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Affect, genealogy, history – Review Symposium on Ruth Leys’s The Ascent of Affect

In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Michel Foucault (1998[1971]: 370) notes that a genealogy requires ‘patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material . . . . [It] demands relentless erudition’. Ruth Leys’s The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique is all of these things: patient, detailed, scholarly. It is extensively researched and her core arguments (for example, that too many affect theorists have detached affect from meaning; that some affect theorists have been too cavalier with empirical detail) are laid out in meticulous fashion. On the material in this book that I know best (the work of Paul Ekman, Brian Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Silvan Tomkins), it is clear that Leys has been exhaustive in her research. Her attention to Tomkins’s work is particularly notable as, at least in the critical humanities, this work has not yet been widely read and analysed. Most often Tomkins’s work is cited, secondarily, through the writing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, who published an influential introduction to his affect theory in 1995 (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995). The four volumes of Tomkins’s master work (Tomkins, 1962, 1963, 1991, 1992) are sometimes difficult to read, and he published a large number of journal articles and chapters that partially overlap with these volumes, or that revise these volumes, or that present research on topics (such as smoking) that are new. Some of these publications report on empirical research; some are sociological or philosophical in orientation; others fuse theoretical arguments with biography. It is a daunting amount of material to read and digest (full disclosure here: I have recently finished writing an introductory book on Tomkins with Adam Frank (Frank and Wilson, forthcoming), and it took me years to become familiar with all this material). Leys has also visited the Tomkins archives (at the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of