Affect theory is all the rage of late. James Noggle’s Unfelt offers both genealogy and endorsement. As genealogy, it locates the origin of affect in an intractable problem that extends across genders, genres, and disciplines. As endorsement, it uses the terms and methods of affect theory to understand its past. Ingeniously, but also riskily, Noggle frames Unfelt as the history of an adverb, insensibly, used “to describe what could look, if described broadly and roughly enough, like the basic components of the ideology of modern Western liberalism” (192). As a mere adverb grows into an idiom and from there into an ideological force, so the chapters expand in scope, demonstrating “the consistency of the insensible as an idiom across a broad range” (18). Chapter 1 focuses on “minute particles that precede all sensory experience” in English and French empiricism (114); chapter 2 treats “the social zone of the courtship...

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