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Criticism 43.3 (2001) 285-288



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Introduction to Erich Auerbach, "Passio as Passion"
["Passio als Leidenschaft"] *

Martin Elsky


THE SUBJECT OF ERICH AUERBACH'S hitherto untranslated "Passio as Passion" concerns a theme that is never associated with him, the history of emotions. For the English-speaking world, Mimesis has been read back into "Figura" (1939) 1 and Dante, Poet of the Secular World (1929) 2 as a critical history that led to the development of Auerbach's powerful analysis of literary realism. His interest in the history of emotions has largely gone unnoticed. We might see a different critical trajectory in Auerbach's work if instead our starting point were an essay like "Passio as Passion." Here Auerbach provides a non-Freudian, prestructuralist philological explanation of, put simply, the ability to express strong emotions, specifically erotic passion. This classic philological essay is more wide ranging than the better known "Figura," but it applies the same method: it examines how a culture reveals the values it holds dear by the way it fills the words available to it with meaning; it proposes that the history of the changing contents of a word is the history of the changing values of a culture. In this case, Auerbach asks how the contemporary French word passion and German Leidenschaft acquired the meaning they bear for us today. Auerbach starts genetically from the Greek word b'gbc, and moves in stages to its Stoic rendition as passio, to its early Christian and medieval transformation, which laid the groundwork for its modern meaning as first established by Racine.

The essay is of interest to us today for two reasons: first, for what it contributes to current interest in the history of emotions, and second, for what it reveals about the practice of criticism at a time of extremes.

That the emotions have a history implies that subjects are historically contingent and open to the possibility that they are hence culturally determined. In their excellent overview of the issues at stake in the argument for the social construction of the emotions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank provide a reference point for approximating where Auerbach stands in the development of this issue. 3 For example, among the tenets that Auerbach does not [End Page 285] share with critical theory's "phenomenology of emotions" are the importance of difference and othering, and the radical suspicion of the idea of a core personality. In "Passio as Passion," he is far from dismissing the notion of a self; he is far from holding that the nature of the subject determines its objects. But in his view that the subject is transformed by the changing object a culture places before it, he edges up to the idea that subject and object are mutually constitutive, and that the way they constitute each other can be traced in language. His treatment of the issue suggests his affinity with a line of thinkers who explore the cultural and historical contingency of subjectivity.

"Passio as Passion" presents Auerbach less as an historian of realism, than a critic (or as he might put it, a Denkmahler), who, with Charles Taylor, reminds us that not everybody at all times and in all places thinks of the self in the same way. Auerbach might agree with Taylor's cautious prudence that we carry with us only "a historically limited mode of self-interpretation, one which has become dominant in the modern West . . ., but which had a beginning in time and space and may have an end." 4 Whereas Taylor seeks his narrative of modern identity in the history of philosophy, Auerbach turns to the history of literature. Both Auerbach and Taylor, however, regard the seventeenth century as a defining moment. Both also wish to show the specific European nature of what we take for granted as our inner life. For Taylor, European modernity has to do with the way philosophers removed inwardness and perceptual experience from the body by dividing the world up into subjects and objects; conversely, for Auerbach it had to with the infusion of...

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