Fanaticism and Feeling: From Nat Turner to the EP

In the spring of 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved man in Southampton County, Virginia, led a rebellion that killed about sixty white settlers. He was captured, tried, and hanged in November of that year. For white observers of the time, what mattered most about the rebellion was this claim: Turner said God had shown him the path. He spoke in the language of prophecy. He had organized the violence around religious conviction.

In this post, the last in my series on affect theory, I will argue that fanaticism is primarily an affective phenomenon, not a linguistic one, by showing 1) how Jeffrey Wheatley reads Turner's rebellion through the affective logic of enslavement, and 2) how a 2023 EP enacts, rather than explains, the felt intensities that reason cannot name.

Voltaire would have called Turner a fanatic. Turner fit his definition perfectly: enthusiasm that moved to action, the taking of internal conviction as a mandate for violence, the refusal to be stopped by argument or law. In Voltaire's taxonomy, fanaticism sat at the apex of the hierarchy of bad religion. Prejudice was curable through education; superstition was a disease of dependence; but fanaticism was defined precisely by its imperviousness to reason. You cannot argue with a fanatic. The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre stood behind the category.

But here is what Voltaire could not theorize: the felt dimension of fanaticism, the affective intensity that makes fanaticism what it is. Jeffrey Wheatley's recent work on Nat Turner and religious fanaticism argues precisely this point. Turner's fanaticism was not powerful because he had constructed a sophisticated argument. It was powerful because he was moved by an intensity, a conviction so total that it exceeded the capacity of doubt to touch it.^[1]

The Affective Ground of Fanaticism #

Wheatley draws on Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies, on Denise Ferreira da Silva's work on the "affectable subject," and on Schaefer's own analysis of religious intensity. His argument takes this shape: Turner's religious experience was not separable from his enslavement. The intensity of his feeling, his sense of divine presence and guidance, emerged precisely from the condition of absolute subjection to an enslaving power. The God who spoke to Turner was a God of absolute authority, demanding absolute obedience. This correspondence was not an accident. It was the affective logic of his condition made manifest in the language of the sacred.

Here affect theory touches something philosophical accounts of fanaticism cannot reach. If you analyze fanaticism only as a belief, as a proposition someone has committed to, you can ask whether the belief is true or rational. You can marshal arguments; you can apply pressure. But this approach assumes that fanaticism moves primarily in the register of belief, that changing someone's mind about the truth of their conviction would change their action. Wheatley and others argue that fanaticism does not work this way.

Fanaticism works by moving the body first. It is the feeling of certainty before the articulation of doctrine. It is the sensation of being held, moved, even invaded by a power greater than oneself. A body seized by this feeling does not stop to weigh arguments; it simply acts. The theology comes after, as a way of making sense of what the body has already done.

For this reason Voltaire declared reasoning impotent against fanaticism. He was right, but not for the reason he gave. Reason is impotent not because the fanatic is irrational in some permanent sense, but because reason and fanaticism operate in different registers. Fanaticism is primarily affective; reason is primarily linguistic and propositional. The weapons of reason cannot touch the register in which fanaticism moves.

The Case of Nat Turner #

What makes Wheatley's analysis so powerful is that he traces the affective intensity of Turner's religious experience back to the structure of slavery itself. An enslaved person exists in a condition of absolute powerlessness; every moment, every body, every thought is subject to another's will. In this condition, the experience of an absolute, overwhelming power (a power that comes from beyond the enslaved person's body and moves through it, seizing it, directing it) can feel like liberation. The God who speaks to Turner is not a meek divine voice. It is an overwhelming force that breaks through the paralysis of subjection and demands action.

The irony, which Wheatley does not hide, is that this experience of liberation through divine seizure reproduces the structure of slavery at another level. The enslaved person, freed from the slavemaster's authority, becomes subject to God's authority in the same absolute, unquestioning way. But in the moment, the affective intensity of this experience is precisely what makes it powerful; it is what makes action possible.

What the white observers who captured and tried Turner could not see was this affective logic. They saw a rebellious Negro who claimed religion as an excuse for violence. They saw theology and doctrine. They did not see the affective intensity that organized Turner's action, the feeling of divine presence so overwhelming that refusal became impossible. Had they understood this logic, they would have been better equipped to grasp what was genuinely dangerous about Turner's rebellion. The danger was not that he held a false belief; the danger was that he had been seized by an affective intensity that had already decided the matter before language arrived.

This dynamic connects directly back to the problem I traced in the Superstition and Sovereignty series. When European observers looked at Indigenous ceremonial practices, they saw superstition. When they looked at enthusiastic religion, they saw fanaticism. In both cases they marked something as dangerous, but they marked it in the wrong register. The real threat was not the beliefs being expressed. It was the affective intensities being generated, the way these practices organized bodies and communities around alternative forms of power.

The Present Moment #

What does fanaticism look like now? The question is harder than it seems, because fanaticism has not disappeared. If anything, the conditions that produce it have only intensified. We live in a moment of religious polarization, of ideological intensity, of the felt certainty that one's own position is not merely defensible but divinely mandated or rationally obvious.

Andrew Mbaruk and Rhys Langston, the creators of the 2023 EP Affect Theory and the Text-to-Speech Grandiloquence, approach this question not through analysis but through artistic practice. The EP itself is not an academic work, and neither artist has claimed it as an engagement with Schaefer or Ahmed or the philosophical tradition of affect theory. But the title signals something: the recognition that contemporary politics, contemporary religion, and contemporary discourse operate through affective intensities that intellectual analysis alone cannot contain.^[2]

In track 2, "Affect Theory," Langston and Mbaruk narrate the experience of "drunkenly studying affect theory," and the humor here is not incidental. Something deeply funny, and also deeply true, sits in the position of studying affect while embedded in the very affective intensities one tries to analyze. You cannot step outside the register of feeling to observe it from a distance; you are always already moved by what you study.

The EP moves through a range of contemporary concerns: discovery, theology, colonialism, the physics of grief. The texture is dense, the language sometimes opaque, the references layered. What the work does, formally, is enact the problem it names. It does not explain affective intensity; it creates it. The listener is moved by sound, by rhythm, by the texture of voices and words, by the affective architecture of the work itself. Understanding the work requires feeling the work, and those two acts are not the same thing.

Between Reason and Intensity #

Here we arrive at a crucial insight that runs through this entire series on affect theory. Fanaticism is dangerous, and it is dangerous precisely because it exceeds reason. But the solution is not to insist on reason more loudly. Reason and fanaticism operate in different registers. The fanatic does not need to be argued with; the fanatic needs to be understood in the register of affect, the register of felt intensity and embodied conviction.

This analysis does not make fanaticism acceptable. Nat Turner was right to rebel against slavery, and the violence he enacted is a tragedy regardless of its religious justification. But understanding why he acted as he did, understanding what moved him, requires moving beyond the language of belief and doctrine into the language of affective intensity.

Voltaire was fighting fanaticism in an earlier moment, and his weapons (the insistence on reason, the appeal to universal morality, the critique of superstition) were not nothing. They mattered. But they were incomplete because they operated in the wrong register. The contemporary right to name and resist fanaticism requires a vocabulary that includes affect, that attends to the texture of feeling, that does not assume reason alone can touch what moves bodies to action.

The EP's title is precise in this sense. Text-to-speech is the voice of pure reason, of language divorced from feeling, of meaning-making without embodiment. But language, meaning, theology, politics: none of these registers is purely rational. They all move through the affective register as well. The grandiloquence of the title-text is the pretense that language alone is enough; the actual work of the EP is the practice of feeling what reason cannot name.

The EP offers no solution to the problem of fanaticism; it deepens the question. Once you understand that fanaticism moves primarily through affective intensity, you have to think differently about how to resist it, how to teach people differently, how to organize communities that do not run on the engine of overwhelming certainty. You have to attend to the texture of belonging, the felt experience of being held by a community, the way bodies and minds are moved together in shared space.

The risk is clear: attending to affect means taking seriously the very registers through which dangerous power operates. But the alternative is to remain blind to the actual mechanisms of religious fanaticism, ideological intensity, and collective action. Voltaire built a language for naming bad religion; affect theory offers a language for understanding how that bad religion actually moves people. Both are necessary. Neither is enough alone, and their insufficiency is the condition of the study of religion writ large.

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1. Jeffrey Wheatley, "Nat Turner and the Affective Power of Religious Fanaticism," Political Theology 25, no. 3 (2024): 171–85. Wheatley draws on Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 4–21, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 45–72, on the affectable subject. ↩︎

2. Andrew Mbaruk and Rhys Langston, Affect Theory and the Text-to-Speech Grandiloquence (Los Angeles: Black Market Poetry, 22 February 2023). Released on Bandcamp at langstonia.org and mbaruk.bandcamp.com. Covered by Stereogum in 2023. Track 2: "Affect Theory"; track 7: "A Dial-Up Theology." The artists have not stated that the title is meant as an engagement with academic affect theory. ↩︎