Articles by Lauren Guilmette
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 35.3, 2021
Stable link for color images and image descriptions (PDF is in black and white): https://laurengu... more Stable link for color images and image descriptions (PDF is in black and white): https://laurenguilmette.wordpress.com/fear-and-desiring-in-the-age-of-paranoia-jsp-35-3-2021-images-and-image-descriptions/
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 Guilmette introduces the value of an image-text format, inspired by a multimedia example from Brennan's unpublished papers.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.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2019
This essay engages the late feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan in conversation with William Jame... more This essay engages the late feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan in conversation with William James on 'energetics' and 'living attention'. Brennan should be prominent in what has been called the 'affective turn'; yet, due to her untimely death, she remains peripheral. Against this trend, Shannon Sullivan (2015) recently appealed to Brennan's Transmission of Affect (2004) to supplement James on emotion, recalibrating the sense of energetic relationality at times obscured by Victorian individualistic tropes. I extend Sullivan's claim to consider how Brennan builds upon a Jamesian discourse of 'energy' to describe the concrete possibilities of-and structural obstacles to-solidarity, with concern for the circulation of affects through relations that energize some and drain others. While Brennan rarely references James, her papers in Brown's Feminist Theory Archive show that she read him actively in her last years, planning to write her next book on "consciousness." It is less surprising, then, that Brennan's theories would resonate with Jamesian ideas, and I develop this resonance in Brennan's published work.
differences, 2019
This article comes from my research in the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University, where I s... more This article comes from my research in the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University, where I studied the published and unpublished papers of the late feminist Teresa Brennan (1952-2003) on what she called the "Age of Paranoia." My first section turns to Brennan’s critical uses of Freud, Klein, and Lacan, while my second section deepens Brennan’s socio-historical theory of paranoia with reference to her unpublished work. Third and lastly, I reflect on the value of Brennan’s theories of paranoia in particular and affect more broadly for responding to our present “post-truth” impasse, in what I believe she would deem an all-the-more paranoid age. At the turn of the millennium, Brennan discerned a politics of personal feeling that has in the fifteen years since her death entrenched itself further through social media and customer favorites, among other forms. Paranoia interprets signs in relation to oneself, premised on the shoring up of self-importance through these forms. While Brennan has been largely overlooked in the twenty-first-century turn to affect in the humanities, her insights into socio-historical paranoia belong in dialogue with the more prominent work of, for instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on paranoid reading and Brian Massumi on the logic of threat.
philoSOPHIA, 2019
This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s (2004) work on the forgetting of affect transmission in ... more This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s (2004) work on the forgetting of affect transmission in conjunction with Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) 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 (1994) 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 (posthumously) 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 (2008). 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.
Full program for the 11th Annual philoSOPHIA Conference, organized and co-hosted this year by Lau... more Full program for the 11th Annual philoSOPHIA Conference, organized and co-hosted this year by Lauren Guilmette and Robert Leib at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, FL), March 30-April 1st, 2017; Keynote: Sara Ahmed; Plenary Speakers: Jane Caputi, Kyoo Lee, Devonya Havis, Shelley Tremain, and Ladelle McWhorter.
Please see the event flyers for the 11th Annual philoSOPHIA Conference, organized and co-hosted t... more Please see the event flyers for the 11th Annual philoSOPHIA Conference, organized and co-hosted this year by Lauren Guilmette and Robert Leib at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, FL), March 30-April 1st, 2017; Keynote: Sara Ahmed; Plenary Speakers: Jane Caputi, Kyoo Lee, Devonya Havis, Shelley Tremain, and Ladelle McWhorter.
Full Conference Program is forthcoming!
Papers by Lauren Guilmette
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking
The Disability Bioethics Reader, Apr 7, 2022
Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, 2018
differences, 2019
This essay engages the published and unpublished writings of the late feminist theorist Teresa Br... more This essay engages the published and unpublished writings of the late feminist theorist Teresa Brennan (1952–2003) on paranoia as a sociohistorical tendency, following the author’s study of her papers housed in the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University. Explicating some of Brennan’s archival papers, this article contextualizes Brennan’s inquiry with her theoretical influences in Freud, Klein, and Lacan. The essay concludes by reflecting on Brennan’s insights for the present “post-truth” political impasse, a discourse of personal feeling for which her theory provides productive critical tools.
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2020
This article considers Lisa Feldman Barrett's challenge to Darwin's claim—popularized by Paul Ekm... more This article considers Lisa Feldman Barrett's challenge to Darwin's claim—popularized by Paul Ekman's cross-cultural studies—that facial expressions are intelligible across the species. Barrett considers how Ekman's research expectations normalize Eurocentric gestures; she proposes that emotions are not hardwired but constructed in a dynamic interplay of interpretation and prediction. Drawing connections between this argument and decolonial feminist challenges to prominent Western accounts of what it means to be human—including Sylvia Wynter on the "ethnoclass of Man" and Sianne Ngai on racialized and feminized "animatedness"—this article explores what assumptions might underpin claims of affective intelligibility across cultures, and develops concepts toward a decolonial feminist affect theory.
50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, 2019
Critically Sick: New Phenomenologies of Illness, Madness, and Disability, 2020
Musing for Puncta special issue "Critically Sick: New Phenomenologies Of Illness, Madness, And Di... more Musing for Puncta special issue "Critically Sick: New Phenomenologies Of Illness, Madness, And Disability"
philoSOPHIA, 2017
As it is known, a doctor enjoys certain privileges with a sick person that nobody dreams of conte... more As it is known, a doctor enjoys certain privileges with a sick person that nobody dreams of contesting.. .. His face was distorted, betraying extraordinary excitement. "I beg you to leave me alone," I said to him. "You are killing me!" "Mademoiselle," he answered, 'I'm asking you for just one minute, and it will be finished.' His hand was already slipping under my sheet and coming to a stop at the sensitive place. It pressed upon it several times, as if to find there the solution to a difficult problem. It did not leave off at that point! ! !-Herculine Barbin, My Memoirs, 68
University of Illinois Press, 2017
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2013
This article considers how the affective turn in queer theory has been a turn away from Foucault ... more This article considers how the affective turn in queer theory has been a turn away from Foucault and argues for a Foucauldian ethics of curiosity, looking to his strange prefaces-without-texts following an impasse in the Sexuality project. These reorienting outlines and abandoned analytics invite the reader to use them in resisting toxic patterns of thinking and feeling, revealing new scripts, relational virtualities, and attending with “care” to “what exists and what might exist,” to that which has been cast off in rendering ourselves intelligible.
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Articles by Lauren Guilmette
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.
Full Conference Program is forthcoming!
Papers by Lauren Guilmette
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.
Full Conference Program is forthcoming!