Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Cultural Studies
Rethinking
Emotion
Edited by
Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes
and Jonathan Petropoulos
Volume 15
Edited by
Rudiger Campe and Julia Weber
DE GRUYTER
Contents
RUdiger Campe and julia Weber
Rethinking Emotion: Moving beyond Interiority
An Introduction - 1
1. Modes of lnteriorization:
Emotion before the Great Dichotomy
Catherine Newmark
From Moving the Soul to Moving into the Soul
On lnteriorization in the Philosophy of the Passions- 21
RUdiger Campe
Presenting the Affect
The Scene of Pathos in Aristotle's Rhetoric and Its Revision in
Descartes's Passions of the Soul- 36
Niklaus Largier
The Art of Prayer
Conversions of Interiority and Exteriority in Medieval Contemplative
Practice- 58
ISBN 978-3-11-025924-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-025925-4
ISSN 1861-8030
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Brigitte Weingart
Contact at a Distance
The Topology of Fascination- 72
Beate Sontgen
Chardin: Inwardness - Emotion - Communication -101
II. Interiority/Exteriority:
Thinking and Writing Emotion
Bernhard Greiner
" ... that until now, the inner world of man has been given ... such
unimaginative treatment"
Constructions of Interiority around 1800 -137
vi -
Contents
julia Weber
Inside/Out
Mediating Interiority in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Rat Krespel-172
Rainer Nagele
Keller's Cellar Vaults
Intrusions of the Real in Gottfried Keller's Realism -187
Daniel Cuonz
Toward a Genealogy of the Internalized Human Being
Nietzsche on the Emotion of Guilt- 202
Claudia Brodsky
"The Real Horizon" (beyond Emotions)
What Proust (Wordsworth, Rousseau, Diderot, and Hegel) Had 'in'
Mind-219
Paul de Man I
Niklaus Largier
59
a~~
distinctio~ 'i:n:~a~;~~~t~~~hT~ater~l
us an t e Exerc1ses are
th
expression, entirely imbued with th l't
b
, even m eu composition and literary
passages liturgical in their re . . e I urgy y reason of their being strewn throughout with
mm1scences. This is so much th
h
parts of the Exercises, the work takes on the a
e case t at, especially in some
from Scripture, and the latter itself ofte
p~earan.ce of ~ cento made up from liturgy and
gini, Cipriano Theologz'cal Dl'
.
n enoug commg to It by way of the liturgy." (VagagL'
60 -
Niklaus Largier
guage or any person I know; and everything I could say about it would be unheard-of to
all those who never apprehended Love as something to work for with desire, and whom
Love had never acknowledged as hers. I can say this about it: I desired to have full
fruition of my Beloved, and to understand and taste him to the full. I desired that his
Humanity should to the fullest extent be one in fruition with my humanity, and that mine
then should hold its stand and be strong enough to enter into perfection until I content
him, who is perfection in itself, by purity and unity, and in all things to content him fully
in every virtue.?
'
~-
61
As I will show, we deal here not with what the moderns _ after Feuerbach and
Freud - call 'p~ojections' but ~th forms of experience that are consciously
prod~ced by artifacts, by texts, Images, and music in close correspondence with
~he hturgy and ~he ~pace ~f the church. These forms of experience are qualified
m t:rms not pn~anly of mtellectual cognition and they are articulated on the
basis of a strong mcarnational theology that informs the process of perception.
!hey are, ho':ever: acknowledged and lived - beyond conceptual language _
m forms of az~theszs or colJr!itio experimentalis,9 experiential cognition, experience of sensatiOn and emotlon, sensual or emotional pleasure or disturbance
'Swe:t' or. 'bitter,' to give a rough idea, are the most obvious qualifiers th~t
are used m this context, both in the case of emotion and sensation. and both _
'sweet'. as well as 'bitter' - are drawn from the scriptures and th~ memory of
the scnptures. These terms, though, are not used in the form of a meta h I
f ,.
p onca
descnptwn
o, . mner' spiritual experience . They are not to be rea d as a11egones
,.
of an mner hfe. Instead, they are deployed as figures that are drawn f
1 h"
rom a
scnptura . arc tve and that serve a phenomenology of rhetorical effects where
the expenence of swe:tness is as much 'outside' as it is 'inside.' Such figures
become part. of strategies of rhetorical amplification that take place in a concrete
space and tlme where 'inner' and 'outer' converge and where the experience
that emerges no longer allows for a distinction between the two. Instead th
'outer' turns into a medium of the 'inner,' allowing for its very constructi~n a:
~ space of experience, and the 'inner' turns into a medium of the 'outer,' allowmg for the deployment of the rhetorical effects in form of a phenomenology of
affects and sensation.
She spoke so sweetly and with such penetrating intelligence, using such eloquent langua~e; her words were so persuasive, effective, and gracious that many who heard her
feelmg. the marve~ous w~y in which their hearts were moved and their wills changed:
bo~e "":tness that It was m truth the Spirit of God who spoke in her; for it was the living
efficacious word, mo~~ penetrating than any two-edged sword, reaching the very division
between soul and spmt (Heb. 4:12) which dwelt in her and worked all this.lO
62 -
63
Niklaus Largier
.
b d on a specific
.
..
elo uently and persuasive1Y IS ase
nin that the text explains with a referThis very ability to speak . q_
form of rhetoric and expenentlallear . g v t 's) - in fact Richard of Saint
ence to "Master Hugh's" (Hugh of Samt IC or
Victor's - teachings:
ood by the human intellect except
. . 1 things cannot b e un der St
b d"l
But as invisible and spmtua
t
lothe them in human and o I y
'
it is necessary o c
. .
1
. th sxteenth chapter of hzs dzscourse
in visible and corporea zmages,
forms. This is what Master Hugh demonstrates m e I
..
th" 1 er world and to come down to the level
on "The Inner Man":
familiar to IS ow
d hi
"In order to refer tothi ngs
.
h"
b means of visible forms, an t s
ture descnbes t mgs Y
.
t
S
l
of human weakness, Hoy cnp . .
.
b
of beautiful images whzch exci e
. . r spmtualzdeas y means
fl
impresses on our zmagma zon
fl .
"zth milk and honey, now of owers
k
of a land owmg w
. h"
our desires. Thus they spea now
d f the chorus of the birds, and m t Is
fth
ngsofmenan o
h
and of perfumes, now o e so
d .
ted Read the Apocalypse of St. Jo n
11
there spiritually."
'?
14 Saint Victor, Hugh of. "On the Power of Prayer." Trans. Hugh Feiss. Writings on the Spiritual Life: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, Walter, and Godfrey of St. Victor.
Ed. Christopher P. Evans. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 331-347, here 334 (7.4).
15 Hugh, "On the Power of Prayer," 331-332 (2-3).
64 -
Niklaus Largier
65
entitle~ The Seven Paths of Eternity (De septem itineribus aetemitatis), uses the
followmg words, largely inspired by Aicher and Bernhard of Clairvaux's Hu h
of Saint Victor's, and Saint Bonaventure's treatment of the inner s'en g .
"
h'
h .
ses.
reac mg t e mner sense of taste, it opens it up toward the tasting of eternal
sweetness." 20
. In other ':'ords, _the _"inner senses" are the senses insofar as they are recept~ve t~ a mampulatw_n m the practices of reading and prayer. This manipulah~n liberates sensation from its empirical bounds, replaces natural stimuli
With rhetorical ones, and leads to an absorption in divine taste and touch that
16 Hugh, "On the Power of Prayer," 335 (7.5): "That form of supplication which occurs only
34 1
~ A1:~Y Peter of. "Compend_ium contemplationis." Peter of Ailly. Opuscula spiritualia. Douai
' 11, 134 (my translatiOn).
'
20
Biberach
Rudolf
f
D
Cann
. '
o e septem ztinenbus aeternitatis. Ed. Margot Schmidt. Stuttgart, Bad
statt. Frommann-Holzboog, 1985. "De sexto itinere," dist. V (my translation).
66 -
Niklaus Largier
is neither 'inner' nor 'outer.' 21 As the affects can be aroused, shaped, and
modified with the help of rhetorical stimuli and artifacts, so can sensation touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting - be aroused, shaped, and modified by rhetorical stimuli. Thus, Origen's and Gregory of Nyssa's theories of
the inner senses, developed in the context of questions of reading and hermeneutics, form the framework for a phenomenological understanding of sensation in the Middle Ages. This phenomenological understanding, however,
focuses not on a primary level of experiential qualities and events but on the
experiential qualities that are induced by the scriptures, by scriptural tropes,
and - as in the case of Gertrude and Hadewijch - by the liturgy. This is the
reason why I am speaking of a phenomenology of rhetorical effects. What
Hugh's theory of prayer and Gertrude's and Hadewijch's visions present us
with are ways in which scriptural tropes are being deployed in order to excite
affects and sensation. They also present us with a phenomenological description of the ways in which the deployment of these tropes produce specific
spheres and events of experience in an application of the senses.
It is the Song of Songs that is often used as a blueprint for the application
of the senses. It provides us with something we could call a dramatic script,
and medieval authors draw on this script both in view of quotes that serve to
evoke specific moments of sensation and affect, and in view of a paradigmatic
model that allows for a dramatization of memory, of sense experience, and of
concomitant emotional states. We know from the re-writing of the Song of
Songs and from complex prayer texts, for example in Mechthild's Flowing Light
of the Godhead, and from the use Mechthild makes of it as a blueprint for the
staging of the life of her soul, that her rumination on this text not only produces sweetness and delight, but also bitterness and desolation. In other words,
her practice of prayer and the aisthesis she produces include more than an
evocation of feelings of divine sweetness. Instead, she deploys the tropes in a
dramatic way, following certain scripts and evoking a diverse range of possible
experience. Thus, prayer serves as a means to explore the realm of possible
sensual experience and to intensify or amplify it. Mechthild uses the Song of
Songs as a dramatic script that can be amplified and rewritten and that allows
for a rich staging of moments of sensation and emotional arousal. In doing
this, some writers, above all Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch of Ant21 Nyssa, Gregory of. In canticum canticorum. Ed. Hermannus Langerbeck. Leiden: Nrill, 1960.
425-426; Herp, Hendrik. Directorium aureum contemplativorum. I Directorio de contemplativos.
Ed. Juan Martin Kelly. Madrid: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Fundaci6n Universitaria
Espanola, 1974. II, 54, 647-649; Herp, Hendrik. Theologia mystica. Farnborough: Gregg, 1965.
II, 54, 169. See also: Largier, Niklaus. "Tactus. Le sens du toucher et la volupte au Moyen
Age." Micrologus 13 (2004): 233-249, esp. 211-215.
67
werp, combine the text of the Song of Songs with elements taken from contemporary love ~oetry. in audacious ways, amplifying further the impact of the
text and playmg wzth the aesthetics of sweetness in minnesong and in a religious context. In exploring a broad range of possible affects and sensations,
they move fr?m the experiential practice that Hugh depicts to a more experimental practice that allows for multiple forms of play with rhetorical stimuli.
Two other sc~ipts have played a major role in monastic contemplation and
s_erv~d as blue~nnts for specific forms of the application of the senses. The
flfst zs the creatiOn narrative, the Hexameron. The second one is the legend of
the t~mptation of Saint Anthony. Two twelfth century texts, On the Fourfold
Exerczse of the Cell (De qu~dripertito exercitio cellae) by Adam of Dryburgh
22
(Ada.~ Scotus) _and ~aldum of Canterbury's On the Twofold Resurrection (De
duplzcz :esurre.ctione) 3 can illustrate this in exemplary ways. Both texts
emphaszze agam - as does Hugh of Saint Victor - that prayer in the cell cannot
be a form of prayer that asks for something or prayer that could be seen as a
gesture of petitioning. Rather, they both point out that prayer has to be understood as a technique that puts the soul in a position in which it can be touched
by the tex~ and artifacts, that is, a technique that makes the soul receptive to
the rhetoncal effects of emotional and sensual arousal. Balduin's notion of a
t\:ofold resurrection refers to the fact that "ordinary people" can be content
wzth the resurrection and the experience of the paradise at the end of time.
Monks however, he writes, are familiar with the practice of evoking this experience as an actual state of emotional and sensual perception.24 In this context
he invokes musical imagery, imagining the soul as a musical instrument tha~
~esonates (a psaltherium or cithara) and the senses as the cords that are put
m moveme~t through the ~se that is made of the biblical text in prayer and
c~ntemplatwn. Thus, speczfic quotes from the creation narrative are used to
s_timulate the ~en~es, to produce moments of sensation which must be qualifzed as aesthe~zc s~nce they are in fact nothing other than the sense experience
of the world m hght of redemption. The words Adam and Balduin use are
stupor and admiratio, expressing the translation of the creation narrative into
phen~mena of overwhelming sensual and affective experience. Paradoxically,
w_e mzght want to add, all this happens in the solitude of the cell where the
direct empirical experience of the world is being replaced by this art of aes-
22
Dry.burgh, ~dam of. "De quadripertito exercitio cellae." Patrologia Latina. Ed. JacquesPaul M1gne. Pans: Migne, 1854. Vol. 153. 799-884.
~ Canter~ury, Balduin of. "De duplici resurrectione." Patrologia Latina. Ed. Jacques-Paul
Migne. Pans: Migne, 1855. Vol. 204. 429-442.
24 Canterbury "De d I"
.
,
.
up ICI resurrect10ne, 429: "Simple mortals are satisfied with one resurrectiOn. We, however, are not satisfied with one resurrection." (My translation.)
2
68 -
Niklaus Largier
69
very "knocking" on heaven's doors (quoting the "knocking at the door" from
Matthew 7:7 and Luke 11:9):
When he tells us to pray, God does not mean that we should tell him with our words
what we wish, since he anyway already knows what we need before we ask him for it.
He rather means that we should knock. Through knocking we experience how sweet and
good he is and thus we love him and join him in love and become one spirit with him.26
This is David's explanation of the act of "rumination," the practice that not
only remembers the scriptures but translates the very act of remembering into
an act of intense affective and sensual experientia, or, in other words, the very
act that deploys the rhetorical effects of the words in order to animate the
scriptures in a convergence of inner and outer worlds.
As I have shown, these inner and outer worlds stand not in opposition to
each other but in a complex relation of mediation. In order to evoke both the
inner or spiritual sense of the scriptures and the inner or spiritual experiential
possibilities of man, all the 'inner' (that which does not yet exist as a matter
of experience) has to be turned into the 'outer.' It has to take shape in the
form of material figurations - words, images, artifacts - that are able to produce their effects beyond conceptual language and understanding. Thus, they
constitute a world of experience - a world of experience that takes shape, as
Hadewijch shows, not in the form of an 'inner' experience but rather in the
form of an experience that is both internal and external at the same time. In
the absorbing power of the experiential event, it is liberated from the constrictions of both the internal and the external, and it constitutes a world of intensity that is equally material and spiritual, corporeal and free. In Hadewijch's
description of this experience, the material, informed by the scriptural tropes
and scripts she enacts, turns spiritual and the spiritual, drawn into the material form of its liturgical enactment, turns material. In other words, her art of
prayer infects the world she sees as well as the stable distinctions of inner and
outer, and makes this very distinction collapse in a moment of overwhelming
absorption. In doing so, however, she develops - together with a range of
other medieval authors - a technique of sensual and emotional stimulation
that evokes and creates a world of emotions and sensations that is full of
possibilities. They emerge in the practice of prayer, a practice that makes the
external into the medium for the evocation and production of the internal,
and the internal into a medium for the experiential intensity of the external.
26 Augsburg, David of. "Septem gradus orationis." Published in: Heerinckx, Jacques. "Le
Septem gradus orationis de David d'Augsbourg." Revue d'ascetique et de mystique 14 (1933):
146-170, here 161 (my translation).
70
Niklaus Largier
11
s.
Nyssa, Gregory of. In canticum canticorum. Ed. Hermannus Langerbeck. Leiden Nrill 1960
O'Callaghan: J_ohn P. "l~ago Dei: A Test Case for St. Thomas's Augustinianism.:' Tho~as th.e
Augusttman. Ed. M1chael Daupinais. Washington: Catholic University of America Pres
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