Building on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.
Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Lisa Blackman, Rizvana Bradley, Ann Cvetkovich, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Adam J. Frank, M. Gail Hamner, Omar Kasmani, Cecilia Macón, Hil Malatino, Erin Manning, Derek P. McCormack, Patrick Nickleson, Susanna Paasonen, Tyrone S. Palmer, Carolyn Pedwell, Jasbir K. Puar, Jason Read, Michael Richardson, Dylan Robinson, Tony D. Sampson, Kyla Schuller, Gregory J. Seigworth, Nathan Snaza, Kathleen Stewart, Elizabeth A. Wilson
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: A Shimmer of Inventories / Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell 1
Part One. Tensions, In Solution
1. The Elements of Affect Theories / Derek P. McCormack 63
2. Ambiguous Affect: Excitements That Make the Self / Susanna Paasonen 85
3. Tomkins in Tension / Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson 103
4. Affect and Affirmation / Tyrone S. Palmer 122
5. Unfuckology: Affectability, Temporality, and Unleashing the Sex/Gender Binary / Kyla Schuller 141
Part Two. Minor Feelings and the Sensorial Possibilities of Form
6. Minor Feelings and the Affective Life of Race / Ann Cvetkovich 161
7. Resisting the Enclosure of Trans Affective Commons / Hil Malatino 179
8. Too Thick Love, or Bearing the Unbearable / Rizvana Bradley 191
9. Migration: An Intimacy / Omar Kasmani 214
Part Three. Unlearning and the Conditions of Arrival
10. Unlearning Affect / M. Gail Hamner 233
11. Why This? Affective Pedagogy in the Wake / Nathan Snaza 255
12. The Feeling of Knowing Music / Dylan Robinson and Patrick Nickleson 273
Part Four. The Matter of Experience, or, Reminding Consciousness of Its Necessary Modesty
13. Nonconscious Affect: Cognitive, Embodied, or Nonbifurcated Experience? / Tony D. Sampson 295
14. Catch an Incline: The Impersonality of the Minor / Erin Manning 315
15. Emotions and Affects of Convolution / Lisa Blackman 326
16. Haunting Voices: Affective Atmospheres as Transtemporal Contact / Cecilia Macón 347
Part Five. A Living Laboratory: Glitching the Affective Reproduction of the Social
17. The Affective Reproduction of Capital: Two Returns to Spinoza / Jason Read 367
18. Algorithmic Governance and Racializing Affect / Ezekiel Dixon-Román 384
19. Dividual Economies, of Data, of Flesh / Jasbir K. Puar 406
20. Algorithmic Trauma / Michael Richardson 423
Coda 447
A Note / Kathleen Stewart 449
Poisonality / Lauren Berlant 451
Contributors 465
Index 471
Gregory J. Seigworth is a professor of communication studies at Millersville University. He has published widely, including in Antithesis, Architectural Design, Cultural Studies, Culture Machine, Radical Philosophy, and Theory, Culture and Society. He is co-editor, with Melissa Gregg, of The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010), and co-editor, with Mathew Arthur, of the online journal Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry.
