The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: Motions of the Soul and the Kinetics of Passion in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre

This article demonstrates the debt of eighteenth-century theories of theatrical emotion to classical, Scholastic, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophies of the passions. An understanding of emotion as a literal movement of the human soul is traced across the philosophy of René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche, the aesthetics of Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and the acting theory of Pierre Rémond de Sainte-Albine and Denis Diderot. The kinetic-kinesthetic epistemologies of emotion contained in these texts, it is argued, ought to provoke renewed attention to the vicarious experience of affect within contemporary performance scholarship.