Emotions and Temporalities


Book Description

This Element brings together the history of emotions and temporalities, offering a new perspective on both. Time was often imagined as a movement from the past to the future: the past is gone and the future not yet here. Only present-day subjects could establish relations to other times, recovering history as well as imagining and anticipating the future. In a movement paralleling the emphasis on the porous self, constituted by emotions situated not inside but between subjects, this Element argues for a porous present, which is open to the intervention of ghosts coming from the past and from the future. What needs investigating is the flow between times as much as the creation of boundaries between them, which first banishes the ghosts and then denies their existence. Emotions are the most important way through which subjects situate and understand themselves in time.




Depression


Book Description

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism. Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.




Power and Time


Book Description

Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.




Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations


Book Description

Time transforms the way we see world politics and insinuates itself into the ways we act. In this groundbreaking volume, Agathangelou and Killian bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to tackle time and temporality in international relations. The authors – critical theorists, artists, and poets – theorize and speak from the vantage point of the anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial event. They investigate an array of experiences and structures of violence – oppression, neocolonization, slavery, war, poverty and exploitation – focusing on the tensions produced by histories of slavery and colonization and disrupting dominant modes of how we understand present times. This edited volume takes IR in a new direction, defatalizing the ways in which we think about dominant narratives of violence, ‘peace’ and ‘liberation’, and renewing what it means to decolonize today’s world. It challenges us to confront violence and suffering and articulates another way to think the world, arguing for an understanding of the ‘present’ as a vulnerable space through which radically different temporal experiences appear. And it calls for a disruption of the "everyday politics of expediency" in the guise of neoliberalism and security. This volume reorients the ethical and political assumptions that affectively, imaginatively, and practically captivate us, simultaneously unsettling the familiar, but dubious, promises of a modernity that decimates political life. Re-animating an international political, the authors evoke people’s struggles and movements that are neither about redemption nor erasure, but a suspension of time for radical new beginnings.




Imperial Emotions


Book Description

Examines the politicisation of empathy across the British empire during the nineteenth century and traces its legacies into the present.




Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies


Book Description

Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies provides a new analysis of the significance of time in Classical and early modern literature, demonstrating that literary temporality continually intervenes in questions of ontology, hierarchy and politics. Examining a diverse range of texts from Homeric epic to eighteenth-century poems on the Last Judgement, this collection of essays contends that temporality in literature sits at the heart of how authors from antiquity through to the early modern period understood and negotiated the structures that shaped their lives and may shape lives to come. Approaching the topic through four themes, the essays in this volume highlight the ways in which time is construed as relational, contestable and politically inflected. The authors show that variations in temporalities enable texts to critique the interactions or tensions between tradition and change, agency and determinism, social system and individual experience. The result is a refreshing approach to literary figurations of time that responds to the recent 'temporal turn' in the humanities, engages with current critical trends (such as ontological analysis and ecological criticism), and opens up an exciting new direction for future research on the connection between time, text, and context.




The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe


Book Description

The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe: 1100–1700 presents the state of the field of pre-modern emotions during this period, placing particular emphasis on theoretical and methodological aspects of current research. This book serves as a reference to existing research practices in emotions history and advances studies in the field across a range of scholarly approaches. It brings together the work of recognized experts and new voices, and represents a wide range of international and interdisciplinary perspectives from different schools of research practice, including art history, literature and culture, philosophy, linguistics, archaeology and music. Throughout the book, central and recurrent themes in emotional culture within medieval and early modern Europe are highlighted from different angles, and each chapter pays specialist attention to illustrative examples showing theory and method in application. Exploring topics such as love, war, sex and sexuality, death, time, the body and the family in the context of emotional culture, The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe: 1100–1700 reflects the sharp rise in scholarship relating to the history of emotions in recent years and is an essential resource for students and researchers of the history of pre-modern emotions.




Subjective Time


Book Description

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the feature of conscious life that scaffolds every act of cognition: subjective time. Our awareness of time and temporal properties is a constant feature of conscious life. Subjective temporality structures and guides every aspect of behavior and cognition, distinguishing memory, perception, and anticipation. This milestone volume brings together research on temporality from leading scholars in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, defining a new field of interdisciplinary research. The book's thirty chapters include selections from classic texts by William James and Edmund Husserl and new essays setting them in historical context; contemporary philosophical accounts of lived time; and current empirical studies of psychological time. These last chapters, the larger part of the book, cover such topics as the basic psychophysics of psychological time, its neural foundations, its interaction with the body, and its distortion in illness and altered states of consciousness. Contributors Melissa J. Allman, Holly Andersen, Valtteri Arstila, Yan Bao, Dean V. Buonomano, Niko A. Busch, Barry Dainton, Sylvie Droit-Volet, Christine M. Falter, Thomas Fraps, Shaun Gallagher, Alex O. Holcombe, Edmund Husserl, William James, Piotr Jaśkowski, Jeremie Jozefowiez, Ryota Kanai, Allison N. Kurti, Dan Lloyd, Armando Machado, Matthew S. Matell, Warren H. Meck, James Mensch, Bruno Mölder, Catharine Montgomery, Konstantinos Moutoussis, Peter Naish, Valdas Noreika, Sukhvinder S. Obhi, Ruth Ogden, Alan o'Donoghue, Georgios Papadelis, Ian B. Phillips, Ernst Pöppel, John E. R. Staddon, Dale N. Swanton, Rufin VanRullen, Argiro Vatakis, Till M. Wagner, John Wearden, Marc Wittmann, Agnieszka Wykowska, Kielan Yarrow, Bin Yin, Dan Zahavi




Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics


Book Description

The aim of this book is to highlight and begin to give 'voice' to some of the notable 'silences' evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The seven co-authors take up seven specific topics in the volume: the relationship between emotions and contention; temporality in the study of contention; the spatial dimensions of contention; leadership in contention; the role of threat in contention; religion and contention; and contention in the context of demographic and life-course processes. The seven spent three years involved in an ongoing project designed to take stock, and attempt a partial synthesis, of various literatures that have grown up around the study of non-routine or contentious politics. As such, it is likely to be viewed as a groundbreaking volume that not only undermines conventional disciplinary understanding of contentious politics, but also lays out a number of provocative new research agendas.




Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England


Book Description

Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Houston Wood suggests that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Wood examines the ways that depictions of time expressed in early modern medical texts reveal themselves in contemporary literary works, demonstrating that the early modern recognition of the self as a palpably volatile entity, viewed within the tenets of contemporary medical treatises, facilitated the realistic portrayal of literary characters and served as a structuring principle for narrative experimentation. The study centers on four canonical, early modern texts notorious among scholars for their structural- that is, narrative, or temporal- difficulties. Wood displays the cogency of such analysis by working across a range of generic boundaries: from the prose romance of Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to the staged plays of William Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale, to John Milton's stubborn reliance upon humoral theory in shaping his brief epic (or closet drama), Samson Agonistes. As well as adding a new dimension to the study of authors and texts that remain central to early modern English literary culture, the author proposes a new method for analyzing the conjunction of character emotion and narrative structure that will serve as a model for future scholarship in the areas of historicist, formalist, and critical temporal studies.