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The Scandal of Insensibility; or, The Bartleby Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Wendy Anne Lee
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Abstract

Reviving Thomas Hobbes's definition of the passions as interior motions that originate action, this essay considers the case of insensibility: an absence of feeling that results in immobility. Embodying this lack of feeling is the figure of the insensible, whose signature nonresponsiveness provokes the most vehement emotions in others. Through readings of Hobbes's theories of resistance and contempt, Adam Smith's condemnation of impassivity, and Herman Melville's tale of an “unmoving” scrivener, I examine how insensibility challenges the model of emotions as causes, as accounts of how a moved body moves. Insensibility confuses distinctions between bad feeling and no feeling, agents and patients, living and dead. Finally, I argue for narrative's surprising dependence on the nonnarrative presence of the insensible, a subject that reaches back through the history of philosophy to Aristotle's unmoved mover, the first cause of the universe that makes all motion possible by not being subject to motion itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Emotions , October 2015 , pp. 1405 - 1419
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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