‘I have no hope for reversing climate change. Instead, what we should focus on is cultivating human relationships and on increasing biodiversity through re-wilding.’ This is what the French photographer-environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand replied when I asked him how he maintained hope about climate change at his Paris show, ‘Vivre Ensemble’. I had this book fresh on my mind. His bluntness surprised me, ‘As long as humans need energy, they will plunder resources. Humans will always need energy. But my hope is in people and their ability to love’. He said this with a tone of resignation equally tempered by determined indignation and verve for action. His response captured the intellectual case for the need to recognise ambivalent affect and emotion that this edited volume makes. It is a book edited by a Classicist and a philosopher, and therefore not written solely by and for Classicists, making it exactly the sort of transdisciplinary perspective that cognitive approaches to literature must take to address conditions that are shared by humanity. It exemplifies the editorial expertise and authorial intellectual resonance needed to produce an impactful edited volume, making the case for such volumes as serious, innovative scholarship that could never occur in monograph form.
Cairns and Campeggiani, the editors of this theoretically rich and geographically, historically and linguistically broad-ranging volume on the ambivalence of affect in emotion theory, lay out the goal of their volume in the introduction. Their central claim is that axial, bipolar models (e.g. the Likert-scale) of theorising emotion fail to account for the reality that opposing affective and emotional states are experienced simultaneously; the word ‘bittersweet’ and the 
emoji are their mantra. Categorical and dimensional approaches, as suggested by preceding scholarship such as J. Russell’s Circumplex Model of Core Affect (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 [1980]), demand that one’s emotional state be mapped onto a chart with pleasure and arousal as X and Y axes. This volume makes a theoretical intervention through science and literature to account for the reality that opposite emotions do not cancel each other out, but can be experienced together in three different ways. The first is through ambivalence, the ‘simultaneous experience of two (or more) conflicting emotions’, because the two emotions had different intentional objects (p. 2). Second, mixed affect can be ‘experienced as an intrinsically blended state in which positive and negative aspects of the experience cannot be pried apart from one another in any meaningful way’ (p. 3). Third, the paired responses of ‘pursuit and avoidance’ of a specific object is caused by shame, guilt or regret about a desired object leading to a ‘meta’ state of experiencing ‘an emotion and the simultaneous experience of a meta-emotion about it’ (p. 4). The introduction critiques six theoretical models from psychology that binarily explain emotion, concluding that there is no consensus on the relationship between valence and arousal.
The first two cognitive psychology chapters set the tone for the volume’s literary analyses. M. Viola’s chapter, ‘Ambivalent Affects in Experimental Psychology’, calls for a realistic approach to ambivalence by presenting a scientific review of studies on emotional ambivalence, which he defines as the ‘co-occurrence of two (or more) felt hedonic states of different polarities, namely pleasure and displeasure, in a single instant’ (p. 44). Viola argues that cognitive psychology’s scientific method fails to accurately capture the lived, ambivalent experience because it requires overly determinative binary data sets. Researchers must step away from their ‘anti-ambivalence’ bias if they want to understand complex phenomena: ‘underdetermination does not imply that scientific debates are doomed to remain unresolved indefinitely. Auxiliary explanations often give rise to empirically testable predictions, and by subjecting these predictions to experimental scrutiny, science can advance … potentially bringing us closer to settling long-standing debates’ (p. 41).
U. Hess’s chapter ‘Mixed Emotions in Emotion Communication: a Chimera in my Brain’ presents a specific study of the type outlined in Viola’s chapter, where subjects were shown images of a human face depicting two conflicting emotions on the top and bottom half and asked to determine the ‘chimeric’ face’s emotional state (p. 55). Hess concludes that individuals resolved perceived ambiguity by claiming to see a single dominant emotional state (p. 56) because they sought to match it to their internal cognitive script of the situation, mimic that emotional state and fit into their situation demonstrating their emotional intelligence (p. 61).
The remaining chapters turn to literature, moving backwards through time from modern anglophone fiction to Augustan Rome. M. Caracciolo’s chapter ‘Mixed Emotions and the Climate Crisis in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction’ brings together Jenny Offill’s novel Weather with Richard Flanagan’s Living Sea of Waking Dreams to argue that fiction is a valuable tool for cultivating ambivalent emotional positionality towards existential crises like Anthropocene climate change. An ‘affective amalgam’ of positive and negative emotions is necessary to maintain hope in being able to survive the inevitable changes to our planet (p. 66); one can be upset about climate change but must face those emotions, balancing them with hope as the Native-American theologian Panu Pihkala warns in dissatisfied cautioning against ‘techno-optimism’ (pp. 68–9). The ‘repertoire of imaginative scenarios that negotiate the future’ (p. 70) helps individuals envision possible future paths despite their present anxieties through ‘constructive hope and doubt’ rather than the wishful thinking of groundless hope or the helplessness of fatalistic doubt (p. 68).
E. Cullhed’s contribution ‘Ubi sunt? On the Varieties and Mixed Pleasures of Poignancy’ investigates the concept of ‘being moved’ by a ‘meaningful ending’ as a blended affective state focused on the transience of everything one values (p. 82). Ubi sunt poetry captures the interdependent positive/negative affective response to a fleeting moment or nostalgic glories of a bygone era, dwelling on the moment’s wistful amalgam of pleasurable and painful sensations. He draws on the Japanese concepts of Mujokan (feeling of impermanence) and Mono No Aware, the ‘yearnful sigh in response to short-lived dewdrops, waning moons, and fading cherry blossoms’, present in haikus and the Tale of Genji (p. 82).
C. Virág’s chapter ‘Being of Two Minds in Eleventh-Century China: Affective Bimodality in Guo Xi and Su Shi’ explores an idea that is distinct from ambivalence and feeling ‘meta’. Central is the third-century bce philosopher Xunzi’s theory of the two-fold capacity of the mind that teaches maintaining differently valenced feelings about a single situation, requiring the individual to be both engaged and disengaged in their response to worldly phenomena (p. 98). This concept is explored through the Song Dynasty (960–1279 ce) works of the court landscape painter Guo Xi and the poet Su Shi. Guo Xi’s theorisation of landscape theory stresses that it must be approached from a bird’s-eye view to understand dynamics at play and then close-up. Thus, one recognises that a single mountain is actually thousands of mountains (p. 105). These acts of viewing are momentary and perspectival like all things in life. Su Shi’s ‘Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff’ teaches that one should be aware of what they actually own in the cosmos, and that everything belongs only to its true master; so you cannot own the moon, but you can savour your own memory of it. Rather than disengaging from the world, you should perceive it with all your senses, delighting in its transience (p. 112).
The tour of Asia concludes with C. Ram-Prasad’s ‘Explaining (Away?) Conflicting Emotions: A View from Sanskrit Aesthetic Phenomenology’, which takes up the Indian Rasa-Bhāva aesthetic theory from Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra dramaturgy treatise (c. third century ce). By working through Dhanamjaya’s tenth-century treatise Daśarūpa and its commentary, Ram-Prasad argues that ‘Sanskrit tradition is comfortable with affective mixtures of positive and negative valence within particular “transitory” emotions’ (p. 26), but does not permit the mixture of stable, individual emotions. As Dhanamjaya put it, ‘Emotion’ (bhāva) is the affecting (bhāvana) of one’s being (bhāva) by conditions (bhāva) of pleasure (sukha) or pain (duḥkha) (p. 122). Ram-Prasad’s four-part argument claims that rasa theoreticians did not deny the possibility of mixed affect, but sought a single rasa elicited in the audience and thus did not permit a single conscious moment of mixed emotions (p. 133).
The final three chapters focus on Roman literature, with the first, ‘Odi et Amo: On Some Ancient Readings of Mixed Affect in Catullus’ by D. O’Rourke, performing a longue durée, intertextual analysis of his infamous odi et amo phrase, tracing its mixed affect through Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic and Epicurean thought, ending with St Augustine’s confessions of his akrasia, where he asks God for the willpower to become chaste – but not immediately! For him odi et amo, O’Rourke argues, refers to God’s ability to hate sin but love the sinner (p. 153).
‘Bittersweet History: Cicero on Mixed Affect in Experiencing Literature’ by M. Baumann focuses on Cicero’s letter Ad familiares 5.12, in which he beseeches the historian Lucceius to biographise an account of the Catilinarian Conspiracy through coupling a series of contrasting emotions and predicted emotional reader-responses. Baumann’s careful reading of this epistle as a ‘metaliterary message’ elucidates Cicero’s ability to link affect and epistolary format. Cicero seeks delectatio and voluptas from future audiences, and in this letter he performs his affective ambivalence through using paired emotion words: admiratio / exspectatio, laetitia / molestia, spes / timor. This sequence displays Cicero’s ‘meta’-emotional state about desiring recognition while being concerned about its social stigma.
This opinionated Cicero takes us to A. Ganter’s ‘Ambivalent Feelings towards the Lupercalia: Discussing Civilisation in Republican and Early Imperial Rome’. She investigates how we might better understand the emotional-moral ambivalence ancient Romans felt about the pre-agricultural Lupercalia festival during an age of Augustan moral reform. Ganter analyses this through Cicero’s condemnation and disgust at seeing the nude body of the consul Marc Antony as a Lupercal before offering Caesar a crown. She goes further to suggest that participants, like the women getting flogged for fertility, embodied this same ambivalence by experiencing paired pain and pleasure. Squaring ancient beliefs with modernity is certainly a modern cultural issue.
This book resonated with me in multiple ways. It makes important theoretical interventions and opens the conversation beyond Classics’ intellectual confines. It says novel things about the inescapably trendy Affect Theory, allowing it to be read alongside B. Massumi, E.K. Sedgwick and A. Novokhatko. The concept of ‘meta-emotion’ presents a fruitful parallel to ‘meta-cognition’, and this volume sets the foundation for future cognitive Classics scholarship on consciousness, embodiment theory and theory of mind. That the editors did not shy away from the ‘hard sciences’ stood out to my neuroscience background. Discussion of feeling ‘meta’ and the early work on emotion theory by C. Darwin recalls the fact that scientists still struggle to explain altruism from a purely scientific lens, and perhaps ambivalence theory can help. Hellenists who might bemoan the lack of a chapter dedicated to ancient drama should look to the excellent volumes edited by P. Meineck et al. (The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory [2019]) and F. Budelmann et al. (Minds on Stage: Greek Tragedy and Cognition [2023]), but I see many dissertations stemming from the application of ‘ambivalence’ theory to ancient cultures. My meta-emotional state conveys no ambivalence about recommending this unique volume to humanities and science graduate students and scholars.
