Commentary

Beacons for Finding Ourselves in Darkness:  

A Review of Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision

Catherine Fullarton

University of King’s College, CA

Fullarton, Catherine. 2026. “Beacons for Finding Ourselves in Darkness:  

A Review of Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision.” Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 8, no. 2: 41-47. https://doi.org/10.33497/2026.latesummer.5.

Abstract: Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision aims to restore dignity to emotional  experiences that have been maligned by a culture insistent on brightness. Against a world that banishes moods like anger, depression, and grief behind closed doors  and labels them with shame if they appear in public, Alessandri’s book invites  readers to consider what important truths lurk in the shadows – and to examine  those truths in their shadows rather than under a light that risks desaturating them. In this review, I propose that Alessandri counters the three “commandments” she  attributes to the “Light Metaphor”—“silence, stifle, and swallow your dark moods”  (Alessandri 2023, 6)—with her own tripartite invocation to rename, reframe, and remain in the dark. I then raise a set of questions concerning the place of shame in relation to the moods on which the text focuses and concerning the retention of the metaphor of seeing.  

Keywords:  grief, anger, shame, light, dark, vision

At its heart, Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision aims to restore dignity to emotional  experiences that have been maligned by a culture insistent on brightness: the injury of injustice; the pain of loss; and the anxieties of a too-finite, too-mortal life. Against the injunction to banish such moods behind closed doors, labelling them shameful if they appear in public, Alessandri’s book invites readers to go into the  dark places we usually avoid, to linger long enough to let our eyes adjust to the  dark, and to see what important truths lurk in those shadows. Further, it calls us to examine those truths in the shadows, in their proper conditions, rather than dragging them 

[page 41]

out into a blinding light that would desaturate and denature them.  

Alessandri frames the book against what she terms the “Light Metaphor” and the  “Brokenness Story” to which it gives rise. The Light Metaphor, she describes, is the pervasive premise, in Western philosophy since Plato, that “light is preferable to dim, sunshine happier than clouds, and light moods superior to dark moods”  (Alessandri 2023, 1). This metaphor “relentlessly insists that darkness is ugly,  negative, miserable” (Alessandri 2023, 7) and tells us that “we ought not to give in  to moods like grief and anger” (Alessandri 2023, 172). Adopting the Light Metaphor, Alessandri argues, gives rise to the Brokenness Story, according to which anyone who fails to live up to the Light Metaphor’s impossible ideal is broken and simply not trying hard enough. We hear the Brokenness Story, she writes, “every time we  fail to live in the light (Alessandri 2023, 8). It “shames those of us who do not smile  through our pain (or at least grit our teeth and bear it)” (Alessandri 2023, 8). 

But the trouble with dark moods, Night Vision tells us, is not their darkness but our prejudice for presuming that light is right. As Alessandri convincingly argues with reference to wise philosophers who have tarried in various kinds of obscurity, some things might be best attended to in the dark, in conditions truer to their authentic appearances. The moods we experience are not the problem, in other words; the problem is the frantic impulse not to experience these moods or not to see them on  their own terms—an impulse which casts anyone who lingers in a dark mood as  “weak, ungrateful, self-pitying, and self-indulgent” (Alessandri 8). Worse still, the  book suggests, is our cultural habit of regarding dark moods as malignant  contagions from which the afflicted must isolate and cure themselves so as not to infect everyone around them. Don’t suffer, our culture insists—but, if you must, suffer alone and in silence. 

Against the Light Metaphor’s three commandments—“silence, stifle, and swallow your dark moods” (Alessandri 2023, 6)—I read Night Vision as offering ways to rename, reframe, and remain in the dark. In what follows, I consider these three new proposals in turn.

RENAME 

Turning to thinkers, writers, and poets who have tarried with the dark, like Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, Gloria Anzaldúa, C. S. Lewis, and Søren Kierkegaard, Alessandri draws out a new vocabulary for naming and thereby reframing dark feelings.  

In the chapter on suffering, for instance, she proffers that the Spanish term dolor  (pain, suffering) offers a more capacious conception than the English term “pain” because dolor spans the ambiguous borders “between emotional and physical, or  psychical and psychological” (Alessandri 2023, 49). “You can have a dolor in your  ankle or your heart, your tooth or your soul,” (Ibid.), Alessandri writes. Dolor facilitates understanding pain as variegated, as when a single cause gives rise to  multiple pains; it can name the diffuse and pervasive pangs of dark feelings like grief and anxiety that sometimes feel like multiple species of pain at once—physical, emotional, and spiritual or existential. 

On the other hand, Alessandri also suggests language for parsing emotions that we tend to regard monolithically, in the pejorative. In the chapter on anger, she praises María Lugones for insisting we “stop talking about anger in the singular” (Alessandri 2023, 38). Recognizing that “anger has many names,” (Ibid.),

[page 42]

Alessandri argues, enables us to see that some of these—like nemesis, the anger that avenges injustice and rebalances the scales (Alessandri 2023, 50)— incense us for good reason and spur us to correct harms that we ought to redress.

REFRAME

Alessandri thoughtfully and carefully critiques the absolutism of modern medicine’s  approach to “dark moods” like depression and anxiety, arguing that the preeminence of pharmacological fixes over hermeneutic approaches perpetuates the Brokenness Story by framing suffering as a biological flaw or a physiological setback that can and should be avoided. This framework, she argues, leaves sufferers helpless and alone when a prescription fails to cure them, or when, for good reason, a sufferer deliberately chooses to forgo the fix to linger sincerely in  darkness. Because there are many reasons to do so in good faith.

The reframing that she offers in these chapters is one of parallel possibilities: “In practicing night vision,” she writes,  

it’s important to keep in mind that the new stories we tell about our dark  moods need not simply oppose or replace the medical stories… alongside these medicalized narratives, we can tell a parallel story to ourselves and each other, a philosophical one that returns dignity to the moods that our society shames. (Alessandri 2023, 177)  

The goal, as elsewhere in the book, is neither to dispel the darkness, nor to replace the dominance of light with dark, but to empower us to appreciate each side for what it uniquely offers: lightness and ease, gravity and grace. 

REMAIN 

Finally, alongside new names and new frames, Alessandri’s book underscores the  value of sometimes lingering in darkness, whether because we’re mired in something that we need time to sort through or because we occasionally need  shade as respite from overbearing heat. Remaining in the dark, the book suggests, need not be a stubborn refusal to be happy and lighthearted: it may be a thoughtful way of remaining present with something or someone that needs us.  

In the book’s second chapter, for example, Alessandri offers a re-interpretation of  Martin Seligman’s example of Jody, the stay-at-home mom who expresses worry and anxiety about re-entering the workforce. Seligman, Alessandri describes, offers Jody as an example of deep-seated pessimism: she is a catastrophizer who needs better cognitive tools to help her see the bright side, which her well-meaning husband and son offer by insistently pointing out the silver lining of Jody’s worries.  But, Alessandri asks, what if Jody is not looking for correction but for connection with her loved ones? What if her worry is not a problem to be fixed but an intimate invitation to know her more fully in her vulnerability? “Somewhere along the way to  developing night vision,” Alessandri writes, “[we] will need to become convinced  that emotional pain can be used as a conduit to community, connection, self knowledge, accuracy, wisdom, empathy, and intelligence” (Alessandri 2023, 178).  To see this, we need to be willing to dwell in the dark. 

[page 43]

In the book’s several discussions of dwelling in darkness— Jody’s, Anzaldúa’s, and  Alessandri’s own intimacy with her father during his illness—I found myself  thinking about older forms of medical care – before medicine defined itself in terms of “saving” mortal lives, when the most important role an attendant played was of  caring, not curing, and the criterion of success was not how quickly the patient got  back on their feet but that they remained dignified in their illness, and that we  remained with them in it, however long it lasted. 

I have in mind, here, episodes from ancient Greek tragedy like Sophocles’s description, in the Philoctetes, of Neoptolemus guarding Philoctetes’s mythical bow while its owner writhes in paroxysms of agony from an incurably wounded ankle. Despite Philoctetes’s bestial moans and screams, during his horrific contortions, and  through his deeply un-heroic weeping and bitterly angry cursing of the gods,  Neoptolemus stays with Philoctetes, remains close and bears witness, ready to assist— but more importantly simply there, paradoxically, moved to stasis by Philoctetes’s deep vulnerability and human suffering. I am also thinking about the way that medieval monastery hospitals were designed to enable the sick to  convalesce in communion with others, under the care of compassionate attendants whose role was also not specifically to cure but to care for and comfort. The very word used to describe this kind of healing, convalesce, has community built in: valere (to be well or become strong), con (together).  

In other words, there is much in Night Vision that harkens back to darker conditions of human experience in a helpful, healthful, and recuperative spirit. Alessandri’s book reminds us that we often encounter ourselves and each other anew in conditions that strain our usual ways of seeing. 

In closing, I’d like to raise two questions that emerged in the course of my reading:  first, the question of shame’s relation to the dark moods explored by each of the  book’s chapters; and second, the retention of the metaphor of sight in relation to  the book’s central challenge of the “Light Metaphor.”

SHAME

The feeling of shame does not receive the same full-chapter treatment as other dark moods, but it runs like a current through the text. For instance, in the discussions of anger and grief, Alessandri beautifully unpacks how the moods she considers are not necessarily darknesses we should seek to dispel, but rather genuine and  appropriate responses to existentially difficult circumstances, and an indication that something important is at stake. Persistent grief attests to an enduring love that is not ready to relinquish its object; anger is sometimes a very righteous and honorable indignation at injustice and a spur to address it; and anxiety may be a clear eyed appreciation of existential contingency and precarity in a culture that frequently (arguably, pathologically) ignores this important source of urgency and meaning.  

Anger and grief are not the problems, in other words, Night Vision suggests. In fact, it insists, these emotions may point to structural injustices which we should address or mark real losses that deserve our mourning, and if we could simply be allowed to feel those feelings and to dwell in them, without shame or guilt, we might be better off. Where the Brokenness Story writes that “on top of feeling fear, doubt, and regret, we also now feel shame over disappointing our loved ones” (Alessandri 2023, 58), Alessandri’s suggestion seems to be that seeing with night vision entails understanding that dark moods may be catalysts to compassion, communion, and solidarity—and so feeling these ways may be laudable rather than shameful.

[page 44]

The real problem, then, seems not to be dark moods themselves but rather the shame or guilt associated with them, whether by the one feeling them or by others. If this is a fair reading of the text, I wonder: What is the relation between shame or guilt and dark moods, in Night Vision’s model? Is shame a dark mood in its own right? Is it an attendant emotion, or an intensifier? Or is it a contingent side effect of the misunderstanding that afflicts us when our dark moods are unrecognized or unattended to by others, or when others refuse to confront our darknesses with us? Does shame make these moods dark? Does it alter their intrinsic darkness – e.g., turning an otherwise valuable and even comfortable obscurity into an isolating or debilitating one? Or are the  moods themselves dark, regardless of shame, and the claim is that dispelling the shame associated with them would allow us to embrace the particularly dark virtues of dark moods, guiltlessly and shamelessly? 

Fundamentally, my question about the book’s treatment of dark moods and shame is: is the central object of the book’s critique the presupposition that darkness is brokenness, or the broader presupposition that everything can and should be subjected to the (criteria of the) light when some things may, conversely, thrive in the dark?

VISION

The second aspect about which I wondered concerns Alessandri’s retention of metaphors of lightness and darkness, sight and obscurity, in relation to the book’s central project. Why maintain the metaphor of sight (e.g., “seeing in the dark,”  “night vision”) in light of the critique of the “Light Metaphor,” instead of, say  metaphors about other kinds of sense? 

As I read it, part of the book’s project is to challenge the dichotomy of our historical  associations of vision and light with knowledge, goodness, and understanding, and of darkness with ignorance, evil, and confusion. As each chapter draws out, not only are there important (indeed, vital) truths to be appraised in and from the dark,  but the dark also occasions these realizations in unique— and perhaps uniquely  demanding— ways. As Alessandri compellingly unpacks, each chapter’s  philosophical guide not only knew the dark, but they also dwelled in it by a  necessity that they came to appreciate for its own sake. To know and appreciate the  dark, the book thus suggests, we might need to enter it, submit to it, allow it to  work on us; unlike the illuminated world, we cannot learn its lessons from a (safe) distance. 

If this is right, then I wonder why maintain the metaphor of vision—even  characterized as night vision (that is, as a form of vision suited to its object)? Why vision rather than, e.g., touch? Vision is capable of operating at a distance and of being far removed from its object. Touch, in contrast, requires proximity, contact, and awareness (if not consideration) of the boundaries of intimacy and  transgression. Touch grasps its object when and for however long it does, only by remaining within that object’s reach, and only by offering itself as touched, in turn.  While vision may be surreptitious (as in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous keyhole  example), there is no touch that does not implicate itself in its outreach.  

The authors examined in the text – Lorde, Lugones, Unamuno, Montaigne, Lewis,  Stephen Colbert, Anzaldúa, and Kierkegaard – could be described as having been  seized by a dark mood; in each case, rather than turn away (or because they could not), they lingered and gave expression to the experience of being gripped by  unbidden

[page 45]

darkness that nevertheless had important insights for them and for us, as their readers. Given the existential import of these lessons—lessons which, moreover, seem so frequently overlooked and unappreciated by others—I wonder:  Are the lessons of the dark appreciable with vision— even a vision attuned to the  dark—or is part of the lesson of dark moods the need to submit to a passivity that problematizes the metaphor of vision, long associated with dominance and control, and the philosophical associations of vision with the light that this book precisely  asks us to reconsider?

Alessandri’s Night Vision is an approachable, attentive, and incisive appraisal of a  long philosophical history of avoiding the dark, as well as a foregrounding of  philosophers who, conversely, equip us to confront it.

[page 46]

References

1. Alessandri, Mariana. 2023. Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark  Moods. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[page 47]

Catherine Fullarton © 2026

Author email: catherine[dot]fullarton[at]dal[dot]ca