Response for Passion is the Gale

“Emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power: politics is just a process of determining who must repress as illegitimate, who must foreground as valuable, the feelings that come up for them in given contexts and relationships. To study emotional expression, then, is necessarily to investigate power relations” (Eustace, 11).

For Eustace, the agent of historical change is emotional expressions. Those who know how to control the emotional expressions possess power and status; meanwhile, those who do not know how to control the emotions are then seen as the lower class. Even if the lower class could control their emotional expressions, the elite still looked at them as the submissive. However, through the study of emotions, one begins to realize how weak the status divisions are. “Indeed, though members of eighteenth-century colonial elites initially turned to emotion in search of a reliable mark of exclusivity, they could not hinder emotion’s eventual emergence as a key element of natural equality” (Eustace, 15). The emotions reshaped the power relations because the feelings and expressions were changing through language which was the key form of social communication. Therefore, language is what gave the emotional expressions meaning. Common emotions became the basis for natural rights.

As far passions go, for Eustace, passions are what drive us, but reasons are what guide us. “Reason the card, but passion is the gale” (Eustace, 4). The reasons will tell us where we need and should go in life, but the passions are what actually move us. Therefore, passions drive us to change or at least move forward (hopefully).