Laura Kipnis in Critical Inquiry:
Lisa Downing’s program in her equable polemic Against Affect is to rescue and redistribute reason, if not necessarily to the masses then to those in the academic humanities who made the affective turn in the mid-1990s and haven’t found their way back.
Focusing on emotions, the body, and experience, affect theory has become, Downing says, the dominant episteme of our time, which is not to the collective good. The distinction between feeling and reason is obviously long-standing; Downing believes they don’t need to be opposed even if an enemies list of foundational thinkers from Plato on thought otherwise. Though she doesn’t mention the Romantics, they’d disagree too, but from the opposite corner.
More recent anti-Enlightenment critics want reason demoted because its exclusions (women, the unpropertied) fatally colluded in structures of gendered and racial privilege. As reason’s defender, Downing thinks this is a faulty analysis: nothing intrinsically connects forms of oppression like heteronormativity or colonialism with reason. It’s the proponents of feeling who are the covert authoritarians.
Besides which, if reason weren’t better and more powerful, eighteenth-century patriarchs wouldn’t have hogged it for themselves. Now the rest of us need to recuperate and democratize it, but a more mongrel version: a feminist Neo-Enlightenment. Women and people of color authored important Enlightenment projects, Dowing reminds us: these need to be reclaimed.
More here.
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