Desire, Unreason, and Truth in Affect

This workshop seeks to explore the tension between the universal normative claim to truth and the singular claim to truth in affect, focusing on one of the strongest human emotions and experiences: (erotic) desire.

A first version of this workshop, organized in September 2024 at KU Leuven, was entitled “Desiring God: The Erotic and the Divine in 20th-Century Thought” and focused on the afterlife of eros in post-religious thought. This workshop takes our collective work a step further to address the connection between truth, unreason, and desire in affect in a broader context. In the absence of an absolute, or in the context of highly debated norms of judgment in a post-secular society, the role of affect has stepped in to substantivize many normative claims, for better or worse—either culminating in a ‘politics of feeling’ or in prioritizing individual emotions and affective economies over normative categories such as justice or freedom. This has major implications for two of the most contested concepts in religious, philosophical, political, and literary thought: truth and reason.

Erotic desire is often thought to unsettle those very concepts: conceived as inevitably singular moments of rapture and ecstasy, and often associated with the loss of (self-)control, desire is believed to be located at the edge of ratio and language and therefore without viable claims to truth. Yet the truth of desire might lie elsewhere–in desire, language not only falters, but also thrives, and as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva have pointed out, the language of desire is inherently literary in nature, thus highlighting the creative, subversive potential of language rather than normative claims expressed by means of language. Recent affect-studies scholars such as Lauren Berlant, Sarah Ahmed, and Kathryn Bond-Stockton have illustrated the equally subversive potential of reading affect in relation to social and political norms. Our workshop will highlight the subversive power of desire and/or affect and its inherent, even if problematic relation to truth and reason.

Against the backdrop of the increasing awareness of affect in the making of truth in  contemporary political discourse – and the failure to read affect in political demographics –, we are seeking to bring together some of the most prominent voices in the field in an international, cross-disciplinary, and multifaith endeavor to understand the power of desire, unreason, and truth in affect. We strongly believe that this will be a very timely intervention.