philosophy of Music 92 Emotional Reference 99

1

VlU

•

Contents Why You Can~t Make a Subject That Feels Pain From Affection to Affect 110 The Regime of Affect 119

4

106

Psyche, Inc.: Derridean Emotion after de Man 128 Hardly Thinking 130 Psyche and Prosopopoeia 134 ""The Theater of Petty Passions~~ L~ame 147

140

Conclusion: Night of the Human Subject Notes

159

References Index

207

191

152

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, I've been influenced by Julie Ellison and Adela Pinch, friends whose work on emotion encouraged response. Writing has been in part a way of writing to them. Many other people have also helped me; those whose help was both intellectual and emotional include MindaRae Amiran, Timothy Bahti, Julia Carlson-Federhofer, Hank De Leo, Alice Fulton, Patricia Geldenbott, Sandra Gunning, Nick Halpern, Kerry Larson, Ian Leong, Yopie Prins, Eliza Richards, Sarah Riggs, Susan Rosenbaum, and Kelly Thomas. I'm grateful for all their support through long Michigan winters. I thank the graduate students in English and Comparative Literature, especially the members of the 1999 seminar on theory of lyric, for their contributions. Thanks too to Patrick O'Donnell and the faculty in English at Michigan State University. I learned from friends at North Carolina State University; from the conversation of Marjorie Levinson, John McGowan, Jim Morrison, Tom Reinert, Charles Stein, Michael Szalay, and David Wayne Thomas; and from participants in the 1999 UCLA Humanities Consortium on the politics of the passions. Neil Hertz encouraged the long-term development of this project; Lindsay Waters, Thomas Pepper, and Steven Shaviro have been perceptive and sympathetic readers. Eyal Amiran, whose ideas and passions show feeling in theory indeed, is the co-creator of this book. Jake supervised. This project was supported by leaves from the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature, the College of Letters, Sciences and Arts, and the Office of the Vice-President for Multicultural

x · Acknowledgments

Affairs at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Portions of Chapter 1 appeared as "Imaginary Seductions: Derrida and Emotion Theory," in Comparative Literature 51 (1999): 193-216; of Chapter 2, as "Pathos (Allegories of Reading)" in Studies in Romanticism 39 (2000): 27-50, reprinted by permission of the Trustees of Boston University; of Chapter 4, as "Psyche, Inc.: Derridean Emotion after de Man," in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 29 (1998): 47-62, reprinted by permission of the editors. I am grateful to the journals for permission to publish this material in revised form.

Abbreviations and Textual Note

AI AR

B BI EPS D G M OCR R RDR RE RR S SP TP WD YFS

Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust Jacques Derrida, "Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments" Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza Jacques Derrida, Dissemination Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, eds., Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, eds., Reading de Man Reading Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference Peter Brooks, Shoshana Felman, and J. Hillis Miller, eds., Yale French Studies 69 [The Lesson of Paul de Man]

Dates that appear in parentheses in the text refer to publication of the editions cited; first publication dates, where these differ, appear in brackets. Within citations, spelling and italicization of words in languages other than the home language of the texts have been regularized.

Introduction: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject"

It may be difficult to imagine what the kinds of experience proposed by poststructuralist theory are supposed to feel like. Many readers have assumed that the very idea of strong emotion is inconsistent with poststructuralism. In the opening pages of Postmodernism, for instance, Fredric Jameson argues for a "waning of affect" in our time. 1 Comparing Andy Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes" with Van Gogh's shoe paintings and Munch's "The Scream," Jameson concludes that "concepts such as anxiety and alienation (and the experiences to which they correspond, as in The Scream) are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern" (14). Jameson's terms qualify one another in the course of his discussion; at times emotion itself seems to be in question, at times merely certain kinds of emotions. Jameson stipulates that "of course, it would be inaccurate to suggest that all affect, all feeling or emotion, all subjectivity, has vanished from the newer image" (10). Nevertheless, he circles back to what seems to be an essential friction between "the 'death' of the subject itself-the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad" (15)-and emotion as such: The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego-what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more-the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal. ... As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely

2 · Feeling in Theory

a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. (15)

Jameson memorably phrases what many people have suspectedthat there is some kind of contradiction in attributing emotion, or at least strong and clear emotion, to anything other than a subject. Emotion and subjectivity seem to be deeply connected. Thus Manfred Frank remarks that "a dead subject emits no more cries of pain."2 Although in poststructuralist theory the "death of the subject" figures the demise of a concept, Frank exaggerates the faux-reifying effect of the figure. Emotion in the "dead" subject evokes for him the oxymoron of a suffering corpse. As if developing this aphorism, another critic comments on Frank's philosophical position: In ... What is Neostructuralism?, he pays particular attention to the problems created by the so-called Death of the Subject, the elimination of a thinking, feeling, and willing self as an existing part of what used to be called a person. Time and again Frank points out that the various systems or discourses offered as more up-to-date replacements of a subject/ self always surreptitiously smuggle in effects supposedly created by such impersonal entities but that only such a self could really bring about. 3

This testimony is offered as part of a symposium in the pragmatist journal Common Knowledge on reactions to the "linguistic turn" in theory. The context for the remark is a discussion of the things "linguistic" theories cannot do, and its assumption is that these theories cannot explain "effects" of thinking, willing, and-my concern here-feeling. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, provocateurs of an antipoststructuralist philosophical movement in France, also assert that "the philosophists of the sixties could not thematize in their own discourses the resistance of subjectivity to its own 'vanishing,' due to the nature of their fundamental theoretical opinions." Believing this, they find something contradictory in Louis Althusser's calls for "class consciousness," "devotion," and "courage": "in this final foundation of history on consciousness and courage, or, in other words, on the classical attributes of the metaphysical subject ... 'the elimination of the category of subject' seems again most decidedly at an abrupt standstill. "4 Certainly, emotion after the "death of the subject" seems strange and worth inquiring into. Many scholars have found it so strange, however, that they simply presume its inconsistency. Some believe that

Introduction · 3

poststructuralist theory describes a blank, mechanistic world; others point out with irritation that, nevertheless, certain theorists seem all too willing to claim and to represent strong emotion. Jacques Derrida, especially, has been criticized for appearing through his work to enjoy and to solicit suffering, sympathy, and animosity, supposedly against his reasoning. 5 Thus much of the secondary literature on poststructuralist theory assumes, first, that this theory does not have an account of emotion, and, second, that evidence of its own emotion belies its own nonbelief in the human subject. If one presumes in the first place that only subjects feel, then poststructuralist emotion looks like a symptomatic irruption, an unconscious contradiction. Yet if emotional effects are so terribly pervasive in poststructuralist theory-" always . .. smuggle[d] in"-it is time to consider the possibility that poststructuralism is directly concerned with emotion. In order for this to be so, emotion would have to be nonsubjective. I will argue that these statements do describe the case. Poststructuralist thought about emotion is hidden in plain sight; poststructuralist theory deploys implicit and explicit logics of emotion and, as its very critics point out, willingly dramatizes particular emotions. It has reason to stress emotive experience, for far from controverting the "death of the subject," emotion entails this death. Not only poststructuralist thought, but the history of thought about emotion says as much. The purpose and the very existence of emotion have traditionally been associated with persistent difficulties in the philosophy of mind. Feared as a hazard or prized as a mysterious gift, emotion indexes strains in philosophy-the same strains that poststructuralist theory argues fracture the classical model of subjectivity. Thus "poststructuralist" dissatisfaction with the subject appears in classical thought about emotion: theories of emotion are always poststructuralist theories. Poststructuralist readings of philosophy render visible both a discourse of emotion and an ideology of emotion, or narrative about the discourse that underrepresents its complexity. The discourse of emotion from Descartes to the present day describes emotion as nonsubjective experience in the form of self-difference within cognition. The ideology of emotion tells a supplementary story in which emotion fills in the difference it registers. These stories may be told within the same text, as in the works of Descartes (a paradigmatic author here). The discourse and the ideology are not equally untrue, however, since only

4 · Feeling in Theory

the ideology makes a circular positive claim. Jerome McGann and Terry Eagleton, and others after them, have analyzed the ideological convenience of casting emotion as a basis for naturalized social or moral consensus. 6 I agree that this is ideological, and add that such a gesture depends on an even more fundamental one that casts emotion as proof of the human subject. Thematizing the discourse-ideology dynamic itself and emphasizing the phenomenology of philosophical narratives, texts like Derrida's Of Grammatology and Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading free a credible concept of emotion from a less credible scheme of subjectivity. I am arguing that a discourse and ideology of emotion exist; that poststructuralist theory shows their relation; and that the effect of this exploration is to suggest that we would have no emotions if we were subjects. As we'll see, deconstruction intervenes in theories of emotion in a particularly mindful way. This may sound surprising, since deconstruction is often thought to be the truly glacial part of poststructuralist theory, the realm in which the death of the subject is most deathly. To explain this apparent irony, and hence my own emphasis, it's helpful to address some basic questions of vocabulary. When I say that emotion requires the death of the subject, do I really mean emotion and not some sort of impulse, affect, sensation, intensity, or mood? Do I mean emotion and not the representation of emotion? How do the differences between modes of emotion such as passion and pathos, and between particular emotions such as grief and triumph, come into play? Emotion terms overlap in ordinary language; battling the vagueness, philosophers have developed the distinctions between them. Inevitably, emotion words are inflected variously by different writers. I try to steer a middle course between imposing a single vocabulary on all discussions of texts and giving up on terminological distinctions altogether. The terms seem to me to differ most valuably in connotation, and I've tried to preserve their shades of meaning. Some of those shades are as follows: by emotion we usually mean a psychological, at least minimally interpretive experience whose physiological aspect is affect. Feeling is a capacious term that connotes both physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions). Although philosophers reserve "feeling" for bodily conditions, I use it when it seems fruitful to emphasize the common ground of the physiological and the psychological. Passion highlights an interesting phenomenon, the difficulty of classifying

Introduction · 5

emotion as passive or active. Emotions are often portrayed as expressions of a subject imposed upon the subject, as when someone is seized by remorse or surprised by joy.7 Philosophers have taken sides on how this question should be dealt with; some address the ambiguity by dividing emotions into passive and active groups.8 The whole quandary concentrates in the word "passion" (the same word in English and French). Although passion's Latin etymology connotes passive suffering, it has come to stand for intense goal-directedness as well-to mean "an aim or object pursued with zeal" (OED). Following this latter track, Paul Ricoeur regards passions as so willful that "no passion can be placed among even the synthetic functions of the voluntary or the involuntary."9 Of course passion's very force makes it seem compulsive. Thus passion drives intentional subjectivity to its self-undoing in senseless vigor-an undoing that does not have to be figured as decadent excess, but can be conceived as an interior limit of volition. Passion, therefore, characterizes the nonsubjectivity within the very concept of the subject. Finally, pathos conveys the explicitly representational, vicarious, and supplementary dimensions of emotion. Scenes are played not for passion, but for pathos; debates about pathos come to be about the relation between representation and intensity. If passion raises questions about the "upper" threshold of emotion-to use a spatial metaphor this time-pathos raises questions about its "lower" threshold and techniques of perpetuation. Since discussions of pathos acknowledge mediation, they playa large role in poststructuralist theories built on the significance of representation. In this book I focus especially on emotion-emotion construed in a psychological and unremarkable way. Although emotion encompasses affect, passion, and pathos-and I grant a specialized privilege to pathos as perpetual emotion-I am most interested in the middle ranges of emotion. I assume, for example, that the meaningfulness implied by emotion is actually at stake in discussions of affect. The alleged authority of objectivity and subjectivity, the quality of affect and emotion alike, ultimately come to bear on the import of experience. Consequently, I believe that what we concede about emotion we will concede about rival terms. We tend to grant that physiological sensations are in some sense impersonal; this prompts Descartes to "prove that the mind [is] more easily known than the body"lO and Michel Foucault and Jean-Fran