Religious Affects by Donovan O. Schaefer

8/20/2019 Religious Affects by Donovan O. Schaefer

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R E L I G I O U S

A F F E C T S Animality, Evolution, and Power

D O N O V A N O. SC H A E F E R


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RELIGIOUS AFFECTS


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R E L I G I O U S A F F E C T S

Animality, Evolution, and Power

D O N O V A N O . S C H A E F E R

Duke University Press Durham and London 2015


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper ∞ypeset in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schaeer, Donovan O., [date]

Religious affects : animality, evolution, and power /

Donovan O. Schaeer.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

978-0-8223-5982-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-5990-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7490-9 (e- book)

1. AnimalsReligious aspects. 2. Affect (Psychology)

Religious aspects. 3. Teological anthropology. I. itle.

439.34 2015

156dc23 2015021376

Cover art: Skunder (Alexander) Boghossian, Night Flight

of Dread and Delight , 1964 (detail). Collection o the NorthCarolina Museum o Art, Raleigh. Purchased with unds

rom the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phier

Bequest). Courtesy o the estate o Skunder Boghossian.


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o my parents


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Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Species, Religious Studies, and the Affective

Turn 1

1 Religion, Language, and Affect 19

2 Intransigence: Power, Embodiment, and the Two Types

of Affect Theory 36

3 Teaching Religion, Emotion, and Global Cinema 60

4 Compulsion: Affect, Desire, and Materiality 92

5 Savages: Ideology, Primatology, and Islamophobia 120

6 Accident: Animalism, Evolution, and Affective Economies 147

7 A Theory o the Waterall Dance: On Accident, Language,

and Animal Religion 178

Conclusion: Under the Rose 206

Notes 219

Bibliography 261

Index 281

CONTENTS


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Tis book is the product o a very long thought process thathas been instructed by countless other bodies over the past de-cade. Financially, Religious Affects was made possible by grantsrom the Mellon Foundation, which sponsored rst a disserta-

tion ellowship in the Humanities Center at Syracuse Univer-sity, then a postdoctoral ellowship in the Hurord Center orthe Arts and Humanities at Haverord College. Te nal roundo revisions was made afer taking up a departmental lecture-ship in the Faculty o Teology and Religion at Oxord.

Intellectually, it owes its greatest debts to my teachers, who have patiently struggled with me throughout all my in-terventions in their classrooms, welcome and unwelcome.

Tis long list would start with Jack Caputo (Jed Bartlet tomy Leo McGarry) and Gail Hamner (who pushed me to nd

ways to always make intellectual labor matter), Lorraine Weir,Masako Nakatsugawa, and John Simmons. My other mentorsat Syracuse, including Linda Martín Alcoff, Zachary “Zeke”Braiterman, Joanne Waghorne, Patricia Cox Miller, Jim Watts,

William Robert, Gustav Niebuhr, and Gregg Lambert, are alldistinctly present in this conversation.

Religious Affects was written during a two- year Mellon post-doctoral ellowship at Haverord, during which time I wasa participant in the Hurord Center’s Faculty Seminar on

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


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Affect Teory, led by Gustavus Stadler. Gus and Jill Stauffer becamemy two most committed and engaged mentors at Haverord, coachingme through and way beyond the writing process. Other members o theseminar, ina Zwarg, Raji Mohan, Lisa McCormick, and Deep Ghosh,

added their own impresses to this project. Laura McGrane, director othe Hurord Center, deserves special mention or her patient mentor-ship in pedagogy, which inevitably ound its way into this book. I amalso deeply indebted to the people who make the Hurord Center intothe nely calibrated machine or producing intellectual community thatit isEmily Cronin, James “Zilla” Weissinger, and Kerry Nelson. Myother colleagues in Haverord’s Religion Department, especially Ken andNaomi Koltun-Fromm, have been unailingly generous with their guid-

ance and riendship.Tis book is, in part, about the ways that intellectual and political cir-

cuits are inormed by relationships between bodies that are invisible todiscursive analytics. Syracuse is remarkable or the rich collegiality o itsgraduate program in religion, and my riendships there inspired much oReligious Affects. Nell Champoux, Jill Adams, Wilson Dickinson, FrancisSanzaro, Dan Miller, Mariam Parekh, and Sangeetha Ekambaram were

some o the strongest voices at my side while I wrote this book. Othersinclude Alyssa Beall, Emma Brodeur, Jenny Caplan, Dan Cheier, MelissaConroy, Wendy DeBoer, Juliana Finucane, Seren Gates Amador, KandaceGeldmeier, anushree Ghosh, Airen Hall, Peter Katz, Craig Martin, PaulMorris, Dan Moseson, Prea Persaud, Jessica Schoolman, Fumi Showers,Christa Shusko, Cordell Waldron, and Holly White. I also want to thankthe spouses and partners o many o these olks or generously loaning theircounterparts to us or our intellectual experimentsespecially Galen,

John, Carly, Pedro, Christy, and Ariane. While at Haverord, I was extremely ortunate to nd mysel in a

similarly generous, vibrant, and welcoming community. My thanks goto everyone who brought so much joy and intellectual energy to the ar-

boretum, especially Jon Wilson and Sara Arnold, Sorelle Friedler andRebecca Benjamin, Andy Cornell and Ellie Shenker, Lindsay Reckson,

Jamel Velji and Chloe Martinez, and Zainab Saleh. Tis extends toeveryone at urtle IslandEmile, Lou, Meg, Berg, the Sea Creature,

and the rest o my riends with shells. It was also during this periodthat I was privileged to be involved with the intellectually charged circlethat ounded the Religion, Affect, and Emotion group in the Ameri-


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can Academy o Religion. My thanks to everyone in that community,especially Abby Kluchin and Jenna Supp-Montgomerie. From an earlierperiod, no less ormative o this project, I need to thank Eric Pedersen,Kelly Henderson, Charlie Demers, Julian Hou, Dylan Godwin, Mark

Rosini, revor Shikaze, and especially Shazah Sabuhi.Tis book is also about pedagogy, conceptualized as a set o multi-

lateral, overlapping networks that make up the affective pulse o social-political worlds. In light o this, I need to thank many o my students,rst rom my Animal Religion class at Syracuseespecially EmilyRomano and Jonni Stormoas well as rom Religion, Emotion, andGlobal Cinema at Haverord: Dominique Caggiano, Simone Crew,Michael De Wol, Mowie Freeman, Ian Gavigan, Edward Gracia, Lauren

Hawkins, Siobhan Hickey, Gebby Keny, Laurie Merrell, Lindsey Palmer, Juliette Rando, Waleed Shahid, Sarah Wingeld, and especially DavidRoza, my indispensable and inventive student research assistant, whohelped with the preparation o this manuscript. It is a platitude that ourstudents teach us, but perhaps we underattend the uncountable other

ways in which they shape us and enrich our lives and thought. Aaron Gross looked at several versions o this manuscript and pro-

vided an extraordinarily generous set o reections that are largely re-sponsible or what I consider some o the best parts o Religious Affects.Tree anonymous reviewers at Duke pointed out several aws I hadmissed in the rst draf and prompted crucial rewrites that have madethe manuscript immeasurably stronger. Nonetheless, I must take respon-sibility or the many weaknesses that remain. My editor at Duke, Miriam

Angress, has been a tireless and passionate supporter o this project romthe beginning, and the editorial staff at Duke have improved the nished

product immensely. My thanks to Lisa Guenther or generously sharingher manuscript or Solitary Connement in advance o its publication,and to Ludger Vieues-Bailey and others who helped with the bookproposal. A number o people helped me think through the title; mostI’ve already mentioned here, but Anna Gade and Mary- Jane Ruben-stein deserve special thanks. Extra thanks to Sondra Hausner or sug-gesting the nal version. Dave Afandilian and Paul Waldau helped withreading lists and other guidance early in the project.

I must also thank my new colleagues in the Faculty o Teology andReligion at Oxord, Sondra Hausner, Joshua Hordern, Justin Jones, PhilipLockley, Joel Rasmussen, Graham Ward, Bill Wood, Steano Zaccheti,


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and especially Johannes Zachhuber or their extraordinarily generousefforts to acquaint me with the aculty and rinity College, my new stu-dents at rinity, and Alister McGrath, Andrew Pinsent, Ignacio Silva, andthe other members o the Ian Ramsey Centre or Science and Religion

or creating one o the most welcoming, open, and generative spaces orthe discussion o religion and science I’ve been privileged to join.

My thanks, nally, to Allison Covey, or the generosity, patience, andpassion o her mind and spirit; to my brother, Gavin, or his condenceand endless, uncanny brilliance; and to my companion creature, Job.Tis book is dedicated to my parents. I hope they see in it the commit-ment to the arts o making the world richer in compassion and dignitythat they taught me.


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I N T R O D U C T I O N

SPECIES, RELIG IOUS STUDIES,

AND THE AFFECTIVE TURN

What is the highest nature? Man is the highest nature. But I must

say that when I compare the interpretation of the highest nature

by the most advanced, the most fashionable and modish [?] school

of modern science, with some other teachings with which we are

familiar, I am not prepared to say that the lecture-room is more

scientic than the Church (cheers). What is the question now placed

before society with a glib assurance the most astounding? The

question is this—Is man an ape or an angel? (loud laughter.) My

lord, I am on the side of the angels (laughter and cheering).

—Disraeli, Church Policy

What is the trajectory of a newly considered humanities, one that

seeks to know itself not in opposition to its others, the “others” of

the human, but in continuity with them? . . . What kind of intellec-

tual revolution would be required to make man, and the various

forms of man, one among many living things, and one force among

many, rather than the aim and destination of all knowledges?

—Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone

The Side o the Apes

In Reason for Hope , the primatologist Jane Goodall describesa scene she witnessed many times in the orests o Gombe.Goodall’s subjects, the chimpanzees o the Kakombe valley


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community, arrive at a particularly lush and magnicent waterallaneighty-oot tower o rushing water. Tey stop walking and begin to, inGoodall’s account, “dance.” Tis dance involves a sequence o “displays”in the direction o the waterall. Te animals swing through the spray

on hanging vines, lif up and hurl heavy rocks and branches, and rhyth-mically stamp their eet in the watersometimes or more than tenminutesthough they usually preer not to get wet.

In her entry “Primate Spirituality” in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature , Goodall identies these “elemental displays” as possible early variants o religious ritual. Goodall’s account o the chimpanzees’ embodied response to a eature o their world as religious is not hers alone.Similar “elemental dances” have been observed by other primatologists

among other groups o chimpanzees, reacting not only to wateralls butto rain, heavy winds, and blazing wildres. Even veteran chimpanzeeresearchers describe these dances as startling. As primate expert Fransde Waal writes o witnessing the chimpanzee rain dance or the rst time,“I had trouble believing what I saw.”

Tese observations open the gates o the zoo, allowing other behav-iors we witness in animals to hover on the edge o orms o behavior

that, in humans, get called religion, including complex orms o sociality,ritual, and responses to death. But is it possible or an animal to havereligion? Te history o Western thought on the animal is studded withinstances in which animality is dened precisely in opposition to the ca-pacity or religion. For British member o Parliament Benjamin Disraeli,speaking at Oxord in 1864 in the early afermath o the shock o theDarwinian revolution, animal religion remained unthinkable: religion

was the exclusive property o humans, an index o our participation in

the divine abric o the universe. Humans, or this nineteenth-centurypolitician, sitting uneasily at the apex o the most powerul EuropeanChristian empire, were better understood as angels, rather than apes. But even in contemporary religious studiesa century and a hal aferDarwin, when almost every other presumed indicator o human unique-ness has allen apart (cognition, language, tool use, morality)wedon’t think o animals as religious. I religion in the Protestant key thatunderpins the Enlightenment axioms o Western culture is a matter o

beliethe cognitive manipulation and the autonomous affi rmationo a set o propositional assertions about the nature o realityhow


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could animals, who are prelinguistic bodies who don’t t the mold ospeaking, reasoning, choosing subjects, be religious?

Religious Affects proposes that i we are to attempt to understand thechimpanzee waterall dance, we must allow or the possibility that what

gets called religion may not be predicated on the uniquely human prop-erty o language. Tis approach not only asks what it would mean oranimals to have religion; it explores the possibility that a turn to affectcan help us better understand human religion as animal. What wouldhappen i we subtracted the ramework o human exceptionalism romreligion, ollowing the Darwinian turn to an animalist understandingo human religious expression? What i religion is not only about lan-guage, books, or belie? In what ways is religionor humans and other

animalsabout the way things eel, the things we want, the way our bodies are guided through thickly textured, magnetized worlds? Or the way our bodies ow into relationshipsloving or hostile with other bodies? How is religion made up o clustered material orms, aspects oour embodied lie, such as other bodies, ood, community, labor, move-ment, music, sex, natural landscapes, architecture, and objects? How isreligion dened by the depths o our bodiesour individual and spe-

cies histories that we know only by their long shadows but that shapethe contours o our everyday experience? How is religion somethingthat puts us in continuity with other animal bodies, rather than some-thing that sets us apart? How is religion something that carries us on its

back rather than something that we think, choose, or command?In Reason for Hope , Goodall speculates on the sources o religious

behavior among great apes: “Is it not possible,” she writes, “that thechimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe?” In a later inter-

view with Kimberley C. Patton and Paul Waldau, Goodall takes her pro-posed etiology o the elemental displays even urther. She distinguishesthe perormance o the waterall dance rom chimpanzees’ knownmating and intimidation routines, linking it instead to her observationo chimpanzees staring in ascination at objects in the worlda re-sponse that she describes as “over and above just play; over and abovemere curiosity.” For Goodall, an affective reaction to the waterallanemotional transport, “over and above” a rationally organized response

or an evolutionarily implanted cost- benet calculationcompels anembodied response, no less among animal bodies than among human


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bodies. “Was it perhaps similar eelings o awe,” she asks, “that gave rise tothe rst animistic religions, the worship o the elements and the myster-ies o nature over which there was no control?”

Goodall’s assessment o the chimpanzee waterall dance is especially

interesting in the context o a book that is markedly concerned withthe question o how the things that bodies do feel. Whether Goodallis describing her own religious experiences in the cathedral o NotreDame or her discovery o empathy as a scientic technique or studyingchimpanzees, affect , the ow o orces through bodies outside o, priorto, or underneath language, is a crucial theme. We could ask the samequestion o Disraeli’s speech. As the transcript records, the audiencedid not simply nod their heads in studied, silent agreement at Disraeli’s

assertions: they lled the halls o the Sheldonian Teatre with theirlaughter and cheering. As Janet Browne writes, this was exactly Disraeli’shope: his objective in resolving the academic question o human originsin avor o a traditionalist biblical account was consummately political,an attempt to corral a religious constituency in ser vice o his ambitionto rise through the ory Party ranks. Affect shapes this intersection be-tween knowledge, religion, and power. Te location o affect as a determin-

ing element o religionas well as other productions o embodied liesuch as knowledge, politics, language, economies, and relationshipsisnot conned to chimpanzees.

A number o scholars o religionespecially those in conversation with evolutionary biologyhave raised the possibility o animal religion,ranging rom passing mention in Darwin, eilhard de Chardin, JohannesMaringer, Mircea Eliade, Walter Burkert, and E. O. Wilson to longer es-says by Goodall, Kimberley C. Patton, Stewart Guthrie, Barbara J. King,

Lionel iger and Michael McGuire, and James Harrod. But animalreligion has not yet been systematically explored through the lens oemotion. Religious Affects develops Goodall’s intuition that starting

with animals in the study o religion prompts us to think about emotionand, as a corollary, that thinking about animality and emotion togethergives us new ways o exploring human religion. Tis begins with articu-lating affect theory to the materialist shif in religious studies.

The Side o the Angels: Religion and the Linguistic Fallacy

In the inaugural lecture o his chairship at the College o the Univer-sity o Chicago in 1974, Jonathan Z. Smith, the most prominent theorist


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in the eld o religious studies o the last orty years, recounted a storyrom his youth, when he worked on a dairy arm in upstate New York.Te armer, his employer, had Smith draw a bath or him every morn-ing. Afer bathing and eating breakast, the armer would step outside,

then immediately plunge his arms into the soil, scoop it up, and rub itover his hands. One day, Smith, overwhelmed by curiosity, asked his

boss, “Why do you do that?” Te armer studied him, then responded,“Don’t you city boys understand anything? Inside the house it’s dirt;outside, it’s earth. You must take it off inside to eat and be with youramily. You must put it on outside to work and be with the animals.”

In the lecture, later published as Map Is Not erritory , Smith ramesthis explanation using the terms o Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger , pro-

posing that the act o picking up the earth instantiates a mental division othe world into different spaces, distributing a set o conceptual propertiesacross a cognitive landscape: outside it’s earth; inside it’s dirt. For Smith,the armer’s action was a cosmological compartmentalizationa way othinking a cosmic architecture into being. Te armer’s body drew a mapo the world, an epistemic regime that divided the cosmos into meaning-ul parts.

In this explanation, Smith is explicitly repudiating a range o ahis-torical, metaphysical systems that had dominated the eld o religiousstudies up to the 1970s, what are now called sui generis understand-ings o religion that saw religion as a distinct (human) undertaking thatcould not be reduced to political or epistemological concerns. Smithreplaced these explanatory strategies with an epistemic orientationthat viewed religion as a way o thinking and labeling certain eatures othe worldand thereby as inextricable rom history and power. Smith

prompted religious studies to move past a set o earlier methodologiesthat tended to orbit some version o experiencesuch as William

James’s description o the varieties o religion as private, solitary experi-ences, Rudol Otto’s phenomenology o holiness as an encounter withthe “numinous,” or the history o religions school’s emphasis on “hiero-phanies o the Sacred” plunging into the mundane or proane world ohuman time. For Smith, and almost all who came afer him, these earliermethods which I will call, ollowing convention in religious studies,

“phenomenological” or “relating to the way things eel”presumedthat religion was an ahistorical phenomenon, a transcendent sourceo meaning arriving rom beyond human circumstances (or ineluctably


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bound to a sacrosanct individual religious subject) and thereore dis-connected rom systems o power. For Smith, the phenomenologicalapproach to religion was a depoliticizing analytics that, like all attemptsto mask the motions o power and history, risked sinister outcomes.

o counter these earlier approaches, Smith devised the rst linguisticturn in religious studies, insisting that religion is best understood as acategory manuactured within human histories through the devices ohuman representation and cognition. Religion, or Smith, is a creative in-tervention in an existing conceptual eld, an “occasion or thought . . .a rational and rationalizing enterprise, an instance o an experimentalmethod.” Robert Shar denes the supersession o earlier phenom-enological approaches along the same lines: “it is ill conceived,” Shar

writes, “to construe the object o the study o religion to be the innerexperience o religious practitioners. Scholars o religion are not pre-sented with experiences that stand in need o interpretation but rather

with texts, narratives, perormances, and so orth.” When J. Z. Smith,armhand, asked the armer, Why do you do that?, he inaugurated anew approach in religious studiesa linguistic-conceptual method thatprimarily engages in “reading texts, in questioning, challenging, interpret-

ing and valuing the tales men tell and the tales others have told aboutthem.” What gets called religion afer Smith’s linguistic turn has beena network o linguistic nodes to be deciphered in terms o their effi cacy

within ideological regimes. Religion, Smith would write in a later essay,is “the relentlessly human activity o thinking through a situation.”

Religious Affects is best understood as one long argument against boththe adjective (“relentlessly human”) and the gerund (“thinking througha situation”) o this claim: religion, I argue, is best understood neither

as exclusively cognitive nor as exclusively human. In spite o this criti-cal rame, however, I see this rmly as an extension o Smith’s project oinsisting on religion’s correspondence with history and power. Smith’scorrective to the early phenomenological approaches was indispensableor the growth o religious studies as a eld. It unshackled the studyo religion rom a model that sequestered religion away rom humanhistorya model that suppressed local differences (Religion is what wesay it is), paved the way or deadly colonial hierarchies (Who has reli-

gion?), and masked the imbrication o religion with networks o power(Religion is “private”). Te conceptual-linguistic strand o Smith’s workthat redened religion as “worldview” even made possible later work


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such as that o Russell McCutcheon, Bruce Lincoln, and omoko Ma-suzawa, which ocused on the politics o how the word religion is used.

But although this line o inquiry has been extraordinarily ruitulor the project o religious studies, it opens onto a set o strictly epis-

temological and linguistic questions that do not offer resources orunderstanding why chimpanzees might dance at the base o a waterall.Some interpretations o Smith’s cognitivist orientation risk constrain-ing religious studies inside the linguistic allacy: the presupposition thatthe medium o powerthe answer to the question, Why did you dothat?can only ever be a linguistic ormation. By contrast, affect theoryoffers resources or charting maps o power that are not limited to theplane o language. It proposes thatcontra earlier phenomenologists

o religion who saw religion as sui generisthe phenomenological isitsel political. Religious Affects , ollowing an animal turn past the grido signication, explores affect theory as a supplement to what MichelFoucault has called the “analytics o power,” a set o tools or analyzingpower in its multidirectional engagements with bodies, within and with-out language.

The Materialist Shif

In the early 1990s, building on Smith’s conviction that an analytics oreligion must be in conversation with an analytics o power but de-parting rom his emphasis on religion as a orm o thoughtscholars inpostcolonial anthropology o religion developed a new set o questions

based on a template o religion as a network o bodily practices. Inparallel with Smith, alal Asad’s seminal critique o the symbol-orientedanalytics o Clifford Geertz showed how a Protestant model o religion

as “aith”a set o propositional belieshad been smuggled into thestudy o religion. Still more recently, a number o scholars have built

bridges into different subelds within brain-mind science to explore a variety o questions surrounding the cognitive, neurological, and evolu-tionary actors affecting religion.

Tese projects have been collectively labeled the “materialist shif” byanother anthropologist o religion, Manuel Vásquez. Vásquez’s startingpoint is the assertion that the religious studies canon is not adequate

or understanding lived religion, religion as it is practiced by bodies, es-pecially under the circumstances o increased hybridization, migration,and mediatization advanced by accelerating globalization. Inverting


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the Enlightenment parameters o Disraeli’s triumphalist conession, Vásquez describes the materialist shif as examining “religion as it is lived by human beings, not by angels.” Religious Affects seeks to advance thismaterialist shif in religious studies by bringing the eld into conversa-

tion with another set o critical resources emerging out o queer theory,eminism, postcolonial critique, and post-structuralist philosophy

what has come to be called affect theory.How can we return to embodied experience outside o the productions

o language what I am here calling the phenomenological domain within religious studies without lapsing into the ahistorical meta-physical essentialism o Eliade or the politically detached individualismo James? Te critique o the “private affair” tradition within religious

studies whether it be as belie or experienceis entirely correct in itssuspicion toward a depoliticized vision o religion as the sel-containedproperty o sel-contained subjects. But this critique also risks eeingso ar rom these experiential accounts that it lapses into the linguisticallacythe notion that language is the only medium o power. Morerecent work within religious studies has renewed attention to religion inits emotive dimensions, but these orays have not had the benet o a

systematic, interdisciplinary account o affect. Affect theory addresses both o these concerns. It emerges out o acritical tradition (queer theory/eminism/postcolonial theory) that hasproduced ormidable critiques o the public-private binaryprecisely

by thematizing the way that private, local, or individual actions haveramications or broader regimes o power. Affect theory is aboutshowing the multidirectional vectors o inuence between embodiedemotions and politics, not about consigning emotions to a private

domain. Trough interdisciplinary engagements between literary the-ory, anthropology, and political science, it has produced the ground-

work or a exible account o the relationship between affect and power.Te affect theorist and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart locates powerrmly within the body’s affects. “Power,” she writes, “is a thing o thesenses.” Religious Affects develops this insight, highlighting the manymodes in which religion, like other orms o power, eels beore it thinks,

believes, or speaks. Te phenomenological is political.

Moreover, this book contends that adding perspectives rom criticalanimal studies (including new resources rom evolutionary theory) toaffect theory has implications or religious studies and other accounts o


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the relationship between power and bodies. Affect theory, in this read-ing, is about thematizing power outside o language. Animal bodiesour bodiesare invested in elds o power that are not mediated by lan-guage. Although language is an important eature o human bodies, it is

only one o many channels or the operation o power. Where conceptsand language are part o the religious matrix, they, too, must be consid-ered as part o an embodied complex that loops through the materialorces o affect that direct bodies. Affect theory is a necessary tool ormapping religion, not just because it adds to our inventory o descriptivetools, but because affect constitutes the links between bodies and power.

ake Smith’s employer, the dairy armer, thrusting his hands intothe soil. In Smith’s telling, the armer’s action is a cosmo-logy, a way o

thinking through a situation that writes a ormation o the cosmos. ForSmith, this thing that a body does is a kind o textthe conceptual in-scription o a grid on the world. Religious Affects opens up a line o in-quiry that is invisible to this analytics: it enables us to propose (as onehypothesis among many) that the armer didn’t start with a cosmology,a need to write the world differently, but with a complex o material sen-sations emerging out o an affectively driven, embodied practice. What

i the practice starts beore the concept? What i his body started by rub- bing earth on his hands, and only stopped to explain it when J. Z. Smith,armhand, came along and asked why? Te armer’s explanation may ormay not be correct, but either way, affect theory offers the suggestionthat the explanation did not come rst.

Religious Affects explores a perspective that sees bodies moving through worlds under the pressure o a complex welter o affects, with language weaving between and reshaping those pressures only sometimesand

even then only haltingly and unevenly. Affect theoryexamining themobile materiality o the bodythematizes the ways that the worldprompts us to move beore the interventions o language. It calls atten-tion to embodied histories that precede the advent o languageas

well as moments when language is bound with other thick, embodiedorces. Beore language, beore cosmology, even beore “thought,” under-stood as a way o converting a situation into an explanation, the armer’s

body moves, interacts with the world, and produces a eld o sensations

through that interaction. Te linguistic allacy misunderstands religionas merely a byproduct o language, and misses the economies o affecteconomies o pleasure, economies o rage and wonder, economies o


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sensation, o shame and dignity, o joy and sorrow, o community andhatredthat are the animal substance o religion and other orms opower.

Affect, the Postsecular, and the PosthumanOne o the many achievements o the linguistic turn in religious stud-ies was Smith’s continuation o the dismantling o nineteenth-centurycolonial hierarchies o the primitive and the civilized. Like Eliade beorehim, Smith showed that there was no essential difference between the

belies and practices o the Christian empire and the non-Christianlieways beyond that empire’s ever-expanding, bloody horizons. But

where Eliade proposed an ontological continuity that cast “primitive”

religions as drawing on the same transcendent religious resources asChristianity, Smith suggested that we view all religion as a ormationo human thought. Where Eliade made all bodies yearn or primitiv-ity, Smith’s approach was to keep a Kantian ramework o rational sub-

jects intact (while subtracting Kant’s racism): he promoted all religious bodies to the level o Kantian rationalizerslinguistic subjects thinkingthrough their situations.

Tis effects an important corrective to racist colonial logics. Butthe move to enshrine the Kantian logic that traffi cs in the linguistic al-lacy also comes with a cost: by establishing language as the medium opower and the primary analytic locus o religious studies, this strando Smith’s project locks religious studies into an Enlightenment prismthat tends to reduce religion to a series o cognitive appraisals o the

world. Tis approach is o no value, thereore, or theorizing what schol-ars are coming to call postsecularismthose moments when religion

ows over the boundaries o language or thought. It can write a concep-tual history o how Benjamin Disraeli and the heavenly host o upper-class white male Christians at the Sheldonian in Victorian Oxord cameto believe that humans were better understood as angels rather thanapes, and it can write a conceptual history o how we came to call thatreligious. It cannot address what, to me, are the equally interesting ques-tions o why those men laughed and cheered when Disraeli spoke their

belies back to them, or how those affective reactions activated a cong-

uration o power that consolidated and transormed the landscape outo which it emerged. Nor can it address moments when bodies withoutlanguage move in ways that seem religious.


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Smith’s work ocuses on what I would identiy as the dawn o texts.He is interested in the cosmologically rich epics o the ancient Near East(Gilgamesh , Enuma Elish , Hesiod’s Teogony). By raising up these lin-guistic artiacts as exemplars o religion, Smith established a template

by which it was possible to see the armer’s act o plunging his handsinto the soil as itsel a sort o texta cognitive operation that writes a

worldview into reality, a book o the world. In this strand o his expan-sive and complex body o work, Smith proceeds under the neo-Kantianassumption that power is directed by language. He relays an interest in amodel o religion that, although shot through rom the beginning withthe striations o power and history, starts and ends with books, ideas,and beliesthe concretizations o religion as a linguistic system.

Religious Affects , by contrast, is interested in histories that start beoretexts: phylogenetic histories originating with prelinguistic bodiesincluding nonhuman bodiesdriven by orces outside o language. Tismove is not designed as a way o retrieving some sort o authentic or nos-talgic essence o religious experience, but o vastly expanding the toolkito religious studiesand other contemporary critical projects ocus-ing on the intersection o bodies and powerto enold a plurality o

historically embedded practices, images, objects, and affects. I contendthat prelinguistic bodies, tooanimal bodiesmay well have steppedoutside o their homes and plunged their hands into the earth, with nota cosmology in sight.

Language produces late-stage explanatory rames or what now getscalled religion, but neither the dancing o the chimpanzees in the water-all nor the armer scooping up the earth nor the cheering o the dioc-esans in the Sheldonian can be reduced to language. Accounts o power

that reduce all o these phenomena to “language-like systems” return tothe logic o Enlightenment secularism, in which religion is always andonly a way o thinking. Religious Affects supplements Smith’s ardentopposition to the divide between “savage/emotional” and “civilized/rational” in a different way: by rmly locating even those bodies thathave demanded the right to hold themselves immune to affect white

bodies, Christian bodies, secular bodies, American bodies, male bodies,even scholarly bodies within the eld o animality.

Disraeli’s ape or angel speech also suggests the riction between whatmight be called the humanities and the natural sciences: the categoricalreusal o human beings to allow their bodies to be ramed by science.


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Tere is an insistence, in the repudiation o the connection between thematerial orces studied by science and the subjects o the humanities, onreserving a special ontological status or humansa consubstantiality

with angels, the Kantian subject as “ree and not determined through

any [prior] causes.” As Aaron Gross writes, “to shif the study o re-ligion rom divine to human may really be little more than a shif romone understanding o divinity prevalent beore modernity to a moremodern conception o the divine that ascribes attributes once consid-ered exclusively divine, such as innity, to the humanas in, or exam-ple, the idea o the innitely open human that can never be xed.” Tisis why Vásquez’s materialist shif enolds approaches rom evolutionary

biology and the brain-mind sciences: understanding religion means

pulling humans out o the domain o the angelic which means out othe domain o sel-determination through sovereign reasonand intothe bodily, the material, and the animal.

At the same time, ollowing the affective turn means putting to restsome o the misconceptions that circulate within scientic accounts oreligion, particularly the varieties o determinist reductionism. Under-standing human bodies as conuences o material processes (affects

as well as language) complicates bodies, rather than rendering themtransparent. Only bodies understood as undamentally light, uncompli-cated, shadowless, and oatingin a word, angeliccan be controlledor and predicted with the degree o precision boasted by classical sci-entic determinism or its contemporary iterations, the more staunchlyreductive orms o sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Tis

work, then, dovetails with contemporary eminist science studies andresearch into embodied cognition that have insisted on understanding

the operations o knowledge production as driven by bodies, rather thantranscendent, immaterial “reason.”

Religious Affects also attempts to ll a gap in contemporary affect the-ory: although there is already a ormidable library o books on reli-gion and emotion, some o which glance at affect theory, and althoughseveral affect theorists have begun to think through the implications otheir work or religion, there is no ull-length work critically engagingaffect theory rom a religious studies perspective. Tis book is designed

to build a bridge between conversations in affect theory and religiousstudies by thinking about species. o this end, it considers three con-cepts derived rom current conversations in affect theory and animal


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studiesintransigence (chapter 2), compulsion (chapter 4), and acci-dent (chapter 6)and explores each with a corresponding case study,

building up to a comprehensive theory o the chimpanzee wateralldance in chapter 7.

Te linguistic allacy assumes that the medium o power is languagethat depth, complex responses, experiences, and decisions cannot takeplace without the machinery o a linguisticized reason. One o the ea-tures o this model is that depth is sculpted out o the sedimentationo linguistic processes. Historicization , in this context, means excavatingthe linguistic regimes that have accumulated within a particular body

to produce subjectivity what Michel Foucault has labeled the com-plex o power-knowledge. Animal subjectivitysubjectivity withoutlanguageby these lights, can only be a contradiction in terms. Reli-gious bodies, according to the linguistic allacy, move because a particu-lar textual regime has directed them to do so.

Te notion o intransigence complicates this model, deploying theresources o affect theory to show how a textured, postessentialist ac-

count o bodies helps us to understand the interace between bodiesand power. Chapter 2 denes intransigence by examining the tension be-tween the Deleuzian and phenomenological branches o affect theory.Deleuzian modes tend to underline plasticity , the undamental recon-gurability o bodies under the inuence o the overlapping systemso orces within which they are embedded. Phenomenological affecttheory retains this interest in the politics o recongurability, butalso thematizes the intransigence o emotions persisting across bodies

and creating species-specic, embodied universals imprinted at birth.Rather than a 3-printed body produced by layers o liquid plastic,

bodies are constituted in part by an array o intransigent shapes embedded within them. Bodies are neither carvings pared out o ormless blocks, nor plastic shapes created ex nihilo: they are complex, chunkygenealogies, bricolages o existing orms.

Building a conversation between affect theory, evolutionary theory,and material eminist philosophy o science, intransigence provides

a new way o thinking about the relationship between power and his-tory. Tis means looking not only at the history o language systems within

which a body emerges, but at embodied historya lineage o intransigent,


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semistable orms emerging out o an evolutionary history and a localconuence o social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. Tisapproach answers the question o whether or not emotionssuch asshame, ear, or happinessexist beore or afer language. Intransigence

suggests that emotions are built into our bodiesthat they are artiactso an embodied evolutionary history. Connecting the analytics o spe-cies to the “onto-epistemological” project o Karen Barad, Religious Affects suggests a new attention to the onto-phenomenology o bodies:the way it eels to be the kind o bodies we are.

Tese onto-phenomenological shapes become the raw material oreligion and are key to understanding how animal religion unoldsespecially, I argue, in a globalized world where the mediatized orces that

can build religious bodies are becoming increasingly complex. Chapter 3explores this approach by considering globalization as a matrix that re-distributes certain affective orms through an assemblage o media andpedagogical practices. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 2006 documen-tary lm Jesus Camp illustrates this network by calling attention to howreligious bodies embedded in particular ormations o nation, race, andgender teach one another how to eel, and in the process produce po-

litical subjectivities made up o reticulated affective orms. Tis allowsor new ways o examining the intersection o religion with global me-diascapes and new ways o typologizing religions according to theiraffective congurations, rather than their propositional belies.

Chapter 4 explores compulsion as a way o naming orms o power out-side o the network o sovereign, speaking subjectsthe things that

make bodies move without being told, either by another body or by anangelic “sel.” In a queerly Cartesian move, chapter 4 starts with a bodyat a sort o phenomenological zero point: a prisoner in solitary conne-ment. But contra Descartes, solitary connement shows that starving

bodies o their affective points o contact with their worlds does not lib-erate them, but drowns them in proound suffering, leaving sustainedtraumatic effects. As the philosopher Lisa Guenther points out, where thesovereign sel would be immune to solitary connement as a orm o

torture, mapping bodies according to their compulsions depicts bodiesas animalas radically dependent on their affective relationships withthe world. Affectivity is not optional, but compulsory.


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Te linguistic allacy affi rms that depth can’t exist withoutlanguagethat we can’t want things without being told that we wantthem, without deciding that we want them, or without learning to wantthem. Tis is the presupposition o classical psychological behaviorism

as much as textualism. But affect theory suggests that our animal intimacy with the world precedes constitution inside a linguistic ramethat thereare “Proustian nooks” that pull us into the world without the applicationo language. Te relationship between affect and power moves bodiestransversally through and across the grids o language, consciousness,or cognition. Te compulsions o affect are better understood as addic-tions, as thick passions or bodies, objects, and relationships.

Chapter 5 turns to the example o contemporary American Islamo-

phobia, in particular the Park51 controversy o 2010, to demonstrate thatthese compulsions guiding bodies off the grid are signally importantor understanding relationships between religion, bodies, and power.

Where anti-Muslim discourse ofen presents itsel as a patient, reasoneddiscourse (and its opponents as bestial), locating the power o affect tomove bodies outside o language highlights how the very practice oinscribing and electriying racialized social boundaries is an eminently

animal process. Rather than a discourse, Islamophobia’s mobilization oan us-them divide is predicated on a cluster o affective orces workingthrough bodies and coalescing into religious orms.

At the same time, this prelinguistic animal sociality is implicated inan antithetical affective process: the cultivation o religious practices ocompassion. Both the production o quasi-racist discourses and theattempts to demilitarize those boundaries can be understood accordingto animal sociality. Religious Affects suggests that embodied religious

practices are ofen ound prolierating at social boundaries what criti-cal race theorist Sharon Patricia Holland calls “easts o difference”

whether through the thrilling disdain or the compassionate embrace o bodies elt to be other. Tese affective orms merge into the global com-plex o animal religion.

Affect theory takes place in the wake o Jacques Derrida’s deconstruc-

tion o traditional Western metaphysics, particularly the xation on sov-ereign human rationality. In Te Animal Tat Terefore I Am , Derrida

writes that his work can be understood as a philosophy o animalisma


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situation o language, reason, and experience against the background oa eld o traces operating according to contingency, contamination, anddifference rather than an overarching rationalitylocating metaphysi-cal artiacts within the rame o species. For Derrida, metaphysicsa

correspondence between human bodies and the transcendent logosisimpossible because every word, concept, or object is susceptible to acci-dent, to the collisions o meaning brought about by the play o traces.By stepping outside o what Derrida calls the carno- phallogocentric re-gime o discoursethe rational, linguistic, nonanimal grid o meaningmaking that underpins the linguistic allacyaffect theory opens upan analytic strategy that is invisible to Enlightenment humanism andconventional ideology critique: the way that regimes o power are com-

posed not by a closed network o rational actors, but within a spiralingcurrent o accidents.

Te invocation o animalism helps to advance the incipient conversation, begun by Elizabeth Grosz, between deconstruction andevolutionary biology. Chapter 6 explores how a Darwinian, post-adaptationist position what in contemporary evolutionary biologyis called the “pluralist” approachcan be brought into dialogue with

the theme o accident. Classical evolutionary biology was beholdento a positivist adaptationism, an orientation Stephen Jay Gould andRichard Lewontin dene as ocusing on “the near omnipotence o natu-ral selection in orging organic design and ashioning the best amongpossible worlds.” Contemporary evolutionary biology does not pre-suppose that evolution produces perect ts, but instead looks at theresidues, the remainders, the collisions, and the dead zones withinphenotypesthe lingering accidents o embodied histories.

Like these post-Darwinian biologists, affect theory is also interestedin sidestepping the idea that bodies can be comortably t into rational-ized economies. What Sara Ahmed calls affective economies are queereconomies marked by “sliding” motionsrelationships between bod-ies and power that twist the arithmetic o rational sel-interest. Affecttheory repudiates the presupposition that bodies, especially our human

bodies, are best understood according to a rationally arranged grid ocalculations, propositions, and decisions, reorienting the study o reli-

gion to the thematics o accidentthe way bodies splash and splatteracross the balance sheet o costs and benets.


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Tis move is particularly important or reraming unctionalist(crypto-adaptationist) and ideological accounts o religionsuch as areound in some evolutionary psychological approaches or the social-rhetorical approach. Affect theory suggests that economically tinged

analytics o religion that analyze complex behavioral orms in termso how they acilitate the accumulation o material or political assets,

what the primatologist Frans de Waal calls “a cardboard version ohuman nature,” is limited in that it cannot account or how affectsdissolve the priority o the economic and become, in Sedgwick’s word,“autotelic”out or themselves rather than aiming toward ulteriorpurposes. Affects are queer because they are ends in themselves: theyrustrate the insistence on a chain o intelligible whys at the heart o

carno-phallogocentric metaphysics and lead to more complex accountso the operation o power.

In chapter 7, Religious Affects returns to the chimpanzee wateralldance and analyzes it as just such an affective economya ow o orcesproducing movement at the knotty contact point between bodies and

worlds. Te dance is not to be construed in unctionalist termsasa device or advancing rational sel-interest but as part o a slid-

ing play o affects linking bodies to systems o power. Even though itemerges out o a spiral o articulated embodied histories driven in part by evolutionary mechanisms (including natural selection), the queeriterations o these histories are better understood as accident-driven, a-ective economies rather than balanced budgets. Te dance is a dancein the way that it recapitulates and replays the affective ligaments tying

bodies to worlds. Drawing lines between a set o interlocking but non-streamlined embodied elements, religion traffi cs in a network o effects

better understood as a regime o accidents than an icon o rationally or-ganized logos. Tis template allows religious studies to consider humanand nonhuman animal religion side by side.

I, as Derrida writes, “nothing risks becoming more poisonous thanan autobiography,” then the story that we are angels is the ultimatenarcotic, distorting our understanding o our own bodies and the bodies

with which we share this world. I a dairy arm is a world where animalsare kept in their proper place violently separated rom us by the bar-

riers o language, religion, and reasonthen the emphasis on languagein the contemporary humanities risks turning us all into armhands,


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patrolling the ences between human and nonhuman animal bodies. Asthe critical animal studies theorist Kari Weil has noted, where “post-structuralism insisted that we humans can never get outside o ourlinguistic rameworks and that we have no knowledge and no expe-

rience that escapes language . . . the turn to animals may be seen as anattempt not only to escape rom post-structuralism’s linguistic trap butto reexamine its connes.” Te gure o the religious animal roils thediscourses o Enlightenment humanism, prompting us to ask ElizabethGrosz’s posthumanist question: “What kind o intellectual revolution

would be required to make man, and the various orms o man, oneamong many living things, and one orce among many, rather thanthe aim and destination o all knowledges?”

Reading affect theory and critical animal studies together allows theposthumanities to draw more detailed maps o ecosystems o bodiesand power by reversing the ction that depth, phenomenological com-plexity, and embodied histories cannot exist without wordsmakingpalpable the plural ows o power outside o language. Lingering withthe chimpanzees dancing in the waterallreassessing the set o differ-ences and proximities that link and divide ushelps us dismantle the

ences separating human bodies and animal bodies. Tis opens up bet-ter understandings o the shared worlds spiraling around, through, and between us, as well as new modes o interspecies community.

Religious Affects by Donovan O. Schaefer

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