The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment

Linda Zerilli explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the “nonintentionalism” of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, argues Zerilli, does not adequately account for t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:New literary history 2015-03, Vol.46 (2), p.261-286
Main Author: Zerilli, Linda M. G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognition & reasoning
Consciousness
Feminism
Feminist Investigations and Other Essays
Judgment
Language
Ontology
Philosophers
Philosophy
Politics
Rationality
Theory
Traditions
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Summary:Linda Zerilli explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the “nonintentionalism” of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, argues Zerilli, does not adequately account for the fascination with nonconceptualism. Such fascination must be understood in relation to a wholly intellectualist view of conceptual rationality, according to which knowing how to do something involves a highly abstract and disembodied form of rule-following. Far from unique to affect theory, this view is shared by certain phenomenological philosophers and postfoundational feminist theorists, who have been eager to recover the idea of human practice as a form of nonrational and nonconceptual embodied coping. Zerilli draws on ordinary language philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, Stanley Cavell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to uncover the misunderstandings that animate the turn to nonconceptualism as the only alternative to intellectualism.
ISSN:0028-6087
1080-661X
1080-661X
DOI:10.1353/nlh.2015.0019