Sense and Affect

Sense and Affect exposes the limits of important recent strands in continental philosophy.

Sense and Affect exposes the limits of important recent strands in continental philosophy. It questions the necessity of a certain language of violence, otherness, disruption and pathos saturating Jacques Derrida''s texts and the texts of those having a proximity to Derrida''s deconstructionist project. This book establishes a connection between such affective terminology and a common, if heterogeneously expressed, theoretical inadequacy binding Derrida and writers such as Lyotard, Foucault, Caputo and Nancy. Their failure to penetrate a presumed irreducibility of suffering in the world is shown to be linked to their dependence on the assumption of an irreducible tension at the origin of meaning. This book develops a fresh method of thought thoroughly unraveling the presuppositions of deconstructive orientations and uncovering a finer silt of the world than is seen via such discourses.