POSTHUMANIST PERSPECTIVES ON AFFECT

Abstract

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.

The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue (sensation, subjectivity, sociality, and politics) in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing.

Notes

We would like to thank Gregory Seigworth and Fiona Cameron for their comments on the earlier drafts of this opening essay. Also, many thanks to Jen Craig for her wonderful editorial assistance in putting this issue together.

1 Another way of thinking about the relationship between the non-human and affect has been proposed within “speculative realist” critique of correlationalism. For example, in his work on panpsychism, Steve Shaviro, rather than point to non-cognitive and non-volitional life forms, seeks to retrieve the meanings of cognition and volition from the realm of human properties (see Shaviro). Many thanks to Gregory Seigworth for pointing this out.

2 We use the concepts of the “non-human,” “other-than-human,” “more-than-human” and “earth others” interchangeably. For a discussion of the vocabulary use see, for example, Plumwood, Environmental Culture.

3 Posthumanist scholarship offers a wide spectrum of thinking on the ontologies and politics of affect – carefully mapped by Gregg and Seigworth in The Affect Theory Reader – including the (Spinozist/Deleuzian) materialist-vitalist, (Tomkins's) psychological, neo-Darwinist, and psychoanalytic notions of affect (see also Thrift; Colombetti 2014).

4 The concept of synanthrope describes beneficial animal association with humans and their habitats, but without including the category of “domesticated animals.” The examples of synanthropic animals include urban wildlife and birds.