Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

Abstract

Much of the writing inTouching Feeling originally appeared in other contexts.But this collection of essays also represents a distinct project, one that has occupied a decade's work, which has nonetheless, and with increasing stubbornness, refused to become linear in structure.I think it is best described as a project to explore promising tools and techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy.No doubt the ambition of thinking other than dualistically itself shaped the project's resistance to taking the form of a book-length, linear argument on a single topic.A lot of voices tell us to think nondualistically, and even what to think in that fashion.Fewer are able to transmit how to go about it, the cognitive and even affective habits and practices involved, which are less than amenable to being couched in prescriptive forms.At best, I'd hope for this book to prompt recognition in some of the many people who successfully work in such ways; and where some approaches may be new or unarticulated, a sense of possibility.The ideal I'm envisioning here is a mind receptive to thoughts, able to nurture and connect them, and susceptible to happiness in their entertainment.Especially since the 1960s any number of Western academic, popular, and professional discourses have been cumulatively invoking nondualistic approaches in physics, gender and sexuality, art, psychology and psychoanaly-