Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect

by Denise Riley

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 the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.

Genres: Theory, Language, Nonfiction, Philosophy

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2005

About the author

Denise Riley (born 1948) is an English poet and philosopher who began to be published in the 1970s.

Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, "identity", and philosophy of language, are recognised as an important contribution to feminism and contemporary philosophy. She was Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A.D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She was formerly Writer in Residence at Tate Gallery London, and has held fellowships at Brown University and at Birkbeck, University of London. Among her poetry publications is Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair (1996). She lives in London.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's often said that what is most familiar to us can in fact be what is most enigmatic to us. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the intimate perplexities of language, the folds of which envelop us even while we ply and pleat it as if at will, in the ease in which words tumble out of us. The signal achievement of Denise Riley’s Impersonal Passion is to forcefully remind us of just these bewitching charms of language, the uncanny strangeness of which insinuates itself in the very tissue of our most passionate and personal speech.

In the words that hurt us, in the name that designates us, in the cries of ‘why me?’ that we cast out in frustration and sorrow; in all these and more Riley teases out, in a series of linguistic vignettes, the ways in which language works its peculiar magic. Not so much in the manner of how words mean, but rather, how they act upon us, lay claim upon who we are and what we do, impelling us now in one way, then another. It's in this 'impersonal' and anonymous dimension of language that Riley stakes her study, tracing the ways in which the ordinances of language incite and inflect our desires, hopes, dreams, fears and hatreds.

Above all, Impersonal Passion is a celebration of language, both in content and style. Riley's prose has a tendency to leap off the page in flourishes that are in turns moving, funny, brilliant, and, in most cases, all three at the same time. It's hard not to feel the sheer enjoyment and exhilaration of writing at work, with words shimmering allusively amongst themselves, reverberating in their playful incisiveness. Whether engaging in a phenomenology of language, critiquing a certain stand of anti-abortionist rhetoric, or exploring the ins and outs of social inclusion, Riley's attention to the nuances of expression sheds an incomparable light on the wonder that is language, and in turn, the lives which weave themselves alongside it.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

a very enjoyable if odd little book of criticism-esqueism I think a big comparison for me is Barthes' A Lover's Discourse this interrogation/unfolding of Situations though especially in speech here, in longer essays. e.g. Linguistic Inhibition as a cause of Pregnancy Which talks about what it sounds like - how silence can quite literally create pregnancy (among other things). "Lying" When You Aren't, a piece about the peculiar embarrassment the too-much-the-self one finds in telling the truth but feeling as if one is lying. So forth I'd like to read her others, the riff on Am I That Name? and Time Lived Without its Flow