Today is Against Affect Publication Day, coinciding with April Fools’ Day in the UK.
Is it foolishly optimistic to call for a redistribution of reason in an age of febrile, emotive tribalism?
Perhaps. But fools have long told uncomfortable truths.
Order here.
Nebraska University Press will publish Lisa’s monograph-manifesto, Against Affect, in their ‘Provocations’ series on 1 April 2026.
Pre-order here.
Description:
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 nonnormative 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.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Provocations
Introduction
1. Repairing What Wasn’t Broken: Queer Theory’s Affective Turn
2. Why Aren’t We Minding Our Own Shoes? On Empathy
3. Words as Weapons: The Tyranny of Vulnerability
4. If Reason Went Viral: Rethinking Vulnerability in Covid-19 Culture
Conclusion: For a Feminist Neo-Enlightenment
Notes
Pre-publication praise for Against Affect:
“For progressives, a moment of truth arrives when their battles against old dogmas merely prove to entrench new ones. In Against Affect Lisa Downing . . . throws down the gauntlet to everyone active in the humanities and social sciences today.”—Eric Heinze, author of The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech Is Everything
“This is a timely and deeply important book in which Lisa Downing offers up a concerted intellectual assault on affect theory—and the broader cultural turn to emotion—that should make even the most trenchant of advocates pay attention. This is not mere attack or deconstruction, however, but instead a clear and precise argument for the return of rationality, grounded in a feminist neo-enlightenment, to academia and Western culture more widely. Against Affect is not a book that can or should be ignored by anyone interested in navigating a route through present cultural challenges that is progressive but also grounded in reason.”—Darren Langdridge, author of Sexual Citizenship and Social Change: A Dialectical Approach to Narratives of Tradition and Critique
“An indispensable critique of the contemporary epistemic and affective terrain. Its proposal for a redistribution of reason is a crucial path out of this terrain. . . . The boldness of the diagnostic and critical dimensions of this argument leave the book with few peers.”—Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism
This edited collection of articles, including Lisa’s meditation on the ideals of freedom in counterintuitive bedfellows Ayn Rand and Michel Foucault, has appeared as a special issue of the journal Paragraph and as a stand-alone book. It also includes Lisa’s interview with Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom: Four Song of Care and Constraint (Vintage, 2022).
View/ buy here.
Description:
The articles in this volume take as their object the concept of freedom broadly – and of freedom of expression in particular – and view them through the lens of insights from modern critical theory and the continental philosophical tradition. Some articles revisit works of key theorists to shine fresh light on their conceptual understanding of “freedom”, examining how they articulate it and how they arrived at it in genealogical terms. Others link concepts and ideas from critical theory to live contemporary debates, such as those concerning online freedom, campus no-platforming, and so-called “cancel culture”, and use the tools of critical theory to nuance discourse surrounding these often sensationalized and polarizing topics. A critical awareness of how power operates in the deployment of the language of freedom – who is allowed to align themselves with that virtue along sexed, gendered, racialized, and class lines – permeates the articles.
Table of Contents:
‘Introduction’ – Lisa Downing
‘”Freeze Peach”: A Fruitful Formulation or a Recipe for Heated Discord?’ Followed by ‘A Response to Keith Reader’s “Freeze Peach”‘ – Keith Reader and Ian James
‘Author Functions and Freedom: “Michel Foucault” and “Ayn Rand” in the Anglophone “Culture Wars”‘ – Lisa Downing
‘Who Gets a Hearing? Academic Freedom and Critique in Derrida’s Reading of Kant’ – Naomi Waltham-Smith
‘Self-Critical Freedoms: White Women, Intersectionality and Excitable Speech (Judith Butler, 1997)’ – Lara Cox
‘Gender, Sex and Freedom: Testing the Theoretical Limits of the Twenty-First-Century “Gender Wars” with Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray – Lucy Nicholas & Sal Clark
‘On Freedom: The Dialogue’ – Lisa Downing in Conversation with Maggie Nelson.
Lisa has contributed a reflection on the contemporary state of feminism to this open access collection, edited by Yvette Taylor and beautifully illustrated by Samia Singh.
Drawing on her work in Selfish Women, Lisa reflects on the current state of female labour, leadership, and self-actualization in pandemic times.
The full publication can be downloaded for free here.
Some of the concepts introduced in Lisa’s writing have gained especial traction in academic and journalistic writing and have been applied in other sectors and fields.
A lexicon of the critical terms coined by Lisa can be found here.
Lisa’s tour of Scotland took in four cities over ten days from 1st-10th October. She visited Glasgow (Strathclyde University); Edinburgh (The University of Edinburgh and Lighthouse Books); Dundee (University of Dundee); and Stirling (University of Stirling).
Activities included: illustrated talks, Q&A sessions, book sales and signing, and networking events.
Dr Kate Mitchell, who was one of Routledge’s expert readers for the book and Lisa’s host in Glasgow, has written up a post about the book and the Q&A held at Strathclyde for the Strathclyde University Feminist Research Network’s blog. You can read the blog post by clicking here.
On 18th September, Lisa gave a day-time talk at UCD about Selfish Women, organized by the Geography Department, and then launched the book in the lovely city-centre independent bookshop, The Gutter Bookshop.
Locations and Dates – 2019
More details will be provided as they become available.
JULY
London: St. Barts Pathology Museum – Thursday 18th July, 5pm
SEPTEMBER
Ireland
Dublin: University College Dublin and The Gutter Bookshop – Wednesday 18th September.
UCD event – Geography Seminar Room – 1.00-2.00pm
Launch at The Gutter Bookshop – 6.30-8.00pm, The Gutter Bookshop, Cow’s Lane, Temple Bar, Dublin 8. See here and scroll down.
OCTOBER
Scotland Launch Tour
Glasgow: University of Strathclyde – Wednesday 2nd October, 3pm.
Venue: Room 319 McCance Building.
Eventbrite page here – please register for a free ticket.
Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh – Thursday 3rd October, 4pm.
Venue: The Practice Suite at Chrystal Macmillan Building (room 1.12 on the 1st floor).
Eventbrite page here – please register for a free ticket.
Dundee: University of Dundee – Monday 7th October, 4pm.
Venue: Tower Building, Baxter 1.36.
All Welcome.
Stirling: University of Stirling – Wednesday 9th October, 4pm.
Hosted by the 2019-20 Literature and Languages Research Seminar Series.
Venue: Pathfoot C23.
NOVEMBER
Oxford: St Cross College – Friday 22nd November, 5.45 pm
Details here.
DECEMBER
Nottingham: Nottingham Trent University – Tuesday 10th December.
2020
USA Tour:
SEPTEMBER
Owing to COVID-19, regretfully, Lisa’s planned 2020 US tour was cancelled.
Her scheduled talk at University of Buffalo took place virtually by Zoom on 17th September.
On 18th July, Lisa launched Selfish Women at St Bart’s Pathology Museum.
On 17th July Lisa chaired a panel debate on “Wellbeing and Freedom of Expression in a Prevent Culture” to accompany Navine G. Khan-Dossos’s exhibition “There Is No Alternative” at The Showroom in Paddington, London.
The panel members, along with Lisa, were Dr Shazad Amin (CEO of MEND and retired Consultant Psychiatrist), Dr Jonathan Hurlow (Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, Birmingham) and Professor Basia Spalek (Visiting Professor of Conflict Management, University of Derby).
The discussion focused on the following three broad issues: (1) impact on the mental health of those having to participate in the strategy, often against their own conscience (GPs, psychiatrists, teachers, social workers, police); (2) impact on the collective mental health of the nation of living under conditions of impaired freedom of expression; (3) impact on gender / race stereotyping and unconscious bias involved in Prevent reporting and counter-terrorism more generally. There was a strong audience presence and interactive discussion.
