Sedgwick, Eve Kosopsky. Touching Feeling

Sedgwick, Eve Kosopsky. Touching Feeling : Affect. Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke
UP: Durham, NC. 2003.

“Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy” (19).

“’ affects may; be either much more casual than any drive could be or much more monopolistic. . . Most of the characteristics which Freud attributed to the Unconcious and to the Id are in fact salient aspects of the affect system. .
.Affects enable both insatiability and extreme lability, fickleness and finickiness (52)’” (21).

“The conventional way of distinguishing shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the senese of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does” (37).

Perhaps, but I think it more straightforward when one considers shame to be attached to what one thinks others will think of one and attaches guilt to what one thinks of oneself.

Quoting Silvan Tomkins
“’It was a short step to see that excitement had nothing perse to do with sexuality or with hunger, and that the apparent urgency of the drive system was borrowed from it co-assembly with appropriate affects as necessary amplifiers’” (100).

Quoting Silvan Tomkins
“’I would account for the difference in affect activation by three variants of a single principle—the density of neural firing. By density I mean the frequency of neural firing perunit of time. My theory posits three discrete classes of activators of affect, each of which further amplifies the sources which activate them. These are stimulation increase, stimulation level, and stimulation decrease’” (102).

Wonder if I need to read Sylvan Tomkins?