Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2010

Abstract

In academic papers about emotion, it is not uncommon to find a kind of disconnect between the detachment of theoretical and scholarly language and the subject of the paper--the emotions. One of the lovely, and challenging, aspects of Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller's article is that it not only conveys the emotions that are its subject, but it brims with its own emotion; it reads like a text written out of shattered love. Goldberg-Hiller takes up Jean-Luc Nancy's contention that "love is shattered by its very essence. It fragments the self at the same time as it refracts into many forms." Goldberg-Hiller understands Nancy as suggesting caution about trying to bridge the gap between love and law, and caution about any unifying theory of love. The author suspects that Goldberg-Hiller also finds in Nancy's theory of fragmented love, a methodology and an emotional style. Goldberg-Hiller writes of love, envy, and law in ways that burst, cut, and multiply as Nancy suggests love does. The article throws out shards of theory, literature, politics, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, visual imagery, texts, and emotions.

In Goldberg-Hiller's analysis of both of the emotional moments around which his article is built, the law remains submerged. Here the author goes back to the evocative analysis of love and especially envy to see if the law can be resurrected just a little by thinking about the conflict these emotional moments reflect and the ways in which law, like language, mediates emotional conflict and social change.

Publication Citation

28 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 747-753 (2010)

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