•  2
    Heterogeneity Matters: Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, and Ethics in the Archives
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 13 (1): 41-49. 2023.
    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 infa…Read more
  •  18
    Wayward Fables, Poem-Life Experiments: Foucault and Hartman in the Archives
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 37 (3): 437-446. 2023.
    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…Read more
  •  5
    Fear and Desiring in the Age of Paranoia
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 35 (3): 217-242. 2021.
    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. Guilmette introduces the value of an image-text format, inspired by a multimedia example from Brennan's unpublished papers.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 W…Read more
  •  3
    Critically Anxious
    Puncta 3 (2): 23-26. 2020.
    Musing for Puncta special issue "Critically Sick: New Phenomenologies Of Illness, Madness, And Disability."
  •  496
    Expression, Animation, and Intelligibility: Concepts for a Decolonial Feminist Affect Theory
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 34 (3): 309-322. 2020.
    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…Read more
  •  526
    Teresa Brennan, William James, and the Energetic Demands of Ethics
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33 (4): 590-609. 2019.
    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 West…Read more
  •  1417
    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…Read more
  •  6
    Introduction
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2): 79-85. 2012.
  •  981
    The Violence of Curiosity
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 7 (1): 1-22. 2017.
  •  12
    Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding by Alexis Shotwell (review)
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 6 (1): 137-141. 2016.
  •  24
    Reading Butler Reading Beauvoir Reading Sade
    Philosophy Today 55 (Supplement): 292-301. 2011.
  •  158
    In What We Tend to Feel Is Without History: Foucault, Affect, and the Ethics of Curiosity
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28 (3): 284-294. 2014.
    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 …Read more