Critical Passions

The author, one of the most influential Latin Americanists in the US, has published a number of books, but none display the importance of her work in literary criticism, cultural studies and marxist and feminist theory as successfully as this collection o

The author, one of the most influential Latin Americanists in the US, has published a number of books, but none display the importance of her work in literary criticism, cultural studies and marxist and feminist theory as successfully as this collection o

The Whirlwind of Passion: New Critical Perspectives on William Shakespeare is a combination of critical, linguistic, stylistic, translation and performance interpretations, providing a fresh insight into Shakespearean studies. It encompasses many different aspects of the Bard’s oeuvre, and thus explores various interpretative possibilities of the texts under scrutiny. The freshness of this book also lies in the fact that it deals with comparative analyses of both Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as in the fact that it emphasises the playwright’s relevance today. All the contributors to this volume are distinguished scholars and academicians with extensive experience of teaching and writing on Shakespeare.

In recent years the humanities, social sciences and neuroscience have witnessed an 'affective turn, ' especially in discourses around post-Fordist labor, economic and ecological crises, populism and identity politics, mental health, and political struggle. This new awareness would be unthinkable without the pioneering work of Gilles Deleuze, who replaced judgment with affect as the very material movement of thought: every concept is an affective experience, a becoming. Besides entirely active affects, the highest practice of thought, there is no thought without passive affects or passions. Instead of a calm and rational philosophy of passions, Deleuzian thought is therefore inseparable from "isolated and passionate cries" that deny what everybody knows and what nobody can deny: "every true thought is an aggression." This inseparability of reason and passion is by no means an anti-intellectualist or irrationalist stance. Rather, it is critical, since it protects reason from its self-imposed stupidity (bêtise) by relating it to the unthought forces that condition it. And it is clinical, because thought becomes possessed by a power of selection. The purely active, i.e. free-floating, unrecorded desire, is never enough to produce a consistent relation to the future, which is why we need the passions to give us an initial orientation, to force and enable us to think. Passions are the beliefs, perceptions, representations, and opinions that attach us to the world; they make up the very material of which our lives and thoughts are composed. Instead of truth as the ultimate criterion of judgment, the only principle according to which affective becomings can be selected and evaluated is the extent to which they proliferate joy. Spinoza and Marx show how the recruitment of desire traditionally takes place through the tyrants and priests who inspire sad passions in us. Similarly, the work of Deleuze and Guattari on capitalism and schizophrenia can be read as an encyclopedia of the passions that constitute the affective infrastructure of the socius of contemporary capitalism. If it takes a lot of inventiveness or imagination to be able to diagnose our present becomings, this is because becomings are always composites of joyful and sad passions. Capitalism could not exist if it did not also inspire happiness, love, courage, and perhaps even beatitude. That is why, today, we witness "the spectacle of the happily dominated" (Frédéric Lordon) of the self-entrepreneur, the managerial class, the flex worker, the citizen-consumer, the bean-roasting hipster, and the self-managed team. It is within this field of contradictory and heterogeneous passions that the authors of this volume pursue the diagnosis of our past and present becomings. Their contributions add up to a systematic taxonomy of the passions and indicate their importance for a thinking that reaches beyond itself. TABLE OF CONTENTS // IntroductionCeciel Meiborg & Sjoerd van Tuinen "Everywhere There Are Sad Passions" Gilles Deleuze and the Unhappy ConsciousnessMoritz Gansen To Have Done with the Judgment of 'Reason': Deleuze's Aesthetic OntologySamantha Bankston Closed Vessels and Signs: Jealousy as a Passion for RealityArjen Kleinherenbrink The Drama of Ressentiment: the Philosopher versus the PriestSjoerd van Tuinen The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and GuattariJason Read Deleuze's Transformation of the Ideology-Critique Project: Noology CritiqueBenoît Dillet Passion, Cinema and the Old MaterialismLouis-Georges Schwartz Death of Deleuze, Birth of PassionDavid U.B. Liu

In 1935, a Chinese woman by the name of Shi Jianqiao murdered the notorious warlord Sun Chuanfang as he prayed in a Buddhist temple. This riveting work of history examines this well-publicized crime and the highly sensationalized trial of the killer. In a fascinating investigation of the media, political, and judicial records surrounding this cause célèbre, Eugenia Lean shows how Shi Jianqiao planned not only to avenge the death of her father, but also to attract media attention and galvanize public support. Lean traces the rise of a new sentiment—"public sympathy"—in early twentieth-century China, a sentiment that ultimately served to exonerate the assassin. The book sheds new light on the political significance of emotions, the powerful influence of sensational media, modern law in China, and the gendered nature of modernity.

Focusing on the new theories of human motivation that emerged during the transition from feudalism to the modern period, this is the first book of new essays on the relationship between politics and the passions from Machiavelli to Bentham. Contributors address the crisis of moral and philosophical discourse in the early modern period; the necessity of inventing a new way of describing the relation between reflection and action, and private and public selves; the disciplinary regulation of the body; and the ideological constitution of identity. The collection as a whole asks whether a discourse of the passions might provide a critical perspective on the politics of subjectivity. Whatever their specific approach to the question of ideology, all the essays reconsider the legacy of the passions in modern political theory and the importance of the history of politics and the passions for modern political debates. Contributors, in addition to the editors, are Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, Riccardo Caporali, Howard Caygill, Patrick Coleman, Frances Ferguson, John Guillory, Timothy Hampton, John P. McCormick, and Leonard Tennenhouse.

Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe created a volume that set the agenda in the field of computers and composition scholarship for a decade. The technology changes that scholars of composition studies faced as the new century opened couldn't have been more deserving of passionate study. While we have always used technologies (e.g., the pencil) to communicate with each other, the electronic technologies we now use have changed the world in ways that we have yet to identify or appreciate fully. Likewise, the study of language and literate exchange, even our understanding of terms like literacy, text, and visual, has changed beyond recognition, challenging even our capacity to articulate them. As Hawisher, Selfe, and their contributors engage these challenges and explore their importance, they "find themselves engaged in the messy, contradictory, and fascinating work of understanding how to live in a new world and a new century." The result is a broad, deep, and rewarding anthology of work still among the standard works of computers and composition study.

Doing Respectful Research is situated within a critical, feminist postmodern framework and addresses the complexities of conducting respectful qualitative research with human participants. Three themes overlap and inform chapter discussions: developing a critical reflexivity, understanding the distance dynamic and engaging in respectful research praxis. The text illustrates how power, privilege and passion influence decisions about what gets researched, who is positioned as researcher or participant and how data are collected, analyzed and ultimately represented in public ways. Tilley explores the intersecting elements of the research process, which include deciding on a research focus and articulating research questions; choosing an appropriate research site and participants; collecting, analyzing and representing data; and making decisions about the dissemination and publication of findings. She emphasizes the dilemmas researchers experience when faced with issues of respectful representation of data, participants and research contexts. Unique to the book are the comprehensive discussions of the advisement process and the student-advisor relationship and Tilley’s use of her doctoral research to carefully illustrate elements of the research process. Each chapter ends with an annotated bibliography of relevant research connected to concepts addressed in the chapter. Tilley offers a comprehensive consideration of research ethics, including guidance for the completion of institutional requirements for review of research involving human participants and an exploration of the complicated ethical issues that emerge during the research process. Doing Respectful Research is written for student researchers, individuals who teach and advise students, instructors of qualitative research courses in social sciences, health and education, and community members interested in qualitative methods and conducting research.