English abstracts #80:

Anders Klostergaard Petersen: “The Naked Skin: On Blushing, Shame and Groupishness”

This article introduces a new paradigm for rethinking emotions and feelings thereby bridging the gap between the two in textual analysis. Based on a brief history of scholarship on feelings, I present the gene-culture coevolutionary perspective and argue for its promising nature in moving ahead of the two cultures paradigm and in obtaining scientific consilience. Interdisciplinarity between the humanities, the natural, the social and the behavioural sciences is called for. I show how culture is a feeble and fragile entity in need of constant undergirding. Shame and guilt have been decisive secondary emotions in enabling humans with a self-centred, aggressive and promiscuous ape nature to partake in increasingly larger forms of sociality. For a species dependent on groupishness for its survival, it has been essential. Blushing has been crucial in this regard as an involuntary self-revelatory indexical sign of shame. Such insights enable us to achieve a better understanding of ancient texts like Paul’s letters instantiating textual representations of feelings. Evolutionary insights may advantageously be used in textual interpretation.

Keywords: Blushing, Emotions; Feelings; Shame; Evolution

Jesper Carlsen: “Family and Emotions among Imperial Slaves and Freedmen at Roman Carthage.”

This article discusses the epitaphs with epithets from two burial grounds at Carthage excavated by Alfred-Louis Delattre in the last decades of the 19 th century. He found more than 900 Latin inscriptions that can be dated between the late first century and the early third century CE. Most of those buried at the so-called ‘cimetières des officiales’ were imperial slaves and freedmen together with their relatives and include almost 1300 individuals. Epithets occur just in about sixty epitaphs or about 6 % of the inscriptions from the imperial burial grounds at Carthage. The inscriptions are mostly short with certain conventions. The employment of epithets characterized the moral qualities of the commemorated seen from the commemorator’s point of view and is an expression of feelings, emotions and grief. The epitaphs from Carthage come from a well-defined context within a well-defined group, which may share the same feelings and be called an emotional community. The analysis of the most common epithets demonstrates remarkable differences between their use at Carthage and in the funerary inscriptions found in Rome.

Key words: Carthage; familia Caesaris; cemeteries of the officials; epithets; emotional community

Lasse Raaby Gammelgaard: “Ludvig Holberg’s angry comedies”

This article contributes to research on anger and neo-classicist comedy drama. Facilitating a dialogue between state-of-the-art theory on anger as a complicated, ambiguous and broad-spectrum emotion and Aristotelian drama theory, especially the concept of anagnorisis, it is argued that neo- classicist comedies are scenes of social interaction that are replete with angry feelings and reactions. Characters are constantly provoking each other and reacting to provocations. The main case is Ludvig Holberg’s comedies. Anger is investigated both from a quantitative perspective employing corpus-linguistic approaches (searching for concordance and clusters in all 36 comedies) and through a close reading of Den Stundesløse.

Key words: Comedy; Anger; Holberg; Essays; Enlightenment.

Susan Matt: “A Preliminary Exploration of the Inner History of Capitalism”

This chapter will examine an important transition in the history of emotions which illuminates how Americans came to embrace capitalistic feelings they once considered sinful. A central shift occurred when they stopped regarding their feelings as moral and cognitive traits and instead came to see them as neurological, non-volitional, physical impulses. When this occurred, once forbidden feelings became far less morally troubling. My history fits with a larger pattern that a number of historians of the emotions have traced. Their respective works have illustrated that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a revolution in the descriptions and conceptions of inner life emerged in Europe and America.

Keywords: capitalism, emotions, moral feelings, physical impulses

Johan Falke Cederfeldt Mendes: “Emotion as an element of contemporary Criticism in the intellectual Environment of the Weimar Republic – A contextual Reading of the Presentation of the Affective in Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt”

This article examines a specific use of emotional concepts as well as a particular understanding of the affective in general in the work of Heidegger and Schmitt during the years 1919-1933. The general character of this idea of the affective is that it is developed as an element of a critical engagement with discourses regarding institutional change. Thus, I will be reading the two thinkers in the light of institutional disputes present in the Weimar Republic. Heidegger is read in relation to the question of university reform, with which he was deeply involved in the 1920´s. Schmitt will be analyzed through the political situation of the newly established liberal democracy. In both cases, I will argue that a conception of the affective is developed that serves to attack a perceived relativism. This is seen in the fact that, for both thinkers, certain affective categories are linked to stable existential categories: being for Heidegger and the dichotomy between friend and foe for Schmitt.

Keywords: Heidegger; Jünger; Emotion; Criticism; Relativism

Kasper Thissenius Haunstrup Rathjen: “The Grundtvigian Case for Museums”

This article investigates the notion that museums are caught between two opposites when it comes to defining the institutions Raison d’être: either you entertain, or you enlighten. Using Barbara Rosenwein’s thoughts on emotional communities, this museological dichotomy between emotion and intellect is challenged by a certain ‘Grundtvigian position’ that was inspired by the philosophy of pastor poet N.F.S. Grundtvig. At the turning point of the 19 th century this position resulted in numerus museums that made the radical statement: the dichotomy is false. A museum should speak to emotions and the intellect. As opposed to the rationalistic, archeological approach that the National Museum represented, the grundtvigians saw themselves as mediators of a living history that needed to be told under the pressure of modern techniques and customs.

Keywords: Museum, Grundtvigian, Nationalism, Museum Communication, Emotional Communities

Lone Kølle Martinsen: “A Conversation with Cardiologist and Professor Dr. Jens Flensted Lassen.“

The essay is a conversation with cardiologist Jens Flensted Lassen about the cultural history of the heart, the connections between the humanities and the hard sciences.

Keywords: Heart, emotions, cardiology