a philosophy of sobbing

estelle ferrarese

rivages, 288 pages, 2025

√ A feminist philosophy that reclaims sobbing as a form of resistance

√ A powerful lens to rethink how we confront and politicize emotions

√ A major contemporary philosopher pushing the boundaries of thought on body, power, and gender

Much has been said and written about tears but, oddly enough, nothing about sobbing, this “rebellion of the body” that brings chaos to our faculties (speech, thought, even the ability to stand up). What are our bodies trying to tell us when we find ourselves in such a convulsive state? Whether it arises from despair, sorrow, terror, rage, or humiliation, sobbing is accompanied by the knowledge that nothing can be done.

In a captivatingly original work, Estelle Ferrarese invites us into a philosophical reflection on the depths of human powerlessness. Far from being an anecdotal experience, sobbing breaks with the classic philosophical fiction: that of the subject as master and possessor of their faculties. In contrast to this illusion of control, sobbing represents an “opening into reality” through which we experience a “clash with the world.” The author then explores the social and gendered implications of emotions. In popular culture, sobbing, even hysteria, has often been attributed to the feminine, the better to praise by comparison the masculine melancholy, more dignified and less tearful. But could sobbing be, on the contrary, understood as a legitimate form of protest? Ferrarese goes further than a rehabilitation of the political power of tears by suggesting that this experience of “radical unproductivity” is also a reappropriation of the body—and of oneself—as subject.

From the figures of Homer to the emotional performances on social media, the mourners of Battleship Potemkin to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, as well as the works of Pina Bausch, Samuel Beckett, and Jean-Paul Sartre among others, Ferrarese proposes a feminist philosophy of sobbing as a “bodily dimension of the experience of oppression.”

Estelle Ferrarese is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at Université Picardie Jules Verne, France. She is the author of The Fragility of Concern for Others: Adorno and the Ethics of Care (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Vulnerability and Critical Theory (Brill, 2018), Ethique et politique de l’espace public. Habermas et la discussion (Vrin, 2015), and Qu’est-ce que lutter pour la reconnaissance? (Editions Le Bord de l’Eau, 2013). She is co-editor of Formes de vie (CNRS Éditions, 2018) and The Politics of Vulnerability (Routledge, 2018). She is also the author of numerous articles on the Frankfurt School, feminism, deliberative democracy, and vulnerability as a political category.