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Chapter 23 - Cartesian Affect

from III - Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2020

Alex Houen
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

In the widespread affective turn, with all its diverse claims for distributed cognition, embodiment, emergence, emotion, feeling, connectedness and shared animality or companionship with non-humans, there would seem to be one point of consensus: we are not Cartesian. We are not minds contingently or unfortunately housed in bodies; we are not brains in a vat, or ghosts in a body that is nothing more than a machine. If there is any ‘we’ or unity today it is perhaps defined by one point of consensus; there is no such thing as mind that is not an emergent property of a broader milieu of affect. In this chapter I want to make three claims. This broad consensus derives from Heidegger’s criticism of Descartes, and his argument that logic and subjectivity are effects of a comportment to the world. Second, what has not been so well discussed is that Heidegger’s criticism of Descartes nevertheless argues that there is a certain Cartesian comportment, or mood. Finally, it is the sense of loss of this Cartesian comportment – the fragility of Cartesian feeling – that typifies many twenty-first-century expressions of preliminary post-human mourning.

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Affect and Literature , pp. 425 - 443
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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