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

Criticism, Summer, 2003 by Don Kuiken

After presenting the basic form of her theory, Terada examines several other theories that vary in their "openness to nonsubjective emotion" (91). She works her way through selected aspects of the work of Peter Kivy (the difficulty of identifying the subjective locus of the expressiveness of music), Ronald de Sousa (the challenge of reconciling singular emotions with the iterability of intentionality), Daniel Dennett (the materialist struggle to provide a cognitive model of emotional qualia without a subjective witness), and Deleuze (the effort to spell out a nonsubjective conception of expression). This phase in Terada's discussion provides the kind of clarification that emerges through comparison, primarily in the form of contrasts between these authors' perspectives and her own.

However, these comparisons seem to postpone pursuit of the author's primary objectives. And later she does return to her own primary enterprise by reviewing Derrida's Memoires for Paul de Man. Here she persuasively demonstrates and documents the self-distributed thinking that generates unspeakable grief. Her discussion of responsibility, of how to say "come" and to answer the "come" of the other, makes present, however tentatively, the fecundity of a conversation that is infinitely open because "interlocking internal divisions turn each thesis toward its antithesis" (146). Her discussion exemplifies but does not yet articulate a response to the complications that her theory presents for subject-centred accounts of sincerity, authenticity, and integrity. Without the forced oppositions and affected polysemy of some deconstructionist writing, these pages compellingly demonstrate the lively pathos that has no determinate locus but that allows the personifications of psyche and prosopopeia reciprocally to enhance rather than obscure each other.

Don Kuiken

University of Alberta