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Reading with Feeling: Affect Theory and the Bible
The psychological approach known as affect theory focuses on bodily feelings--depression, happiness, disgust, love--and can illuminate both texts and their interpretations. In this collection of essays scholars break new ground in biblical interpretation by deploying a range of affect-theoretical approaches in their interpretations of texts. Contributors direct their attention to the political, social, and cultural formation of emotion and other precognitive forces as a corrective to more traditional historical-critical methods and postmodern approaches, and response essays push the conversations into profitable directions for future research.
246 pages, Hardcover
Published November 20, 2019
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October 29, 2024
Introduction: Some Ways to Read with Feeling. Black and Koosed
DEF: Affect theory is a critically informed analysis of emotions and bodily sensations, one that resists any neatly bifurcated analysis of emotions as either interior states or as social-political conditions. Instead, affect theory refuses both essentialism and the linguistic turn that dominated so much of scholarship in the late twentieth century
Religions are not just sets of doctrine or theological tenets, intellectually affirmed. Religions move people in their bodies, sometimes alongside but sometimes counter to rational thought. Bodies touch, feel, sense, come together, and move apart as affects circulate. Affect theory gives us the conceptual tools to explore these movements, intensities, sensations.
AFFECTS
Material, physiological things,
Energetic dimension. Enhance and deplete.
Gregg: forces or intensities
They are the “things that happen,” the “stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (2).
Ahmed: affects work to shape the surfaces of bodies (individual and collective), drawing the inevitable political consequences of such shaping to the fore.
Ahmed’s affective archive: how words for feeling, and objects of feeling, circulate and generate effects: how they move, stick, and slide. We move, stick and slide with them
Affect theory attempts to articulate lived experience, as well as to appreciate how this experience leaves traces in the world
AFFECT EMERGING AT NEXUS OF SOMATIC, SOCIAL, POLITICAL
Its emergence as domain: two seminal essays
1. Sedgwick and Frank (who work with work of Tomkins, who coined affect as it relates to biological systems of stimulus-response)
Tomkins perceives affects as biological system that underlies emotion. Innate protocols hardwired into our body
Subject receives stimulus which triggers neural firing, the density of which determines which affective system is activated.
Yet the simple on/off switch of neuron does not result in any predictable affective arousal.
Complex, interleaving of endogenous and exogenous, perceptial, proprioceptive and interpretive–causes, effects, feedbacks, motives, long-term states such as moods and theories, along with distinc transitory physical or verbal events.
Affect theory therefore is not determinative but provides a way to think about the role of the body, particularly the role of drives that exceed cognition, in individual behavior and social interactions.
2. Massumi (works with Deleuze)
Here affect is not on/off switches, even unpredictable ones. Affects are becomings. Affects are what preexist all perception, cognition, and language; they preexist even the bodily sensations that we experience as emotions
Affect is the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact
Many biblical scholars who use affect theory tend to follow the Deleuzian path, since it lends itself well to the facilitation of inquiry into the bodily, cultural, and political markers of emotion and sensation.
In biblical studies, it’s slippery
“Affect theory does not yield a ‘method’ in the standard biblical-scholarly sense of the term. There is not even a ‘single, generalizable theory of affect’
1. Affect and Animality in 2 Sam 12: Ken Stone
SUMMARY: Ken Stone, for example, begins the volume with an essay grounded in Schaefer’s (2015) innovative work on affect theory, animality, and religion. Schaefer argues for the centrality of bodies in any understanding or definition of religion. Religion is not just about language—doctrine, sermon, text—but also about communities, objects, and other bodies. By focusing on bodily sensations, religion becomes not something that separates and divides humans from other animals, but something that binds all of our animal bodies together. Once Stone establishes a shared affective economy between people and (especially) their companion species, he brings those insights to a reading of 2 Sam 12—the parable of the ewe lamb used by Nathan to confront David over the Bathsheba-Uriah affair. Stone’s reading highlights the “circulation of women and animals as sticky affective objects” and hence uncovers a gendered power dynamic at work in the story and in how we read it.
Shaefer makes case for affect’s significance in religious studies. Says religious studies have fallen prey to linguistic fallacy that overemphasizes “language as the medium of power and the primary analytic focus of religious studies.” this fallacy leads to myth that where bodies go is fundamentally determined by language
Instead, religions should be understood in terms of the way things feel, the things we want, the way our bodies are guided through thickly textured, magnetized worlds…the way our bodies flow into relationships with other bodies and with clustered material forms, aspects of our embodied life, such as other bodies, food, community, labor, movement, music, sex, natural landscapes, architecture, and objects. He is expanding what gets called religion.
Shaefer also engages with animal studies
He opened his book with Goodall’s primate spirituality. Humans too have this, he says. By unlinking religion from language, it ceases to be a uniquely human phenomenon. Human religion might be animal. Blurring or dissolution of boundaries between humans and other animals.
Emotions and Bodies in 2 Sam 12
In 2 Sam 11 David fucks Bathsheba. To cover this and her pregnancy after Uriah refuses to fuck her, David arranges for him to be killed. Bathsheba laments this. Nathan is sent by YHWH to confront David
Nathan’s parable
Rich man has many flocks and cattle, poor man has small ewe lamb. Traveler comes to rich man but he won’t share. RIch man takes the poor man’s only ewe and prepares it. You are that man, Nathan says!
God will not kill David but his son. David pleads and fasts, stays on the ground. Child dies anyway. David gets up, anoints himself, eats.
Why different after child’s death–he lamented when there was chance to change God’s mind. Fasting now won’t bring him back. They have another son Solomon.
So much emotion here! Instability, imbalance, psychological portrait
Rather than reconstruct such inner states here, I reconsider 2 Sam 12 in terms of what we might call, borrowing from Sara Ahmed, “the sociality of emotions.”
This rejects psychologizing inside-out model, or, emotion as interiority. Rejects individualistic understanding of interior emotion. Rejects also outside-in model that says emotions come from outside.
Rather than conceptualizing emotions as moving inside out or outside in, or belonging to individuals, Ahmed prefers to emphasize the “circulation” of “objects of emotion.”
attachment and emotion in Ahmed’s view “create the very surfaces and boundaries that allow all kinds of objects to be delineated. The objects of emotion take shape as effects of circulation” (10). “Emotions are relational,” then, involving subjects, objects, and contacts with objects
AFFECT HERE: Affect involves the various ways in which our bodies are touched by other objects, including other bodies.
THESIS: Two animal bodies press in 2 Sam 12. The ewe lamb lies on the bosom of the poor man. As David had lied on Bathsheba. As they fuck after the death of Uriah. A kind of parallel is set up, then, between the lamb who lies on the poor man’s bosom in Nathan's story and the woman who lies with the king in the narrative of 2 Samuel. Linked by language of LYING ON THE BOSOM
Lasine analyzes the story as unrealistic sentimentality–says David overreacts because it’s a melodrama. He calls the story unrealistic. It is inappropriate to use the story as evidence of Israelite attitudes toward pets or of social customs
From Modern Pets to Israelite Companion Species
Donna Harroway moves us away from anachronism by speaking of conceptual framework of companion species. These include but are not identical to companion animals, those individual animals such as pets with whom many humans life and form affective bonds
Human nature and human cultures do not preexist such relationships. Individually and collectively, humans “become who they are” with other living and non-living entities in particular “situated histories, situated naturecultures”
Harroway says we are entangled with critters in specific contact zones
The use of a category such as companion species to read 2 Sam 12 serves as a check against glossing over the lamb as merely an insignificant element of the story. At the same time, it avoids focusing too narrowly on the sentimental relationship between an individual human character and an individual animal character in isolation from the larger context in which that relationship takes place.
Our interpretation of the affective relations between characters needs to take those naturecultures into account as well.
{survey of shepherds and sheep being close}
Affective Economies of Women and Sheep
SO TO RECAP the physical proximity of humans and sheep, and the particular characteristics of sheep, facilitate an emotional response to the ewe lamb’s story. BUT THERE IS MORE. THere are more affective objects circulating here!
Lamb is described like a daughter. Daughter, bat…Bathsheva.
He is consider the political economy of gender, kinship, and slavery, and animality, as an effective economy as well.
AFFECT, ANIMALITY, AND THE TRAFFIC OF WOMEN
What we find in these and other texts is thus both a political economy and an affective economy, in which women, children, slaves, and livestock circulate among men.
To return to Ahmed’s (2004c, 11) language, these circulating bodies become “sticky” “objects, which are “saturated with affects.” Affective relations develop between the men who are subjects of circulation and the objects they are circulating
In the story of David, of course, the affective relationships at play include the relationship between David and God.
Conclusion
SUMMARY I suggest that attention to both affect and animality allows us to make sense of David's reaction to the story of the poor man’s lamb in 2 Sam 12. Such a reading seems more felicitous to me than reducing David’s reaction to emotional imbalance or dismissing the poor man’s relationship to his lamb as a sentimental or even an unnatural relationship. But by linking Nathan's story and oracle, and David's reaction, to the circulation of women and animals as sticky affective objects, my reading also brings affect and animality into alignment with analyses of power and subordination found, for example, in feminist criticism. That Ahmed (2010, 13) associates her work with “feminist cultural studie
Echoes of How: Archiving Trauma in Jewish Liturgy by Koosed
SUMMARY: Koosed’s essay addresses the way in which phrases from Lamentations are found in Jewish Prayers. Using Ann Cvetkovich’s (2003) assessment of trauma, which cautions against a strictly medicalized understanding and instead recognizes how trauma creates new genres and cultures, Koosed argues that the Jewish prayer book is an “archive of feeling,” transmitting and transforming the experience of war, loss, and exile. She considers Jewish prayer as an act of collective recovery, through the making of community that transcends time and space as well as the bringing of the physical, emotional, and intellectual together as the body prays.
Opens with OPPOSITE OF AN ARCHIVE. I begin this essay not with the book of Lamentations or the siddur (Jewish prayer book) or with affect theory or an “archive of feeling” (Cvetkovich 2003) or any other archive, but with its opposite. Because it is in this knowledge—the knowledge of the fragility of our ideas, our products, and our bodies—that we write and strive to create archives to begin with.
Much of the HB is written in response to trauma. Suffering and survival of it was written into the Bible.
Within this literature of trauma, foremost is the book of Lamentations (Hebrew title is Eicha, “How.”
As a response to one historically situated trauma, Lamentations then moves forward carrying that trauma into a variety of other contexts. In Jewish ritual, appropriately enough, Lamentations is canted in its entirety on the holiday of Tisha bAv, the commemoration of the destruction of the 1st and 2ns Temples.
More subtly, though, fragments of Lamentations break off and embed themselves in other parts of Jewish liturgy, which seemingly have nothing to do with Jerusalem’s destruction.
THESIS This essay examines two echoes of Lamentations—one heard in a private morning prayer (Modeh ani) and the second in a public prayer recited after the Torah reading (Etz hayim hi)—through the work of affect theorist Ann Cvetkovitch.
Drawing together many of these different strands of affect and trauma, theorist Ann Cvetkovich develops a theory of trauma that attends to the everyday texture of people's lives and finds trauma located not just in catastrophic events but also in everyday acts of personal suffering. In fact, “catastrophic traumatic histories are embedded within everyday life experience. Trauma becomes the hinge between systematic structures of exploitation and oppression and the felt experience of them”
Trauma is not just debilitating and destructive; it can become the ground out of which new cultures and new cultural products emerge. These texts constitute an archive of feelings and the practices political counter-cultures. She defines an “archive of feeling” as “an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception
The Book of How (Lamentations) has been shattered and its pieces scattered. We gather them up and piece them together the best we can. This is a political act, and in brokenness there is power.
3. The Affective Potential of the Lament Psalms of the Individual by Cottrill
SUMMARY: Cotrill’s intention is to weight the effectiveness of affect theory for the psalms. In doing so, she focuses explicitly on the body, the one who inhabits the “I” of individual lament. Affect moves through bodies–in this way, it is not just about how someone feels but it is also about the social and political consequences of those circulating affects
THESIS: This essay explores the connection between affect and the experience of prayer, especially the lament psalms of the individual. The first-person subject position of the individual laments is a particularly intimate space, and the language of lament—through prayer—therefore shapes the experience of the supplicant. Affect theory provides an important avenue for exploring the embodied feelings generated by the performance of the language of the psalms in the act of prayer.
How does the physically performed experience of the intensely complex, volatile, and multivalent language of the laments of the individual in the form of prayer create sensory registers of sensation in the one who prays the psalmist’s words? Especially in the language of the laments specifically, how does the alternating language of violence and powerlessness and the mixture of evocative, embodied experience create an affective experience in the one who inhabits the subject position of the speaker? How might those bodily experiences and movements be or become politically relevant? This essay describes a methodology for investigating such questions.
My focus is on the affective potential of Ps 109, which offers a particularly volatile and evocative subject position for the ‘I,’ alternative between submission and demand, powerlessness, and aggression. How does this shifting combination of images register in the body of the one who prays it, and how do those feelings and sensations become politically and socially relevant?
The Embodied Psalmist and the Laments of the Individual
Who is the “I” of the laments of the individual? WHat sensory experiences and feelings are generated in the psalmist as an embodied person in the performance of this language as prayer?
Rather than thinking about the psalmist as rhetorically shaped and constructed in and through the language of the psalms, I extend the question to include how the psalmist as an embodied supplicant is shaped affectively by performing the language of the laments of the individual as prayer. What feeling is generated in the psalmist when he inhabits the subject position afforded by the “I” in the psalm? What happens to one’s body when one performs these words as prayer? What happens between and amongst bodies standing together praying these words? How do those feelings and bodily sensations evoked by the images and narratives of the laments, not yet taken up by the conscious mind and categorized into emotions, become socially, ideologically, and politically persuasive in certain times and places?
Affect Criticism and the Laments
Relevant here is affect theory’s focus on embodiment, the social and political implications of embodiment, and understanding of the language as replete with affective potentialities
Spinoza: “no one has yet determined what that body can do”
Affect DEF: interested in totality of bodily experience, not only conscious level. Sounds more like poetry than argument-based scholarship. Interested also in social and political implications of preconscious sensory reality. Relationality is at the root of understanding the body and affect, and that relationality means that affect is inherently political. Bodies are not self-contained isolated containers of individual experience. Affect is transindividual
Riley’s concept of ventriloquy of inner speech: the ways we interiorize external definitions of ourselves, allowing dominant discourses to become our narrative of the self
SO As first person speech in texts detached from their original contexts, the “T” is not a historical referent to a specific speaker but a rhetorical placeholder for the speaker, a linguistic point of entry for anyone who prays these psalms as their own prayer.* In other words, when one assumes the subject position of the “T” in the laments, one steps into a specific linguistic and affective world. As is abundantly clear in the long history of praying, memorizing, and meditating on the psalms, these prayers have-offered individuals and communities a linguistic experience in which they have come to see themselves through that language. The laments have and continue to offer a particularly powerful place for affective experience, perhaps because they offer the speaker an emotional script, language that both reflects and creates feeling as one inhabits the identity of the “I” Affect criticism brings into focus the affective possibilities that are generated in the individual who sees herself through the language of the laments.
5. Public Suffering? Affect and the
DEF: Affect theory is a critically informed analysis of emotions and bodily sensations, one that resists any neatly bifurcated analysis of emotions as either interior states or as social-political conditions. Instead, affect theory refuses both essentialism and the linguistic turn that dominated so much of scholarship in the late twentieth century
Religions are not just sets of doctrine or theological tenets, intellectually affirmed. Religions move people in their bodies, sometimes alongside but sometimes counter to rational thought. Bodies touch, feel, sense, come together, and move apart as affects circulate. Affect theory gives us the conceptual tools to explore these movements, intensities, sensations.
AFFECTS
Material, physiological things,
Energetic dimension. Enhance and deplete.
Gregg: forces or intensities
They are the “things that happen,” the “stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (2).
Ahmed: affects work to shape the surfaces of bodies (individual and collective), drawing the inevitable political consequences of such shaping to the fore.
Ahmed’s affective archive: how words for feeling, and objects of feeling, circulate and generate effects: how they move, stick, and slide. We move, stick and slide with them
Affect theory attempts to articulate lived experience, as well as to appreciate how this experience leaves traces in the world
AFFECT EMERGING AT NEXUS OF SOMATIC, SOCIAL, POLITICAL
Its emergence as domain: two seminal essays
1. Sedgwick and Frank (who work with work of Tomkins, who coined affect as it relates to biological systems of stimulus-response)
Tomkins perceives affects as biological system that underlies emotion. Innate protocols hardwired into our body
Subject receives stimulus which triggers neural firing, the density of which determines which affective system is activated.
Yet the simple on/off switch of neuron does not result in any predictable affective arousal.
Complex, interleaving of endogenous and exogenous, perceptial, proprioceptive and interpretive–causes, effects, feedbacks, motives, long-term states such as moods and theories, along with distinc transitory physical or verbal events.
Affect theory therefore is not determinative but provides a way to think about the role of the body, particularly the role of drives that exceed cognition, in individual behavior and social interactions.
2. Massumi (works with Deleuze)
Here affect is not on/off switches, even unpredictable ones. Affects are becomings. Affects are what preexist all perception, cognition, and language; they preexist even the bodily sensations that we experience as emotions
Affect is the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact
Many biblical scholars who use affect theory tend to follow the Deleuzian path, since it lends itself well to the facilitation of inquiry into the bodily, cultural, and political markers of emotion and sensation.
In biblical studies, it’s slippery
“Affect theory does not yield a ‘method’ in the standard biblical-scholarly sense of the term. There is not even a ‘single, generalizable theory of affect’
1. Affect and Animality in 2 Sam 12: Ken Stone
SUMMARY: Ken Stone, for example, begins the volume with an essay grounded in Schaefer’s (2015) innovative work on affect theory, animality, and religion. Schaefer argues for the centrality of bodies in any understanding or definition of religion. Religion is not just about language—doctrine, sermon, text—but also about communities, objects, and other bodies. By focusing on bodily sensations, religion becomes not something that separates and divides humans from other animals, but something that binds all of our animal bodies together. Once Stone establishes a shared affective economy between people and (especially) their companion species, he brings those insights to a reading of 2 Sam 12—the parable of the ewe lamb used by Nathan to confront David over the Bathsheba-Uriah affair. Stone’s reading highlights the “circulation of women and animals as sticky affective objects” and hence uncovers a gendered power dynamic at work in the story and in how we read it.
Shaefer makes case for affect’s significance in religious studies. Says religious studies have fallen prey to linguistic fallacy that overemphasizes “language as the medium of power and the primary analytic focus of religious studies.” this fallacy leads to myth that where bodies go is fundamentally determined by language
Instead, religions should be understood in terms of the way things feel, the things we want, the way our bodies are guided through thickly textured, magnetized worlds…the way our bodies flow into relationships with other bodies and with clustered material forms, aspects of our embodied life, such as other bodies, food, community, labor, movement, music, sex, natural landscapes, architecture, and objects. He is expanding what gets called religion.
Shaefer also engages with animal studies
He opened his book with Goodall’s primate spirituality. Humans too have this, he says. By unlinking religion from language, it ceases to be a uniquely human phenomenon. Human religion might be animal. Blurring or dissolution of boundaries between humans and other animals.
Emotions and Bodies in 2 Sam 12
In 2 Sam 11 David fucks Bathsheba. To cover this and her pregnancy after Uriah refuses to fuck her, David arranges for him to be killed. Bathsheba laments this. Nathan is sent by YHWH to confront David
Nathan’s parable
Rich man has many flocks and cattle, poor man has small ewe lamb. Traveler comes to rich man but he won’t share. RIch man takes the poor man’s only ewe and prepares it. You are that man, Nathan says!
God will not kill David but his son. David pleads and fasts, stays on the ground. Child dies anyway. David gets up, anoints himself, eats.
Why different after child’s death–he lamented when there was chance to change God’s mind. Fasting now won’t bring him back. They have another son Solomon.
So much emotion here! Instability, imbalance, psychological portrait
Rather than reconstruct such inner states here, I reconsider 2 Sam 12 in terms of what we might call, borrowing from Sara Ahmed, “the sociality of emotions.”
This rejects psychologizing inside-out model, or, emotion as interiority. Rejects individualistic understanding of interior emotion. Rejects also outside-in model that says emotions come from outside.
Rather than conceptualizing emotions as moving inside out or outside in, or belonging to individuals, Ahmed prefers to emphasize the “circulation” of “objects of emotion.”
attachment and emotion in Ahmed’s view “create the very surfaces and boundaries that allow all kinds of objects to be delineated. The objects of emotion take shape as effects of circulation” (10). “Emotions are relational,” then, involving subjects, objects, and contacts with objects
AFFECT HERE: Affect involves the various ways in which our bodies are touched by other objects, including other bodies.
THESIS: Two animal bodies press in 2 Sam 12. The ewe lamb lies on the bosom of the poor man. As David had lied on Bathsheba. As they fuck after the death of Uriah. A kind of parallel is set up, then, between the lamb who lies on the poor man’s bosom in Nathan's story and the woman who lies with the king in the narrative of 2 Samuel. Linked by language of LYING ON THE BOSOM
Lasine analyzes the story as unrealistic sentimentality–says David overreacts because it’s a melodrama. He calls the story unrealistic. It is inappropriate to use the story as evidence of Israelite attitudes toward pets or of social customs
From Modern Pets to Israelite Companion Species
Donna Harroway moves us away from anachronism by speaking of conceptual framework of companion species. These include but are not identical to companion animals, those individual animals such as pets with whom many humans life and form affective bonds
Human nature and human cultures do not preexist such relationships. Individually and collectively, humans “become who they are” with other living and non-living entities in particular “situated histories, situated naturecultures”
Harroway says we are entangled with critters in specific contact zones
The use of a category such as companion species to read 2 Sam 12 serves as a check against glossing over the lamb as merely an insignificant element of the story. At the same time, it avoids focusing too narrowly on the sentimental relationship between an individual human character and an individual animal character in isolation from the larger context in which that relationship takes place.
Our interpretation of the affective relations between characters needs to take those naturecultures into account as well.
{survey of shepherds and sheep being close}
Affective Economies of Women and Sheep
SO TO RECAP the physical proximity of humans and sheep, and the particular characteristics of sheep, facilitate an emotional response to the ewe lamb’s story. BUT THERE IS MORE. THere are more affective objects circulating here!
Lamb is described like a daughter. Daughter, bat…Bathsheva.
He is consider the political economy of gender, kinship, and slavery, and animality, as an effective economy as well.
AFFECT, ANIMALITY, AND THE TRAFFIC OF WOMEN
What we find in these and other texts is thus both a political economy and an affective economy, in which women, children, slaves, and livestock circulate among men.
To return to Ahmed’s (2004c, 11) language, these circulating bodies become “sticky” “objects, which are “saturated with affects.” Affective relations develop between the men who are subjects of circulation and the objects they are circulating
In the story of David, of course, the affective relationships at play include the relationship between David and God.
Conclusion
SUMMARY I suggest that attention to both affect and animality allows us to make sense of David's reaction to the story of the poor man’s lamb in 2 Sam 12. Such a reading seems more felicitous to me than reducing David’s reaction to emotional imbalance or dismissing the poor man’s relationship to his lamb as a sentimental or even an unnatural relationship. But by linking Nathan's story and oracle, and David's reaction, to the circulation of women and animals as sticky affective objects, my reading also brings affect and animality into alignment with analyses of power and subordination found, for example, in feminist criticism. That Ahmed (2010, 13) associates her work with “feminist cultural studie
Echoes of How: Archiving Trauma in Jewish Liturgy by Koosed
SUMMARY: Koosed’s essay addresses the way in which phrases from Lamentations are found in Jewish Prayers. Using Ann Cvetkovich’s (2003) assessment of trauma, which cautions against a strictly medicalized understanding and instead recognizes how trauma creates new genres and cultures, Koosed argues that the Jewish prayer book is an “archive of feeling,” transmitting and transforming the experience of war, loss, and exile. She considers Jewish prayer as an act of collective recovery, through the making of community that transcends time and space as well as the bringing of the physical, emotional, and intellectual together as the body prays.
Opens with OPPOSITE OF AN ARCHIVE. I begin this essay not with the book of Lamentations or the siddur (Jewish prayer book) or with affect theory or an “archive of feeling” (Cvetkovich 2003) or any other archive, but with its opposite. Because it is in this knowledge—the knowledge of the fragility of our ideas, our products, and our bodies—that we write and strive to create archives to begin with.
Much of the HB is written in response to trauma. Suffering and survival of it was written into the Bible.
Within this literature of trauma, foremost is the book of Lamentations (Hebrew title is Eicha, “How.”
As a response to one historically situated trauma, Lamentations then moves forward carrying that trauma into a variety of other contexts. In Jewish ritual, appropriately enough, Lamentations is canted in its entirety on the holiday of Tisha bAv, the commemoration of the destruction of the 1st and 2ns Temples.
More subtly, though, fragments of Lamentations break off and embed themselves in other parts of Jewish liturgy, which seemingly have nothing to do with Jerusalem’s destruction.
THESIS This essay examines two echoes of Lamentations—one heard in a private morning prayer (Modeh ani) and the second in a public prayer recited after the Torah reading (Etz hayim hi)—through the work of affect theorist Ann Cvetkovitch.
Drawing together many of these different strands of affect and trauma, theorist Ann Cvetkovich develops a theory of trauma that attends to the everyday texture of people's lives and finds trauma located not just in catastrophic events but also in everyday acts of personal suffering. In fact, “catastrophic traumatic histories are embedded within everyday life experience. Trauma becomes the hinge between systematic structures of exploitation and oppression and the felt experience of them”
Trauma is not just debilitating and destructive; it can become the ground out of which new cultures and new cultural products emerge. These texts constitute an archive of feelings and the practices political counter-cultures. She defines an “archive of feeling” as “an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception
The Book of How (Lamentations) has been shattered and its pieces scattered. We gather them up and piece them together the best we can. This is a political act, and in brokenness there is power.
3. The Affective Potential of the Lament Psalms of the Individual by Cottrill
SUMMARY: Cotrill’s intention is to weight the effectiveness of affect theory for the psalms. In doing so, she focuses explicitly on the body, the one who inhabits the “I” of individual lament. Affect moves through bodies–in this way, it is not just about how someone feels but it is also about the social and political consequences of those circulating affects
THESIS: This essay explores the connection between affect and the experience of prayer, especially the lament psalms of the individual. The first-person subject position of the individual laments is a particularly intimate space, and the language of lament—through prayer—therefore shapes the experience of the supplicant. Affect theory provides an important avenue for exploring the embodied feelings generated by the performance of the language of the psalms in the act of prayer.
How does the physically performed experience of the intensely complex, volatile, and multivalent language of the laments of the individual in the form of prayer create sensory registers of sensation in the one who prays the psalmist’s words? Especially in the language of the laments specifically, how does the alternating language of violence and powerlessness and the mixture of evocative, embodied experience create an affective experience in the one who inhabits the subject position of the speaker? How might those bodily experiences and movements be or become politically relevant? This essay describes a methodology for investigating such questions.
My focus is on the affective potential of Ps 109, which offers a particularly volatile and evocative subject position for the ‘I,’ alternative between submission and demand, powerlessness, and aggression. How does this shifting combination of images register in the body of the one who prays it, and how do those feelings and sensations become politically and socially relevant?
The Embodied Psalmist and the Laments of the Individual
Who is the “I” of the laments of the individual? WHat sensory experiences and feelings are generated in the psalmist as an embodied person in the performance of this language as prayer?
Rather than thinking about the psalmist as rhetorically shaped and constructed in and through the language of the psalms, I extend the question to include how the psalmist as an embodied supplicant is shaped affectively by performing the language of the laments of the individual as prayer. What feeling is generated in the psalmist when he inhabits the subject position afforded by the “I” in the psalm? What happens to one’s body when one performs these words as prayer? What happens between and amongst bodies standing together praying these words? How do those feelings and bodily sensations evoked by the images and narratives of the laments, not yet taken up by the conscious mind and categorized into emotions, become socially, ideologically, and politically persuasive in certain times and places?
Affect Criticism and the Laments
Relevant here is affect theory’s focus on embodiment, the social and political implications of embodiment, and understanding of the language as replete with affective potentialities
Spinoza: “no one has yet determined what that body can do”
Affect DEF: interested in totality of bodily experience, not only conscious level. Sounds more like poetry than argument-based scholarship. Interested also in social and political implications of preconscious sensory reality. Relationality is at the root of understanding the body and affect, and that relationality means that affect is inherently political. Bodies are not self-contained isolated containers of individual experience. Affect is transindividual
Riley’s concept of ventriloquy of inner speech: the ways we interiorize external definitions of ourselves, allowing dominant discourses to become our narrative of the self
SO As first person speech in texts detached from their original contexts, the “T” is not a historical referent to a specific speaker but a rhetorical placeholder for the speaker, a linguistic point of entry for anyone who prays these psalms as their own prayer.* In other words, when one assumes the subject position of the “T” in the laments, one steps into a specific linguistic and affective world. As is abundantly clear in the long history of praying, memorizing, and meditating on the psalms, these prayers have-offered individuals and communities a linguistic experience in which they have come to see themselves through that language. The laments have and continue to offer a particularly powerful place for affective experience, perhaps because they offer the speaker an emotional script, language that both reflects and creates feeling as one inhabits the identity of the “I” Affect criticism brings into focus the affective possibilities that are generated in the individual who sees herself through the language of the laments.
5. Public Suffering? Affect and the
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