sianne ngai in ugly feelings on jonathan lear’s study of freudian catharsis, love and its place in nature, and susan campbell’s interpreting the personal, which both sound pretty rad. “[lear’s]…argument that in giving conscious, conceptualized expression to one’s emotional life or ‘archaic fantasies of mental functioning’ in language, ‘one is able to influence the fantasy and thus the mental functioning which embodies and expresses that fantasy’, comes close to campbell’s suggestion that feelings, as forms of ‘mental functioning,’ are individuated by their expressions.”  

22 Jan 2012 / 4 notes / tumblr affects digital valley girls