Shiloh Whitney | Fordham University (original) (raw)
I’m a critical phenomenologist and feminist philosopher leading efforts to theorize affective injustice and emotional labor.
My permanent position is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. In 2021/2022 I was a Fellow at the University of Connecticut's prestigious Humanities Institute. I did my doctorate at McGill University (under Alia Al-Saji’s supervision, and working with Lisa Guenther).
My current book project on affective injustice aims to theorize uniquely affective varieties of injustice: just as epistemic injustices concern knowledge and credibility, affective injustices concern emotions and affective influence. Beginning with a study of the phenomenon of anger gaslighting as a paradigm case, I develop concepts for identifying and evaluating affective inustices and our agency to intervene in them. Affective life, I argue, is a powerful site of political struggle. My article "Affective Intentionality and Affective Injustice" is a key publication; also look for my article "Anger and Uptake" in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, and my article on "Anger Gaslighting and Affective Injustice" in Philosophical Topics' issue on affective injustice.
My published work on affective and emotional labor (“Byproductive Labor” in Philosophy and Social Criticism is a key publication) is in service to the larger research goal of developing an ameliorating the concept of emotional labor. Pushing back against gatekeepers who warn of the concept creep of “emotional labor,” I aim instead to support the expanding feminist usage of the term by building the theoretical framework of affective economies and affective injustice that it requires. Emotional work is not only an important site of exploitation, but a uniquely affective variety of agency through which we can resist affective injustice and build a more just and caring world.
My published work on French thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Fanon (“Affective Intentionality and Affective injustice” and “From the Body Schema to the Historical-Racial Schema” are key publications) contributes to the emerging area of Critical Phenomenology by developing the phenomenological theory of the body schema into a theory of affect, and by offering a critical phenomenology of uniquely affective forms of injustice. I am also working on a paper contributing to the area-defining work in critical phenomenology by thinking about the role of emotional work in critical phenomenological method, arguing that the critical turn in phenomenology should be an affective turn: critical phenomenology’s shift in object of inquiry requires the cultivation of uniquely affective phenomenological methods.
My work can be found in Philosophical Topics, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Chiasmi International, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and PhaenEx, among others. Look for my contribution in the Northwestern University Press edited collection 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, as well as Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives.
Please reach out if you’d like me to give a talk at your institution on affective injustice, emotional labor, or critical phenomenology! It’s best to use my email (swhitney[at]fordhma[dot]edu), since I check my academial.edu messages infrequently.
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Papers by Shiloh Whitney
Philosophical topics, 2023
Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this p... more Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this paper, I analyze the case of anger gaslighting, using it as a paradigm case to argue that gaslighting can be an affective injustice (not only an epistemic one). Drawing on Marilyn Frye, I introduce the concept of “uptake” as a tool for identifying anger gaslighting behavior (persistent, pervasive uptake refusal for apt anger). But I also demonstrate the larger significance of uptake in the study of affective injustice: just as the concept of credibility names the epistemic behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an epistemic being, the concept of uptake names the uniquely affective cooperative behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an affective being. I answer Miranda Fricker’s epistemic notion of a prejudicial credibility economy with the affective notion of prejudicial uptake economies: uptake, like credibility, can be produced in a deficit for one social group relative to a surplus for another. Deviating from the parallels with Fricker, for whom the injustice of epistemic injustice is due to prejudice in the motives or character of individuals, as well as from accounts that ground it in aptness or affective goods, I suggest that the injustice of anger gaslighting behavior can be located at the structural scale of power relationships between social groups, in the tradition of Iris Marion Young. Anger gaslighting behavior counts as unjust wherever it (re)produces prejudicial uptake economies. Adapting sociological concepts of feeling rules and the emotion work they demand, I introduce the concepts of “uptake rules” and “uptake work” to further enable analysis of uptake economies as affective social structures, and to suggest a site for resistant or reparative affective agency.
Philosophical Topics, 2023
Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this p... more Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this paper, I analyze the case of anger gaslighting, using it as a paradigm case to argue that gaslighting can be an affective injustice (not only an epistemic one). Drawing on Marilyn Frye, I introduce the concept of “uptake” as a tool for identifying anger gaslighting behavior (persistent, pervasive uptake refusal for apt anger). But I also demonstrate the larger significance of uptake in the study of affective injustice: just as the concept of credibility names the epistemic behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an epistemic being, the concept of uptake names the uniquely affective cooperative behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an affective being. I answer Miranda Fricker’s epistemic notion of a prejudicial credibility economy with the affective notion of prejudicial uptake economies: uptake, like credibility, can be produced in a deficit for one social group relative to a surplus for another. Deviating from the parallels with Fricker, for whom the injustice of epistemic injustice is due to prejudice in the motives or character of individuals, as well as from accounts that ground it in aptness or affective goods, I suggest that the injustice of anger gaslighting behavior can be located at the structural scale of power relationships between social groups, in the tradition of Iris Marion Young. Anger gaslighting behavior counts as unjust wherever it (re)produces prejudicial uptake economies. Adapting sociological concepts of feeling rules and the emotion work they demand, I introduce the concepts of “uptake rules” and “uptake work” to further enable analysis of uptake economies as affective social structures, and to suggest a site for resistant or reparative affective agency.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2023
One of the narratives of anger as a pandemic emotion is not diagnostic, but celebratory: anger at... more One of the narratives of anger as a pandemic emotion is not diagnostic, but celebratory: anger at racial injustice made a social and political breakthrough during the pandemic. What this breakthrough narrative celebrates is that people who had previously been moved only to alarmed scrutiny of the anger itself and the project of quelling it began instead, not merely to approve of this anger, but to to be oriented and instructed by it, permitting the anti-racist anger of others to sensitize them to the insults and injuries that provoked it. The breakthrough narrative implies that anger is a moral sentiment that can be instructive, not only for the angry person herself, but also for others. This suggests a phenomenological puzzle: under what description of affective intentionality and its interpersonal and social triangulation would the breakthrough be possible? I draw on Marilyn Frye’s account of anger uptake and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body schema to give an account of the conditions of possibility for the breakthrough narrative. Along the way, I offer an account of uniquely affective hermeneutical injustices, the uniquely affective variety of power at stake in them, and the reparative gesture required to remedy them.
Chiasmi International, 2019
What resources does Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema offer to the Fanonian one? First I... more What resources does Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema offer to the Fanonian one? First I show that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema is already a theory of affect: one that does not oppose affects to intentionality, positioning them not only as sense but as force, cultivating affective agencies rather than constituting static sense content. Then I argue that by foregrounding the role of affect in both thinkers, we can understand the way in which the historical-racial schema innovates, anticipating and influencing feminist theories of the affective turn – especially Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The historical-racial schema posits the constitution of affective agencies on a sociogenic scale, and these affective economies in turn account for the possibility of the collapse of the body schema into a racial epidermal schema, a disjunction of affective intentionality Fanon calls “affective tetanization.” Quelles ressources l’analyse du schéma corporel faite...
https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/09/22/emotional-labor-and-affective-injustice/, 2021
Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives, 2021
Renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s work on “global care chains” tracks the phenomenon in whi... more Renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s work on “global care chains” tracks the phenomenon in which women from the Global South migrate thousands of miles for years at a time to serve as nannies and domestic workers in wealthier countries.¹ When Vicky Diaz² moved from her home in the Philippines to Los Angeles to care for Tommy, the two-year-old son of an affluent white family in Beverly Hills, she joined this migration pattern, one of the largest in human history.³ Some scholars in the social sciences refer to this as a second colonization, one that mines affective resources from the Global South...
***DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 15*** There's still time! CFP deadline for the International Merlea... more ***DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 15***
There's still time! CFP deadline for the International Merleau-Ponty Circle in New York City this fall has been extended.
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology
While Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception relies on the descriptive register of the body ... more While Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception relies on the descriptive register of the body proper, his Sorbonne lectures on child psychology investigate the genesis of the experience of a body as one's own. I demonstrate the uniqueness of Merleau-Ponty's account of the narcissistic affect and sociality involved in this developmental process, distinguishing his account vis-à-vis Wallon's and Lacan's studies of the mirror stage. I conclude that in Merleau-Ponty's account, (1) the experience of the body proper is not singular, but encompasses a range of phenomenological variation; and (2) the genesis of the body proper is not confined to the mirror stage. The production of bodily boundaries is an ongoing process identified not only with its advent in childhood, but also with adult emotional life. The boundaries between inner and outer domains of perception are not merely discovered, but must be negotiated and cultivated in the intercorporeal affective dramas of adult life.
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2018
I argue that there is an affective injustice in gendered and racialized oppression. To account fo... more I argue that there is an affective injustice in gendered and racialized oppression. To account for this, we must deny the opposition of affect and intentionality often assumed in the philosophy of emotion and the affective turn: while affect and intentionality are not opposed in principle, affective intentionality may be refused uptake in oppressive practices. In section 1, I read Merleau-Ponty's theory of the body schema as a theory of affect that accommodates my account of affective injustice and aligns with accounts of affect transmission and circulation in feminist philosophies of the affective turn. This is crucial for understanding Fanon's contribution to the theory of the body schema, in which it is susceptible to historical-racial " affective disorders. " In sections 2-4 I distinguish three types of affective injustice: affective marginalization, exploitation, and violence. In section 2 I develop an intersectional feminist account of this distinction drawing on Lorde and Lugones, and raising questions about the limits of framing the issue of affective injustice in terms of intentionality as opposed to a more psychoanalytic conceptual vocabulary that accommodates the displacement of affective force. In sections 3 and 4 I explore these affective injustices through an analysis of Fanonian concepts, showing how the theory of the body schema can accommodate not only affective intentionality but also the oppressive disjunction of affect and intentionality, as well as forms of affective injustice that exceed the oppressive disabling of sense-making and involve the exploitative and violent displacement of affective force.
50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology
While immanence and transcendence are positioned in existentialism and phenomenology as key conce... more While immanence and transcendence are positioned in existentialism and phenomenology as key concepts for describing the structure of experience, problematizing this distinction also emerges as a theme, especially in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. These three thinkers offer phenomenological accounts that rethink the immanence-transcendence distinction such that their relationship is not oppositional. Each reacts against the Sartrean treatment of the immanence-transcendence distinction as an agonism, a struggle for transcendence. Merleau-Ponty's work demonstrates that problematizing the immanence-transcendence distinction, especially in its agonistic Sartrean form, is necessary for a phenomenology of experience as embodied; Beauvoir's and Fanon's work demonstrates that problematizing this distinction is necessary for a phenomenology of gendered and racialized oppression.
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2018
My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I dev... more My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of the phenomenology of various affective labor practices in dialogue with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I motivate my theory in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, engaging the post-Marxist literature on affective and immaterial labor and emphasizing feminist critiques. I argue that affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. I make three central claims: (1) affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker, (2) the unique kind of affective expenditure I call “byproductive” (metabolizing affective surplus, containing affective waste, and producing depleted affective agency) is a defining feature of affective labor not circumscribed by the productive-reproductive distinction, and (3) the marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency constituted through the intersections of this labor with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class are themselves byproducts of affective labor. Thus, theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and marginalization.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy
This paper explores the dangers of exploitation that are unique to affective labor. I suggest tha... more This paper explores the dangers of exploitation that are unique to affective labor. I suggest that in order to understand the risks of exploitation indigenous to affective labor, we must consider the way in which the production of affects functions according to at logic of transmission and amplification rather than use and exchange. Following Encarnacion Gutierrez-Rodriguez and Audre Lorde, I propose a metabolic model of “affective indigestion” for theorizing the potential for exploitation endemic to affective labor. Drawing on Lorde’s account of anger as an indigestible affective byproduct of metabolizing racist hatred, and Fanon’s account of “affective ankylosis,” I explore the connection of exploitative affective labor and racialization.
Knowledge Cultures
Frantz Fanon's critical adaptation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body schema to descri... more Frantz Fanon's critical adaptation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body schema to describe the operations of colonial racism and the lived experience of racialization are well known. Less widely remarked upon is the role of affect in Fanon's account of racialization in Black Skin, White Masks. Colonial racism, in Fanon's account of it, operates not only through the influence of the historical racial schema, but also through "affective disorders." In this paper, I foreground this affective dimension of Fanon's project, offering a reading of how affect operates in Fanon's account of racialization. I position Fanon's analysis of racializing body schemas alongside his analysis of racializing affects, showing how these apparently disparate threads of his account must be understood together. Emphasizing Fanon's analysis of colonial racism as "negrophobia," I draw on psychoanalytic accounts of horror as the unique affect of phobia in order to argue that the crucial racializing affect in his account is not Sartrean shame, but horror. I compare Fanon's phenomenology of racialization with a similar one offered by Audre Lorde in her essay "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger." I analyze in each the unique operation of racializing horror, and reread Fanon's notion of the historical racial schema in terms of a uniquely affective dimension of racializing power.
PhaenEx Vol 7, No 2 (2012)
I begin by reviewing recent research by Merleau-Ponty scholars opposing aspects of the critique o... more I begin by reviewing recent research by Merleau-Ponty scholars opposing aspects of the critique of Merleau-Ponty made by Meltzoff and colleagues based on their studies of neonate imitation. I conclude the need for reopening the case for infant self-other indistinction, starting with a re-examination of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of indistinction in the Sorbonne lectures, and attending especially to the role of affect and to the non-exclusivity of self-other distinction and indistinction. In undertaking that study, I discover the importance of understanding self-other distinction and indistinction in terms of their affective significance. For Merleau-Ponty, self-other indistinction is a virtual or imaginary participation in others’ orientations that he defines as an affective phenomenon. Further, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the advent of the body proper—the aspect of the body image that circumscribes the body as a distinct and private space—theorizes it as an affective innovation. Rather than being a fact of which we at first are ignorant and gradually grow to recognize, distinction from others in the sense that is important to Merleau-Ponty is a situation that must be cultivated and maintained through the negotiation of affective intimacy. Understanding indistinction and distinction in terms of the affective forces that sustain them explains how it is possible for them to coexist.
Theories of the liberal tradition have relied on independence as a norm of personhood. Feminist t... more Theories of the liberal tradition have relied on independence as a norm of personhood. Feminist theorists such as Eva Kittay in Love’s Labor have been instrumental in critiquing normative independence. I explore the role of corporeal vulnerability in Kittay’s account of personhood, developing a comparison to the role it plays in Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. Kittay’s crucial contribution in Love’s Labor is that once we acknowledge the facts of corporeal vulnerability, we must not only acknowledge but affirm dependency in a genuinely inclusive affirmation of personhood. While endorsing Kittay’s “dependency critique”, I discover difficulties that beleaguer Kittay’s development of new norms of personhood. I trace these to a constitutive exclusion determining how Kittay’s argumentative method engages its context in the liberal tradition, revealing a dependency of Kittay’s account on a crucial premise of the model it resists. I argue that in order to affirm dependency in a manner that departs more thoroughly from the criticized aspects of liberal personhood, we must cease to position it in a dichotomy of power and vulnerability. I suggest that attending to the corporeality of vulnerability can aid us in developing the terms of a discourse affirming relational personhood while undermining that dichotomy.
Teaching Documents by Shiloh Whitney
Office: Lowenstein 913A Office hours: Mondays & Thursdays 4:00-6:00pm
Philosophical topics, 2023
Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this p... more Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this paper, I analyze the case of anger gaslighting, using it as a paradigm case to argue that gaslighting can be an affective injustice (not only an epistemic one). Drawing on Marilyn Frye, I introduce the concept of “uptake” as a tool for identifying anger gaslighting behavior (persistent, pervasive uptake refusal for apt anger). But I also demonstrate the larger significance of uptake in the study of affective injustice: just as the concept of credibility names the epistemic behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an epistemic being, the concept of uptake names the uniquely affective cooperative behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an affective being. I answer Miranda Fricker’s epistemic notion of a prejudicial credibility economy with the affective notion of prejudicial uptake economies: uptake, like credibility, can be produced in a deficit for one social group relative to a surplus for another. Deviating from the parallels with Fricker, for whom the injustice of epistemic injustice is due to prejudice in the motives or character of individuals, as well as from accounts that ground it in aptness or affective goods, I suggest that the injustice of anger gaslighting behavior can be located at the structural scale of power relationships between social groups, in the tradition of Iris Marion Young. Anger gaslighting behavior counts as unjust wherever it (re)produces prejudicial uptake economies. Adapting sociological concepts of feeling rules and the emotion work they demand, I introduce the concepts of “uptake rules” and “uptake work” to further enable analysis of uptake economies as affective social structures, and to suggest a site for resistant or reparative affective agency.
Philosophical Topics, 2023
Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this p... more Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt herself about her anger. In this paper, I analyze the case of anger gaslighting, using it as a paradigm case to argue that gaslighting can be an affective injustice (not only an epistemic one). Drawing on Marilyn Frye, I introduce the concept of “uptake” as a tool for identifying anger gaslighting behavior (persistent, pervasive uptake refusal for apt anger). But I also demonstrate the larger significance of uptake in the study of affective injustice: just as the concept of credibility names the epistemic behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an epistemic being, the concept of uptake names the uniquely affective cooperative behavior whereby we take someone seriously as an affective being. I answer Miranda Fricker’s epistemic notion of a prejudicial credibility economy with the affective notion of prejudicial uptake economies: uptake, like credibility, can be produced in a deficit for one social group relative to a surplus for another. Deviating from the parallels with Fricker, for whom the injustice of epistemic injustice is due to prejudice in the motives or character of individuals, as well as from accounts that ground it in aptness or affective goods, I suggest that the injustice of anger gaslighting behavior can be located at the structural scale of power relationships between social groups, in the tradition of Iris Marion Young. Anger gaslighting behavior counts as unjust wherever it (re)produces prejudicial uptake economies. Adapting sociological concepts of feeling rules and the emotion work they demand, I introduce the concepts of “uptake rules” and “uptake work” to further enable analysis of uptake economies as affective social structures, and to suggest a site for resistant or reparative affective agency.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2023
One of the narratives of anger as a pandemic emotion is not diagnostic, but celebratory: anger at... more One of the narratives of anger as a pandemic emotion is not diagnostic, but celebratory: anger at racial injustice made a social and political breakthrough during the pandemic. What this breakthrough narrative celebrates is that people who had previously been moved only to alarmed scrutiny of the anger itself and the project of quelling it began instead, not merely to approve of this anger, but to to be oriented and instructed by it, permitting the anti-racist anger of others to sensitize them to the insults and injuries that provoked it. The breakthrough narrative implies that anger is a moral sentiment that can be instructive, not only for the angry person herself, but also for others. This suggests a phenomenological puzzle: under what description of affective intentionality and its interpersonal and social triangulation would the breakthrough be possible? I draw on Marilyn Frye’s account of anger uptake and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body schema to give an account of the conditions of possibility for the breakthrough narrative. Along the way, I offer an account of uniquely affective hermeneutical injustices, the uniquely affective variety of power at stake in them, and the reparative gesture required to remedy them.
Chiasmi International, 2019
What resources does Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema offer to the Fanonian one? First I... more What resources does Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema offer to the Fanonian one? First I show that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema is already a theory of affect: one that does not oppose affects to intentionality, positioning them not only as sense but as force, cultivating affective agencies rather than constituting static sense content. Then I argue that by foregrounding the role of affect in both thinkers, we can understand the way in which the historical-racial schema innovates, anticipating and influencing feminist theories of the affective turn – especially Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The historical-racial schema posits the constitution of affective agencies on a sociogenic scale, and these affective economies in turn account for the possibility of the collapse of the body schema into a racial epidermal schema, a disjunction of affective intentionality Fanon calls “affective tetanization.” Quelles ressources l’analyse du schéma corporel faite...
https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/09/22/emotional-labor-and-affective-injustice/, 2021
Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives, 2021
Renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s work on “global care chains” tracks the phenomenon in whi... more Renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s work on “global care chains” tracks the phenomenon in which women from the Global South migrate thousands of miles for years at a time to serve as nannies and domestic workers in wealthier countries.¹ When Vicky Diaz² moved from her home in the Philippines to Los Angeles to care for Tommy, the two-year-old son of an affluent white family in Beverly Hills, she joined this migration pattern, one of the largest in human history.³ Some scholars in the social sciences refer to this as a second colonization, one that mines affective resources from the Global South...
***DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 15*** There's still time! CFP deadline for the International Merlea... more ***DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 15***
There's still time! CFP deadline for the International Merleau-Ponty Circle in New York City this fall has been extended.
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology
While Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception relies on the descriptive register of the body ... more While Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception relies on the descriptive register of the body proper, his Sorbonne lectures on child psychology investigate the genesis of the experience of a body as one's own. I demonstrate the uniqueness of Merleau-Ponty's account of the narcissistic affect and sociality involved in this developmental process, distinguishing his account vis-à-vis Wallon's and Lacan's studies of the mirror stage. I conclude that in Merleau-Ponty's account, (1) the experience of the body proper is not singular, but encompasses a range of phenomenological variation; and (2) the genesis of the body proper is not confined to the mirror stage. The production of bodily boundaries is an ongoing process identified not only with its advent in childhood, but also with adult emotional life. The boundaries between inner and outer domains of perception are not merely discovered, but must be negotiated and cultivated in the intercorporeal affective dramas of adult life.
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2018
I argue that there is an affective injustice in gendered and racialized oppression. To account fo... more I argue that there is an affective injustice in gendered and racialized oppression. To account for this, we must deny the opposition of affect and intentionality often assumed in the philosophy of emotion and the affective turn: while affect and intentionality are not opposed in principle, affective intentionality may be refused uptake in oppressive practices. In section 1, I read Merleau-Ponty's theory of the body schema as a theory of affect that accommodates my account of affective injustice and aligns with accounts of affect transmission and circulation in feminist philosophies of the affective turn. This is crucial for understanding Fanon's contribution to the theory of the body schema, in which it is susceptible to historical-racial " affective disorders. " In sections 2-4 I distinguish three types of affective injustice: affective marginalization, exploitation, and violence. In section 2 I develop an intersectional feminist account of this distinction drawing on Lorde and Lugones, and raising questions about the limits of framing the issue of affective injustice in terms of intentionality as opposed to a more psychoanalytic conceptual vocabulary that accommodates the displacement of affective force. In sections 3 and 4 I explore these affective injustices through an analysis of Fanonian concepts, showing how the theory of the body schema can accommodate not only affective intentionality but also the oppressive disjunction of affect and intentionality, as well as forms of affective injustice that exceed the oppressive disabling of sense-making and involve the exploitative and violent displacement of affective force.
50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology
While immanence and transcendence are positioned in existentialism and phenomenology as key conce... more While immanence and transcendence are positioned in existentialism and phenomenology as key concepts for describing the structure of experience, problematizing this distinction also emerges as a theme, especially in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. These three thinkers offer phenomenological accounts that rethink the immanence-transcendence distinction such that their relationship is not oppositional. Each reacts against the Sartrean treatment of the immanence-transcendence distinction as an agonism, a struggle for transcendence. Merleau-Ponty's work demonstrates that problematizing the immanence-transcendence distinction, especially in its agonistic Sartrean form, is necessary for a phenomenology of experience as embodied; Beauvoir's and Fanon's work demonstrates that problematizing this distinction is necessary for a phenomenology of gendered and racialized oppression.
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2018
My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I dev... more My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of the phenomenology of various affective labor practices in dialogue with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I motivate my theory in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, engaging the post-Marxist literature on affective and immaterial labor and emphasizing feminist critiques. I argue that affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. I make three central claims: (1) affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker, (2) the unique kind of affective expenditure I call “byproductive” (metabolizing affective surplus, containing affective waste, and producing depleted affective agency) is a defining feature of affective labor not circumscribed by the productive-reproductive distinction, and (3) the marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency constituted through the intersections of this labor with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class are themselves byproducts of affective labor. Thus, theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and marginalization.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy
This paper explores the dangers of exploitation that are unique to affective labor. I suggest tha... more This paper explores the dangers of exploitation that are unique to affective labor. I suggest that in order to understand the risks of exploitation indigenous to affective labor, we must consider the way in which the production of affects functions according to at logic of transmission and amplification rather than use and exchange. Following Encarnacion Gutierrez-Rodriguez and Audre Lorde, I propose a metabolic model of “affective indigestion” for theorizing the potential for exploitation endemic to affective labor. Drawing on Lorde’s account of anger as an indigestible affective byproduct of metabolizing racist hatred, and Fanon’s account of “affective ankylosis,” I explore the connection of exploitative affective labor and racialization.
Knowledge Cultures
Frantz Fanon's critical adaptation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body schema to descri... more Frantz Fanon's critical adaptation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body schema to describe the operations of colonial racism and the lived experience of racialization are well known. Less widely remarked upon is the role of affect in Fanon's account of racialization in Black Skin, White Masks. Colonial racism, in Fanon's account of it, operates not only through the influence of the historical racial schema, but also through "affective disorders." In this paper, I foreground this affective dimension of Fanon's project, offering a reading of how affect operates in Fanon's account of racialization. I position Fanon's analysis of racializing body schemas alongside his analysis of racializing affects, showing how these apparently disparate threads of his account must be understood together. Emphasizing Fanon's analysis of colonial racism as "negrophobia," I draw on psychoanalytic accounts of horror as the unique affect of phobia in order to argue that the crucial racializing affect in his account is not Sartrean shame, but horror. I compare Fanon's phenomenology of racialization with a similar one offered by Audre Lorde in her essay "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger." I analyze in each the unique operation of racializing horror, and reread Fanon's notion of the historical racial schema in terms of a uniquely affective dimension of racializing power.
PhaenEx Vol 7, No 2 (2012)
I begin by reviewing recent research by Merleau-Ponty scholars opposing aspects of the critique o... more I begin by reviewing recent research by Merleau-Ponty scholars opposing aspects of the critique of Merleau-Ponty made by Meltzoff and colleagues based on their studies of neonate imitation. I conclude the need for reopening the case for infant self-other indistinction, starting with a re-examination of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of indistinction in the Sorbonne lectures, and attending especially to the role of affect and to the non-exclusivity of self-other distinction and indistinction. In undertaking that study, I discover the importance of understanding self-other distinction and indistinction in terms of their affective significance. For Merleau-Ponty, self-other indistinction is a virtual or imaginary participation in others’ orientations that he defines as an affective phenomenon. Further, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the advent of the body proper—the aspect of the body image that circumscribes the body as a distinct and private space—theorizes it as an affective innovation. Rather than being a fact of which we at first are ignorant and gradually grow to recognize, distinction from others in the sense that is important to Merleau-Ponty is a situation that must be cultivated and maintained through the negotiation of affective intimacy. Understanding indistinction and distinction in terms of the affective forces that sustain them explains how it is possible for them to coexist.
Theories of the liberal tradition have relied on independence as a norm of personhood. Feminist t... more Theories of the liberal tradition have relied on independence as a norm of personhood. Feminist theorists such as Eva Kittay in Love’s Labor have been instrumental in critiquing normative independence. I explore the role of corporeal vulnerability in Kittay’s account of personhood, developing a comparison to the role it plays in Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. Kittay’s crucial contribution in Love’s Labor is that once we acknowledge the facts of corporeal vulnerability, we must not only acknowledge but affirm dependency in a genuinely inclusive affirmation of personhood. While endorsing Kittay’s “dependency critique”, I discover difficulties that beleaguer Kittay’s development of new norms of personhood. I trace these to a constitutive exclusion determining how Kittay’s argumentative method engages its context in the liberal tradition, revealing a dependency of Kittay’s account on a crucial premise of the model it resists. I argue that in order to affirm dependency in a manner that departs more thoroughly from the criticized aspects of liberal personhood, we must cease to position it in a dichotomy of power and vulnerability. I suggest that attending to the corporeality of vulnerability can aid us in developing the terms of a discourse affirming relational personhood while undermining that dichotomy.
Office: Lowenstein 913A Office hours: Mondays & Thursdays 4:00-6:00pm
Office: Lowenstein 913A Office hours: Tuesdays & Fridays 4:00-6:00pm
This course is an introductory survey of major existentialist thinkers and topics. One of the pec... more This course is an introductory survey of major existentialist thinkers and topics. One of the peculiarities of the existentialist tradition is that many of its central figures grappled with philosophical questions, not only in more conventional philosophical prose, but also in fictional narrative: novels, plays, and short stories. Thus we will study the work of the central figures of French existentialism both through their philosophical prose and their fictional narratives. In addition to studying major texts, figures, and ideas from the existentialist tradition, we will reflect on the question of the relationship of existentialism and literature: what is the philosophical function for the existentialists of the fictional narratives they wrote?
Audio of my talk at CUNY on the demand for authenticity in affective labor. I critique the use of... more Audio of my talk at CUNY on the demand for authenticity in affective labor. I critique the use of authenticity as a framework for analyzing affective labor, suggesting instead a notion of affective agency that allows us to rethink emotions outside of the binary of sovereign and spontaneous versus forced or feigned.
Video of my talk at the 2014 Kristeva Circle at Vanderbilt University
