ABSTRACT
For Sartre (1971), emotion springs from a transformation of the subject’s perspective on the world. There is a kind of ‘magic’ in this transformation because the subject is spontaneously altering his or her attitude in the face of objective events. Emotion is an embodied experience. It involves physiological sensations like the pounding heart associated with love or fear, or the nausea – even retching – associated with disgust. This interpretation of emotions embeds them in corporeal being in the world but the element of magical transformation suggests that, at the same time, emotion may be either immersion in positivity or an attempt to escape from an alienating, objective, engulfing presence. The link between emotion as an embodied perspective and as a mechanism for disengagement with certain aspects of the world has advantages in understanding the emotional relationships between disabled and non-disabled actors. In the phenomenological tradition emotions are the means by which consciousness apprehends objects and attaches value (or disvalue) to them. They may be a source of – pre-reflective – judgement or they may also be based on long-held grievances. With respect to the basic aversive emotions (Kolnai 2004) – fear, hatred and disgust – there is little ambiguity about the value associated with the objects and persons that inspire and arouse the sense of abhorrence and antipathy that accompanies these feelings. There may be ‘magic’ in the social transformation that these emotions generate but it is profoundly negative in nature and disturbingly violent and validating in its consequences.
