The history of emotions and emotional history

Abstract

The appearance of Anger’s Past, with the prospect of more work on the history of the emotions from Barbara Rosenwein herself, is very welcome. But that prospect is also problematic. It is in some ways a response to Nietzsche’s call for a ‘critique of moral values, [that] the value of these values should itself be examined’. 1 Values, to which emotions are closely tied, turned out for Nietzsche to be contingent, not constant: to have a genealogy. The master’s epigones have gone on to sweep away the notion of an unchanging human identity; the individual subject has turned out to be historically constructed and contingent too and has thus dissolved; Man has vanished. Further, language was to be understood as a master that constructed reality, not merely the medium through which it could be perceived. Thus the good news for historians, that a historical approach to all forms of social experience and value is both appropriate and necessary, is balanced by the bad news that the recapturing of that experience is bound up with all sorts of problems of representation. 2 In its concern with what seems to be such a personal experience as emotion, and in its concern with a medieval past that, particularly before the twelfth century, has left us sources encased in exceptionally rigid conventions and in which individual identity is problematic, a history of the emotions raises in acute form key questions of historical writing, as well as about the otherness of the past, authenticity, experience and representation. 3 Professor Rosenwein’s project is, on every level, the opposite of eccentric, and I hope to indicate here some of the 1 F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. C. Diethe and ed. K. Ansell-Pearson