and artificiality of the anti-imperial/colonizer and liberator/oppressor binaries but also, and perhaps more importantly, in analyzing the elements and mechanisms that perforate these dichotomies and transform them into violent and tyrannical discourses.
Post-Metaphysical Thinking
For literary and cultural studies, situated reason and the linguistic turn represent a fruitful opportunity to analyze power dynamics in different social contexts. Nevertheless, these first two philosophical ruptures analyzed by Habermas also make it challenging to locate elements capable of overcoming contextual limitations.
For Habermas, contemporary thinking broke with the ancient, medieval, and modern metaphysical tendency to seek a grand unifying theory behind the phenomena of life and history.[24] Contemporary theoretical arguments in the field of the humanities, situated within a framework of immanence, rely instead on the specialization of knowledge and generate positions that illuminate individual sectors of reality and of history, without aspiring to the construction of closed and totalizing systems.
The powerful influence of post-structuralism and deconstruction in literary and cultural studies since the 1980s seems to condemn metaphysics to a dead end: the pursuit of artificial binaries reveals nothing but prejudices against social groups and actually undermines the search for some stable foundation on which to build a lasting cultural evaluation or movement towards political change. Nonetheless, there are serious and convincing theoretical proposals that may help in overcoming this impasse; among the most interesting of these is the study of emotions.
For Habermas, the connection of philosophy, and the humanities in general, to science can be a fruitful way of navigating the challenges of post-metaphysical thinking.[25] Scientific knowledge is based on empirical and experimental data collection, and its probabilistic arguments do not aspire to the totalization of reality but to the possible reproduction of scientific results. This approach can offer the humanities some hope of escape from an endlessly discursive relativism and a resigned passivity in the face of the world’s complexity.
From the first publications of Charles Darwin to the most recent cutting-edge work in neuroscience, the study of the emotions has represented one such intersection between the sciences and the humanities; today it is an increasingly popular area of investigation. Emotions that manifest in the human body—whether on the face, through behavior, or in neurons—allow us to collect empirical data for the construction of theories. The most radical scientists promote a biological determinism that minimizes or excludes the role of culture and society in the construction of emotions.[26] On the other hand, there are also extreme positions within social and cultural studies—particularly in the field of cultural anthropology—that focus exclusively on contextual factors in emotional expression.
But these extreme schools of thought have been losing followers as new scientific and cultural studies have verified the interaction between biological factors and social context. For many disciplines, emotions are seen as a constitutive biological element of the human person, while their way of operating—their social uses and meanings—are what vary according to context and are shaped by linguistic variations in different historical periods and cultural spaces. Keith Oatley describes the biological and social characteristics of emotions like this:
For emotions, history has three meanings. The first is evolutionary. Aspects of our emotions derive from millions of years ago when our pre-human ancestors became more successful than members of other pre-human species who did not survive because those others were less well equipped in their emotional and practical repertoires than were our ancestors. The repertoire that was successful in the past has been passed by human genes on to us in the present. The second meaning is the personal history of each of us: how our emotions develop from birth, through the relationships of childhood and across the life span. The third sense is the ordinary one: a history of ideas and social movements.[27]
Emotions have been studied since classical antiquity and by different disciplines, making it impossible to find an exact or comprehensive definition. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, the word emotion comes from the Latin emotio, and evokes an intense and transient mood alteration, pleasant or painful, which is accompanied by some somatic commotion. In a similar vein, one of the earliest recorded definitions is that of Aristotle, who uses the Greek term pathos: “The emotions are all those affections which cause men to change their opinion in regard to their judgments, and are accompanied by pleasure and pain; such are anger, pity, fear, and all similar emotions and their contraries.”[28]
Hundreds of authors have offered their own definitions since. Some common features are the reaction of the body and the mood of human beings before an external or imaginary stimulus, which affects the judgment and promotes a certain action. Some ascribe a moral or ethical dimension to human feelings, and others, like the ancient and medieval authors, believe in the possibility of educating them. However, due to each emotion’s basic complexity, perhaps the best way to approach them is to focus on one in particular.
One of the epithets Toribio de Ortiguera assigns to Aguirre, in one of the first relaciones about the marañón rebellion, is “the Wrath of God.”[29] This phrase captures the conquistador’s personality as it is evoked in the colonial texts, which describe him as an angry man who is easily exasperated and who resorts to vengeful and bloodthirsty violence as a way of life. Subsequent fictional adaptations highlight this dimension of Aguirre; for instance, the name of Werner Herzog’s film, the most popular depiction of the conqueror, is Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Aguirre is not only “Prince of Freedom” and “Tyrant,” but also the “Wrath of God.” This wrath stands as an invitation to analyze the anti-imperial/colonizing and liberating/oppressive dimensions of Aguirre from the standpoint of the study of the emotions. Anger can be a lens for the study of Aguirre and his future appropriations, as well as of the constitution of the first modern anti-imperial project as a founding archetype. Anger functions as a sort of tunnel that connects both binaries and allows one to pass, back and forth, from the anti-imperial liberator to the oppressive tyrant.
Aristotle defines anger (orge) as the feeling that someone has hurt me, or hurt someone or something that matters to me, and that this person must therefore pay the consequences.
Let us then define anger as a longing, accompanied by pain, for a real or apparent revenge for a real or apparent light, affecting a man himself or one of his friends, when such a slight is undeserved. If this definition is correct, the angry man must always be angry with a particular individual (for instance, with Cleon, but not with men generally), and because this individual has done, or was on the point of doing, something against him or one of his friends; and lastly, anger is always accompanied by a certain pleasure, due to the hope of revenge to come. For it is pleasant to think that one will obtain what one aims at; now, no one aims at what is obviously impossible of attainment by him, and the angry man aims at what is possible for himself. Wherefore it has been well said of anger, that “Far sweeter than dripping honey down the throat it spreads in men’s hearts” for it is accompanied by a certain pleasure, for this reason first, and also because men dwell upon the thought of revenge, and the vision that rises before us produces the same pleasure as one seen in dreams.[30]
Aristotle’s rhetorical goal was to persuade and edify the leaders of the polis,[31] and his discussion of anger therefore unfolded against the backdrop of certain political concerns. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum adopts the public dimension of this Aristotelian definition for her own investigation of the role of what she calls, precisely, “political emotions.” Her analysis of anger focuses, as does my own, on its political dimension.
Nussbaum explains that anger is often the engine of change, rebellion, and revolution, as it pushes populations or social groups to rise
