A Feeling and Body Investigator would be incomplete without in-depth explorations of joyous sensations. We explore what it feels like to be so filled with energy that you cannot sit still (Ernie the Energy Ball) or when you have so much music in your heart that you have to dance around (Dancing Darrin). We investigate moments when you are so filled with joy that you feel your heart might burst out of your chest (Bursting Bella), or when you are laughing so hard that your side hurts (Lulu the Laughing Pain). In this session we move. We dance. We giggle. We explore ways to take these joyous sensations and share them and make them even bigger.

The Coda returns to the example with which the book begins: the story about the gentleman caller and the naked lady in the bathroom told by the character Fabienne in Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968). The aim of the Coda is to revisit key aspects of the theory and history of tact developed in the course of the book, and to draw its findings to a close.

Today we can barely understand why millions were swept along by the mass National Socialist gatherings and euphorically idolised their ‘Führer’. This chapter shows how after defeat in the Second World War, the time for waves of national enthusiasm seemed to be over, to be replaced by political sobriety. It was only in 1954, when the Federal Republic’s national football team unexpectedly won the FIFA World Cup, that the Germans, now divided, were united in cheers of joyful celebration once again. The ‘miracle of Bern’ was followed in the West by the economic miracle, which provided West Germans with growing wages and a previously unimaginable ability to purchase consumer goods. Meanwhile, the GDR was trying in vain to awaken its citizens’ enthusiasm for socialism. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East and West Germans celebrated together in pure collective joy that was felt around the world. But most people show joy primarily in private and value ‘small happiness’ with family or among friends, and that has also to do with the experience of how often enthusiasm has been politically manipulated and instrumentalized throughout the twentieth century.

At 106, Eleanor’s quote: “You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream.” Importance of making new friends as one ages. Many of our older friends will die. My children’s and grandchildren’s friends are also mine, through them. Your own joy increases when you make someone else happy. A highly concerning study reveals that one out of ten people report they have no close friendships at all. Everybody has something they like and can do! Volunteer! When you just think “poor me”, joy runs away from you. You have to think about making someone else happy. Bringing joy to others, focusing on others, is the surest way to know joy yourself. “Every morning when I wake up I say, ‘thank you.’ Thank you, God, for another day. Another good day.”

The chapter studies the several accounts of the wise person’s joy that are found in Seneca’s works, arguing that these can give insight into his working methods as a philosopher. Seneca is clearly invested in the idea that the fulfillment of one’s rational nature would result in a life filled with joy, the virtuous counterpart to the problematic pleasure or delight of ordinary agents. Yet his explanations of how wise joy relates to objects of value are interestingly dissimilar, reflecting different views of the phenomenology of joy, the nature of its objects, and its dependence on social interactions. Graver argues that these discrepancies reflect a tendency to preserve ideas found in his various reading materials without attempting to impose a system, and, further, that the Stoic tradition itself must have had room for divergences of view concerning some specifics of moral psychology, as long as core principles were maintained.

This chapter investigates questions of language, context, cross-cultural communication and collective learning through three examples from Fórum Shakespeare. For the past twenty years, the (almost) bi-annual project Fórum Shakespeare has brought young actors from Brazilian peripheries together with theatre makers and audiences to ask questions about multicultural, multilingual and potentially mutually beneficial ways of engaging with Shakespeare. The three case studies discussed in this chapter include: Paul Heritage’s work on Romeo and Juliet with a group of juvenile prisoners in Rio de Janeiro in 1999; Bridget Escolme’s workshops for young people in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Brasília in 2011, 2013 and 2014; and Catherine Silverstone’s lecture and workshop for general audiences in São Paulo in 2016. The Fórum – and each case study – insists on the plurality of Shakespeare. The chapter explores how professional and non-professional participants have disturbed the harmful assumptions and challenged the negative expectations that limit young people, while teaching pleasure, resilience and compassion through performance. In Fórum Shakespeare meaning has consistently been constructed through exchange, with participants’ embodied acts of translation introducing new understandings of how working inter-culturally with Shakespeare’s texts can allow different stories to be told.

Sandra Shapshay looks at the joy Schopenhauer acknowledges us to feel in the presence of natural beauty. Many commentators subordinate this theory of pleasure to the cognitive aspect of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic. Shapshay resists this interpretation. But she also resists its opposite but still reductive or unifying strategy that minimizes the cognitive for the sake of the hedonic. Rather, she discards the notion that Schopenhauer had a unified aesthetic theory as not only false but undesirable. Instead, she shows that Schopenhauer develops two, mutually irreducible spectrums of aesthetic value, based on two different criteria. The spectrum that commentators acknowledge in Schopenhauer is the hierarchy of the arts, which puts architecture and fountainry at the bottom (as revealing the lower Ideas) and literature at the top, as a display of the higher, more complex ideas. The spectrum that is overlooked, but becomes visible if we take his more formalist views of natural aesthetics seriously, is the spectrum of the beautiful and sublime, where the beautiful – and botanical beauty in particular – lends itself more readily (than experiences at the sublime pole) to a state of mind that is not only tranquilizing but (in a departure from his usual attitude) positively joyful.

As the central villain of Infinite Jest, entertainment is a persistent preoccupation in Wallace’s writing. He presents it as a locus of neoliberal power in ways that anticipated the development of tailored entertainment services well ahead of time. This chapter examines Wallace’s representation of entertainment, couching it particularly in its antagonistic relationship with attention and engagement, which his work elevated as cardinal virtues. This chapter situates Wallace’s vision of entertainment in a critical paradigm of entertainment as a form of individual and social control, and as the ultimate Jamesonian manifestation of late capitalist flattening, arguing that the anhedonia of Wallace’s characters is a direct result of the dominant forms and agendas of entertainment on display in his writing. The chapter also argues that the forms of entertainment in Wallace’s work invite and reflect the idea of absorption, which is characterized positively and negatively depending on its genesis. That is to say, the absorption of entertainment is contrasted with the absorption of boredom, and again with the absorption of attention, with widely diverse effects on the postmodern subject. Entertainment constitutes a seductive and deadening force that both unites and isolates the subjects of Wallace’s writing, the great threat to the contemporary self.

This chapter explores Albert Murray’s diagnosis and refusal of key elements of 1960s-style Black cultural politics. In books like The Omni-Americans he repudiated the pessimism and particularism that he found in figures like Baldwin and replaced it with a life-affirming concrete universalism rooted in the blues as a mode of phenomenology and in the sense that a fully American Blackness could stand as an instance and emblem of universal human experience. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Murray’s life; discusses the intellectual commitments he shared with his most important interlocutor, Ralph Ellison; explains how Murray turned these shared commitments into his own distinctive philosophical apparatus; and explores what may be the clearest difference between Murray and Ellison: Murray’s willingness to cultivate followers like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Wynton Marsalis, pivotal culture workers in the post-civil rights shift in U.S. racial politics.

Gabriel Zamosc argues that a proper understanding of TSZ will help to advance the contemporary transhumanist movement that often claims to be inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch. According to Zamosc, Zarathustra warns us against falsely or sickly transcendent versions of his superhuman ideal that are actually a veiled hatred of our unchangeable human-all-too-human past. Indeed, this is why he teaches eternal recurrence, in order to show us how to love this past as an embodiment of our creative will to power. The transhumanist movement must therefore incorporate this doctrine so as to secure a joyful version of itself that embraces our transitional destiny of forever remaining mere bridges to the superhuman.

This essay explores the metaphysical foundations of Spinoza's psychology. A particular focus is Spinoza's conatus principle according to which each thing strives not only to persevere in existence but also to increase its power of acting. This striving is, for Spinoza, the actual essence of each thing, and it forms the basis of the three fundamental affects desire, joy, and sadness--which are central to Spinoza's accounts of weakness of the will, self-deception, the imitation of the affects, egoism, altruism, and teleology. Throughout, the essay emphasizes the ways in which Spinoza's psychology manifests his naturalism, his view that everything –including human beings and their various affects or emotions – is governed by the same laws that are found throughout nature.

Drawing on insights from affect theorists Silvan Tomkins, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, and Sue J. Kim, this chapter argues that Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna developed sophisticated understandings of what affects do: how they are triggered, modulated, and extinguished though human interaction in an unequal field of power relations. Not only did they use writing to meditate on the ways in which fear, hatred, and contempt for the Chinese in North America had shaped their own affective systems, but they also sought to understand what fictional representations of affects could do to the reader. When looked at from the perspective of Tomkinsian theory, such works as “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” and Marion are clearly structured around scenes of shaming, linked by complex reparative scripts that model ways of responding to shame, from self-effacement and withdrawal, through anger and contempt for others, to constructing allegories of a nonracist society and becoming politically engaged. Using such a reading strategy allows us to appreciate particularly those narratives by the Eaton sisters which have hitherto been dismissed as naively sentimental.

This essay examines affect in Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson. Each of them has a characteristic method: for Spinoza, the geometrical method; for Nietzsche, genealogy; and for Bergson, intuition. Each method takes them beyond the human condition of concern with useful manipulation of material objects to the point of an affect-soaked contact with reality. All three seek conditions for joy, rare though those capable of fully feeling it might be: for Spinoza, joy is felt when adequate ideas lead to increased power to be the cause of actions and thoughts, including even the joy of understanding the way our singular body makeup constitutes reasons for our sadness; for Nietzsche, joy is possible from the practice of ‘gay science’ leading to an affirmation of life; and for Bergson, joy is felt in immersion in life’s creativity.