Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power

299 Pages·2015·18.84 MB·English

by  Donovan O. Schaefer

RELIGIOUS AFFECTS
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R E L I G I O U S A F F E C T S
Animality, Evolution, and Power
DONOVAN O. SCHAEFER
Duke University Press D urham and London 2015
© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ∞
Typeset in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Schaefer, Donovan O., [date]
Religious affects : animality, evolution, and power /
Donovan O. Schaefer.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5982-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5990-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7490-9 (e- book)
1. Animals— Religious aspects. 2. Affect (Psychology)—
Religious aspects. 3. Theological anthropology. I. Title.
bl439.s34 2015
156— dc23 2015021376
Cover art: Skunder (Alexander) Boghossian, Night Flight
of Dread and Delight, 1964 (detail). Collection of the North
Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds
from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer
Bequest). Courtesy of the estate of Skunder Boghossian.
To my parents
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CONTENTS
Ac know ledg ments ix
I ntroduction: Species, Religious Studies, and the Affective
Turn 1
1 Religion, Language, and Affect 19
2 I ntransigence: Power, Embodiment, and the Two Types
of Affect Theory 36
3 Teaching Religion, Emotion, and Global Cinema 60
4 Compulsion: Affect, Desire, and Materiality 92
5 Savages: Ideology, Primatology, and Islamophobia 120
6 Accident: Animalism, Evolution, and Affective Economies 147
7 A Theory of the Waterfall Dance: On Accident, Language,
and Animal Religion 178
Conclusion: Under the Rose 206
Notes 219
Bibliography 261
Index 281
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AC KNOW LEDG MENTS
This book is the product of a very long thought pro cess that
has been instructed by countless other bodies over the past de-
cade. Financially, Religious Affects was made possible by grants
from the Mellon Foundation, which sponsored first a disserta-
tion fellowship in the Humanities Center at Syracuse Univer-
sity, then a postdoctoral fellowship in the Hurford Center for
the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College. The final round
of revisions was made after taking up a departmental lecture-
ship in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford.
Intellectually, it owes its greatest debts to my teachers,
who have patiently struggled with me throughout all my in-
terventions in their classrooms, welcome and unwelcome.
This long list would start with Jack Caputo (Jed Bartlet to
my Leo M cGarry) and Gail Hamner (who pushed me to find
ways to always make intellectual labor matter), Lorraine Weir,
Masako Nakatsugawa, and John Simmons. My other mentors
at Syracuse, including Linda Martín Alcoff, Zachary “Zeke”
Braiterman, Joanne Waghorne, Patricia Cox Miller, Jim Watts,
William Robert, Gustav Niebuhr, and Gregg Lambert, are all
distinctly present in this conversation.
Religious Affects was written during a two- year Mellon post-
doctoral fellowship at Haverford, during which time I was
a participant in the Hurford Center’s Faculty Seminar on