Eva Illouz

emotional numbness which separated people from one another,

urban life creates an endless flow of nervous stimulations and stands in contrast to small-town life which rests on emotional relationships.

Wouldn’t focusing on such a highly subjective, invisible, and personal experience as “emotion” undercut the vocation of sociology, which has been, after all, chiefly concerned with objective regularities, patterned action, and large-scale institutions

Emotion is not action per se, but it is the inner energy that propels us toward an act, what gives a particular “mood” or “coloration” to an act.

quite the contrary, never has the private self been so publicly performed and harnessed to the discourses and values of the economic and political spheres.

which affect is made an essential aspect of economic behavior and in which emotional life – especially that of the middle classes – follows the logic of economic relations and exchange.

Inevitably, the themes of “rationalization” and “commodification” (of emotions)

Freud’s extraordinary cultural achievement consisted both in enlarging the scope of the normal by incorporating in it what was hitherto defined as pathological (for example his idea that sexual development starts with homosexuality), and in problematizing normality, thus making it an arduous goal which, for it to be reached, now demanded the mobilization of a large array of cultural re

Thus, if, as Foucault has claimed, the nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse instituted a rigid boundary between the normal and the pathological,25 Freud systematically blurred that boundary and posited a new kind of normality, riddled with a new cast of pathological characters, an open-ended project for the self, an undefined and yet powerful goal for the self.

at Foucault called an episteme, a new object of knowledge which in turn generates new instruments and practices of knowledge.5