Introduction
Victoria Kahn and Neil Saccamano
IN RECENT YEARS there has been a renaissance of interest in the passions
in interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences. Scholars
have directed their attention to the passions as vehicles of knowledge, as
attributes of aesthetic experience, as labile affects or shifting currents
that contribute to political upheaval or religious self-sacrifice. The
reasons for this affective reorientation are multiple. We might think of
it as a reaction to the linguistic turn or the deconstruction of the
subject. We might instead think of it as the logical consequence of the
focus on tropes and figures: themselves, as ancient rhetoricians tells us,
the best means of representing the swerve of affect away from pure
cognition, as well as the best means of stirring up the passions of the
audience. We might think of the recourse to the passions as a consequence
of the interest in the body and the body politic across a variety of
disciplines. But there are also less academic reasons for the renewed
interest in the passions. At a time when a rhetoric of "terror" is a
central featur ... read full excerpt from Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850 ebook
