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Affect theory entered religious studies through a door marked "feeling," but once you step through that door, the room splits in two. In this post, the first in a series on affect theory, I will argue that this split has nothing to do with which scholars you cite; it has everything to do with which philosophical tradition holds the blueprint. Following Donovan Schaefer, I will show that affect theory speaks two dialects, and that knowing which dialect you are reading determines what you can and cannot see.
Schaefer's The Evolution of Affect Theory, published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press as one of their Elements in Religion and Philosophy series, makes this split explicit. He calls the two traditions dialects. One runs through Spinoza and Deleuze and surfaces in the work of Brian Massumi. The other runs through Silvan Tomkins and shows up in Sara Ahmed, in Schaefer's own work, and in the whole strand of affect scholarship organized around specific named emotions, the ones Tomkins called basic affects.[1]
The dialects differ so fundamentally that they give different answers to the founding question: what is affect? If you are reading Massumi, affect is intensity, a force that does not yet have form; it is the virtual before it becomes actual, and its power lies precisely in that threshold position. If you are reading Ahmed, affect is already shaped by the world; it is a relation, a stickiness that certain objects gather around you, and its power lies in the way it organizes your body in relation to what you encounter.
These two answers are not refinements of the same basic idea. They are different theories of what becomes feeling, and therefore different theories of what feeling does in the world.
The Deleuzian Dialect #
The Deleuzian line, as Schaefer lays it out, runs from Spinoza through Bergson and Deleuze to Massumi. Each philosopher in this chain wants to break free from what Deleuze calls representation, and Spinoza begins by refusing Descartes. Descartes splits mind and body into two substances that never really touch. Spinoza says no: there is one substance, appearing as both extension (body) and thought (mind), and a body's power to affect and be affected is the same as a mind's capacity to think. You cannot separate them because they are not two things.
Deleuze takes this move and turns it on temporality. The present moment carries within it a dimension that has not yet actualized, forces that are virtually present but not yet actual. An event is real before its consequences arrive. You feel an encounter before you know what you feel; a texture of encounter precedes and exceeds the emotions you can name.
Massumi pushes the argument further. For him, intensity is the body's capacity in any given moment, its openness to becoming something other. Affect, in this usage, means you have been changed by an encounter before you can describe the change. If you have ever reacted emotionally to something before you understood why, if your body has ever moved before your mind caught up, you have lived in Massumi's register. The real work of affect, Massumi argues, happens in that prepersonal, intensive dimension where change arrives before consciousness does.
This orientation matters because it makes the Deleuzian dialect actively skeptical of the idea that you can simply name your affects and be done with the matter. Intensity cannot be reduced to the emotions you can articulate. It has excess; it escapes language. The whole Deleuzian project aims to think past representation, and affect in this register is precisely what exceeds any representation you could offer.
The Tomkins Dialect #
Silvan Tomkins, an American psychologist working in the middle of the twentieth century, approaches emotion from a very different direction. He looks at the basic affects (fear, anger, sadness, joy) and asks what they have in common. His answer: they are biological programs that amplify whatever stimuli activate them. Your face contracts when you feel disgust because that preprogrammed response amplifies the problem; you are signaling, internally and externally, that this thing is bad. The affect itself is the amplification system.
Tomkins does not treat affects as mysterious forces. He catalogues them; he counts them; he asks whether joy and interest are physiologically distinct, and which is primary. Such enumeration is not a Deleuzian move. It is a systematic mapping of the ground structures of human feeling, and from this enumeration Tomkins builds a whole theory of how personality forms, how political conviction takes shape, and what motivates human action.
When Ahmed enters the affect theory conversation in the 2000s, she does not adopt Tomkins wholesale. But she works in the Tomkins tradition in a precise sense: she begins with a named emotion, she refuses to abstract it into intensity, and she asks what that emotion does in the world. Shame is not an intensity that exceeds itself. Shame is the feeling that turns you toward a world that has rejected you or failed to recognize you. It attaches to objects; it has directionality; it can be tracked.
This commitment explains why Ahmed can write a book on happiness and trace how the figures of the happy housewife, the happy immigrant, and the happy citizen have functioned in literature and policy. She shows the reader the work an emotion does, the way it organizes social worlds. Such work would not be visible in the Deleuzian register, because in that register the point is precisely that affect exceeds any neat social arrangement.
Why This Split Reshapes Religious Studies #
In the study of religion, the dialects produce different kinds of scholarship, and Schaefer's own work illustrates the point. His book Religious Affects works primarily in the Tomkins tradition. He takes up the way an emotion moves through a body, the way it organizes religious practice, the way it shapes what people do when they gather for ritual or prayer. He asks about intransigence, about desire, about the economy of dignity that structures how religious communities form around the protection and distribution of honor.
His later book Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin pushes toward the Deleuzian side without abandoning the Tomkins foundation. He introduces cogency theory, the idea that an argument feels true before you decide whether it is true. Cogency is not quite intensity, but it is the texture of a claim before you have settled it rationally. In this way Schaefer moves toward Deleuze; he recognizes that reasoning itself has a felt dimension that cannot be fully articulated.
And here the split matters for religious studies. If you work in the Tomkins dialect, you ask: what emotion does this practice generate, and what does that emotion do? If you work in the Deleuzian dialect, you ask: what intensities circulate in this gathering, what affects are virtually present but not yet actualized, what dimensions of experience exceed the language these people have for naming them?
These questions differ radically. They produce different books; they require different methods. A scholar working in the Tomkins tradition will interview people, collect narratives, and trace how emotions move through social worlds. A scholar working in the Deleuzian tradition might engage in what Massumi calls "applied" affect theory, attending to the texture of experience itself, often with the help of video, sound, or the presence of the body in space.
The problem, and Schaefer assesses it honestly, is that choosing one dialect does not actually solve the rationality problem both dialects grew up trying to address. Both emerged because scholars wanted to theorize something reason alone could not capture. But naming that something "affect" and assigning it a philosophical genealogy does not make it fully manageable. The Deleuzian dialect manages the problem by declaring intensity irreducible; the Tomkins dialect manages it by parsing affect into types. Neither fully solves it.
In my estimation, however, the solution is not to reject the dialects. It is to know which one you are reading when you encounter it, and to notice what you can and cannot see depending on the lens you have chosen. Religious Affects asks us to see how a community's emotional economy works. The Deleuzian work asks us to see what escapes that economy, what excess remains. Both are necessary; they are not in conflict if you treat them as complementary registers, different depths at which the same phenomenon can be read. I will return to this complementarity throughout the series, because the two dialects are, in the end, flip sides of the same coin.
Donovan O. Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1–6. Schaefer articulates the Deleuzian and Tomkins dialects explicitly on pages 2–3. Page numbers correspond to the DOI version: 10.1017/9781108765343. ↩︎
Tags : affect-theory religious-studies philosophy-of-emotion deleuze silvan-tomkins ahmed
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