ABSTRACT
The essays here gathered show the passions to be constitutive of a distinctive early modern mode of subjectivity. They present successively the self as object, the hermeneutic of the attempt to understand the self as embodied, the nexus of intersubjective relations constitutive of the self, and the relation between individual and God. While vindicating questions of interiority and selfhood as concerns central to the philosophy and literature of the period, they also point towards a radical divide between early modern approaches to the self, and our modern, post-Lockean, post-Romantic understanding of subjectivity. Viewed from this perspective, the phenomenology and philosophy of the early modern passions can perhaps help show the way towards a history of selfhood that steers clear from an essentialist account of the emergence of the ‘modern self’ that an earlier generation of scholarship rightly took issue with.
