Tenderness and Pathosformeln in the Work of Héctor Ciocchini

Abstract

This text investigates the presence of tenderness in the poetry and criticism and the Argentine writer Héctor Ciocchini. Tenderness is an important concept for both general and specific reasons. Despite the boom in affect theory in the humanities, very little attention has been paid to it, indeed theory vacillates between «emotion» and «affect» in classifying tenderness. It seems to conform to affect theory’s notions of impersonality and non-subjectivity; but at the same time, it is recognized as an emotion that can be named and ascribed to a person. Tenderness is an individual and shared experience, an awareness of the vulnerability and porosity of persons, and stretches over the physical and the emotional, the personal and the social. As we will see in Ciocchini’s case, it has important links with the disturbance of the senses, and the relationship between pain and creativity. Here we see the presence of Aby Warburg’s thought, and his Pathosformeln, or formulas of pathos, or feeling, as described by the German art historian in his monumental Atlas Mnemosyne.