IPP Workshop Series: Introducing Body Talk and Affect Theory (Maaike Hommes)

The body feels and shivers. The body feels before it may be aware.

This workshop introduces a topic that may resist theoretical reflection, and is, at the same time, highly theoretically mediated: the notorious question of how to talk of the body. To sum up different approaches to the body, Bruno Latour speaks of ‘body talk’, with which he refers to the various ways in which our own materiality is accounted for. This shall be problematized alongside an introduction of affect theory, which places emphasis on the ways in which preconscious experiences have a shared, social and historical dimension. This growing attention to the multiple ways in which bodily experience is culturally constructed as well as biologically registered is often called the ‘affective turn’. 

This workshop will not only introduce affect theory as an elusive field, but also situate the various ways in which affect is exposed through analysis. It aims to give a broad theoretical overview of the many entanglements between different schools of post-structuralist theory that can be seen to have contributed to the affective turn. Special attention is given to the politically motivated concerns within intersectional feminism, queer, crip and disability theory and critiques of neoliberalism, as well as ontologically formulated problems within posthuman thought and new materialism. While these terms may seem hard to navigate, this workshop aims to bring them together as different theoretical engagements with the materiality of the body, creating a first basis for a better theoretical understanding of the situatedness of what can be said is affect theory.

This workshop will be accessible five minutes before 14:00 through the following link:

https://uni-giessen.webex.com/meet/ipp20-21

Note: The sessions of the IPP Workshop Series are open for BA, MA and PhD students and the participants do not require any previous knowledge to take part.

Suggested Bibliography (not required): 

- Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, vol. 31, Telos Press, Oct. 1995.

- Seigworth Gregory J., Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers”, The Affect Theory Reader. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), Duke University Press, 2010.

// Maaike Hommes (IPP)