In praise of irritation

Fernando Kaskais

May 1

Unlike anger, irritation has neither glamour nor radicalism on its side. Yet it might just be the mood we need right now

Photo by Richard Kavlar/Magnum

Will Rees is a writer and editor, and publisher at Peninsula Press. His writing has been published in The Guardian, Granta and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others, and his debut book Hypochondria is forthcoming from Coach House. He lives in London.

The everyday experience of irritation conceals a paradox. When one is suitably attuned, virtually anything is liable to provoke it: a telephone left to ring or a phone call taken, people who walk too slowly or drive too quickly. Running late is irritating but so is arriving early. Impudence is irritating but obsequiousness even more so. Yet, however various its incitements, irritation is also an empty and tautological feeling. The irate know their claims against the world to be baseless or at least wildly exaggerated, and this, too, annoys them. Seemingly about every little thing and also nothing at all, irritation is a feeling in search of causes: it goes out into the world, and finds them.

On a recent train journey, my irritation flared by degrees. There were no tables or plugs, so I couldn't work. The chair was uncomfortable, my back sore, and the loudspeaker kept sounding directly overhead. I sighed and shifted in my seat, feeling my partner grow irritated by me, and this seemed to relieve me of the feeling. Moving closer, I tried to comfort her; at which point she got up to fetch her water bottle, took a few performative sips, and settled into the chair opposite. I found the dishonesty of this gesture grating and, as the train crawled towards our destination, irritation passed between us like a ball, both of us insisting that nothing at all was the matter.

Something about this ordinary, negligible feeling seems to make it inaccessible to critical reflection. Perhaps because, when irritable, we tend to be at our least reflective – preoccupied with those diminutive miseries whose oversize effect we know would not stand up to criticism. It is as though irritation always suspects itself to be ridiculous, and must avoid looking at itself too closely lest it be annoyed by its own speciousness.

For Aristotle, irritation was closely related to anger. You might say that irritation is anger's meaner little sibling – what, in Ugly Feelings (2007), the scholar Sianne Ngai calls 'inadequate' anger. One loses oneself in a rage – that is one of anger's seductions: it offers a holiday from the self, that licenses acts ordinarily proscribed. To be irritated is to hover at anger's threshold, while knowing its repertoire of decisive actions are inappropriate responses to the present situation. Communicated by huffs and sighs but rarely through more drastic measures, irritation is a feeling that's expressed only through being inadequately expressed. One is not moved to commit appalling acts due to irritation. Nor is one permitted to do so: there are no 'crimes of irritation', no clemency for the irate.

In his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), James Boswell tells us of the 'perpetual irritation' that made his friend's 'existence misery'. Indeed, there seems to be nothing one can do with one's irritation; and the usual solutions – breathe, count to 10, relax – have the unfortunate quality of being themselves very irritating. It is this ongoing and helpless quality that makes irritation so frustrating. Unlike irritation, however, frustration enjoys the advantage of existing in dialectical relation to satisfaction. Really, it is a promissory note against a future satisfaction, one whose pleasure increases, like interest, in proportion to its postponement. Irritation, meanwhile, does not make us any nice promises: once irritated, one hopes only for its abatement.

And yet, however much we dislike it, we are very resourceful in our search of pique. Nor need we look far to find it: partial to the mundane, irritation is often a household feeling. In Maeve Brennan's story 'Family Walls' (1973), a marriage rocks unsteadily when Hubert Derdon is baffled to see his wife, Rose, close the kitchen door the very moment he returns home. He decides to confront her, writes Brennan, but 'at the kitchen door he hesitated', and soon the pique generated by this non-event morphs into a catalogue of all the ways that, over the years, she has 'irritated him nearly beyond endurance'. Once we have entered a state of irritation, we are often afflicted by one thing after another – as if via all the accumulating annoyances we might cross the threshold that will stir us, finally, into action...

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https://aeon.co/essays/a-meditation-on-irritation-a-feeling-in-search-of-causes