Introduction to Erich Auerbach " Passio as Passion " ["Passio als Leidenschaft"]

Abstract

The subject of Erich Auerbach's hitherto untranslated Passio as Passion con cerns a theme that is never associated with him, the history of emotions. For the English-speaking world, Mimesis has been read back into Figura (1939)1 and Dante, Poet of the Secular World (1929)2 as a critical history that led to the development of Auerbach's powerful analysis of literary realism. His interest in the history of emotions has largely gone unnoticed. We might see a different critical trajectory in Auerbach's work if instead our starting point were an essay like Passio as Passion. Here Auerbach provides a non-Freudian, pre structuralist philological explanation of, put simply, the ability to express strong emotions, specifically erotic passion. This classic philological essay is more wide ranging than the better known Figura, but it applies the same method: it examines how a culture reveals the values it holds dear by the way it fills the words available to it with meaning; it proposes that the history of the changing contents of a word is the history of the changing values of a culture. In this case, Auerbach asks how the contemporary French word passion and German Leidenschajt acquired the meaning they bear for us today. Auerbach starts genetically from the Greek word (3'yPx, and moves in stages to its Stoic rendition as passio, to its early Christian and medieval transformation, which laid the groundwork for its modern meaning as first established by Racine. The essay is of interest to us today for two reasons: first, for what it contri butes to current interest in the history of emotions, and second, for what it reveals about the practice of criticism at a time of extremes. That the emotions have a history implies that subjects are historically con tingent and open to the possibility that they are hence culturally determined. In their excellent overview of the issues at stake in the argument for the social construction of the emotions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank pro vide a reference point for approximating where Auerbach stands in the devel opment of this issue.3 For example, among the tenets that Auerbach does not