Problems of Romanticizing Negative Emotions:
Romanticizing Negative Emotions as a Way of Non-Seriousness, Instrumentalization and Abjection
Alexix (Yuan) Cao • Colorado College
Whoever has not experienced the awful agony of death, rising and spreading like a surge of blood, like the choking grasp of a snake which provokes terrifying hallucinations, does not know the demonic character of life and the state of inner effervescence from which great transfigurations arise…in which paradisal visions conquer you with their splendor and you rise to a purity that sublimates into immateriality…in which death appears with the awful seduction of nightmarish snake eyes.
Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
The passage with such ardency and passion is Emil Cioran’s account of the true agony of death, following Cioran’s critique of the believers of spiritual immortality viewing death as a triumph. Ironically, I do not take this account of death’s true agony as more authentic than the theistic triumph of death. Cioran’s description of agony is not true; the meticulously crafted and fabricated agony using ostentatious language has long transcended and left the agony of death in itself. Romanticizing death as a luring snake at night would paradoxically mild or degrade the emotion; the more intense and enthusiastic diction, the more superficial the emotion becomes.
In what follows, I will indicate problems of romanticizing negative emotions, like the agony of death. Here the phrase “negative emotion” is used in a generalized fashion, and it includes but does not limit itself to agony, melancholy and fear. The use of “negative emotions” is by no means equating them as Aristotelian vices opposing virtues. Neither is it sinful nor wrong, according to Pope Gregory. Negative emotions are indispensable components of our lives. I would contend that we should live a life of seriousness, that is, a life with full attention and non-indifference, a life experiencing things in themselves, and this should also be the attitude when it comes to negative emotions. Romanticization deals with and describes negative emotions in an idealistic fashion and makes them more appealing than they are. Thus, it distorts our experience of the negative emotions themselves. Romanticizing negative emotions creates a mirage for us and hinders us from a serious life.
Romanticizing as a Way of Avoiding Experiencing Negative Emotions Seriously:
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell,
and count myself a king of infinite space
– were it not that I have bad dreams.
Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 24
As I have contended, we should live a life of seriousness. I shall use the two-fold definition given by Monteleone, a) attention to some intentional object and b) non-indifference to that same object. Seriousness could not stand when either of the bipartite definition is missing. An example of full seriousness would be when a professional coffee taster is paying their main attention to the aroma of the coffee; they are voluntarily and involuntarily paying their attention to the cup of coffee. The coffee taster is non-indifferent to this action since it ties closely to their interest as a person of expertise in the field, and the comment on the coffee is related to their evaluation by their peers. However, if the coffee taster accidentally slips the cup and the coffee is poured out, the coffee taster shifts the phenomenological experience of attention to the mess created by the poured coffee instead of its taste. In this situation, the individual is no longer serious about tasting the coffee, but the seriousness has been transferred onto another subject: the mess of poured coffee. The coffee taster example is a showcase of how seriousness works, and I will use this bipartite definition of seriousness to address negative emotions. The shift of attention would be the main theme for me, arguing that romanticizing is a way of avoiding experiencing negative emotions seriously. In this part of the essay, I will focus on the negative emotions towards death and birth, since they act as the start and end of our desperately finite life.
I will first focus on death by Cioran and Hamlet in their perspectives of not having or having an afterlife and point out their romanticization which distorts the seriousness of the negative emotion towards death itself. Cioran describes how analogizing death and sleep makes death less frightening and more ordinary or boring. The analogy is a direct way to turn the attention to the object being used for analogy, which in this case is sleep. Here we can see Cioran using powerful language to romanticize Death while Hamlet uses light-hearted language, but both descriptions contribute to a distortion of death. Hamlet’s following guess about death is based on sleep, and he thinks that the afterlife must have something dreamlike, which there might be a false conclusion since the premise that death is like sleep is unsure. Hamlet then reflects on the extremely long afterlife being painful and disastrous, and he makes an analogy again, in a more hidden manner, about the afterlife and his life right now. There are attention shifts as long as analogies are made, especially to things unknown, such as Hamlet’s state of being dead. The attention shift may be involuntary, but it aids the non-seriousness. I suggest when we come to negative emotions towards things that are impossible for us to know, such as the state of being dead, we should not first try to compare it to things we know, but we should focus on the unknown itself and experience the frustration it brings us and acknowledge our inability to know and make sense of everything. When we pay attention to the unknown and experience the relationship between us and the unknown as something we are unable to grasp, we are experiencing serious negative emotions towards the unknown seriously.
The fear and agony towards existence could be as profound as non-existence. “We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it.” Cioran gives the reason for will-to-death as escaping the calamity of birth. He also quoted the Buddhist idea that ahead of old age and death was “birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.” Alas, we ignore birth since it happened, and we cannot travel through time, but it was birth that opened the Pandora’s box in our lives. People may have a friendlier attitude or be clouded by the romanticization of birth since it is prominent to the extent that people see them as truths or moral norms. I will contend that birth is what needs to be granted more emotional seriousness compared to death. The reason for more attention is because people forget negative emotions towards birth, or perhaps the world forgetting it is voluntary, contributing to our forgetting being involuntary. The discourse often enhances positive images towards birth and considers our descendants in the picture of political policies, which assumes the legitimacy of having more children, and that we make efforts to provide them with a better future. Children are called the crystal of love, god’s gift, or hope for the future. No matter how promising and fascinating it sounds to have more children, we cannot ignore that children are brought into the world in pure passivity. Why don't we adopt an antinatalist stance towards our own birth? No one chose to be born, but one can choose to end their life. Alternatively, consider this: Is it not birth that gave birth to the possibility of death? The two conspicuous negative emotions towards birth are despair and disappointment. Despair is due to the inability to change the fact that you are born. Yes, everyone reading my essay right now, you have to bear all the consequences of birth. The world brings disappointment which utilizes birth for the society’s ever-growing workforce. Despite the disappointment towards policy makers and the government, the majority of the society is unable and unwilling to comprehend negative emotions towards birth. In living a life of seriousness, our birth is the most important thing we cannot and should not forget. Our lives begin from birth, and we should be non-indifferent about it. Never compromise with birth since it granted us the ability to live a life of seriousness but having such finite time that eventually led to annihilation.
We could not choose but to be born, but we could choose to lead a serious life and examine romanticization, even if it could be determined by our experience or the extremely slight chance of reading this essay. Ponder things that seem unnecessary to consider, criticize and reflect on accounts by the discourse that is beautified, and be able to feel uncomfortable with it. Do not shun the object of attention just because you are afraid to think more about it and be non indifferent to examine everything of attention possible. Strip down the delusion of romanticization. We thus create more possibilities to choose and think. We feel free to choose, pay full attention and be interested in it since every decision could be important to living our finite lives to a larger extent. There may be new revelations about reality and yourself, and try to live a life of authenticity, not a life full of lies.
Romanticizing as a Way of Instrumentalizing Negative Emotions:
While young, I knew no grief I could not bear;
I'd like to go upstairs.
I'd like to go upstairs
To write new verses with a false despair.
I know what grief is now that I am old;
I would not have it told.
I would not have it told,
But only say I'm glad that autumn's cold.
Xin Qiji, Tune: Song of Ugly Captive
Romanticization hamstrings our ability to experience negative emotions seriously since we are prone to elevate and transcend them to something artistic and poetic. So far as we notice the start of the negative emotion, we skip experiencing it and are eager to make a product out of it. We even fake negative emotions for art, like the poem’s narrator above. We make art out of negative emotions to make it have more connotation and let more audiences empathize with it. Good art may only need attention, but serious art needs non-indifference, not only non indifference at the start but through the process. I will first address how art as romanticization is a way of distorting negative emotions.
The purpose of art is not to depict reality; thus, it requires distortion, exaggeration, simplification, embellishment, etc. How writers would potentially distort the types of expressive, rhythmic work through romanticization has the same guidelines of being non-serious; either they shift the attention or are indifferently created. One way a writer could distort an expressive rhythmic work is in its name, rhyme. Using rhyme to distort the negative emotion is different from forced rhymes which are rearranging phrases to make the rhyme end of the line or respelling the end word to force it to rhyme unnaturally. Distorting the negative emotion in a rhyme is hard to detect by the reader, but it happens by the writer’s will. For instance, the writer changes the emotion from anguish to sorrow to rhyme; though it may be hard to tell by the readers, the changed word choice of emotion weakened the intensity of the language. Rhythmic works are not always for the reader but also for writers. When their works serve as a source of memory, distorted negative emotions will give them a more inauthentic conception of the moment they hoped to capture at that time. On top of distortion, the more problematic romanticization could happen with a made-up negative emotion or an underdeveloped negative emotion. Made-up negative emotions could be the product of societal expectations since they romanticize negative artistic emotions. Nevertheless, faking a negative emotion is, of course, an inauthentic attempt or even crude imitation. Making up negative emotions to create art for fame, wealth, or any voluntary intentions will only degrade the art to a soulless production.
Unlike made-up negative emotions, underdeveloped negative emotions are even difficult to notice by the creator. This type of romanticization in arts often happens in but is not limited to underdeveloped melancholy, agony, and disappointment. When people cannot wait to transcend
their negative emotions into art, they are sublimating the emotions before experiencing them purely. This is not to say that we should not make art from negative emotions but that it is disproportionately less experienced than positive emotions. When we experience joy or serenity, we often experience them by ourselves, fully immersed in the external world that brings us such emotions, such as the scenic route of the train we are on; we are in a state of enjoyment. It is much less likely when we want to write or paint something because our friends gave us a surprise, or we won the lottery. However, we often get inspired to do art when we first experience negative emotions considered painfully beautiful. When we lose our love, we cry that perhaps fate is unfair and me and my love are destined to be apart. We write poems that you are the moon in water, and I am the blossoms in the mirror, both impossible to grasp. We cannot or are not used to stand the pain of losing our lover, so we lie to ourselves to turn the sadness into something romantic before the painful emotion has been experienced more.
I would suggest that before romanticizing, we should first realize how our lives would change without them. Every time you pass their favorite cafe, would you still have the courage to enter it? Losing them means the person who left all the traces in your life is gone; every experience created could only be traced in your memory but not recalled by your lover. Go through the emotion, feel the ache of your heart, realize the missing parts of your life, and try to feel the emotion before transcending it to something symbolic. Do not escape from negative emotions, shallow or deep. Experience and explore the thingness of the negative emotion concerning that moment or in that duration of time.
Romanticization could be authentic and serious after experiencing negative emotions seriously. After a serious experience with negative emotions, romanticization could be the embodiment of authenticity itself. Romanticization is always an embellishment of the true experience, and the experience itself should be the dominant record. The prevalence of romanticizing negative emotions reveals their importance to people, often deeper and more intense than positive ones. Schopenhauer compared pain and pleasure in this aphorism, “One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” Perhaps the overwhelmingness and deepness we experience in some negative emotions are the positive society’s disdain and disgust.
Romanticizing as a Way of Abjecting Negative Emotions:
I am free whether I love American prawns or not; but if I do not love
human beings, I am a poor man, and I cannot find my place in the sun.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Erostratus
If the former passages about instrumentalizing negative emotions are more towards the self, this part of the essay is more about how society looks at individuals with negative emotions, especially intense negative emotions like anguish. People are at peace with negative emotions when they are aesthetically pleasing, which normally exists in the fictional world. People would be horrified when agonizers exhibit intense negative emotions since that person in agony would bring them abjection. I will start with individuals that society approves of having strong negative emotions, the tragic heroes.
Tragic heroes are not individuals that could represent the majority: they are romanticized fictional characters. Hamlet is a classical representation of a tragic hero; he looks aesthetically pleasing, writes in an aesthetically ravishing manner, and dies in a dramatically beautiful irony. Hamlet is himself an artwork of romanticization of negative emotions. Hamlet is pessimistic, cynical, and bitter, but society still grants him the title of a tragic hero. No matter how much Hamlet demonstrates negativity, the part of him being heroic is always waiting for a bright exit from negativity. Bahnsen describes a tragic hero as “a pessimist who is at heart an idealist.” A pessimist never abandons their ideals, but they continue to fight for them, even facing possible defeat. It is not hard to see that when analyzing a pessimistic tragic hero, the focus is still put on what society considers virtuous traits, such as striving for goals in the face of possible defeat. How courageous and persistent are the tragic heroes even if they suffer from all the disappointments! Negative emotions experienced by the tragic heroes are treated as a side dish, while the main focus is to make a hopeful explanation out of one described as tragic. Society would be calm when experiencing the tragic heroes since they are out of reach as an ideal in the fictional realm and people fixate on the part of their positivity.
The romanticization of the discourse spoils people even in reality. The news reporter will remain dispassionate when an incident involves people’s death. There is a discrepancy between their expression and the words “we are sorry for their loss”. When accidents involve gory scenes, they will not be shown but instead described in words. Death and violence are thus weakened to a large extent. Despite the weakened presentation of death and violence, they are negative emotions widely sympathized with by the majority. There are negative emotions that society pities and sympathize with, and they are not limited to losing a close companion in life, breaking up, feeling injustice, negative emotions towards traumatic memories, depression, and phobias. People who exhibit negative emotions that society fails to sympathize with are not that fortunate, and I will focus on the one which society abjects of: agony. The abject is a concept brought up by Julia Kristeva referring to horror felt in response to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of boundaries between self and other. An example would be seeing a corpse, and you may feel fearful and disgusted; the negative emotions towards seeing the corpse originate from the ambiguous state of the corpse as something was alive but is now dead; the corpse exists on the border of life and death. The corpse challenges our distinctions between life and death. Thus, we move away from the corpse because of the negativity it brought us, which rejects death and enhances our being in the realm of being alive. I contend that an agonizing person is like a living corpse who does not respect borders and rules.
One who agonizes about their eventual death and finds no way to avoid annihilation; in a way, they embody death in themselves by their weariness. People are disgusted and confused and tend to move away from those who agonize at the face level that they present as hollow, ominous and lethargic, like a corpse. An agonizing person reminds others of their corporeal reality, especially by their dark circles and bloodshot eyes. People saw the agonizer and became even for seconds sober of their bodies’ fragility, their organs soft, their proneness to disease, and their predisposition to death. The agonizer exists on the border of life and death. Unlike the order of positivity, the agonizer shows the immanence of negativity and death. People feel their realm of life is intruded upon by existence as a paradox that is alive but reminds people of death. Even more horrifying, the agonizer talks about how it is painful to be prone to death and birth, not their identity, goals of life or achievements. The agonizer’s appearance and outward thoughts and emotions vaguely indicate that they are not in the order world the discourse has provided people. The person experiencing the agonizer would then feel uncomfortable, disgusted and horrified; they hope to move the agonizer out of their realm of reality. Unfortunately, rejecting the agonizer out of one’s realm is problematic. After all, isn’t rejecting the agonizer also a rejection of oneself’s aliveness? After the intrusion of the agonizer, even the most optimistic could not eliminate their agony out of the way. Seeing an agonizer in reality, would people’s joyous life ever be the same? People will not accept the change of their positive life order; thus, they categorize the agonizer as insane, ungrateful, and non-humane. If it does not work to reject the agonizer to the realm of the dead, then reject them to the realm of non-humans.
The agonizer was brought to existence from the boundary of fiction and non-fiction when a person first experienced them; it is hard to comprehend such a person exists in reality. The agonizer also challenges one’s boundary of death and life since they resemble a corpse in appearance. Moreover, the agonizer intrudes on the order of the healthy, lively discourse, further disgusting the person who is now in touch with them and being infected. Now, the agonizer is juxtaposed with symbols of abjection like a corpse, open wound, feces, sewage, and the skin on warm milk.
A Peculiar Case of Romanticisation, Instrumentalization and Abject: Shinju:
Farewell to this world, and to the night farewell. We who walk the road to death, to what should we be likened? To the frost by the road that leads to the graveyard, vanishing with each step we take ahead: how sad is this dream of a dream!
—— Chikamatsu Monzaemon, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki
The symbolic weight of shinju—a lovers' mutual suicide—rests uneasily in its duality: an act of profound unity and an affront to societal order. It is a gesture suspended between devotion and defiance, love and annihilation, life and death. Yet, as with all romanticized expressions of negative emotions, shinju has been elevated to the sublime, transformed into a cultural artifact where love and death collide in an orchestrated crescendo. This romanticization, rather than illuminating the act, veils its essence. Like the melancholia of Hamlet’s soliloquies or Cioran’s meditations on death, shinju is contorted by metaphor, reduced to something digestible, stripped of its raw, visceral truth. In seeking to beautify despair, we displace its power, rendering it distant and ornamental.
“Farewell to this world, and to the night farewell,” writes Chikamatsu Monzaemon in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, his words woven into the michiyuki—a poetic journey toward death. This lyrical farewell, inspired by a real double suicide, has come to define shinju in cultural memory. Chikamatsu, much like Georges Bataille, confronts the primal forces of life—love and death—where ecstasy reaches its zenith only to dissolve into annihilation. Just as violence and transgression erupt to disrupt the established order, shinju tears through the fabric of societal norms. Yet how could I not mourn its transformation into spectacle, its wild intensity dulled by poeticization? The michiyuki’s frost-laden path to the graveyard no longer bears the weight of death’s inevitability; instead, it has become a fragile ornament, polished and safe for the aesthetic gaze.
Romanticization, then, betrays the gravity of shinju. It shifts our attention from the lived agony of despair to the polished sheen of its outward performance. The lovers’ mutual embrace of death becomes not an act of profound suffering but a symbol—a cultural mirage of love so boundless it defies mortality. This transformation, while captivating, displaces the raw immediacy of despair with an aesthetic that distorts rather than deepens our understanding. Shinju, as an act of flesh and finality, is diminished to mere narrative, its piercing agony dulled by the adornments of metaphor.
Instrumentalization furthers this diminishment, recasting shinju as a cultural artifact that titillates rather than disrupts. The 1932 Sakatayama suicides serve as a chilling example. The media’s detailed accounts of the woman’s purple yukata, the rumors of necrophilia, and the police’s proclamation of her corpse’s “unblemished beauty” elevated their deaths to a mythic status. The Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun declared their love “Bound in Heaven, Radiating Pure Fragrance,” a headline that amplified their story’s allure. In the months following, adaptations of their tragedy—films, songs, and performances—proliferated, transforming their deaths into a spectacle of public fascination. The aestheticization of their despair obscured its truth, reducing it to a tale of tragic beauty for consumption. As with Chikamatsu’s plays, their deaths were repurposed to reflect societal anxieties, their agony instrumentalized to serve a voyeuristic need for catharsis or titillation.
Yet, beneath this romanticized veneer lies the haunting specter of abjection. The poeticized narratives of shinju may cast it as sublime, but real-life instances confront us with death’s raw, unvarnished reality. The failed Mount Mihara suicide of 1933 exemplifies this tension. One lover leapt into the volcanic crater while the other survived, transforming an initial narrative of “same-sex love suicide” into one of betrayal and pathology. The media’s sensationalized descriptions of the leap—her purple kimono billowing like a cicada disappearing into the volcanic smoke—quickly gave way to vilification. The survivor was cast as a “death guide,” a manipulative temptress who had lured her companion to her death. Here, shinju’s abjection emerges in sharp relief: a romanticized act shattered by the unresolved, messy realities it unveils. Society romanticizes the beauty of the act but recoils from its aftermath, dividing it into two irreconcilable halves: allure and repulsion.
Transgression defines shinju, for it collapses the boundaries between love and destruction, unity and dissolution. Lovers who commit shinju embody death while still alive, rejecting the societal constraints that suffocate their desires. Yet, society recoils from such defiance, seeking to neutralize its unsettling implications. The case of Sada Abe reveals the limits of romanticization. After strangling her lover, Abe severed his penis and testicles, carrying them wrapped in paper for days. She declared she wanted to keep a part of him forever. In this act of necrophilia. Abe blurred the line between the living and the dead, thrusting society into the existential horror of the grotesque of mortality’s proximity. The grotesque serves more than evoke fear and anxiety; it forces a confrontation with the abject realities of human desires and actions. Abe's actions, profoundly disturbing, resist aestheticization, compelling society to face the undercurrents of shinju—not as an act of transcendent love, but as a haunting collapse of moral and physical boundaries.
At its heart, the romanticization of shinju exhibits a broader failure to engage with seriousnessness. By aestheticizing despair, we strip it of its power to unsettle and confront us with our mortality. Shinju ceases to be an act of raw defiance and becomes a sanitized narrative, its disruptive potential dulled by its poetic framing. To reclaim seriousness of shinju, we must resist this temptation. We must look beyond the metaphor and the ornament, acknowledging the the profound humanity and tension at its core. Only then can we truly engage with shinju as more than a cultural artifact—perceiving it not as a polished symbol, but as an unfiltered reflection of love’s capacity for both creation and destruction, life and death entangled.
Negative Emotions: The Majority of Our Lives, Resurrected:
Life is like a pendulum swinging in pain and boredom…
When people put pain and suffering in hell, all that's left in heaven is boredom.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Negative emotions are prevalent and compose so much of our lives that we often ignore or transcend them. One who does not review their birth, examine their death, and seriously experience life’s suffering is not living. When people are suffering, they look to the possible future of achievement; as a result, they lose the process, but when the goal is achieved, happiness exists for a short time as we gain the desire for something new. We are, in fact, not experiencing the majority of our time. In seriousness, we pull even force ourselves back at the moment, being non-indifference towards our negative emotions, we live to a fuller extent. We combat the temptation to romanticize and retrieve the majority of life lost: experience of negative emotions. We thus live to be more in-the-moment and feel to the extent when the body aches.
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