Against Affect

Against Affect interrogates shibboleths of feeling and reason and their relationship with ideas of identity, gender, and freedom in the twenty-first century. Lisa Downing starts with the familiar premise that emotion has been historically gendered and racialized since the Enlightenment, with women, people of color, and other non-normative subjects associated with emotionality, and only white men with logic and reason. The “affective turn” in the academic humanities attempted to redress this injustice in the 1990s, and affect theory, ubiquitous today, revalorized precisely what was excluded from logos: the bodily, the emotive, and the experiential. But how effective has this strategy truly been in changing perceptions of marginalized forms of knowledge and subjectivity? Against Affect argues that the academic affective turn has prompted a broader cultural one, marked by increasing prioritization—and exploitation—of feeling over reason, issuing from both the political left and right.

Using a series of case studies, Against Affect explores how the deployment of a language of emotion in both the academic and cultural spheres constitutes a new normativity. In thinking against affect, Downing questions the efficacy and desirability of idealizing feeling and proposes instead the redistribution of reason.