The seminar focuses on the tension between thinking and feeling as a crucial resource for understanding the mediation of politics and culture. This tension has often been lost in the “turn to affect”. The seminar reorients the politics of feeling by setting it into relation with thought, concepts and reasoning. Rather than finesse varied forms of “affect theory”, the seminar constructs a mise-en-scène within which thinking and feeling, reasoning and sensing, are explicitly staged as fractious interlocutors. The tension between thinking and feeling will be understood for their potential to generate forms of knowledge rather than as a block to action. Three broad perspectives frame the seminar: firstly, to engage with a much longer history of affect, feeling and sensorial experience from the specific vantage point of critical theory; secondly, to relate the question of feeling and the body in relation to post-structuralism and affect theory; lastly, close readings of texts in philosophy, aesthetics and media studies from queer, postcolonial, and feminist perspectives to rethink the relation between thinking and feeling. This theoretical focus will be concretized by looking at cultural objects and practices where the tension between thinking and feeling is staged. Media in many forms, from literature to film, photography to art in general, will be engaged with, as they relate to specific political struggles.

The seminar comprises 6 sessions between October 2025 and June 2026.

Dates/times for first three meetings (2025):

Wednesdays: October 3, 29 [P.C. Hoofthuis PCH 519]

December 10 [Oudemanhuispoort OMHP E0.14]

11 am – 2 pm.

For further information, please visit >

https://www.rmes.nl/rmes-asca-thinking-and-feeling-seminar-2025-2026/

Image: L: Installation view, Doris Salcedo, Palimpsesto (2017), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía R: Detail, Maria Magdalena Pons, Elevata (2002)