Abstract
This chapter examines the relationship between emotions and time. Drawing from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, it takes a fusion of horizons as a means by which to place multiple temporal perspectives in dialogue with one another. As such, we argue that a fusion of horizons allows us to consider emotions not as isolated, ephemeral experiences but as a creative continuum in which a host of emotional appraisals, including their connections, can be explored. Looking at the effects of time and emotional experience opens up the methodological compass of the study of emotions. Upon discussing the nature of emotional experience and Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, the chapter turns to Stanley Fish’s affective stylistics, a method which takes the reader as ‘an actively mediating presence,’ in order to look at the connections between time and emotional experience. To exemplify how the method can be applied, the chapter studies the links between the emotional appraisals extolled by the Bush administration before and immediately after 9/11. Contrary to interpretations which suggest that 9/11 resulted in a radical restructuring of United States’ foreign policy, we argue that Bush’s emotional appraisals were actually beset by a strong level of continuity.
America at its best is also courageous…. The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world, by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favours freedom…. America at its best is compassionate .
George W. Bush, 20 January 2001, Inaugural Address
In a single instant, we realized this will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty, that we’ve been called to a unique role in human events. Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential.
George. W. Bush , 29 January 2002, State of the Union Address
Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome… In fact the important thing is to recognise temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding.
Hans Gadamer (1989 [1960], p. 297)
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Notes
- 1.
One could argue that the distinction drawn by Stanley Fish between ‘what a sentence means’ and what a ‘sentence does’ resonates with part of John Austin’s speech act theory. Austin distinguishes between the locution, the act of saying something, the illocution, the act in saying something and the perlocutionary effect, the consequential effects of the word on the hearer, where the success of the first two make a sound utterance, conform to a specific grammar, whilst the last provokes effects on the hearer or reader. In How to do things with words, Austin argues that words are performative through these three acts. In effect, for Austin (2008, p. 130) ‘to say something is to do something, or in saying something we do something, and even by saying something we do something.’ Hence, substituting the question ‘what does this sentence mean?’ with ‘what does this sentence do?’, as Fish suggests, emphasises the effects of the text on the audience and thus the perlocutionary effect of speech.
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Eroukhmanoff, C., Teles Fazendeiro, B. (2018). Emotions and Time: Approaching Emotions Through a Fusion of Horizons. In: Clément, M., Sangar, E. (eds) Researching Emotions in International Relations. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65575-8_11
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