The book Emotional Confrontation with the World: Embodiment, Logic, Authenticity, and the Social Nature of Emotions by Igor Cvejić primarily examines contemporary phenomenological approaches to emotions, which understand emotions as an engaged relationship with the world, others, and ourselves. The author explains emotions as specific forms of ‘encounters’ characterized by the disturbance of the world of experience, which can be both negative and positive, and the constitution of the horizon of action. Therefore, an emotional relationship is characterized by the fact that we are confronted with or required to respond to something, for example, to distance ourselves or come closer, and at the same time, it makes us engaged with the situation around us and others. The author emphasizes that emotional encounters are a form of vulnerability inherent to emotional beings, ‘cracks’ through which the world and others enter our emotional landscape, but which also make us transparent in these relationships. In this way, emotions simultaneously reveal ourselves, the world, and others in a certain way and become a kind of guide on how we find ourselves in these relationships. By examining the phenomenological characteristics of emotions and emotional relationships with others, the inherent logic of emotions, and the authenticity of emotional relationships, the author points out ways to adequately emotionally relate to both past and present situations and open possibilities in relation to the world and others.

Igor Cvejić is a senior research associate at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He has published numerous works at the intersection of the philosophy of emotions, the theory of collective action and sociality, aesthetics, and research on social engagement, including a monograph on Kant’s understanding of feelings The Irreducibility of the Capacity for Feeling (2018).