Unlearning Affect

Abstract

This chapter traces a genealogy of affect as the logic of racial enclosure writ as universal possibility. It begins by offering close readings of force, feeling, sense certainty, and affective quality in the philosophies of J. G. Herder, G. W. F. Hegel, and C. S. Peirce. The argument is that these philosophers' work cannot be extricated from its rational and dispositional entrapment in whiteness. The second section of the chapter seeks sources and tools for unlearning the logics of enclosure by unlearning affect, in resonance with Denise Ferreira da Silva's and Sylvia Wynter's scholarship. The chapter aims to unlearn affect theory's tendencies to articulate affect as a generally shareable force and to unlearn one's own scholarly and lived affectscape. Drawing on Tomkins's script theory, it maps lived connections between social valuation and affect in order to revise the tendency to theorize affective possibility in disavowal of racial logics of enclosure.