The Affect Critique: Ruth Leys, Intention, and When the Theory Ran Aground

Midway through the 2010s, when affect theory had become canonical in literary studies, religious studies, and cultural criticism, Ruth Leys published a book called The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique. The University of Chicago Press brought it out in 2017, but the argument had been circulating since her influential 2011 essay in Critical Inquiry. Her complaint was simple and devastating: affect theory rested on a false dichotomy between affect and intention, and that false dichotomy broke the entire edifice.^[1]

In this post, the third in my series on affect theory, I will argue that Leys's critique, devastating as it looks, did not kill affect theory; it clarified affect theory, and I will show what her skepticism reveals (and what it misses) about how feeling actually works in religious life.

Leys's target was precise. She focused on two foundational texts: Brian Massumi's "The Autonomy of Affect" and the Sedgwick-Frank essays on Silvan Tomkins. Both made the same move. They insisted that affect was non-conscious, that it happened to the body before consciousness arrived, that it was therefore radically different from the intentional states philosophers had spent centuries analyzing. This autonomy, this pre-intentional status, was precisely what gave affect its theoretical power. It let affect theorists explain why people do things they did not intend to do, believe things they did not rationally endorse, and participate in systems they intellectually reject.

The problem, Leys points out, is that "non-conscious" does not mean "non-intentional." A body can intend something without doing so consciously. You can be motivated by something you do not recognize as a motive. The pre-intentional and the non-conscious are not the same thing, and conflating them is a logical error. Once you see this conflation, the whole theoretical structure starts to wobble.

What Leys Really Criticized #

Here the argument gets subtle, because Leys's skepticism is not quite what it looks like from a distance. She does not argue that affect theory is wrong because feelings are really just beliefs in disguise, or that consciousness is the only real player in human life. Her argument is narrower and more precise. She says that if you define affect as non-intentional, you have to show that such a thing exists and that it operates differently from intentional states. Both Massumi and Sedgwick-Frank failed to make this case, because they moved too quickly from "non-conscious" to "non-intentional," and once you separate those concepts, their evidence does not support their conclusions.

Leys is also suspicious of Tomkins and of the basic-emotions paradigm that underwrites much of the phenomenological strand of affect theory. She cites Barrett, Fridlund, and Russell to argue that the assumption of basic emotions with universal, cross-cultural meanings is empirically wrong. People do not have hardwired fear responses that operate identically across cultures. The whole edifice of Tomkins-based affect theory, in Leys's account, sits on a foundation that neuroscience and psychology have already undermined.

This complaint differs from the one about intention, but it points to the same problem: affect theory makes claims about how the body and brain work without engaging seriously with the science. It borrows from neuroscience selectively, affirming findings that support the theory and ignoring findings that do not. Leys presses this charge most forcefully. The theory looks scientific, but it is not doing science.

The Exchange That Followed #

The response was sharp. William E. Connolly argued that Leys misread the theorists, that she imposed philosophical categories they had never used in that way. Then Leys replied. Then Adam Frank and Elizabeth Wilson entered, and Leys responded again. The whole exchange played out in Critical Inquiry over 2011 and 2012, and it remains one of the most important conversations in the field precisely because it never resolved.^[2]

Schaefer himself engages Leys directly in The Evolution of Affect Theory, and his response is worth sitting with. He acknowledges that the Tomkins presented in Leys's pages is almost unrecognizable; she has, he argues, created a straw figure. But then he does not simply dismiss her. Instead he concedes the point about the rationality problem: both the Deleuzian and Tomkins dialects handle this problem imperfectly. The Deleuzian dialect says intensity exceeds representation. The Tomkins dialect says you can enumerate the basic affects. Neither fully solves the puzzle of how to theorize something that exceeds language without simply mystifying it.

Such a concession is honest; it is the kind of intellectual honesty that survives criticism.

What the Critics Miss #

But Leys's own critique has a blind spot, and I want to name it. She operates almost entirely in the register of philosophy and epistemology. She asks: can we know that non-conscious affects exist? Can we describe them accurately? Do they operate according to the rules affect theory claims? These questions are valid philosophical questions.

What interests her less is the practical problem affect theory was built to solve. Religious studies did not embrace affect theory because philosophers had proven something true. It embraced affect theory because analysts of religion needed a way to talk about what happens in ritual, in prayer, in gathering, in moments when bodies are moved to action in ways that language and rational argument could not fully explain.

A ritual works on bodies. A sermon moves people. A moment of collective grief or joy reorganizes a community. Leys is right that we cannot call these experiences "non-intentional" in a strict philosophical sense; people intend something when they come to prayer. But something also happens in the gathering that exceeds what any individual intends. The affective space created by fifty people in prayer is more than the sum of their individual intentions. It is emergent, it is real, and it matters.

Leys's philosophy does not quite touch this problem. She can prove that affect is not non-conscious in the strict sense, and she can point out that affect theorists have been sloppy about the distinction between consciousness and intention. Both charges are true. But neither addresses the core need that drove the turn to affect in religious studies: a vocabulary for what moves bodies and communities when reasoning and intention cannot account for it. In my estimation, this lacuna between the philosophical critique and the practical need is where the real conversation should happen.

The Secular Turn on Affect #

Another response to Leys has emerged from a different quarter, and it is stranger and more productive. Some scholars ask: what if affect itself is not the solution, and what if the feeling of the secular, the affective texture of secularism, is what needs to be analyzed?

Henning Schmidgen, Elizabeth Povinelli, and others point out that the critique of religion (the whole apparatus of rationalism and secularism) is itself affectively organized. The feeling of being rational, the sense that one has escaped superstition, the satisfaction of rigorous thought: these are affective states. What if the problem with affect theory is not that it mystifies feeling but that it has been applied only to the analysis of religious communities, while the secular ground on which that analysis stands has been left unexamined?

This line of inquiry interests me because it does not require choosing between Leys and Schaefer. You can accept Leys's philosophical points (the terminology is sloppy; the science is cherry-picked) while still maintaining that a register for analyzing felt intensities, affective coherence, and emotional atmospheres is necessary. The question becomes not whether affect theory has solved the problem, but whether a revised, more careful affect theory could work better than the vocabulary religious studies had before.

The Opening Leys Created #

The irony of Leys's critique is that it did not kill affect theory; it clarified it. Schaefer's response to her, the whole revisionary project of the Cambridge Elements book, responds directly to Leys's pressure. He tries to rebuild affect theory without the false dichotomy between non-conscious and intentional, while still preserving the insight that something happens in affective registers that rational analysis alone cannot capture.

Leys herself would not endorse this solution. But her critique made it possible.

Where this exchange leaves religious studies is a productive place. We now know that we cannot simply invoke "affect" and expect to have explained something. We know that naming an emotion is not the same as analyzing its effects. We know that the body matters, that gathering matters, that the texture of ceremonial space matters, but we cannot claim a kind of affective knowledge lying wholly outside language and intention. Instead we have to work at the boundary, in the space between what can be said and what exceeds saying, with full knowledge that the boundary itself is contested and that the maps we draw of it will be disputed.

This boundary work is harder than it was when affect theory first arrived and seemed to offer a clean answer. But it is more honest. And for religious studies, which has for centuries struggled to describe the felt dimension of faith and practice, honesty about the limits of our vocabulary is itself a kind of progress.

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1. Ruth Leys, "The Turn to Affect: A Critique," Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 434–72. See also Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). The false dichotomy between affect and intention is Leys's central claim at 434–42. ↩︎

2. Leys, "The Turn to Affect," 450–54 on the Tomkins-Ekman basic-emotions paradigm and empirical critiques from Barrett, Russell, and Fridlund. See also Barrett, "Emotions Are Real," Emotion Review 4, no. 3 (2012): 270–71. ↩︎