What starts from a shrewd review of contemporary polemics goes on to take the shape of a theory of emotion of Terada’s own, drawn from her analytical reading of post-structuralist writing and of earlier and present-day philosophies of emotion. With Feeling in Theory Terada has produced something excellent and major, both a contribution to post-structuralist theory and its interpretation, and a placing of it in a wider surround.
-- Cynthia Chase, author of Decomposing Figures

Feeling in Theory takes issue with the often-expressed view that postmodern culture in general, and post-structuralist theory in particular, is hostile to the idea—and even to the very existence—of emotion. Terada argues that what is at stake in these debates isn’t really emotion per se, so much as it is the fate of the unified subject. An anxiety over postmodern notions of a foundering subjectivity is what actually underlies all these calls for a return to more conservative aesthetic positions. Emotion is invoked in polemics only because it is thought to be the ultimate guarantor of the subject’s integrity; if there are feelings, the argument goes, then there must be a Self present to experience them. Terada shows, however, that this line of argument is deeply problematic, arguing startlingly but quite cogently that there is a fundamental contradiction between emotion or ‘experience’ on the one hand, and the notion of a unified subjectivity on the other. It is not merely that emotion does not need to be grounded in a subject; but more strongly, that emotion requires the nonexistence of the subject, and that a subject as traditionally conceived could not possibly experience emotion. Terada therefore proposes to develop a post-structuralist theory of emotion.
-- Steven Shaviro, author of Doom Patrols