Affect Theory Began as an Argument With Language

Affect theory's founding gesture, in the telling Aeon gives it, was a mid-1990s pushback against the idea that we are built by language. The alternative it reached for was feeling and the body. That is the whole disagreement in miniature: whether the self is best explained as something constructed in words and signs, or as something that registers the world through bodily response before it is ever put into a sentence.