Kierkegaard's "ugly feelings"
pp. 695-711
in: Thomas Blake (ed), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Reconsidering contemporary affect theory through the lens of Søren Kierkegaard's writings, this chapter extrapolates from Kierkegaard's thought a more secular phenomenology of affects that stresses the pivotal role of experiences of overwhelmed and disproportionate cognition. The chapter argues that reimagining Kierkegaard as a theorist of affectively driven thinking helps us discern a conceptual gap in the way contemporary academic scholarship tends to analyze affects in our day and age. This gap consists in affect theory's simultaneous insistence that an affect theorist is moved, and even possessed, by her affects, and that she can quasi-objectively evaluate their broader import. Kierkegaard's writing enables us to see that this theoretical position is partly misguided. It constitutes a hitherto missed (but not irretrievable) opportunity for deeper engagement with affects as experiences of losing critical scale and distance.
