In the mid-1990s, some thinkers began to challenge the prevailing notion that our selves are largely constructed through language and turned to our bodies to make sense of how we build our worlds. In this video, the UK video essayist Lewis Waller examines what’s known as the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities. He traces how figures including the Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi and the US literary critic Eve Sedgwick looked to the embodied and visceral to help bridge Western philosophy’s mind-body divide and ‘think about ideas and matter at the same time’.
A brief dive into a dense topic, this short nonetheless makes for a provocative exploration of the interplay of physicality, emotion and identity. Embodied cognition seems intuitive, but philosophy can push it to some strange places From ‘The Second Sex’ to ‘Gender Trouble’ – Butler’s hat tip to de Beauvoir ‘Repulsion, at the core of attraction’ – on the paradox of touch Do we have good reasons to believe in beliefs? A radical philosophy of mind says no Henri Bergson on why the existence of things precedes their possibility I am, therefore I think – how Heidegger radically reframed being Why Romantic historians acknowledge the human feelings behind the facts It’s easy to get caught up in constructing our selves, but what does it cost us?
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