Sentient Subjects : Post-humanist Perspectives on Affect

Non-cognitive expressions of the life of the subject – feeling, motion, tactility, instinct, automatism, and sentience – have transformed how scholars understand subjectivity, agency and identity. This collection investigates the critical purchase of the idiom of affect in this ‘post-humanist’ thinking of the subject. It also explores political and ethical questions raised by the deployment of affect as a theoretical and artistic category.

Together the contributors to this collection map the theoretically heterogeneous field of post-humanist scholarship on affect, making inspiring, and at times surprising, connections between Spinoza’s and Tomkins’s theories of affect, the concept of affect and psychoanalysis, and affect and animal studies in art and literature. As a result, the concepts, vocabulary, compatibility, and attribution of affect are challenged and extended.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Gerda Roelvink is interdisciplinary scholar located in human geography. She is the author of Building Dignified Worlds (Minnesota UP) and co-editor of Making Other Worlds Possible (Minnesota UP). She has also co-edited, with Dr Magdalena Zolkos, two special issues for the journals Angelaki and Emotion, Space and Society.

Magdalena Zolkos works across the fields of political theory, cultural studies and philosophy, currently as Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. She is the author of Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory (Edinburgh UP) and co-editor of Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched (Lexington).