Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought

What are emotions, where do they originate and how are they brought into being? While from antiquity to early modernity, affects or passions were mostly conceived of as external physiological forces which act upon a passive subject, modern conceptions generally locate emotions within the subject. Drawing on the dichotomy of “interiority / exteriority” as a complex interdependent relationship, they mostly envision emotions as interior processes. Contemporary conceptions of emotion from such different fields as human geography, art history and cognitive sciences recently started to challenge this notion of internal emotions by developing alternative descriptions of externalized emotion.

This book reevaluates premodern, modern and contemporary conceptions of affects, passions and emotion by analyzing various historical manifestations of the discourse on emotion. Unlike most previous research, which ‑ especially in the German tradition ‑ often focused exclusively on the rise of the modern (Romantic) interiority without paying attention to the underlying dichotomy of “interiority / exteriority”, this study aims to explore the historical preconditions, the internal logic and the possible shortcomings that inform our thinking on emotion.