After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography

Recently, geographical work on affect has made a small but noticeable emergence (e.g. McCormack 2003; Thrift 2004). In the context of diverse and emergent geographies of emotion (e.g. Anderson and Smith 2001; Wood 2002; Bennett 2004; Davidson and Bondi 2004; Thien 2005; Bondi forthcoming), this work on affect has a distinctive, intentional bent towards the 'transhuman' a state of being after or beyond human. This political move to get after or beyond humanity seeks to surpass a 'simple roman ticism of somehow maximising individual emotions' (Thrift 2004, 68). This model of affect discourages an engagement with everyday emotional subjectivities, falling into a familiar pattern of distancing emotion from 'reasonable' scholarship and simultaneously implying that the emotion of the individual, that is, the realm of 'personal' feelings, is distinct from wider (public) agendas and desirably so. In contrast, placing emotion in the context of our always intersubjective relations offers more promise for politically relevant, emphatically human, geographies. Affect has arguably been on the philosophical register for many centuries; however, as the acade mies of the twenty-first century take shape, an increasing attention to emotion is rippling through the forefront of critical thought, bringing questions of affect to the forefront. Social, cultural and feminist geographers (Bondi 1999 forthcoming; Wood 2002; Airey 2003; Bondi and Fewell 2003; Callard 2003; Thrift 2004), cultural and gender theorists (Chodorow 1999; Ahmed 2002 2004; Harding and Pribram 2002; Sedgwick 2003), philosophers (Nussbaum 2001), sociologists (Jamieson 1998; Hochschild 200