David Stubblefield, Senior Editor

While the humanities have traditionally privileged the realm of language and symbolic behavior, the contemporary affective turn has questioned this bias and raised important questions about the role of affective experience for embodied life. This turn can largely be conceived of as reaction to the perceived textualism and anti-realism of theories and movements which were heavily influential in the 1980’s and 1990’s. These theories include social constructionism, deconstruction, the linguistic turn, and semiotics. In the course of moving away from these lines of thought, the affective turn has positioned itself as a dramatic turn, intervention or even break away from the western notion of reason has underpinned much of history of humanities.

While there is much that is new about this turn and many theorists of affect have emphasized the novelty or even the discovery of affect, this chapter argues that affective experience has, in fact, always played a central role in western forms of thought. In particular, by providing a brief genealogy of the notion of affect and focusing on what I call the moral and romantic interpretation of affect, this chapter shows that a “decision on affect” has always been central to western thought.

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