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

Criticism, Summer, 2003 by Don Kuiken

Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject" by Rei Terada. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. 224. $46.00 cloth.

The "death of the subject" heralded in poststructuralist theory challenges some pivotal assumptions in the philosophy of emotion. Most pointedly, we are led to ask whether the subject, whose presence is no longer assured, is nonetheless necessary to "do" the feeling. Rei Terada responds to this question firmly and in detail: not only is emotion not "subjective," she argues, but "we would have no emotions if we were subjects" (4). From her perspective, we have clearly crossed the divide: the death of subjectivity is secure. But, its demise has left emotional experience dangling somewhere between intellectual desiccation and nostalgic reversion to the 'expressive hypothesis.' Terada's objective is to replace that hypothesis with a discourse of emotion that is faithful to the pathos of Derrida's deconstruction of presence and de Man's deconstruction of prosopopeia.

The path toward that replacement is restlessly traveled, passing through the territory of scholars as diverse as Daniel Dennett, Ronald de Sousa, Edmund Husserl, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, of course, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Such breadth has risks: it is not easy to coordinate these diverse forms of scholarship, and the occasional missteps along the way are worrisome. For example, to frame the issue, Terada refers in passing to psychological research by Schacter and Singer, suggesting that Husserl was a "precursor" to their "content approach" to emotion. Not only would these neo-positivistic authors be stunned to learn of their imputed phenomenological heritage, but Terada assimilates their concern with the labelling of feeling sensations (e.g., as "anger") to her own concern with the intentionality of feeling acts (e.g., what anger is "about"). And yet, there are, to this reviewer's knowledge, very few such missteps in this volume; in general the author's arguments are effectively grounded--and documented--in relevant sources.

Terada begins by revisiting the Derridean critique of Husserl's phenomenological account of the living present. Her reinstatement of that critique may be difficult for a reader not independently versed in the subtitles of Derrida's Speech and Phenomena (trans. David Allison [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973/1967]), and it may seem presumptive to a reader who is not already acquainted with Denida's explication of self-distribution (cf. Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl [Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2002]). Nonetheless, this reinstatement is critical to Terada's objectives. Husserl's description of the immediacy of auto-affective subjectivity is contrasted with Derrida's account of the contamination of auto-affective interiority by exteriority; Husserl's description of the expression of ideality within subjectivity is contrasted with Derrida's account of the self-differential non-immediacy of re-presentation; and, most importantly, Husserl's portrayal of the idealized expression of emotion is contrasted with the pathos that seems inevitable within the self-differential non-immediacy of re-presentation. "Emotion demands virtual self-difference--an extra 'you'" (31), concludes Terada, opening the way to consideration of fictive courage within Kant's version of the sublime, the virtual "you" within Rousseau's discussion of theatrical imagination, and the personified tropes within de Man's portrayal of the nominative force of emotion.

The realm of analogy, metaphor, and irony opened by Derrida's discussion of pathos becomes the site for Terada's articulation, primarily through de Man's Allegories of Reading, of different types of self-differential emotion. Fear, she argues, is the flight from suspended meaning, from figural distrust, toward literal (or faux-figural) reference to a locus of "danger." Love, similarly, is the flight from vacillation between ipseity and alterity toward the literal (or faux-literal) identification of a "beloved." in general, Terada argues, emotion is the gradual resolution of nameless uncertainty through nominative acts, a tropological shift--or, more precisely, flight--from fictive to more nearly literal meaning.

The character of this shift locates emotion within the realm of bad faith or, despite its self-centering connotations, self-deception. "Interest" (63) and "deception" (63), phrases that can be (and, in Terada's text, occasionally are) self-referential (e.g., self-interest, se/f-deception), suggest the displaced reconstruction of an egoic centre that purposively and deceptively acts. And yet, the figurative "flight" from pathos that Terada posits seems to betray the (plural?) self-relational nuances that would warrant the language of self-deception. This dilemma becomes especially salient when considering that "particularly bizarre corner of de Man's world in which personified concepts and figures go around deceiving themselves and one another in a kind of masked ball for abstractions" (66). Personifications within this theatre remain figuratively related, but it is unclear whether these figurative relations support the attribution of self-deception, i.e., of one egoic center "deceiving" another (cf. Fingarette, Self-deception [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969]). To complete her account of personified emotions, an equally nuanced discussion of self-deception--and of the possibility of its allegorical "undoing"--seems necessary.