Emotion at the Edge

Abstract

Are emotions internal episodes – psychical or neurological – as is often claimed? Some certainly are; but I maintain that an important class of emotions are “peripheral”; by this I mean that they consist in what we pick up from others’ expressions of their emotions in words, gestures, or actions – or from surrounding circumstances of various sorts. These expressions and circumstances contain affect clusters that manifest themselves to us exophanously, literally “showings-forth.” I explore both of these basic situations of “the transmission of affect” (Brennan). I also present an abbreviated periphenomenological description of various ways in which emotions have their own peculiar edges, thereby correcting and supplementing the common conception that edges inhere only in physical objects.