Whereabouts : locating emotions between brain, body and world

What are emotions, where do they originate and how are they brought into being? While from antiquity to early modernity, affects or passions were mostly conceived of as external physiological forces which act upon a passive subject, modern conceptions generally locate emotions within the subject. In this paper I challenge this notion of internal emotions by developing an alternative description of emotions as embodied skills that unfold in the interaction with a structured social environment. Emotions are not in the head alone but should be described as complex patterns that can only be realized in the interplay of brain, body and world.