Chapter 4 - Embodiment and Affect

Summary

This chapter examines the implications of theories of affect and embodiment for posthumanism. It argues that the recognition of bodies as fluid, co-composed, material and relational constitutes a crucial site for the emergence of the posthumanities.  After examining the impact of Spinoza on Western ontologies of the body via Gilles Deleuze, the chapter addresses the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences and its consequences for how we understand affect, embodiment and the human. From affect as autonomous intensity to the cultural politics of affect to queer theories of embodiment in, this chapter shows how theories of affect and embodiment leads to the limits of the human and humanist knowledge production. This question of bodies, however, also exposes problems in the desire to move ‘beyond the human,’ when many racialized bodies were never fully counted as human. Scholars discussed include Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, Anna Gibbs, Erin Manning, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Dana Luciano, Mel Chen, Eliza Steinbock, Zakkiyah Jackson and Jasbir Puar.