Stories about the Emergence of the Affective Turn and New Materialism: Is the Linguistic Turn Exhausted?

Abstract

The goal of this article is to examine the ways in which the so-called new materialism and affective turn have given an account of their own emergence in a set of foundational stories that portray the linguistic turn and social constructionism as their main antagonists. These narratives claim that those theories that privilege the discursive and cultural analysis –like feminist and queer theory– are problematic because they overestimate the role of language at the same time that they misinterpret the nature of matter. This article examines the textual mechanisms that are used to legitimizes these new intellectual communities by exaggerating the evils of the past. What I will try to show is that, in order to do this, these narratives deploy a set of narrative vices and conceptual problems that this paper seeks to discuss.