Eliza Haywood and the Epistemological Frustrations of Embodiment

Abstract: Focusing on Love in Excess and Lasselia , this article reads Eliza Haywood's depictions of passionate intensity in relation to the current embrace of affected bodies in both Haywood studies and interdisciplinary research. However, I argue that, rather than clarifying the relations among the passions, the body, and the self, Haywood's figurations of embodiment disclose new epistemological frustrations for the embodied subject. But those frustrations, I suggest, are ultimately the generative aspect of Haywood's project. By encouraging us to think with her about how the language of embodiment challenges understandings of the self, the affects, and sovereignty, Haywood also challenges us to formulate a new, more flexible vocabulary to describe the baffling entanglements among ourselves, each other, and our world.