On her book Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion
Cover Interview of March 04, 2012
The wide angle
I am trained in philosophy and literary analysis. My particular take on the intersection of philosophy and literature consists in using the tools of a literary scholar to analyze a philosophical text.
I grew up with emotionality. Like everyone, in some sense. But my point here is that I have tended to try to figure out ways to grow up with and alongside emotionality, rather than growing up by dismissing emotionality as immature, irrational, or childish.
In my studies in philosophy, I was drawn to epistemology but I couldn’t find much explicit and sustained engagement by canonical philosophers with the role affect and emotion play—not only as a disturbance of rationality but as a partner, as it were, in philosophical attempts to envision and understand worlds.
Tropes of Transport furnishes some of this kind of engagement. I was looking for affect and emotion not as the object of philosophical knowledge but as philosophically acknowledged forces that propel and inhibit thought. This is why Tropes of Transport explores less what Hegel says about emotion than how emotion organizes and disorganizes his text.
I am not particularly fond of the crisis model and of vehement relations to emotionality. The crisis model creates pressure in order to enable release and transformation. This psychic hydraulics operates by repression and produces violent outbursts. I will grapple again with violent emotion in my next book on Kleist, but Tropes of Transport ends with an argument against emotional violence. I am concerned with developing a steady relation to the unsteadiness that is emotionality.
All this is to say that my work is driven by a pressing feeling that we need better and more ways to relate to emotional life. I am convinced that this relation needs to be more nuanced than unconditional celebration or unqualified elimination. I also hope that a more nuanced or plastic relation to emotional life will stretch our modes of thought, our rationality, and our logic, so that they can accommodate and accept more confusion, incongruence, and messiness.
[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
The wide angle
I am trained in philosophy and literary analysis. My particular take on the intersection of philosophy and literature consists in using the tools of a literary scholar to analyze a philosophical text.
I grew up with emotionality. Like everyone, in some sense. But my point here is that I have tended to try to figure out ways to grow up with and alongside emotionality, rather than growing up by dismissing emotionality as immature, irrational, or childish.
In my studies in philosophy, I was drawn to epistemology but I couldn’t find much explicit and sustained engagement by canonical philosophers with the role affect and emotion play—not only as a disturbance of rationality but as a partner, as it were, in philosophical attempts to envision and understand worlds.
Tropes of Transport furnishes some of this kind of engagement. I was looking for affect and emotion not as the object of philosophical knowledge but as philosophically acknowledged forces that propel and inhibit thought. This is why Tropes of Transport explores less what Hegel says about emotion than how emotion organizes and disorganizes his text.
I am not particularly fond of the crisis model and of vehement relations to emotionality. The crisis model creates pressure in order to enable release and transformation. This psychic hydraulics operates by repression and produces violent outbursts. I will grapple again with violent emotion in my next book on Kleist, but Tropes of Transport ends with an argument against emotional violence. I am concerned with developing a steady relation to the unsteadiness that is emotionality.
All this is to say that my work is driven by a pressing feeling that we need better and more ways to relate to emotional life. I am convinced that this relation needs to be more nuanced than unconditional celebration or unqualified elimination. I also hope that a more nuanced or plastic relation to emotional life will stretch our modes of thought, our rationality, and our logic, so that they can accommodate and accept more confusion, incongruence, and messiness.