Abstract

The general aim of the study is to critically evaluate the concept of emotion employed in psychology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The modern idea of emotion is shown to emerge in the wake of Darwinian biology, physiological psychology and psychoanalysis, which frame it as a natural, biologically based occurrence: innate reflex, psycho-physiological disturbance or discharge of drive energy. But emotion is less a natural datum than a metaphysical idea: to understand human behavior as emotive is necessarily to place it within a particular picture of subjectivity and sociality. However outwardly neutral and descriptive, a theory of emotion conceals a philosophical anthropology. I argue that the dominant picture underlying theoretical discourse on emotion is subjectivist, functionalist, and voluntarist. My constructive aim is to outline a more adequate picture of emotive subjectivity by exploiting neglected resources of social anthropology and psychoanalysis. The main features of this picture are specified in terms of allocutive intentionality, social integration and vulnerability. Emotive experience is allocutive in that it is necessarily expressed in view of and recognized by other persons; it is social in that it derives from a fundamental attachment and dependency on others that is subsequently oriented by collective norms and symbolic roles; and it testifies to vulnerability in that in emotion one feels the claim of another beyond one's will or understanding. These ideas are developed through a detailed examination of Freud's pre-psychoanalytic understanding of affect and Lacan's critique of emotion