John Protevi

On his book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic

Cover Interview of February 16, 2010

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“Placing affective cognition in a political context.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“Continental philosophy of science looks at scientific practice as its object of study; it doesn’t incorporate scientific findings in a continental investigation of philosophical problems.”

On the second:

“During the Katrina storm and the days following it, pundits indulged a rhetoric of Hobbesian fantasy. The reality was much more Rousseauean. There was very little, if any, atomized anti-social predation in New Orleans; there was instead massive and spontaneous solidarity born out of empathy for threatened lives.”

philosophy / 20th century / emotions / aristotle / neoliberalism / 21st century / cognition / kant immanuel / deleuze gilles / schiavo terri /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009