[Xmca-l] Passions, (Projects?) and Interests

[David Kellogg]

Last July in Geneva, I got into a bit of a tiff with my hosts over whether
or not Vygotsky had a theory of emotion. The commonplace position, taken by
almost all high Vygotskyans including my francophone friends, is that
Vygotsky spent too much of his life developing a theory of thinking and
intellect, complexes and concept formation, and when he turned his
attention to the lower and higher emotions, that dark side of the moon, it
was too late. He worked out a kind of prolegomena, in the form of "Teaching
on the Emotions" (or "Study of the Emotions" or perhaps "The Doctrine of
the Emotions"--you can read what he did in Volume 6 of the Collected
Works). And the rest was silence.

Here in Korea we are bringing out our tenth volume of Vygotsky's works (see
attached cover, with blurbs from Renee Van der Veer and Irina
Leopoldoff-Martin). It's all about sex education, which is a very important
topic here in Korea, because we have fifteen hours of sex education a week
mandated by the government, but the ministry of education has more or less
withdrawn the downloadable materials for this, not for the usual reasons
but instead because of criticism from Human Rights Watch (it is terribly
sexist, homophobic, and just plain ignorant).

Vygosky's view is that sex education (which he calls "sexual
enlightenment") has to be integrated into ALL subjects (so for example the
test of a good sex enlightenment programme would be one that ensures equal
participation of boys and girls in math and physics), it has to start as
soon as preschoolers enter primary school, and it has to be INTERESTING. In
other words, instead of the "sex education without sex" programme we have
here in South Korea, we need non-sex education...but with a good deal of
sex.

All of which has got me thinking about the problem my Geneva friends set
before me. I think that Vygotsky really DOES have a theory that unites
passions and interests. It's like that book by Hirschmann on how the unity
of passion and interest gave rise to capitalism, but instead it is all
about how passions, shared projects, and interests give rise to sexual
love, and it is more or less right before we would expect to find it: in
the Pedology of the Adolescent, right before the chapter on concept
formation, which shows how complexes (which are categories for others)
become concepts (categories for themselves). This is the chapter on
interests, which explains how passions (which are sensations in themselves)
become interests: that is, emotions for themselves. (There is already a
passable translation of this in Volume Five of the CW). The only thing is
there is a need for a transitional form--a feeling with others. Andy's idea
of the Project?

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New in *Language and Literature*, co-authored with Fang Li:
Mountains in labour: Eliot’s ‘Atrocities’ and Woolf’s
alternatives
Show all authors

https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947018805660
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