Introduction

Abstract

Is it morally dubious for a child to learn to use caution in the handling of sharp objects, or for a social group to feel guilt at the thought of harming others? This book took shape as an attempt to move beyond the common approach to fear as an undifferentiated emotion tied to irrational, morally, or ideologically suspect effects that thwart the exercise of autonomy. It was also developed in an effort to counter the lack of nuanced attention paid to emotional experience—its modalities, its relational content, its triggers, and the agential forms to which it gives rise—in the contemporary analysis of social-emotional configurations. On the one hand, emotional experience is viewed as a structured form of felt in/capacity—as an emotional perspective— through which subjects exercise subjective and moral forms of autonomy. On the other hand, agency is conceived of as the outcome of embodied self-regulation in the course of subjects’ interactions or co-constitutive relations with forces they experience as dangerous or as securing. When agency is fear-driven, emotional experience is structured by felt powerlessness in the face of forces that are anticipated to produce pain. When agency is desire-driven, emotional experience is structured by felt powerfulness in the face of forces that are anticipated to produce pleasure. The collective forms taken by these felt in/ capacities make up the emotional norms on whose basis subjects interact with the world, much as these norms are understood to emerge through subjects’ embodied interactions with the various forces that surround them.