Hurt Feelings: Affect, World, and Time in As You Like It and Early Modern Studies

Abstract:Engaging current affect theory through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin, "Hurt Feelings" argues that affect should be understood neither as a form of embodiment nor of sympathetic correspondence but as a state of incommensurability between self and world that is at the same time the originative condition of those categories; rather than extending the self into the world, affect concerns the possibility of world as such. The essay brings such claims to bear on a scene of miraculous conversion in As You Like It that suggests both the grounds of theater's affective hold and affect's inextricable relation to our status as historical beings.