Popular culture and the meaning of feelings

Abstract

In the human sciences at large, it is still the case that only literary criticism and psychoanalysis seek to theorize with any degree of generosity a place for the feelings in the practice of their discipline. Of late, indeed, the most weighty presences in both literary criticism and psycho-analysis have worked to expel mere subjectivity and the theoretically irrelevant but idiosyncratically incontestable feelings which are held to define subjectivity. The structures that are left become venerable in virtue of their scientific standing: the fierce induration of such Parisian worthies as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and (in his playful, dandyish way) Jacques Derrida has worked to reproach devout Gallophiles in England for ever countenancing 'sincere and vital emotion' and all the emotional vocabulary-baggage of the bourgeoisie. And even in philosophy, which has taken the place of the emotions seriously, the subject has come clearly down the list of both difficulty and prestige- epistemology first, then the theory of meaning, then (perhaps) metaphysics, and only then the emotions as the difficult adjunct of ethics.