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Philipp Nielsen, An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture, by Anna M. Parkinson, The English Historical Review, Volume 132, Issue 556, June 2017, Pages 769–771, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cex117
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Extract
Anna Parkinson’s book opens with a quotation from the German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ 1945/6 lectures on German guilt. The first of the three chapters is dedicated to the same topic. Yet this focus on guilt is misleading, for Parkinson has set her sights on a different feeling, or rather an affective structure: ressentiment. Following Nietzsche, she defines ressentiment as to ‘revel in tormenting suspicions and to intoxicate [oneself] with the malice of [one’s] own malice’ (p. 70). While emotions such as guilt, according to Parkinson, are normative and essentially top-down, affects are the unstructured, not necessarily clearly legible feelings of the individual, polyvalent and frequently in excess of the sanctioned emotions of a given time (pp. 12–13). Next to prominent emotion scholars such as William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, Chantal Mouffe and Deborah Gould, Parkinson turns to Sigmund Freud for conceptual guidance. Expanding on Freud, according to Parkinson, affective structures establish a relationship between the subject and society and are thus important to any interpretation of social history (p. 10). In different guises, ressentiment, according to Parkinson, surfaced in post-war West German history up to Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich’s seminal Die Unfahigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn) of 1967 on West German society’s relationship to its National Socialist past and beyond. Next to establishing ressentiment as the centre of an emotional politics of post-war West Germany, debunking the Mitscherlichs’ claim of the West Germans’ inability to mourn after 1945, or, more precisely, showing how this claim precluded any fruitful discussion of emotions, forms the argumentative thread of Parkinson’s book. Along the way, she thoroughly works through the questions of affect and emotions in society and politics and, mostly, stays true to her goal of ‘moving our understanding of emotions from the status of descriptors to that of legible social signs in a larger affective structure’ (p. 1).
