"For progressives, a moment of truth arrives when their battles against old dogmas merely prove to entrench new ones. In Against Affect Lisa Downing . throws down the gauntlet to everyone active in the humanities and social sciences today."--Eric Heinze, author of The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech Is Everything "This is a timely and deeply important book in which Lisa Downing offers up a concerted intellectual assault on affect theory--and the broader cultural turn to emotion--that should make even the most trenchant of advocates pay attention. This is not mere attack or deconstruction, however, but instead a clear and precise argument for the return of rationality, grounded in a feminist neo-enlightenment, to academia and Western culture more widely. Against Affect is not a book that can or should be ignored by anyone interested in navigating a route through present cultural challenges that is progressive but also grounded in reason."--Darren Langdridge, author of Sexual Citizenship and Social Change: A Dialectical Approach to Narratives of Tradition and Critique "An indispensable critique of the contemporary epistemic and affective terrain. Its proposal for a redistribution of reason is a crucial path out of this terrain.

The boldness of the diagnostic and critical dimensions of this argument leave the book with few peers."--Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism.