Foucault, Affect, History: On the Art of Feeling
Abstract
While the work of Michel Foucault has not generally been thought to engage in questions of affect, I argue that his work entails a meaningful engagement with such questions but in a way that challenges how we tend to think about affect. Drawing from Foucault’s oeuvre, I enter a series of dialogues with thinkers of affect, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Brian Massumi, in order to understand to what extent the turn to affect—especially for Sedgwick and Massumi—represents an attempt to work through a number of difficulties and tensions in Foucault’s thought and writing. I argue that Foucault is an insightful yet challenging interlocutor for affect theorists because of his understanding of the ethical dimensions of affect, and his historicization of separate modalities of relating to those areas of life and experience that belong to affect, emotion, and feeling. In this thesis, I aim to tease out that historicization in the form of two key historical modalities belonging to modern and ancient technologies of the self: the scientia affectus, which endeavours to decipher truth in emotion or affect, and the ars pathetica, which derives truth from feeling itself.