Writing the Passions

Uses the works of authors from Plato to Iain Banks to explore writing and the passions in thought and literature. Topics addressed in the book include the meaning of crime passionnel, art, passion and ceremonial, adoration and abjection, and the nature of the exotic.

Writing the Passions is a book of literary criticism, of philosophy and of the politics of modernity. It explores the arguments on the location of feeling in literature; on the fragmentation of the self under the pressure of the passions; of the place of the passions in psychoanalytic practice and theory; and on the notions of multiplicity, soul, spirit, polytheism and animism developed from their bases in psychoanalytic and Derridean theory.

The relations between writing and the passions are addressed through individual texts, ranging across many centuries and from Europe to China. Writers and texts discussed include Plato, Andrew Marvell, Swinburne, Salman Rushdie, Iain Banks, Deleuze, Guattari and many others. Topics addressed include: the meaning of crime passionnel; art and the wound; passion and ceremonial; adoration and abjection; dread and disgust; the nature of the exotic; shame and irony; separation, incompletion and the cure.

Written in a uniquely engaging and accessible style, Writing the Passions provides readers with a fascinating exploration of the general notion of ''the passions'', together with a set of historical insights into how the passions have been considered and treated in different literatures and cultures.