Yet recent thinkers have expressed deep reservations about the concept and the term has become marginalized in the humanities and social sciences.Eschewing this ...

This is a book for all those fascinated by the state of politics, critical thinking, and the plight of the individual in the 21st century.

This article takes two supposedly emergent genres of contemporary fiction – »autofiction« and the »theory novel« – and holds them up to a critical scrutiny made possible through close analysis of Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1941 essay »Epic and Novel.« Bakhtin’s principle of the heteronomy of novelistic discourse anticipates such formal developments and suggests, rather, a nonformal definition of the novel in terms of the thought of which it is capable.

This essay offers a critique of the philosophical ‘turn to affect’, a formation represented here by the work of Brian Massumi and Mark Hansen. In such discourses, affect is celebrated as an entity that is inimical to conceptualisation, subjective intention and linguistic transcription. However, insofar as it boasts such qualities, affect cannot, I argue, be celebrated or made the object of a critical ‘turn’. In drawing on Deleuze's work, contemporary scholarly discourses on affect dispense with Deleuze's most profound proposition: of (...) an order of philosophy, perception, reflection and thought that originates outside, or is no longer dependent upon, a human perspective. (shrink)