Lauren Guilmette

Placing pressure on what it means to “do” feminist philosophy, Feminist Making, Doing, and Sensing offers an innovative and critical rethinking of feminist philosophical practice and feminist philosophy as a disciplinary field of thought. The collection raises questions about how disciplines are made, how philosophy gets done, and the collaborative nature of thinking. Seeking to decenter disciplinary norms about content, authority, and belonging, this collection disrupts the status quo of feminist philosophy through its insistence on formal experimentation and creative methods as well as its refusal to take philosophy and its disciplinary attachments at face value. The essays argue for ways of thinking, making, and doing philosophy that are participatory, relational, somatic, affective, sonorous, and sensorial, often looking to experimental and art-based practices such as film, music, poetry, comedy, crocheting, and more. Meant to encourage a collaborative dialogue with readers, several essays conclude with prompts, exercises, and activities, inviting readers to participate in creative philosophical making alongside their own practices.

This interview, conducted over several months between Lauren Guilmette and Taylor (“Tay”) Rogers, in conversation with Amy Marvin, Qrescent Mali Mason, and Kelly Gawel, examines the creation and impact of a film that Rogers produced as part of their doctoral research in Continental philosophy. The film’s creation process is, itself, of interest to contemporary Continental philosophy: this process was collaborative, emergent, and based on music that Rogers composed. In the interview, the film’s philosophical import is explored, from its connections to canonical figures like Nietzsche and Lugones to emerging feminist voices in philosophy of humour, trans studies, critical race studies, and themes related to embodiment, grief, affect, and relational ontologies. Readers are introduced to research-creation as an arts-based practice of research that holds great, often untapped value for philosophical inquiry.

This interview, conducted over several months between Lauren Guilmette and Taylor (“Tay”) Rogers, in conversation with Amy Marvin, Qrescent Mali Mason, and Kelly Gawel, examines the creation and impact of a film that Rogers produced as part of their doctoral research in Continental philosophy. The film’s creation process is, itself, of interest to contemporary Continental philosophy: this process was collaborative, emergent, and based on music that Rogers composed. In the interview, the film’s philosophical import is explored, from its connections to canonical figures like Nietzsche and Lugones to emerging feminist voices in philosophy of humour, trans studies, critical race studies, and themes related to embodiment, grief, affect, and relational ontologies. Readers are introduced to research-creation as an arts-based practice of research that holds great, often untapped value for philosophical inquiry.

This essay draws upon Namita Goswami’s 2019 book Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory for the insights she brings to an ethics of archival encounters, particularly regarding the files of those whose only record is their judgment and/or objectification by existing dominant institutions. First, I briefly summarize some key insights, with attention to Goswami’s careful exegesis of Spivak. In the next section, I consider these postcolonial feminist questions about infamous women in conjunction with Saidiya Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” and in the third section, I explore the resonances of Goswami’s book with Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, a text also published in 2019 that shares Goswami’s commitment to the heterogeneous complexity of lives that overflow their often-dismissive records. In conclusion, I suggest some alternative formulations of subjectivity and agency suggested by this line of inquiry between Goswami and Hartman.

ABSTRACT This article explores Saidiya Hartman’s speculative mode of narration with respect to lives whose only record is their judgment by power. The author interprets her insights in productive tension with Michel Foucault’s concerns about the violent will-to-know and the possibility of conveying the poem-lives he finds in archives. Hartman’s method primarily diverges from Foucault by exploring the possibilities of literary close narration, that is, “critical fabulation.” While telling stories of “the nameless and forgotten” can neither change nor do justice to what happened, Hartman suggests that exploring these counterhistories contributes to what Foucault also called a “history of the present.”

This article develops the ongoing relevance of the late feminist theorist Teresa Brennan's thinking about affect in her posthumous book, The Transmission of Affect (2004). Guilmette introduces the value of an image-text format, inspired by a multimedia example from Brennan's unpublished papers. Experimenting with images as well as words, Guilmette explores Brennan's conceptual distinction between affect and feeling through its recent uptake by decolonial feminist and queer readers, as a turn from the Western emphasis on individual agency to consider instead the responsibility that follows from what is absorbed into our bodies and psyches, and how we discern, work through and, when needed, resist these energetic transfers.

In this article, I link Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion1 to decolonial perspectives that also challenge this universality of affect in cross-cultural facial expressions. After first outlining some of the present-day political stakes of these questions, I turn to Sylvia Wynter on the "ethnoclass of Man" in Western modernity, where she asks: how were concepts of not only being, truth, power, and freedom but also affect—the intelligibility of one's feelings toward others—framed by histories of colonial violence and refusals of imaginative identification?2 Wynter argues that the overrepresentation of the Western ethnoclass results in the naturalization of a limited and contingent mode of being as...

Teresa Brennan was born in 1952 in Australia and died in South Florida, following a hit-and-run car accident in December 2002. In the ten years between her doctorate and her death, Brennan published five monographs, the most famous posthumously. The Transmission of Affect begins with a question that readers often remember: “Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?” Here and throughout her work, Brennan challenges the self-contained subject of Western modernity, whose affects are presumed to be possessions of that self, underscoring the historical emergence of this egoic construction.I never met Teresa Brennan; I did not know her name until a decade after she...

This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s work on the forgetting of affect transmission in conjunction with Sylvia Wynter’s argument concerning the rise of Western Man through the dehumanization of native and African peoples. While not directly in dialogue, Wynter’s decolonial reading of Foucault’s epistemic ruptures enriches Brennan’s inquiry into this “forgetting,” given that callous, repeated acts of cruelty characteristic of Western imperialism and slavery required a denial of the capacity to sense suffering in others perceived as differently human. Supplementing Brennan with Wynter, we can better describe the limits of sympathy discourses as resting on identification and perceived sameness. In turn, Brennan comes to Wynter’s defense in her call for a new science of plural cultures to redefine the human, which some have interpreted as a positivist misreading of Frantz Fanon. Brennan and Wynter alike have been criticized for their appeals to science; yet, I defend their respective proposals for social-scientific inquiry with support from Brennan’s response to the 1996 Sokal Hoax: the influence of the social on the biological body is, indeed, difficult to study, but this does not invalidate the inquiry as such.

From these elements, however, genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events … in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles.In much of what has been called the “affective turn,” Michel Foucault has figured as a paranoid foil where he has been mentioned at all. Both continental feminists—influenced by Gilles Deleuze’s work on Spinoza and Nietzsche—and queer theorists—for whom affect presents an alternative to the normalizing ..