When we try to compare feelings, what are we actually comparing? Is it possible to extricate them from their names? Feelings and language have a fraught relation, which is an underlying motive in many of affect theory’s main debates and concerns. Settling such discussions is not the aim of this presentation, though they are undoubtedly in the background. My aim is to advance a mainly methodological argument: that an unwavering attention to language as always already plural and political is a crucial step in exploring differences in affective tones and textures. In order to make my case, I look into the comparison between depression and anger as it unfolds in feminist and queer discussions. According to one line of reasoning, depression and anger are different in terms of their political scope and value. Compared to anger, the pain of depression might look colder, impotent, more resistant to language and expression—its realm is the pathological, not the political. However, building on an argument by Marilyn Frye (1983) and drawing on developments in affect theory and translation studies, I intend to show that the scope of a feeling is not a given, but always mediated by the languages available to make it legible. When the history of depression as an idiom of distress (and, I will argue, a very particular one) is truly taken into account, the comparison with anger becomes muddier. Whatever is we feel in the face of injustice, it takes shape only in the public arena of languages.
Renata Prati is a PhD candidate at the University of Buenos Aires, where she studied Philosophy and Literary Translation. As a CONICET fellow, she is currently at the final stages of writing her dissertation, which focuses on depression and the contrast with previous notions of melancholy.