Duke University Press Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect

Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In Impersonal Passion, she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal. In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life’s absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if you’re lying when you aren’t. Impersonal Passion reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday. Review "Denise Riley's splendor as a writer is unclassifiable: she is language philosopher, phenomenologist, poet, feminist theorist, and cultural critic all bound into one. In addition to the gorgeous thinking and language, Impersonal Passion offers singular takes on common conundrums that most of us don't think deeply about let alone get to the bottom of. This book is a rarity: a work of philosophy that one can't put down."--Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley From the Back Cover "Denise Riley writes a poet's prose, and her theoretical originality more than matches the engaging quality of her writing. She breathes life into the claim that the 'I' is an effect of language and draws her reader in both for the sake of her brilliant unpacking of existential idioms and for her renewal of the theoretical questions of where and how language locates us and how and with what effect we can relocate ourselves."--Ellen Rooney, Brown University About the Author Denise Riley is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia. Her books include The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony; “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History; and War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, as well as many collections of poetry.