Turning Emotion Inside Out: Affective Life beyond the Subject

by Edward S. Casey

In Turning Emotion Inside Out , Edward S. Casey challenges the commonplace assumption that our emotions are to be located inside our minds, brains, hearts, or bodies. Instead, he invites us to rethink our emotions as fundamentally, although not entirely, emerging from outside and around the self, redirecting our attention from felt interiority to the emotions located in the world around us, beyond the confines of subjectivity.
 
This book begins with a brief critique of internalist views of emotion that hold that feelings are sequestered within a subject. Casey affirms that while certain emotions are felt as resonating within our subjectivity, many others are experienced as occurring outside any such subjectivity. These include intentional or expressive feelings that transpire between ourselves and others, such as an angry exchange between two people, as well as emotions or affects that come to us from beyond ourselves. Casey claims that such far‑out emotions must be recognized in a full picture of affective life. In this way, the book proposes to “turn emotion inside out.”
 

 

272 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2021

About the author

Professor Edward Casey was the president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) from 2009-10, and he was chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University for a decade. He works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. He obtained his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1967 and has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, The New School for Social Research, Emory University, and several other institutions. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.

His recent research includes investigations into place and space; landscape painting and maps as modes of representation; ethics and the other; feeling and emotion; philosophy of perception (with special attention to the role of the glance); the nature of edges.

Reviews

[Jordan Shapiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I over-highlighted. There was so much in here that I want to come back to. If you're familiar with Ed Casey's work, you know that he's been concerned with thinking and being in the world in a way that moves beyond individual subjectivity for most of his career. Here he uses the subject of emotion to help the reader comprehend what he's been saying about place and edge for so long. In many ways, I found this to be the book which best combines all his previous works. I can't recommend it highly enough.