A Pissing Contest of Wisdom 2: The Feeling of Feeling

Lauren Berlant calls our attention to “the unfortunate tendency in much contemporary affect theory to elide the difference between the structure of an affect and the experience we associate with a typical emotional event.”  This almost sounds like asking “what does feeling feel like?”  To answer that question it is tempting to explode the emotional event and find at its core an empty present.  The zero-degree of feeling may very well be empty, but all that really means is that the present is not present in and of it self, but takes form through its place in a past series of moments.  When I ask what feeling feels like, I am asking for a slightly distracted gaze toward the margin of subjectivity between the absolute instant of feeling and the forms through which emotion registers.