Reading Feeling in Theory was a let down, but I’m not sure whether it to hold the book or myself more responsible. That is, I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped either Terada’s project--constructing a poststructuralist theory of emotion--or her fundamental claim--that emotion not only doesn't require a unified subject to do the feeling, but that emotion depends upon the very nonexistence of the subject. At times it seems that Terada’s book boils down to an extended meditation on the de Manian claim that our insights into the meaning of the ultimately undecidable text are a function of our blindness to the figural status of tropes that we literalize.
In other words, her basic critical insight is that whenever de Man works through the play of figures and tropes in his readings, the passages he chooses to analyze are directly concerned with emotional responses. Terada argues, then, that de Man is advancing a theory of emotion as well as a theory of rhetoric and that the two are intimately related, for emotions turn out to be effects produced by the play of rhetorical structures. I was expecting more of a payoff from Terada’s book.
My disappointment, according to Terada’s theory, could be due to my inability to make adequate sense of her book. As a strategy of coping with my experience of the book’s undecidability, which generates an intolerable anxiety, I dub her book a "disappointment." Calling the book a "disappointment," according to this line of reasoning, should not trick anyone into believing that it is literally a disappointment. This is merely a metaphorical substitution that I’ve made as a sort of coping strategy which enables me to being acting (in this case, to get around to writing a response, to reread the second half of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, etc. to finally getting around to actually reading Rousseau, etc.). My act of denomination makes possible a series of metaphorical substitutions that will generate subsequent emotions. For example, once I convince myself that the book is a “disappointment” (perhaps an act of bad faith, but possibly a useful one) I may get angry or I might be inspired, etc.
Ultimately, I’m not sure Terada breaks much new ground regarding de Man. Like Frances Ferguson, she identifies a strong empiricist streak in deconstruction, thoughfor Terada this is precisely why it offers a useful account of emotion. Here, then, are some key quotes from Terada that are particularly relevant to her discussion of "deconstructive passion" and the "nonsubjectivism of emotion."
"If we have emotions because we can’t know what to believe (what texts and people are up to), as de Man suggests, then we have emotions even though we can’t know which emotions we ought to have. if we truly knew which emotions we should have, we would no longer feel like having any" (89).
This quote illustrates that Terada gets the fundamental de Manian move, which is to treat written compositions, artworks, bodies, iconographic representations, and objects in the world as texts, which is to say as objects that seem to signify. However, what de Man’s analyses strive to demonstrate is the complex manner in which these text generate the illusion of meaningfulness. For de Man all off the aforementioned objects are ultimately opaque and meaningless. Terada’s reading begins with the notion that what we experience as emotion begins with instinctive (I think this is the right word) response to the fundamental meaninglessness of objects in the world. (In this regard, Terada picks up on the existential streak that was more prominent in early de Man, which has been described in detail by Frank Lentricchia).
"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" (4).
When Terada speaks of poststructuralist theory, she primarily means deconstruction; she argues, for example, that "Derrida and de Man unfold fully the nonsubjectivism of emotion" (7). Terada proposes that, contrary to his reputation for being a dispassionate theorist, de Man was not only particularly interested in emotion, but that his writings offer a "direct" theory of emotion. She notes that de Man's choice of authors in Allegories of Reading (Rilke, Proust, Nietzsche, and Rousseau) was due in part to the emotionality of their prose. In the preface to Allegories de Man informs us that "The choice of Proust and Rilke as examples is partly due to chance, but since the ostensible pathos of their tone and depth of their statement make them particularly resistant to a reading that is no longer thematic, one could argue that if their work yields to a rhetorical scheme, the same would necessarily be true for writers whose rhetorical strategies are less hidden behind the seductive powers of identification" (AR ix). The phrase that Terada picks up on and runs with is “ostensible pathos." As she explains, de Man's larger deconstructive project is to undermine the priority that has been given to "thematic," by which de Man means, "referential" readings and to advance in their place "rhetorical" readings that trace the figural movement of tropes through a text. In Allegories of Reading , de Man aims to deconstruct the "ostensible pathos" in several texts associated, in complex ways that needn't concern us here, with Romanticism. In other words, de Man wants to reject so-called referential readings of these texts in which their meaning "would be located in their author's intentionality and psychology" (48). That is, the typical way of treating the pathos in the texts written by the aforementioned authors is to identify it with real emotions that were experienced by them. De Man regards such a view as being dependent upon a naive understanding of emotions--how they function, why they occur, and how the can be transmitted. De Man wants to expose emotion and affect as a rhetorical effect and to do so he "calls our attention to the deployment of pathos as a persuasive tactic" (49).
(Note: When de Man speaks of rhetoric he does not do so in the usual sense of a carefully crafted mode of discourse aimed at persuading its audience of a particular position. This view of rhetoric emphasizes authorial control and mastery over language; whereas rhetoric in the de Manian sense stresses the extent to which the figurative nature of language eludes control of its users. For de Man, language users are always trumped by the tropes that they employ).
As a critic, de Man is typically interested in foregrounding the extent to which all of our experiences of reality are thoroughly mediated. As Stanley Fish has put it, "deconstructive or postructuralist thought is in its operation a rhetorical machine: it systematically asserts and demonstrates the mediated, constructed, partial, socially constituted nature of all realities, whether they be phenomenal, linguistic, or psychological" (Critical Terms 215). Terada's move, then, is to read Allegories of Reading as a text about the illusory nature of our emotions, which are typically regarded as being immediate expressions of an internal state. Terada argues that such a model of "expression is the dominant trope of thought about emotion" and that as a trope it functions "to extrapolate a human subject circularly from the phenomenon of emotion" (11). Following upon the work of de Man, whose mid to late texts provide "a coherent model of emotion as tropic structure" that conceptualize "emotions as practical interpretive acts which are as yet not classically subjective" (50) Terada aims to expose the expressive hypothesis as part of an ideology of emotion that is to be rejected for perpetuating an outdated model of subjectivity based upon a unified and stable self. The claim that emotions are thoroughly mediated doesn’t strike me as being a particularly novel position, though, to her credit, Terada’s account of how emotions function in de Man’s readings is more interesting. The interest, for me anyway, lies in the move to treat emotions as linguistic or rhetorical phenomena.
Here, then, are some passages that we might turn to in order to extract more from Terada’s account of de Man's theory of emotion:
ex #1) Wordsworth
Terada focuses attention on how de Man’s reading of the "Blessed Babe" passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude—in which the "Babe who sleeps/ Upon his Mother’s breast; who, when his soul/ Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye!"—stages an ur-scene of perception. In this scenario, an emotion, here passion, is figured as a nurturing substance that can be exchanged from one person to another and which makes possible a communion between them. This communion between mother and infant is based upon the sense of recognition that occurs during the exchange, and what de Man would have us recognize is the illusory nature of of the sense making that the emotion facilitates.
Terada summarizes de Man’s reading, which puts pressure on the ambiguous nature of emotion, as such: "...emotion coincides with the shaping of sense, suggesting that emotion is itself a figure—here it serves as a prosopopoeia and as metaphor—that consolidates an outside, a face, an inside, and a precarious means for getting back and forth between them" (5). The conclusion de Man would have us take away from his reading is that "one’s own emotion does not really provide access to the feelings of others or reflect the structure of reality... but the affective force of emotion understandably persuades us to think so" (55). In other words, the force of an emotionally moving experience creates a powerful and convincing illusion, namely, that we have direct access to the inner life of others and by extension to reality itself. However, the very experience of emotion, of being affected and feeling intensely, is always and already thoroughly mediated. The sense of being overcome by emotion is a form of making sense, and sense making, for de Man, is a linguistic phenomenon that involves being seduced by the movement of rhetorical figures and tropes. This Wordsworthian moment is particularly important for de Man as it illustrates the trope of prosopopoeia and the role that the face plays in the interpretive process.
This raises a question posed to me by my lovely wife, Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, in an e-mail: "What about babies who have not yet entered the mirror stage?" As I understand it, Terada and de Man are relatively uninterested in psychoanalytic accounts of the prelinguistic subject, though they do share a belief with thinkers like Lacan and Kristeva that the entry into the symbollic order is a foundational moment in human development. If I read Terada correctly, she would argue that until they acquire language infants do not, in fact, experience emotions, though they obviously are affected by their sensory impressions of the world.
ex #2) Rousseau
The key moment in deconstruction’s engagement with emotion is the moment from Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Human Languagesin which a primitive man first encounters a man from another tribe and reacts with fear. In Rousseau’s parable of denomination, the primitive man’s fear leads him to perceive them as bigger, stronger and as a potential threat to his welling being. As a consequence of his fear and distrust, he dubs them giants. Only after repeated encounters with the other man and members of his tribe will he discover that these men are not actually bigger or stronger. At that point the man will invent a word, such as man, that will apply both to himself and the other. The point of Rousseau’s parable is the figurative nature of the first word: "This is how the figurative word is born before the literal word, when our gaze is held in passionate fascination; and how it is that the first idea it conveys to us is not that of the truth" (42).
ex #3) Kant and Schiller
In "Kant and Schiller," de Man criticizes Schiller for misappropriating the Kantian sublime for "practical psychology," a move that dephilosophizes the sublime by neglecting Kant’s concern with the limitations of the faculties of reason and the imagination and instead focusing on the problem of coping with a terrifying experience. De Man is full of contempt for Schiller’s use of the sublime. He acknowledges the usefulness of the "topological figuration." Schiller posits in which a fictive or hypothetical danger substitutes for a literal danger. Such a move, we have seen, occurs in Kant as well, and at times the ability to come to terms with a real, but uncertain, danger by providing a fictional figure can provide a strategy for self-preservation. However, de Man opposes the manner in which Schiller deploys the trope of the sublime so that self-preservation becomes a purely idealized state in which the powers of the mind are entirely divorced from the material body, which remains in physical danger (65).
Terada understands De Man’s late essays on Kant to be addressing the aforementioned fear “by tracking the consequences of Kantian apatheia” (82). Kant takes care to distinguish between affects and passions. The distinction lies in the fact that affects are "impetuous and unpremeditated, passions persistent and deliberate" (Kant 132n39). Surprisingly, perhaps, in Kant’s system, affects are valued more highly, because the deliberate pursuit of passion threatens to become an a manic obsession for repetition, that is a from of addiction. Kant’s discussion of affects advances a hierarchy of value that privileges "emotions the less arbitrary and coercive they are" (83). Kant’s criteria for judging emotions lead him to praise apatheia "when found in a mood that adheres emphatically and insistently to its principles, cannot only be sublime but most admirably so" (quoted in Terada 83).
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