Leftover:Affect in/as Methodology

Abstract

Leftover: the residual, the adjunct, the tenacious, dismissed from the 'Whole', a demarcation, a rejection, an excess, a stain, a trace, to be re-decorated, re-moved, re-cycled, re-turned to a primordial condition. Only it won't. Unwanted as they might be, leftovers linger, escape, insist, and demand our attention; they are a constant distraction, intensity, and transgression. As objects, environments, actions, and intentions, leftovers incite affects. Although not essentially antagonistic or the product of agential action and intention, leftovers are helpful in mapping the political, not only by drawing the coordinates of the respectable, responsible, reasonable, essential, and the aesthetic, but concurrently as the rejected yet lingering remnant of knowledge production. Using 'Leftover' as an invitation for theorization across disciplines and research paradigms, this event reflected on what we might mean when we use affective vocabularies in order to position ourselves in theoretical and methodological terms, and what is being left-over in theory, action, and passion. Eirini Avramopoulou is a fellow at the ICI Berlin. Currently, she is working on her first monograph on affect, performativity, and queer/gender activism in Istanbul, Turkey. Heather Love is the R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin ('Rethinking Sex'), and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History ('Is There Life after Identity Politics?'). Nahal Naficy is a fellow at the ICI Berlin. Her most recent work, Our Tale Was True, Our Tale Was A Lie, co-authored with Alice Gavin, is forthcoming with Punctum Books. Ruth Preser is a fellow at the ICI Berlin. Currently she is working on a monograph on queer Israeli diaspora in Berlin. Yael Navaro-Yashin is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Faces of the State: Secularism ...