Technologies of Feeling: Affect, Objects, Early Modern

The early modern period has been understood as a moment when different forms of emotional experience are named, organized and classified, and when distinctions between mind and body and the human and non-human were invented, upheld, or policed. “Technologies of Feeling: Affect, Objects, Early Modern” charts a path through and beyond these distinctions. Across French cultural production of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this dissertation uncovers affect’s affiliations – with materiality, embodiment, the non-human, and hierarchies of race and gender – in an array of genres not ordinarily placed in dialogue with each other. Affects, objects, and the early modern work relationally, putting into motion distinctions between subject and object, persons and things, and mind and body that may have hardened over time. Technologies of feeling operate across four affective modes: in fiery elements, in visceral feelings, in the minor feelings of marginal objects, and in persons and things uncomfortably embodied through racialized and gendered affects. Fiery elements break down the emotional consensus of seventeenth-century classificatory regimes in works ranging from the journalistic and epistolary to Jean Racine’s 1674 play Iphigénie. Visceral feelings in Théophile de Viau’s 1621-23 tragedy Les amours tragiques de Pyrame et Thisbé animate the material world and deanimate the human, decoupling the human subject from the emotional work of the seventeenth century-theater. Minor feelings in a pair of narratives of disenchanted feeling objects, Samuel Isarn’s Louis d’or (1660) and Antoine Bret’s 1746 Le ***** (or Le Bidet), scale down human subjectivity to the level of objects and materialize the uncomfortable boundaries between subject and object, sex and the body. Metempsychosis in Crébillon’s Orientalist and libertine novel Le Sopha (1742) sets the stage for a parodic revision of Descartes’ foundational mind-body split, interrogating the gendered and racialized hierarchies of animacy that uphold personhood. This dissertation locates affect in the interstice of early modern distinctions between subject and object, human and non-human, uncovering their points of suture and disconnection – drawing out the shifting and often surprising contours of early modern configurations of bodies, texts, and feeling.