The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique

by Ruth Leys

In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their basic nature or workings.
 
Ruth Leys’s brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement. The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning. Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel.
 

Genres: Psychology

416 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2017

Reviews

[Tomás Narvaja · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best, more critical and carefully studied book on emotions you will ever read, at least for the next few years. One that is relevant to any and all fields that grapple with affect theory, emotions, or other similar phenomena. I have been eagerly waiting for Leys' book for quite a while and it did not disappoint. She is able to critically review and undermine the work surrounding the dominant understandings of emotion and affect both empirically and theoretically. I particularly appreciated her repudiation of the alternative constructionist theories proposed by scholars like James Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett. She provides a much stronger alternative, stemming from the work of Alan J. Fridlund. This is one that I find to resonate with Vicki Kirby's Quantum Anthropologies where she makes the claim that culture was really nature all along, among many others, as well as with Catherine Malabou's Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. The latter of which is particularly clear about the problem with looking for something "beneath the surface" and "more foundational," which is the exact same thing Fridlund challenges, but scholars like Russell and Barrett fail to take up. Other suggested authors who resonate with the theoretical and methodological approaches Leys is calling for include Karen Barad and Elizabeth Wilson. Lastly, despite the lack of coherence of much of the current theory and research, she also explains why these the work of Fridlund has not significantly been taken up (which even when taken up, is not taken up fully, thus undermining its value) and why the incoherent affect theory associated with Ekman and Tomkins remains dominant.

[learnedHamster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank u Ruth Leys