DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-8 7 Atmospheres of boredom in Martin Heidegger and David Foster Wallace Elisa Magrì Abstract In contemporary philosophy of emotions, it is often argued that moods fa- cilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart in that, unlike emotions, they never target specifc objects. From a phenomenological and existential angle, however, moods bring to light a specifc element, namely the quality of one’s sense of reality. This chapter aims to further develop the analysis of moods by investigating whether they manifest attunement and sensitivity to intersub- jective experience. Through a comparison of Martin Heidegger’s and David Foster Wallace’s respective approaches to boredom, this chapter explores how boredom is infuenced by receptivity to other people’s states, an aspect that is crucially missing in Heidegger’s account of boredom. Keywords Moods; Attunement; Boredom; Atmospheres; Martin Heidegger; David Foster Wallace When we speak of writing something in the book of oblivion, we are indeed suggesting that it is forgotten and yet at the same time is preserved. S. Kierkegaard, Either-Or 1 Introduction In contemporary philosophy of emotions, it is often argued that moods facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart in that, unlike emotions, they never target specifc objects. 1 Typically, one is in a grumpy or in a joyful mood, but never about one person or an object in particular. Nonetheless, moods exhibit a spe- cifc form of afective intentionality, including a feeling component and an evaluative 1 See Tim Crane, “Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental,” in ed. O’Hear, Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136–157; Julien A. Deonna and Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions. A Philosophical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).