Impersonal Passion

Denise Riley is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia. Her books include The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony; “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History; and War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, as well as many collections of poetry.

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 11. Malediction 92. "What I Want Back Is What I Was": Consolation's Retrospect 293. The Right to be Lonely 494. Why WHYs and why mes 595. Linguistic Inhibition as a Cause of Pregnancy 716. "Lying" When You Aren't 857. All Mouth and No Trousers: Linguistic Embarrassments 978. "But Then I Wouldn't Be Here" 1059. Your Name Which Isn't Yours 115Notes 129

“Denise Riley writes a poet’s prose, and her theoretical originality more than matches the engaging quality of her writing. She breathes life into the claim that the ‘I’ is an effect of language and draws her reader in both for the sake of her brilliant unpacking of existential idioms and for her renewal of the theoretical questions of where and how language locates us and how and with what effect we can relocate ourselves.”-Ellen Rooney, Brown University “Denise Riley’s splendor as a writer is unclassifiable: she is language philosopher, phenomenologist, poet, feminist theorist, and cultural critic all bound into one. In addition to the gorgeous thinking and language, Impersonal Passion offers singular takes on common conundrums that most of us don’t think deeply about let alone get to the bottom of. This book is a rarity: a work of philosophy that one can’t put down.”-Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley