Feeling Dead, Dead Feeling

What does it mean to read and write devoutly, religiously, mystically—even, or especially, if one’s reading or writing qualifies for none of these adverbs in any conventional sense? What, in particular, does it mean to read and write about death and dying in these affective registers? These are the questions that animate this essay, a deeply personal dialogue with selected literary authors that smudges the line between literature and criticism and is less a discourse on affect than an immersion in affect. The author of the essay approaches her chosen literary works—literature with which she has bonded—as both fragmentary inscriptions of the divine and articulations of complex affects that exceed individual subjectivity. Difficult literature, for this author—reading it, writing it—is valuable training for the intractable difficulty of death.

Gender: A Public Feeling?

This essay reframes and reconceives gender as both a public feeling (in Cvetkovich’s sense of the term) and an affective assemblage. The latter concept, which extends the former, is designed to accommodate the multiplicity of factors, forces, processes, and agencies implicated in gender in general, but in non-normative gender in particular. The essay’s affective assemblage is eclectically composed from Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, pheonomenology, new materialisms, and affect theory, and enacted in the limit case of non-transitioning transgendered people in online communities. Gender as an affective assemblage takes a theological turn in the essay’s concluding section where it counters a territorialized reading of Christ’s body, one which seeks to exclude non-normative genders from the church. Calling for the church’s self-deterritorialization, the essay proposes a corporate body enfleshed by queer affective assemblages that would facilitate gendered exploration and discovery.

Weeping by the Water: Hydraulic Affects and Political Depression in South Korea after Sewol

Sewol names both the senseless mass drowning of schoolchildren in a 2014 ferry disaster off the southwest coast of South Korea and its abiding affective impact on the South Korean population and diaspora. Anchoring itself in the tide of emotion washing from the broadcasted images of Pangmok Harbor where families and friends wept and awaited news of lost loved ones, but also reactivating the image from Psalm 137 of earlier weeping by another body of water (“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…”), this essay explores the affective possibilities of water as an elemental archive or repository of emotion beyond the constricting confines of the national. The essay also argues that a generalized concept of affect will not suffice to do justice to Sewol. A Korean tragedy evokes a Korean affect, and that affect the essay locates in the Korean concept of Han.

Capitalism as Religion, Debt as Interface: Wearing the World as a Debt Garment

Taking its lead from St. Francis of Assisi, this essay elaborates the theme of the “debt garment,” one that offers both the promise of recognition—that of one’s worldly belongingness to all other humans and nonhumans—and the threat of burdens that crush some more harshly than others, but whose weight all must carry. In a semi-secular-theological turn, the essay contends that credit/debt relationships make and unmake worlds. Threading together insights from a patchwork assemblage of sources, including M. T. Anderson’s YA novel Feed, current advancements in “wearable” technologies, St. Francis, Parrika, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari (to name but a few), the essay explores the ethological and ecological web of debt and ultimately proffers an aesthetics of debt, whereby debt becomes not merely a garment worn, but both a gesture of promise for, and a threat to, other worlds.

The Animality of Affect: Religion, Emotion, and Power

This essay argues that the immensely influential concept of affect as unstructured proto-sensation that is primarily associated with Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi is insufficient to understand the roles of affect in religion and other formations of power. The Deleuzian approach to affect fails to reckon adequately with the animality of the human body, with its evolutionarily particular bio-architecture that affords it a finitely multiple repertoire of affects. Moving to religion by way of Sylvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Sara Ahmed, the essay argues that the felt bodily needs and consequent affective economy of which religion is the product hinge on shame and dignity, and it proceeds to illustrate its claim with reference to Saba Mahmood’s analysis of the women’s Mosque Movement in pre-revolutionary Egypt.

Writing Affect and Theology in Indigenous Futures

Issues of territory and territorialization are germane to this essay. Its driving question is whether affect theory or theology can ever deterritorialize themselves fully from Western-citationality. Acutely attuned to the impossibility and importance of this challenge, the essay enjoins “sticking with the trouble” (a là Donna Haraway) represented by animisms and their indigenous territories: geographical, intellectual, and spiritual. Weaving together indigenous modes of knowing with feminist science studies, the essay resists the sovereignties of both affect theory and theology. Countering modes of thinking affect and theology that might stake out ground, it instead tracks what each does when they are invoked. It thereby seeks alternate routes for making a world and finds them most fruitfully in indigenous futurism. The essay adumbrates a hope for an animist-affect-theology that would create a storied world necessarily rooted in the colonial past/present but also open to indigenous futures and inclusive of other-than-human meanings.

Immobile Theologies, Carceral Affects: Interest and Debt in Faith-Based Prison Programs

This essay examines how the biblically-based theologies deployed in faith-based prison programs are intertwined with carceral technologies and how the emotional/spiritual objectives of the increasingly theologically supported prison industrial complex are bound up with the affective structures and strategies of (racialized) interest and debt. In effect, the essay brings a range of affect theorists into conversation with critics of the prison industrial complex to tease out the interconnected affective, financial, theological, moral, and environmental components of contemporary carceral technologies. Without such analysis, it is argued, prison reform can only ever be a further occluded phase of radical neoliberalism.

Reading (with) Rhythm for the Sake of the (I-n-)Islands: A Rastafarian Interpretation of Samson as Ambi(val)ent Affective Assemblage

This essay reframes the Bible as both a Caribbean text and a rhythmic text. It argues, moreover, that the Bible, in its illimitable capacity to affect and be affected, is also what Gregory Seigworth, Melissa Gregg, and Kathleen Stewart would term an affective bloom-space, an exceedingly fertile concept. The essay proceeds to assemble a Rastafari hermeneutic that effectuates a rhythmic reasoning whereby the resonances of Glissantian orality and Deleuzian affect throb together upon the pulsating pages of the biblical Samson story. Orality as musicality meets affect theory in the essay’s reactivation of the Samson story, a reading acutely attentive to rhythm and to the intra-action of narrative and interpretive bodies in/as ambient affective assemblage.

Affective Politics of the Unending Korean War: Remembering and Resistance

This essay treads the routes and traces the roots of dispossession created by the Korean War. Framing it not as the “forgotten war” but rather as the “unending war,” the essay renounces individualized theories of trauma and witnesses to the complex spatiotemporal pulls of transgenerational terror. Through contemporary acts of collective mourning, the essay, which is also an exercise in critical Christian theology, reopens the wounds of the cross to register collective rage, grief, and unending mourning as counters to US imperialism. In making a postcolonial turn to affect, the essay confronts elisions in affect theory and assumes a posture of critical melancholia as an intersubjective act of mourning of and resistance to historical trauma.

Introduction: Mappings and Crossings

This introduction to the volume begins with a definition of affect and proceeds to a mapping of the principal varieties of affect theory. Having critically discussed the most common mapping of the field, it proposes that affect theory may best be focused through three interconnected, yet distinct, lenses: a psychobiological lens, a prepersonal lens, and a cultural lens. The introduction then ponders possible relationships between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly, and proposes that affect theory makes at least four key contributions to religious studies: it facilitates engagement with the religious significance of the non-linguistic and the non-rational; it impels attention to material encounters in the religious sphere; it highlights affective religious dimensions in contemporary cultural and political movements; and it returns us to “the fourth source of theology” after scripture, tradition, and reason—that of experience.