Laura Kipnis reviews Against Affect

Lisa Downing. Against Affect. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2026. 164pp.

20 August 2026

Lisa Downing’s program in her equable polemic Against Affect is to rescue and redistribute reason, if not necessarily to the masses then to those in the academic humanities who made the affective turn in the mid-1990s and haven’t found their way back.

Focusing on emotions, the body, and experience, affect theory has become, Downing says, the dominant episteme of our time, which is not to the collective good. The distinction between feeling and reason is obviously long-standing; Downing believes they don’t need to be opposed even if an enemies list of foundational thinkers from Plato on thought otherwise. Though she doesn’t mention the Romantics, they’d disagree too, but from the opposite corner.

More recent anti-Enlightenment critics want reason demoted because its exclusions (women, the unpropertied) fatally colluded in structures of gendered and racial privilege. As reason’s defender, Downing thinks this is a faulty analysis: nothing intrinsically connects forms of oppression like heteronormativity or colonialism with reason. It’s the proponents of feeling who are the covert authoritarians.

Besides which, if reason weren’t better and more powerful, eighteenth-century patriarchs wouldn’t have hogged it for themselves. Now the rest of us need to recuperate and democratize it, but a more mongrel version: a feminist Neo-Enlightenment. Women and people of color authored important Enlightenment projects, Dowing reminds us: these need to be reclaimed.

So, what stands in the way? One impediment is the work of affect theory’s founding spirit, Eve Sedgwick, whose influence spread across the theoretical humanities to the point of becoming a methodological norm. But the mistaken equation of “‘reparative feeling’” with collective liberation was a wrong turn, Downing argues (p. 20). Affect theory may style itself as counterhegemonic but has ultimately been more reactionary than progressive, aligned with the creeping neoliberalization of queer thought generally.

But who could tell? Affect theory came packaged in its own dense stylistics, which Downing gently mocks in pleasurably crisp prose. Under the auspices of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, difficult-to-follow allusions to flows and forces became a hallmark; Sedgwick’s influence produced writing so impressionistic—titles like “An Inventory of Shimmers” headed position statements—that no one knew what claims were being made.

For Downing, this centrality of emotive language amounts to intellectual blackmail, ushering us into the maw of cultural coercion—especially the insistence that words themselves can be “‘literal violence,’” a move deployed by all factions in campus cultural and political contestations (p. 4). (Leaning toward classical liberalism, Dowing herself favors freedom of speech.) Importantly, she wants us to think harder about the relation between the emotionalism of political phenomena like Brexit and MAGA and campus-held intellectual fashions that their partisans naively thought contested the rise of the authoritarian right. Rather, the imperative to feel and feel is one of the ways that neoliberal governance infiltrates everyday thinking.

So, is affect theory done, or is it reason we still need to guard against?

Allow me to turn briefly to personal experience, as that’s what we do these days. This is my second time writing for Critical Inquiry. The first time, in 1998, was life-changing. Lauren Berlant, a longtime coeditor of the journal before her death in 2021, was editing a special issue on “Intimacy.” We were at the time close friends, and she asked me to propose something for it related to the politics of feelings. Among our bonds was that we’d both had affairs, at different times, with the same married English professor whose wife had, in both cases, “somehow” found out, in my case recently. This had been the subject of much bitter mirth and hilariously brilliant (we thought) cotheorization regarding the norms of (and simultaneous resistance to) marital monogamy. It had long been said that Marxism lacked a theory of subjectivity; with the assistance of Freud, we saw our mission as rectifying the gap.

I said, completely jokingly, in response to the invite, “I’ll write about adultery!” Lauren insisted that I had to do it. I protested but finally did what I was told, striving to invent a fervid yet critical and Marxian-inflected theory about the exploited emotional labor and overpolicing of domestic coupledom. There was an apparently somewhat rancorous meeting of the CI editorial board about whether this was “a contribution to knowledge,” but the essay (titled “Adultery”) ran, became a bit notorious, and later evolved into my book Against Love: A Polemic (2003).

Though I entirely agree with Downing about the tyranny of vulnerability—we Against-ers must stick together—and though I was never more than a fellow traveler on the pleasure boats of affect theory, I think she overminimizes the intellectual and creative potential, and unpredictability, in those environs before “hurt feelings” ruled the roost (p. 69). Mining the emotional contradictions of lived experience supplied the objects for untried forms of intellection. Risks could be taken. No one knew where it would lead.

As far as returning to reason, is inverting the terms of aged binaries the only option? Downing admits she’s cynical about the search for novelty in the humanities. Still, if affect theory failed to break through sclerotic norms, if (as with queer theory generally) covert puritanism, identity checks, and personality cults made it boring and toothless, a volte-face to reason doesn’t exactly stir the blood. It’s like a sheepish retreat to the placidity of spouse and hearth when shortly ago thrilling new emotions ruled and different futures seemed momentarily possible.