Pathologies of passion

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to clarify and expand Alphonso Lingis’ understanding of impassioned states by showing how society pathologises passion through the language of emotions, there by obscuring the excesses that are constitutive of life. I proceed by first analysing how modernity reconfigures disruptive passions into manageable emotional states that sustain regularity, utility, and calculative models of the self. Second, I elaborate six interrelated properties of passion while systematically contrasting the latter with culturally coded emotions. Finally, I briefly examine how literature, theatre, cinema, and media narratives disclose the contingent, irrational forces that shape individual lives. I conclude that pathologising passion is not a neutral diagnostic gesture but a deeply philosophical operation that props up a shallow, needs-based conception of agency, and I argue instead for a philosophical practice that attends to impassioned ruptures and shared festive intensities as indispensable revelations of the real forces that contour both individual and collective existence.