Craig DeLancey
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195142716
- eISBN:
- 9780199833153
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195142713.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Passionate Engines shows that our best understanding of emotion has important implications for understanding intentionality, rationality, phenomenal consciousness, artificial ...
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Passionate Engines shows that our best understanding of emotion has important implications for understanding intentionality, rationality, phenomenal consciousness, artificial intelligence, and other issues. Some theories of mind, of action, and of moral psychology, and some approaches in artificial intelligence, are shown to be inconsistent with our best understanding of emotions. However, our best understanding of emotions also suggests fruitful new approaches to the challenges of these disciplines. There are three additional themes. First, the book introduces a version of a theory of some emotions called the affect program theory. This theory is defended against social constructionist and cognitivist views of emotion, and shown to be able to account for the rationality of emotions and our ability to emote for fictions. Second, the book defends the hierarchical view of mind. Part of this view is the thesis that the primary topic of the study of mind and artificial intelligence is autonomy, and not the skills typically associated with intelligence. Third, the book challenges the simplistic associations that naturalism has come to have in much contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that science typically complicates and enriches, instead of eliminating and reducing, our view of natural phenomena.Less
Passionate Engines shows that our best understanding of emotion has important implications for understanding intentionality, rationality, phenomenal consciousness, artificial intelligence, and other issues. Some theories of mind, of action, and of moral psychology, and some approaches in artificial intelligence, are shown to be inconsistent with our best understanding of emotions. However, our best understanding of emotions also suggests fruitful new approaches to the challenges of these disciplines. There are three additional themes. First, the book introduces a version of a theory of some emotions called the affect program theory. This theory is defended against social constructionist and cognitivist views of emotion, and shown to be able to account for the rationality of emotions and our ability to emote for fictions. Second, the book defends the hierarchical view of mind. Part of this view is the thesis that the primary topic of the study of mind and artificial intelligence is autonomy, and not the skills typically associated with intelligence. Third, the book challenges the simplistic associations that naturalism has come to have in much contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that science typically complicates and enriches, instead of eliminating and reducing, our view of natural phenomena.
Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195388275
- eISBN:
- 9780199943937
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195388275.003.0015
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Psychology and Interaction
This chapter summarizes identity theory in its more general formulation as it is viewed in the work of several modern researchers. It begins by identifying the symbolic interaction roots of identity ...
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This chapter summarizes identity theory in its more general formulation as it is viewed in the work of several modern researchers. It begins by identifying the symbolic interaction roots of identity theory, and shows the differences between structural symbolic interaction and traditional symbolic interaction. Next, it reviews all of the theorists who helped develop identity theory and emphasize the social structural version of symbolic interaction. The chapter also presents two theories that have a lot in common with identity theory.Less
This chapter summarizes identity theory in its more general formulation as it is viewed in the work of several modern researchers. It begins by identifying the symbolic interaction roots of identity theory, and shows the differences between structural symbolic interaction and traditional symbolic interaction. Next, it reviews all of the theorists who helped develop identity theory and emphasize the social structural version of symbolic interaction. The chapter also presents two theories that have a lot in common with identity theory.
Craig Delancey
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195142716
- eISBN:
- 9780199833153
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195142713.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
The chapter develops a taxonomy of emotions and other affects and introduces and defends a version of the affect program theory. A general and primitive notion of affect as a motivational state is ...
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The chapter develops a taxonomy of emotions and other affects and introduces and defends a version of the affect program theory. A general and primitive notion of affect as a motivational state is introduced. Affects are defined as real, occurrent states, functionally identified, and not well characterized by such bivalent features as positive/negative. Some of the states typically called “emotions,” such as fear and anger, are found to be special kinds of affects, characterized primarily by the actions they cause or are associated with. These basic emotions are explained by a version of the affect program theory that takes many emotions to be evolved from action programs.Less
The chapter develops a taxonomy of emotions and other affects and introduces and defends a version of the affect program theory. A general and primitive notion of affect as a motivational state is introduced. Affects are defined as real, occurrent states, functionally identified, and not well characterized by such bivalent features as positive/negative. Some of the states typically called “emotions,” such as fear and anger, are found to be special kinds of affects, characterized primarily by the actions they cause or are associated with. These basic emotions are explained by a version of the affect program theory that takes many emotions to be evolved from action programs.
Craig Delancey
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195142716
- eISBN:
- 9780199833153
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195142713.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Cognitive theories of emotions are criticized. Cognitivism is shown to have two forms: reductive and doxastic. Each is found inconsistent with a range of important scientific findings about affects. ...
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Cognitive theories of emotions are criticized. Cognitivism is shown to have two forms: reductive and doxastic. Each is found inconsistent with a range of important scientific findings about affects. The affect program theory is consistent with these findings, and is consistent with a weak form of cognitivism. The failure of cognitivism about emotions is also evidence for the hierarchical view of mind.Less
Cognitive theories of emotions are criticized. Cognitivism is shown to have two forms: reductive and doxastic. Each is found inconsistent with a range of important scientific findings about affects. The affect program theory is consistent with these findings, and is consistent with a weak form of cognitivism. The failure of cognitivism about emotions is also evidence for the hierarchical view of mind.
Craig Delancey
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195142716
- eISBN:
- 9780199833153
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195142713.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Social constructionism about emotions is the view that emotions are socially constructed entities. I defend the view that some emotions are pancultural and inherited capabilities against social ...
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Social constructionism about emotions is the view that emotions are socially constructed entities. I defend the view that some emotions are pancultural and inherited capabilities against social constructionism. Social constructionism is shown to lack evidence, and to be based on inaccurate characterizations of scientific views. The affect program theory is able to account for the social variation that social constructionists do identify.Less
Social constructionism about emotions is the view that emotions are socially constructed entities. I defend the view that some emotions are pancultural and inherited capabilities against social constructionism. Social constructionism is shown to lack evidence, and to be based on inaccurate characterizations of scientific views. The affect program theory is able to account for the social variation that social constructionists do identify.
John Brenkman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226673127
- eISBN:
- 9780226673431
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226673431.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Starting from the fact that the emotions were conceptualized for the first time in Western thought by Aristotle in a treatise on rhetoric, Mood and Trope introduces two propositions into affect ...
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Starting from the fact that the emotions were conceptualized for the first time in Western thought by Aristotle in a treatise on rhetoric, Mood and Trope introduces two propositions into affect theory. First, affect can be studied with some precision in literature, especially poetry, because it resides there not in speaking about feelings but in the very speaking and way of speaking. Second, rhetoric and poetics are intrinsic, not supplemental, to emotions, affects, and passions. A quartet of modern philosophers known for their fundamental antagonisms—Kant and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze—provides this inquiry’s theoretical webbing, since they all approach the question of affect primarily through art and literature. Various essential concepts among these thinkers—mood, state-of-mind, Angst, sensation, affects and percepts, Rausch, the fourfold, aisthesis, the beautiful and the sublime—are probed and tested through interpretations of a heterogeneous group of writers and artists: Edgar Allan Poe and Harold Pinter, Charles Baudelaire and Li-Young Lee, Shakespeare, Tino Sehgal and Rineke Dijkstra, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jorie Graham. The book shows that the philosophical quartet’s often surprising convergence on aesthetic questions is not a sign of agreement so much as evidence that art and literature stand athwart philosophical systematization. The book argues for modern criticism as a distinct genre of writing and a distinct genre of thought. Straddling the philosophical and the literary, the art of criticism plies the tensions and strife at play between philosophy and art.Less
Starting from the fact that the emotions were conceptualized for the first time in Western thought by Aristotle in a treatise on rhetoric, Mood and Trope introduces two propositions into affect theory. First, affect can be studied with some precision in literature, especially poetry, because it resides there not in speaking about feelings but in the very speaking and way of speaking. Second, rhetoric and poetics are intrinsic, not supplemental, to emotions, affects, and passions. A quartet of modern philosophers known for their fundamental antagonisms—Kant and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze—provides this inquiry’s theoretical webbing, since they all approach the question of affect primarily through art and literature. Various essential concepts among these thinkers—mood, state-of-mind, Angst, sensation, affects and percepts, Rausch, the fourfold, aisthesis, the beautiful and the sublime—are probed and tested through interpretations of a heterogeneous group of writers and artists: Edgar Allan Poe and Harold Pinter, Charles Baudelaire and Li-Young Lee, Shakespeare, Tino Sehgal and Rineke Dijkstra, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jorie Graham. The book shows that the philosophical quartet’s often surprising convergence on aesthetic questions is not a sign of agreement so much as evidence that art and literature stand athwart philosophical systematization. The book argues for modern criticism as a distinct genre of writing and a distinct genre of thought. Straddling the philosophical and the literary, the art of criticism plies the tensions and strife at play between philosophy and art.
Simon Mussell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526105707
- eISBN:
- 9781526132253
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526105707.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the ...
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Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The chapter then discusses contemporary theories of affect that have emerged in the past couple of decades as part of the so-called ‘new materialisms’. Taking on board some of the key findings of this recent work on affect, the author also highlights the potential political deficiencies that accompany such accounts, particularly within a growing ‘post-critical’ context. The chapter closes with suggestions as to how early critical theory – read through an affective lens – might provide the social and political grounding that affect theory often lacks, while at the same time noting how theories of affect are invaluable in shedding light on the efficacy of the pre- or extra-rational, so often sacrificed on the altar of political philosophy.Less
Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The chapter then discusses contemporary theories of affect that have emerged in the past couple of decades as part of the so-called ‘new materialisms’. Taking on board some of the key findings of this recent work on affect, the author also highlights the potential political deficiencies that accompany such accounts, particularly within a growing ‘post-critical’ context. The chapter closes with suggestions as to how early critical theory – read through an affective lens – might provide the social and political grounding that affect theory often lacks, while at the same time noting how theories of affect are invaluable in shedding light on the efficacy of the pre- or extra-rational, so often sacrificed on the altar of political philosophy.
Kaye Mitchell
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474461849
- eISBN:
- 9781474481250
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474461849.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Writing Shame examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literature. Through readings of an array of recent texts – literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, ...
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Writing Shame examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literature. Through readings of an array of recent texts – literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental – the book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture. Shame is presented here as an emotion of self-assessment, a peculiarly social experience, and a culturally pervasive affect with particular pertinence for understanding contemporary constructions of gendered subjectivity, expressions and experiences of sexual desire, the complexities of embodiment, and social processes of othering.
The book, then, unpicks the complex triangulation of shame, gender and writing, and intervenes forcefully in feminist and queer debates of the last three decades. Starting from the premise that shame cannot be overcome or abandoned, and arguing that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, Writing Shame examines writing that explores and inhabits this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page.Less
Writing Shame examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literature. Through readings of an array of recent texts – literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental – the book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture. Shame is presented here as an emotion of self-assessment, a peculiarly social experience, and a culturally pervasive affect with particular pertinence for understanding contemporary constructions of gendered subjectivity, expressions and experiences of sexual desire, the complexities of embodiment, and social processes of othering.
The book, then, unpicks the complex triangulation of shame, gender and writing, and intervenes forcefully in feminist and queer debates of the last three decades. Starting from the premise that shame cannot be overcome or abandoned, and arguing that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, Writing Shame examines writing that explores and inhabits this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page.
Donald Davidson
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- July 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780198237570
- eISBN:
- 9780191602610
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/019823757X.003.0020
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This essay explores the difficulty of reconciling Spinoza’s ontological monism; his thesis that mind and body, extension and thought, are two different and mutually irreducible way of describing the ...
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This essay explores the difficulty of reconciling Spinoza’s ontological monism; his thesis that mind and body, extension and thought, are two different and mutually irreducible way of describing the universe; his insistence on the reality of the mental; and his denial of mind-body interaction. According to Spinoza, while a particular event described in one vocabulary may cause a particular event described in the other, a fully adequate explanation of a mental event cannot be given in physical terms and vice versa. This thesis is what Spinoza had in mind in denying mind-body interaction.Less
This essay explores the difficulty of reconciling Spinoza’s ontological monism; his thesis that mind and body, extension and thought, are two different and mutually irreducible way of describing the universe; his insistence on the reality of the mental; and his denial of mind-body interaction. According to Spinoza, while a particular event described in one vocabulary may cause a particular event described in the other, a fully adequate explanation of a mental event cannot be given in physical terms and vice versa. This thesis is what Spinoza had in mind in denying mind-body interaction.
Karen Bray and Stephen D. Moore
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823285679
- eISBN:
- 9780823288854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823285679.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This introduction to the volume begins with a definition of affect and proceeds to a mapping of the principal varieties of affect theory. Having critically discussed the most common mapping of the ...
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This introduction to the volume begins with a definition of affect and proceeds to a mapping of the principal varieties of affect theory. Having critically discussed the most common mapping of the field, it proposes that affect theory may best be focused through three interconnected, yet distinct, lenses: a psychobiological lens, a prepersonal lens, and a cultural lens. The introduction then ponders possible relationships between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly, and proposes that affect theory makes at least four key contributions to religious studies: it facilitates engagement with the religious significance of the non-linguistic and the non-rational; it impels attention to material encounters in the religious sphere; it highlights affective religious dimensions in contemporary cultural and political movements; and it returns us to “the fourth source of theology” after scripture, tradition, and reason—that of experience.Less
This introduction to the volume begins with a definition of affect and proceeds to a mapping of the principal varieties of affect theory. Having critically discussed the most common mapping of the field, it proposes that affect theory may best be focused through three interconnected, yet distinct, lenses: a psychobiological lens, a prepersonal lens, and a cultural lens. The introduction then ponders possible relationships between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly, and proposes that affect theory makes at least four key contributions to religious studies: it facilitates engagement with the religious significance of the non-linguistic and the non-rational; it impels attention to material encounters in the religious sphere; it highlights affective religious dimensions in contemporary cultural and political movements; and it returns us to “the fourth source of theology” after scripture, tradition, and reason—that of experience.
Linda M. G. Zerilli
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226397849
- eISBN:
- 9780226398037
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226398037.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This chapter explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the “nonintentionalism” of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as ...
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This chapter explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the “nonintentionalism” of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, does not adequately account for the fascination with nonconceptualism. Such fascination must be understood in relation to a wholly intellectualist view of conceptual rationality, according to which knowing how to do something involves a highly abstract and disembodied form of rule-following. Far from unique to affect theory, this view is shared by certain phenomenological philosophers and postfoundational feminist theorists who have been eager to recover the idea of human practice as a form of nonrational and nonconceptual embodied coping. Drawing on ordinary language philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, Cavell, and Wittgenstein, the chapter seeks to uncover the misunderstandings that animate the turn to nonconceptualism as the only alternative to intellectualism.Less
This chapter explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the “nonintentionalism” of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, does not adequately account for the fascination with nonconceptualism. Such fascination must be understood in relation to a wholly intellectualist view of conceptual rationality, according to which knowing how to do something involves a highly abstract and disembodied form of rule-following. Far from unique to affect theory, this view is shared by certain phenomenological philosophers and postfoundational feminist theorists who have been eager to recover the idea of human practice as a form of nonrational and nonconceptual embodied coping. Drawing on ordinary language philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, Cavell, and Wittgenstein, the chapter seeks to uncover the misunderstandings that animate the turn to nonconceptualism as the only alternative to intellectualism.
Marta Figlerowicz
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714221
- eISBN:
- 9781501714245
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714221.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? Spaces of Feeling examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, as well as deeply disturbing. Their ...
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Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? Spaces of Feeling examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, as well as deeply disturbing. Their characters and lyric speakers are undone by the realization that they depend on others to solve their inward affective conundrums—and that, to these other people, their feelings often do not seem mysterious at all. To a psychoanalyst, such realizations might sound like truisms. Spaces of Feeling shows that they become considerably weightier within the context of our contemporary approaches to affects as gateways into larger social conditions. Through close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens, it highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors’ representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, it also shows that the questions about subjectivity that these earlier works open remain pressing, and tantalizingly unanswered, in our present day.Less
Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? Spaces of Feeling examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, as well as deeply disturbing. Their characters and lyric speakers are undone by the realization that they depend on others to solve their inward affective conundrums—and that, to these other people, their feelings often do not seem mysterious at all. To a psychoanalyst, such realizations might sound like truisms. Spaces of Feeling shows that they become considerably weightier within the context of our contemporary approaches to affects as gateways into larger social conditions. Through close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens, it highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors’ representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, it also shows that the questions about subjectivity that these earlier works open remain pressing, and tantalizingly unanswered, in our present day.
Maria-Daniella Dick
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748693252
- eISBN:
- 9781474412346
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748693252.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter presents a critique of affect theorists’ attempts to situate the novelty of their discourse in its separation from poststructuralist linguistic philosophies, a separation that takes the ...
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This chapter presents a critique of affect theorists’ attempts to situate the novelty of their discourse in its separation from poststructuralist linguistic philosophies, a separation that takes the character of a disavowal rather than an observation. The chapter interrogates the construction of affect as a form of extra-linguistic excess, arguing that the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses allows for a reconsideration of affect as a non-pure or non-originary state in its relation to modernity. Exploring the continuities between Roland Barthes’s elaboration of jouissance and contemporary descriptions of affect, the chapter considers Joyce’s novel as both a text of jouissance (understood by Barthes not as non-linguistic excess but rather as excess borne out of the signifying plurality of the text) and as a less radical text of plaisir, mimetic of affect. Ultimately, Ulysses refuses to separate literal and textual jouissance and posits the processual, unfixed, and material nature of language itself, thus challenging theories in which affect is formulated in opposition to (fixed) semiosis.Less
This chapter presents a critique of affect theorists’ attempts to situate the novelty of their discourse in its separation from poststructuralist linguistic philosophies, a separation that takes the character of a disavowal rather than an observation. The chapter interrogates the construction of affect as a form of extra-linguistic excess, arguing that the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses allows for a reconsideration of affect as a non-pure or non-originary state in its relation to modernity. Exploring the continuities between Roland Barthes’s elaboration of jouissance and contemporary descriptions of affect, the chapter considers Joyce’s novel as both a text of jouissance (understood by Barthes not as non-linguistic excess but rather as excess borne out of the signifying plurality of the text) and as a less radical text of plaisir, mimetic of affect. Ultimately, Ulysses refuses to separate literal and textual jouissance and posits the processual, unfixed, and material nature of language itself, thus challenging theories in which affect is formulated in opposition to (fixed) semiosis.
Karen Bray
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286850
- eISBN:
- 9780823288762
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286850.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
“Unbegun Introductions” maps the contemporary state of political theology, most significantly its engagement with postsecularism and autonomist Marxism; the contemporary fields of affect, queer ...
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“Unbegun Introductions” maps the contemporary state of political theology, most significantly its engagement with postsecularism and autonomist Marxism; the contemporary fields of affect, queer temporality, and crip theories; and gives a brief introduction to process theology. This chapter maps the key fields with which the rest of the manuscript will then constructively play in order to bring to bear the significance of contemporary affect and crip theory for the doing of postmodern and political theology. Interspersed amongst this mapping are narrative scenes—personal stories that bring to the fore the way in which the moods of everyday life function as the contexts from which the assemblages of thinkers come to matter. The introductory chapter refuses to separate the personal mood from the political or philosophical one.Less
“Unbegun Introductions” maps the contemporary state of political theology, most significantly its engagement with postsecularism and autonomist Marxism; the contemporary fields of affect, queer temporality, and crip theories; and gives a brief introduction to process theology. This chapter maps the key fields with which the rest of the manuscript will then constructively play in order to bring to bear the significance of contemporary affect and crip theory for the doing of postmodern and political theology. Interspersed amongst this mapping are narrative scenes—personal stories that bring to the fore the way in which the moods of everyday life function as the contexts from which the assemblages of thinkers come to matter. The introductory chapter refuses to separate the personal mood from the political or philosophical one.
Andrew Thacker
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474454438
- eISBN:
- 9781474477123
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454438.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This paper explores the significance of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys as colonial outsiders in the modernist metropolis of Paris. The paper draws upon a number of ideas from contemporary affect ...
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This paper explores the significance of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys as colonial outsiders in the modernist metropolis of Paris. The paper draws upon a number of ideas from contemporary affect theory (such as work on the idea of shame) to present an original account of how, in texts such as ‘Je ne parle pas français’ and ‘Feuille d’Album’ (Mansfield) and Quartet (Rhys), both writers responded, in differing ways, to the moods of the modernist spaces of the city. It also discusses the importance of their engagement with the cultural institutions of modernism in Paris, such as that of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and explores their shared connections to the French writer Francis Carco.Less
This paper explores the significance of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys as colonial outsiders in the modernist metropolis of Paris. The paper draws upon a number of ideas from contemporary affect theory (such as work on the idea of shame) to present an original account of how, in texts such as ‘Je ne parle pas français’ and ‘Feuille d’Album’ (Mansfield) and Quartet (Rhys), both writers responded, in differing ways, to the moods of the modernist spaces of the city. It also discusses the importance of their engagement with the cultural institutions of modernism in Paris, such as that of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and explores their shared connections to the French writer Francis Carco.
Marta Figlerowicz
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714221
- eISBN:
- 9781501714245
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714221.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The introduction lays out this book’s methodology and main thesis. Spaces of Feeling takes modernist poems and novels as illustrations of an attitude toward affective awareness that has become lost ...
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The introduction lays out this book’s methodology and main thesis. Spaces of Feeling takes modernist poems and novels as illustrations of an attitude toward affective awareness that has become lost from contemporary conversations about affect. By engaging with critics such as Lauren Berlant, Charles Altieri, Sianne Ngai, and Brian Massumi, as well as moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, it also highlights reasons why this attitude should, once more, become important to us.Less
The introduction lays out this book’s methodology and main thesis. Spaces of Feeling takes modernist poems and novels as illustrations of an attitude toward affective awareness that has become lost from contemporary conversations about affect. By engaging with critics such as Lauren Berlant, Charles Altieri, Sianne Ngai, and Brian Massumi, as well as moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, it also highlights reasons why this attitude should, once more, become important to us.
John Brenkman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226673127
- eISBN:
- 9780226673431
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226673431.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
For Heidegger, the question of being is at the heart of philosophy and of art; for Deleuze, it is the question of life and sensation—ontology versus vitalism. Two such incommensurate philosophical ...
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For Heidegger, the question of being is at the heart of philosophy and of art; for Deleuze, it is the question of life and sensation—ontology versus vitalism. Two such incommensurate philosophical orientations unexpectedly converge when it comes to reflecting on the nature of the artwork. In Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” earth in the earth/world relation plays a role analogous to sensation in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Out of their shared concern to foreground the materiality of art and not reduce it to matter (hylē, materia), to which the artist gives form (morphē, forma), they are shown to converge around three theses on art: the artwork’s difference from what it represents; its paradoxical standing as “the self-positing of the created”; and its exceeding of any communicative relation between creator and recipient. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 120 provides a test of this last thesis, as the discussion of affect and art is brought back to the rhetoric of poetry. It is argued that interpretation is the way to the work’s affect, thus bridging the divide that would separate sensation and being, vitalism and hermeneutics.Less
For Heidegger, the question of being is at the heart of philosophy and of art; for Deleuze, it is the question of life and sensation—ontology versus vitalism. Two such incommensurate philosophical orientations unexpectedly converge when it comes to reflecting on the nature of the artwork. In Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” earth in the earth/world relation plays a role analogous to sensation in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Out of their shared concern to foreground the materiality of art and not reduce it to matter (hylē, materia), to which the artist gives form (morphē, forma), they are shown to converge around three theses on art: the artwork’s difference from what it represents; its paradoxical standing as “the self-positing of the created”; and its exceeding of any communicative relation between creator and recipient. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 120 provides a test of this last thesis, as the discussion of affect and art is brought back to the rhetoric of poetry. It is argued that interpretation is the way to the work’s affect, thus bridging the divide that would separate sensation and being, vitalism and hermeneutics.
Tanya Jakimow
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- August 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198854739
- eISBN:
- 9780191888939
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198854739.001.0001
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Development, Growth, and Environmental, South and East Asia
Susceptibility in Development offers a novel approach to understanding power in development through theories of affect and emotion. Development agents—people tasked with designing or delivering ...
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Susceptibility in Development offers a novel approach to understanding power in development through theories of affect and emotion. Development agents—people tasked with designing or delivering development—are susceptible to being affected in ways that may derail or threaten their ‘sense of self’. This susceptibility is in direct relation to the capacity of others to affect development agents: an overlooked form of power. This book proposes a new analytical framework—the capacity/susceptibility to affect/be affected—to enable new readings of power relations and their consequences for development. These barely perceptible forms of power become visible through ethnographic attention to local level development. Susceptibility in Development offers a comparative ethnography of two types of local development agents: volunteers in a community development programme in Medan, Indonesia, and women municipal councillors in Dehradun, India. Ethnographic accounts that are attentive to the emotions and affects engendered in encounters between volunteers and ‘beneficiaries’, or municipal councillors and voters (for example) provide a fresh reading of the relations shaping local development. Local development agents may be more ‘susceptible’ than workers and volunteers from the global North, yet the capacity/susceptibility to affect/be affected orders relations and shapes outcomes of development from the local to the global. In theorizing from the local, Susceptibility in Development offers fresh insights into power dynamics in development.Less
Susceptibility in Development offers a novel approach to understanding power in development through theories of affect and emotion. Development agents—people tasked with designing or delivering development—are susceptible to being affected in ways that may derail or threaten their ‘sense of self’. This susceptibility is in direct relation to the capacity of others to affect development agents: an overlooked form of power. This book proposes a new analytical framework—the capacity/susceptibility to affect/be affected—to enable new readings of power relations and their consequences for development. These barely perceptible forms of power become visible through ethnographic attention to local level development. Susceptibility in Development offers a comparative ethnography of two types of local development agents: volunteers in a community development programme in Medan, Indonesia, and women municipal councillors in Dehradun, India. Ethnographic accounts that are attentive to the emotions and affects engendered in encounters between volunteers and ‘beneficiaries’, or municipal councillors and voters (for example) provide a fresh reading of the relations shaping local development. Local development agents may be more ‘susceptible’ than workers and volunteers from the global North, yet the capacity/susceptibility to affect/be affected orders relations and shapes outcomes of development from the local to the global. In theorizing from the local, Susceptibility in Development offers fresh insights into power dynamics in development.
Karen Bray and Stephen D. Moore (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823285679
- eISBN:
- 9780823288854
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823285679.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what the blooming field of critical inquiry known as affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, or liturgies. ...
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Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what the blooming field of critical inquiry known as affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, or liturgies. Contributors explore the crossings and crisscrossings between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly. At once transpersonal and prepersonal, affect transcends and subtends the human. As such, it has affinity with divinity, but a divinity that is indissociable from materiality. Bringing together affect theorists, theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars of religion, this volume enacts creative transdisciplinary interventions in the study of affect and religion through exploring such topics as biblical narratives, Christology, animism, Rastafarianism, the Egyptian mosque movement, the unending Korean War, the Sewol ferry disaster, trans and gender queer identities, YA fiction, historiography, the prison industrial complex, debt and neoliberalism, and death and poetry, all in dialogue with such fields as postcolonial and decolonial theories, critical animality studies, secular theology, feminist science studies, new materialism, and indigenous futurism. Not only does the volume map affect theory and add breadth and depth to the study of affect and religion, but it demonstrates the political and social import of such study. Those desiring an introduction to affect theory, together with those eager to delve into its wide-ranging applications within religious studies, will find this volume to be essential reading.Less
Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what the blooming field of critical inquiry known as affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, or liturgies. Contributors explore the crossings and crisscrossings between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly. At once transpersonal and prepersonal, affect transcends and subtends the human. As such, it has affinity with divinity, but a divinity that is indissociable from materiality. Bringing together affect theorists, theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars of religion, this volume enacts creative transdisciplinary interventions in the study of affect and religion through exploring such topics as biblical narratives, Christology, animism, Rastafarianism, the Egyptian mosque movement, the unending Korean War, the Sewol ferry disaster, trans and gender queer identities, YA fiction, historiography, the prison industrial complex, debt and neoliberalism, and death and poetry, all in dialogue with such fields as postcolonial and decolonial theories, critical animality studies, secular theology, feminist science studies, new materialism, and indigenous futurism. Not only does the volume map affect theory and add breadth and depth to the study of affect and religion, but it demonstrates the political and social import of such study. Those desiring an introduction to affect theory, together with those eager to delve into its wide-ranging applications within religious studies, will find this volume to be essential reading.
Paul Hurh
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780804791144
- eISBN:
- 9780804794510
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791144.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical ...
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American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.Less
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.
