Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the Death of the Subject

Rating:
Summary: "Dead subjects are the zombies of literature departments":
Review: The "death of the subject and the vacancy of a postmodern redundancy haunt this de-politicizing and inconsequential study, which attempts to arrive at some semblance of aesthetic feeling by doing critical theory, and mimes the plot of an author theorizing her way to (self-evacuating) feeling and intervention. The melancholy and trauma of leftist agency ("left melancholy"via Benjamin) or postcoloniality are fully missing from this book, not to mention any engagement with the affirmative energies and 'becoming revolutionary' energy of Delueze or Zizek. Rehashing Derrida on DeMan on Derrida, the book is a deathly cold wind across a US professionalized landscape where all the positions are coded and conventional and all too sophisticated for politics or intervention. It is a sign of bankruptcy and derivative thought, masquerading as newness and theoretical sublimity. The study is a professionalized symptom of US literature departments, where as she proclaims, dead subjects and zombies take seeming ascendancy. Very cold and clever and alone this book, just this side of a bleak snowstorm in Michigan and a closing car factory.