#antiessentialism

[findepartida]

And yet the intellectual antipathy toward nature and the natural has steadily been stretched to the point of incoherence. It is one thing to point out that certain ideas are bad and also taken for granted. It is another to conclude that they are bad because they are taken for granted—in other words, that anything taken for granted is an agent of domination.

Rita Feski, The Limits of Critique

[feelingpolitical]

it makes all the sense in the world that a ‘theory’ structured in the first place on vigilant antiessentialism will stringently require the sacrifice of qualitative differences among, in this case, different affects. The hygiene of current antiessentialism seemingly depends on rigorous adherence to the (erroneously machine-identified) model of digital, on/off representation: insofar as they are ‘theorized,’ affects must turn into Affect

Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame and the Cybernetic Fold” in Touching Feeling, 111