Is the Body an Immanent Domain? On Postsecular Affects

Resumen

What critical possibilities and problems emerge when affect theory and postsecularism are brought together? This article explores this question and its implications for literary theory. Can affect at once open a space beyond rationality while at the same time remaining emphatically materialist and foreclosing feelings of religious transcendence or automatically subsuming them within materialism? What might be the critical and cultural authority of postsecular affects, of feeling religiously? I suggest that if past modes of public arbitration for such questions are declining, literature itself can serve as the site for contesting new ways of being and feeling in the contemporary world.