Affect
by
“Can the subaltern feel?” asks José Esteban Muñoz (2006, 677) in response to Gayatri Spivak’s well-known dictum “Can the subaltern speak?” According to Spivak (1988), the subaltern, a postcolonial variation of the Gramscian figure of the economically dispossessed, cannot speak, let alone know herself under the neocolonial structures of discourse she seeks to disrupt. But does this also preclude the subaltern from feeling? Muñoz’s provocative retort gets to the epistemological problem at the center of affect studies: Can knowing be felt, and is feeling a way of knowing? The Spivak-Muñoz relay unearths what Judith Butler (1986) names the “Cartesian ghost” haunting western epistemology. In feminist theory, the Cartesian ghost represents the residual though consequential split between mind (i.e., thought, philosophy, consciousness, activity) and body, whereby the former is revered, valued, endowed, and proudly managerial over the latter, which, since antiquity, has been coded as feminine (i.e., the passions, the passive, the body, the corporal, the flesh). Therefore, what affect circumscribes for feminist theorization is how masculine gender norms of western colonial thought emerge as the very “embodiment of denial” of the body (J. Butler 1986, 44). This will have a profound impact on the gender binary system (masculine/feminine), where the...
This essay may be found on page 15 of the printed volume.