Critical Inquiry

Winter 1995

Volume 21, Number 2

Excerpt from "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins" by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank:

In this essay we want to discuss a figure not presently well known, the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991), who seems implicitly to challenge [current theoretical] habits and procedures-- to challenge them not from the vantage point of the present, but from (what we take to be) a moment shortly before their installation as theory. He is also, then, a figure whom such habits and procedures would tend sharply to rebuke. In fact, reading Tomkin's work on affect has consistently involved us in a peculiar double movement; to be responsible to the great interest of his writing seems also, continually, to make graphic the mechanism of what would seem an irresistibly easy discreditation. You don't have to be long out of theory kindergarten to make mincemeat of, let's say, a psychology that depends on the separate existence of eight (only sometimes it's nine) distinct affects hardwired into the human biological system."

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