Jonathan Edwards, Affective Conversion, and the Problem of Masochism

This essay uses the work of Jonathan Edwards to trace intellectual, historical, and theoretical connections between eighteenth-century religious conversion in England and New England and later accounts of masochism's Enlightenment philosophical basis. Expanding feminist readings of revival abjection to include racial abjection, I focus on Edwards's account of religious sentiment in a "Personal Narrative" (ca. 1739), A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God (1736-37), and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742). Situating these texts in their philosophical and political contexts, I then use A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) to show how Edwards's evolving response to revivalist disruptions of hierarchy led him to describe a sentimental structure of desire similar to masochism as a defense against a modern subjectivity that would allow for masochism

Aesthetics · Art · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Hierarchy · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subjectivity · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

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