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2020, The Immanent Frame - A Universe of Terms
A short essay on the intersection of affect theory and critical secularism studies. Originally published as part of The Immanent Frame's "A Universe of Terms" project. (http://tif.ssrc.org/2020/04/17/affect-schaefer/)
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Feeling Secular2009 •
In the past decade, ‘‘affect’’ has emerged as a keyword for queer and feminist studies – and beyond. The turn to affect is also a re-turn, with contemporary studies of affect drawing across rich earlier studies of emotion, feelings and sentiment. This article is less interested in offering a long history of affect studies than it is in asking: Why affect? Why now? As a provisional response this article situates the so-called ‘‘affective turn’’ (to use sociologist Patricia Clough’s term) in relation to the anxiety that secularists, including and especially secular intellectuals in the US academy, have had at the resurgence of religion post-1979. This anxiety, I suggest, formed in response not just to any religion, but to religion understood as ‘‘fundamentalist’’: 1979 is the date of the Iranian revolution, and also marks the emergence or re-emergence of a certain kind of US Christian fundamentalism. Jerry Falwell names his ‘‘Moral Majority’’ as such in 1979. These twinned emergences have shaken the epistemological foundations of large segments of the US academy for whom secularism has been and remains a kind of guiding sentiment. This article goes on to consider the political and epistemological stakes of the secular academy’s disidentification not just with religion, but feelings coded as ‘‘religious.’’ Rather than reject the allegedly contaminating affects of religious feelings, this article argues, scholars of gender and sexuality studies might profit from considering the places where religious and secular feelings ‘‘touch.’’ The case study for this analysis is Hell Houses, Evangelical theatrical performances that seek to scare young people to Jesus.
Religious Studies 50/2 (2014): 139-156
Emotion, Religious Practice, and Cosmopolitan SecularismPhilip Kitcher has recently proposed a form of ‘cosmopolitan secularism’ which he suggests could enable the members of a future secular society to continue to access and benefit from the moral and existential resources of the world’s religions. I criticise this proposal by appeal to contemporary work on the role of emotion and practice in religious commitment. Using the work of John Cottingham and Mark Wynn, two objections are offered to the cosmopolitan secularists’ claim that the moral resources of a religion could be both preserved by and employed within a secular society whose members lack emotional commitment to and practical engagement with the religions in question. I conclude that, pace Kitcher, cosmopolitan secularism cannot fulfil its promise to preserve the moral resources of religion in the absence of genuine religious traditions and communities.
2017 •
The above photograph appeared in the online edition of the German daily Der Tagesspiegel, in an article updated on September 21, 2012. The picture shows protesters in an unspecified German city who rallied against the release of the film “The Innocence of Muslims”, an antiIslamic film produced by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. The film was widely perceived to be offensive to Muslims and has stirred both violent and non-violent protests on a global scale. Protesters complained that the film ridiculed their belief, was deeply injurious, and perceived as dishonoring and demanded – amongst others things – the film be removed from the online platform YouTube. The controversy was further aroused when some Western commentators claimed the film was protected by the right to freedom of speech and expression. The banner shown in the photograph reading “No to the freedom to offend” represents a further development in this controversy, claiming that the right to freedom of speech and expression must...
South Asian History and Culture
Feeling religious – Feeling secular? Emotional style as a diacritical categoryPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
Religious zeal as an affective phenomenon2020 •
What kind of affective phenomenon is religious zeal and how does it relate to other affective phenomena, such as moral anger, hatred, and love? In this paper, I argue that religious zeal can be both, and be presented and interpreted as both, a love-like passion and an anger-like emotion. As a passion, religious zeal consists of the loving devotion to a transcendent religious object or idea such as God. It is a relatively enduring attachment that is constitutive of who the zealot is, and it expresses itself in a distinctive set of mental and behavioral dispositions. Most importantly, it motivates uncompromising actions and involves intense, hot, and deep emotions. As an anger-like emotion, religious zeal is an occurrent affective state of mind that is intentionally directed towards a specific (immanent) object, characteristically a person or group of persons. It condemns the violation of a religious norm that is taken to be of absolute validity and general applicability. It motivates...
This essay is an attempt to do an intellectual history, one of affect theory both within and without biblical studies, as an ecology of thought. It is an “archive of feelings,” a series of thematic portraits, and a description of the landscape of the field of biblical studies through a set of frictions and express discontentments with its legacies, as well as a set of meaningful encounters under its auspices. That landscape is recounted with a fully experiential map, one drawn with as much capacity for precision and self-relativizing as I can muster, and one that also intentionally relativizes those more dominant sources and traditional modes of recounting intellectual history. Affect theory and biblical studies, it turns out, both might be described as implicitly, and ambivalently, theological. But biblical studies has not only typically refused explicit theologizing, it has also refused explicit affectivity, and so affect theory presents biblical studies with both its own losses and new and vital possibilities.
Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture
The Politics of Affect: the Glue of Religious and Identity Conflicts in Social MediaAffect theory often overlooks decades of anthropological, feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarship on emotion. I build on this extensive scholarship of emotion and use my online ethnography of a Facebook group that promotes the public visibility of Christianity as a springboard to build a conceptual framework of the politics of affect. I address three theoretical gaps: 1) the lack of distinction between different emotions, 2) how affect is often performed for someone, and 3) the varying intensities of emotion. I delve into the intricate ways in which emotions fuel identities, worldviews, and their contestations, and how fake news may come to be perceived as affectively factual. This article deepens our understanding of the role of affect in polemic and mediatized conflicts. The role of emotion in religious conflicts and identity politics is not simply analytically useful, but is, at times, the very fabric of which political ideas are made.
2021 •
This article explores the emergent politics of the 21st century through an analysis of the interactions of media and religion in these relations. It argues that to fully understand the dynamics underlying the new forms of populism emerging across the globe, it is necessary to account for them as movements of religious nationalism encompassing race, gender, and nostalgia, made possible by modern media imaginaries. The article argues that disciplined and substantive work on religion remains a lacuna within media and cultural studies, and that its explorations provide an example of how such work could address this critical gap. It concludes by suggesting a specific theoretical approach rooted in its consideration of relations of religion and media: that we think of media texts that circulate in these discourses of religious nationalism as “affective infrastructures” that do important work in making unstable and contradictory imaginaries possible and weaponizing them to political purpose.
Christian von Scheve of the Freie Universitat Berlin interviews Donovan Schaefer on religious affects at the Affective Societies Collaborative Research Centre at FUB, November 2016. http://affective-societies.de/en/2016/collective/c02/an-interview-with-donovan-schaefer-on-religious-affects/
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