Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is the author or editor of twenty books, including Selfish Women and After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century. She is an editor of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory. Her new book Against Affect (Nebraska, 2026) was published in April in the Provocations series.

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.

Introduction

Is there any remaining doubt that we are now fully within the Episteme of the Affect?

—Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects

We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment.

—Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”

Although Kant said some very stupid things about women, reason is not a masculine construction. Rather, partly because Kant wrote, reason is ours, a universal present in everyone.

—Margaret C. Jacob, “The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective”

In this book I want to ask a number of questions about what it might mean to declare oneself “against affect,” where “affect” is understood in a very specific sense, a sense that is directly related to the academic “affective turn,” but that also moves beyond it into all areas of public and political discursive life. I shall also bring critical attention to the notion of being “against,” which I intend in a more nuanced and less absolutist way than outright rejection. I invite the reader to understand the “against” of my title provocatively and provisionally as a challenge to think reflexively about what we assume to be “good” and “bad” in value—and what it might mean to argue contra what passes as an unmarked good at a particular moment in cultural history. The invitation to be (provisionally) against affect is an invitation to think against the grain about the ethical and epistemological underpinnings of taking emotion or feeling as the best way of apprehending and inviting responses to the world, to political situations, and to others. For this proposition to make sense, it would need to be understood that affect is currently the dominant episteme in our twenty-first-century cultural moment, as Eugenie Brinkema rhetorically proposes in the first quotation of my epigraph, threatening to eclipse the episteme of Enlightenment that shaped us as moderns, according to Michel Foucault in the second. And that is one of the claims that this book will elaborate and demonstrate. A further claim it will make is that this state of affairs is not necessarily a desirable one.

The aim throughout my book, as should be obvious, is not to oppose or discourage the feeling of emotions themselves in any literal sense, for individuals or for the collective—that would be as impossible a demand to make as it would be undesirable. Nor do I believe, in the face of evidence from the cognitive, psychiatric, and neurological sciences, that it is genuinely possible to separate thinking from feeling, body from mind, experientially, in any absolutist way. The research of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that emotions are in fact inherently “enmeshed” in the “networks” of reason. Instead, I consider the fraught pair of “feeling” and “reason” as discursive terms, positions, or rhetorics in political, cultural, and academic life that undoubtedly still resonate and obtain, long after the questioning of Cartesian dualism, and that operate as a cultural and philosophical pair—with different weight attributed to them in different historical moments. Indeed, the history of separating reason from feeling and opposing them to each other as a pair is long and checkered. We find it in Plato with the notion of the “tripartite soul” comprising reason, appetite, and spirit as distinct parts. We find it in the metaphysics of Descartes, with the primacy of thought as the ontological prerequisite for being human (the “cogito”). And it is, of course, a pair of ideas central to the Enlightenment—that contested and complex phenomenon that I shall discuss in the next section of this introduction.

Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction has taught us much about the enduringness of binary thinking, and also about the necessity of recognizing the power imbalances that inhere in it. In this tradition, in Matter, Affect, Antinormativity: Theory Beyond Dualism (2022), which attempts to avoid thinking “for” or “against” a series of binary pairs for politically progressive ends, Caroline Braunmühl argues that privileging either “affect” or “discourse” involves colluding in “unegalitarian (gendered, racialized) discourses that are implicated in sustaining social inequality.” She proposes instead thinking about feeling and discourse as “mutually implicating, yet irreducible to one another.” It is self-evident that these terms coexist in a relationship of tension. I depart from Braunmühl in that I do not necessarily agree that demonstrating how one term in a binary may speak more appropriately or powerfully to a given situation or moment inevitably replicates the historical inequality built into hierarchal binaries—unless we assume that making any value judgment on the basis of any evidence is always already an oppressive act. In this vein I should emphasize here that my critique of affect is time-and-place-specific. I argue that a commitment to recognizing that feeling is real, powerful, important, and inevitable must not prevent our urgent critique of the use of emotive language for the purposes of coercive cultural propaganda. And I question the notion that the broad turn from a prioritization of reason on critical thinking (“Enlightenment thinking”) to a prioritization of affective responses and a reliance on “experience,” in relation to culture, to political events, and to the other, has been a wholly positive or progressive move.

As noted, binaries established as such over time that may not be “true,” in the sense of being epistemologically or ontologically defensible, nevertheless persist in the cultural imaginary, shaping how we think and organize knowledge and affecting our judgments. It is precisely how the obstinate pair “reason” and “feeling” are deployed, valorized, and set against each other in the current moment that interests me here. As we look around us, we may find evidence that a cultural imperative such as “Be reasonable! Think critically!” has been replaced by exhortations such as “Be kind! Words are literal violence!” or, conversely, “Be proud of your traditions! Protect Western values! Make America great again!” This binary pair of sets of exhortations exemplifies another keystone of my book’s claims: that the lexical field of “feeling” and appeals to emotion are being deployed by what we might traditionally think of as both left-wing and right-wing causes. Though, I would also add here that the terms “left” and “right” increasingly lose their fixed meanings, with other terms such as populism, nationalism, authoritarianism, libertarianism, wokeism, and identitarianism, among others, describing more saliently contemporary political trends. Indeed, the fact that it is possible to identify a creep of the language of feeling in discourses issuing from all points on the political compass suggests that what I will call the “cultural affective turn” (an offspring of its academic counterpart) is a broad and prevalent discursive and imaginative phenomenon.