#silvan tomkins

[zielenna]

Silvan Tomkins, Shame and its sisters, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995)

[dk-thrive]

"Sedgwick’s work on shame—inspired by psychologist Silvan Tomkins—teaches us that that rush of blood signals our interest, our investment, our care. If we’re lucky, we care a lot."

— Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations. (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

[findepartida]

Shame, like other affects in Tomkins's usage of the term, is not a discrete intrapsychic structure, but a kind of free radical that (in different people and also in different cultures) attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of -- of almost anything: a zone of the body, a sensory system, a prohibited or indeed a permitted behavior, another affect such as anger or arousal, a named identity, a script for interpreting other people's behavor toward oneself. Thus, one of the things that anyone's character or personality is is a record of the highly individual histories by which the fleeting emotion of shame has instituted far more durable, structural changes in one's relational and interpretive strategies toward both self and others.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity,  “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel“

[juanfalla]

Interest-excitement and Enjoyment-joy

Interest-excitement is the affect that dominates male western human sexuality. The unrealistic desire for nonstop hot, passionate, lusty sex is the desire for activation of the affect interest-excitement. Our lovemaps (Money, 1986), core erotic themes (Morin, 1995) and pornography exist to trigger this affect.

Enjoyment-joy is activated by a decrease in rate of neural firing in an individual. This is the major post orgasm affect although it can be experienced for periods of time before orgasm. Enjoyment-joy is also the affect of love and communion with a partner. In many folks this affect triggers a smile or even laughter. The Mona Lisa and the smiling Buddha are examples of enjoyment-joy.

[zielenna]

Man is not only an anxious and a suffering animal, but he is above all a shy animal, easily caught and impaled between longing and despair.

Silvan Tomkins, Shame and its sisters, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995)

[zielenna]

Silvan Tomkins, Shame and its sisters, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995)

[pleaseiwanttoseeyou]

I'd really like to re-read Shame and Its Sisters one day. I'd like to go back and take notes this time, especially on Nuclear Scripts because I found that concept very interesting and potentially useful, but also it's just like. Beautiful prose? Thomas Silkans writes in such a way that makes me feel good about feeling and being human, idk if I ever do re read I'll try to find examples

[usunezukoinezu]

''(Affect Imagery Consciousness)...there isn’t any way to separate the three interlocked concepts. Affect produces attention that brings its trigger into consciousness, and the world we know is a dream, a series of images colored by our life experience of whatever scenes affect brought to our attention and assembled as scripts.''

- Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness