Feeling otherwise: Ambivalent affects and the politics of critique in geography

Difference in affirmative and reparative critique

Much affirmative and reparative work seeks to understand and promote difference beyond singular modes or moods of critique. Yet, in that move, there is a risk that crucial aspects of difference can escape attention. For example, advocates of affirmative or reparative modes of inquiry often seek to cultivate a position ‘that does not allow the terms of critique to foreclose an ethos of presumptive generosity towards the object of […] critique’ (McCormack, 2012: 726). A generous ethos of this sort is undoubtedly attractive to many, including ourselves, and yet, difference can be elided in such formulations. In particular, there is a question of what difference difference makes among objects of critique. Generosity may be a productive orientation toward many objects, but there are also objects of critique for which generosity may be a dangerous orientation, for example white supremacy or colonialism. Although it is important not to represent these objects as the same everywhere regardless of geography, as singular, or universal (important tenets of affirmative critique), an affective orientation of generosity may foreclose more than it reveals (in particular by being pushed to ignore, in the name of generosity toward an object, work or experiences that point the researcher away from generous readings), rather than having the intended result of generating new understanding through multiplying attitudes of thought toward an object. So while our affective disposition toward research matters in a non-trivial way, it remains important to situate those affects within an acknowledgment of difference (Catungal, 2017). Critics themselves—and the position of the critic need not be only an academic one—are necessarily different and, as such, the prescription of a particular affective orientation will affect a researcher and their work differently (Tolia-Kelly, 2006, 2017). This elision of difference—though by no means a universal feature of affirmative and reparative work—is, we think, at the core of a number of critical interventions that continue to raise questions about affirmative or reparative approaches.

A number of scholars in and beyond geography have raised important concerns about how reparative and affirmative modes of inquiry may ignore difference in efforts to rethink critique for all scholars. As Harrison (2015) notes, there are real reasons to be hesitant over a turn toward affirmative, joyful, and enthusiastic affects of critique, in that such a turn may necessarily involve directing attention away from injustice and suffering. We echo that concern here, especially for those who may find joy or enthusiasm difficult to perform in the face of racist and heteropatriarchal forms of violence. Ahmed (2010) shows how feeling good may become a demand that works to discipline those whose access to various kinds of social and material goods is limited, to normalize certain conceptions of ‘the good’ over others, and to position those who are unhappy with existing arrangements as a problem, rather than to identify problems with the arrangements themselves. She further develops a critique of affirmative projects that turns on the way that positive affects are elevated as open, active, and generative, while negative affects become associated with closure and passivity. Ahmed emphasizes that negative encounters and moments of blockage have a life of their own and that ‘we cannot know in advance what different affects will do to the body before we are affected in this or that way’ (p. 215). Ahmed’s criticism of the affirmative turn could be read as a turn toward the negative, but it can just as easily be seen (as in Ruez, 2017) to suggest that some affirmative work has not been affirmative enough in approaching ‘negative’ affects and experiences. Ahmed asserts, after all, that ‘bad feelings are not simply reactive; they are creative responses to histories that are unfinished’ (Ahmed, 2010: 217).

Though much affirmative scholarship in geography does not explicitly conflate affirmation with positivity or ‘good’ feelings, there is the risk of an implicit connection between the two. Indeed, some efforts in geography to rethink critique as affirmative do make this explicit connection. Suggesting a solution to the personal negative feelings that academic work can engender, Woodyer and Geoghegan (2013; see also Geoghegan and Woodyer, 2014) suggest that geographers can inhabit a more positive approach to critique through enthusiasm or enchantment. In doing so, they sometimes connect this positivity with affirmation, critique, and reparation suggesting ‘an “enchanted” academic stance in order to progress [to] a more affirmative mode of critique within geography’ and that ‘as a sensory encounter of unintelligibility, enchantment is an affective force that can lead to a changed emotional state’ (Woodyer and Geoghegan, 2013: 197, 203). While emphasizing too the ambivalence of their position, in which enchantment means both charm and uncanniness, their writing nevertheless tends to align affirmation with positivity, with both pitted against negative affects that include scepticism and anxiety. In their argument, enchantment becomes directly associated—through reference to Alexander von Humboldt and JK Wright—to an Enlightenment-era ‘pleasurable sense of mystery’ (p. 201). Without dismissing curiosity as a potentially enlivening motivation for inquiry and other valuable aspects of Woodyer and Geoghegan's provocation, there is a risk, in the name of feeling better, of sidestepping longstanding feminist and anti-racist critiques of the masculinist and Eurocentric ocularcentrism that such forms of knowledge imply (Haraway, 1990; Rose, 1997; Said, 1978).

Another important angle on affirmative work emerges from Wilkinson’s (2017) critique of Hardt’s account of love as a political concept. While not dismissive of love in general, Wilkinson argues that Hardt’s account reduces the necessarily complicated and ambivalent nature of love to a singularly positive joy. In doing so, Wilkinson argues that Hardt fails to account for difference—specifically, how the same loving action or encounter might be experienced differently—and assumes, as well, too much about the political value of togetherness against discomfort or desires for distance. She builds on Ahmed’s revaluation of bad feelings and Spinozan themes of capacities to act that have been central to affirmative scholarship. Here, Wilkinson makes the important point that an undifferentiated project of increasing capacities to act is potentially problematic in contexts where those capacities to act are, from the beginning, differently distributed. She suggests, in contrast to pervasive work centered on increasing affective capacities, and in the context of the massive inequalities that characterize the current moment, that some individuals’ capacities to act may instead need to be diminished.

Eng (2016: 3) poses similar questions to reparative approaches. Highlighting the implications of the Kleinian account of the reparative psychic position in colonial relations, Eng argues that ‘affect is unevenly distributed in the history of liberal empire and reason’ and shows ‘how love and hate are affectively policed to create a field of good and bad objects and liberal and indigenous subjects, regulated by a colonial morality that is not the cause but rather the effect of processes of repair’. Eng’s argument itself exemplifies ambivalence in and toward the reparative in that his critique of Klein’s concept of reparation is developed, in part through a Kleinian framework, which Eng (2010) has also productively used elsewhere to make sense of the racialization of kinship and intimacy. Eng argues that psychic processes of reparation can be found at work within colonizing subjectivities and projects, which raises important questions about the political limits of the reparative. Most significant for our purposes is Eng’s emphasis on how the reparative impulse is ‘unevenly distributed and received among different objects and subjects’ (Eng, 2016: 6). From this perspective, the reparative position can be understood not, or at least not only, as an alternative to paranoid critique, but as already bound up with the regimes of violent differentiation (e.g., racialization and coloniality) that are rightly the object of critique.

Taken together, the scholars discussed here raise questions about how affirmative and reparative modes of inquiry engage with the unevenness produced by heteronormative, racialized, colonial, and capitalist regimes. To be sure, these questions are not equally applicable to all affirmative and reparative work. However, if care is not taken, there are risks that, precisely in the affirmative embrace of difference as multiplicity or of pluralizing modes of inquiry against singular scripts of critique, the ‘negativity’ produced by those regimes will be sidelined or that scholars will assume too much about how particular affects or interpretive styles will be experienced and how those experiences will be shared. This is the danger, following Tolia-Kelly’s (2013: 157) similar point about differences within materialist geographies, of accounts that ‘depoliticize and make palatable the material world’. Rather than enabling political action—which is a goal of much affirmative and reparative work—an insufficient engagement with difference, including both plurality and unevenness, risks eliding politics altogether.

Affirming ambivalence

The problems posed above are not, we think, solved simply by a turn to the negative as such. Indeed, we wonder what the language of the ‘turn’ does in terms of occluding or misrepresenting that from which one turns away (Wiegman, 2012). Many scholars have argued against the danger of fetishizing the negative in research, especially for marginalized groups, even when attempting to use that negativity as a leverage point for better circumstances or access to resources. Research that frames people of color and Indigenous people as only marginalized, injured, or damaged risks re-entrenching (rather than ameliorating) these very characteristics, both rhetorically and materially (McKittrick, 2011; Tuck, 2009). In a similar vein, Muñoz (2009) argues that anti-relational strands of queer theorizing (see Bersani, 1987, 1995; Caserio et al., 2006), while offering useful critical leverage on what Joseph (2002) has called the romance of community, nevertheless risk getting caught in their own ‘romances of the negative’ in turn (e.g., Edelman, 2004)—that through their very anti-relational theorization of sexuality or queerness along a singular axis which is inherently disconnected from race, gender, and class, this tends therefore toward undermining the intersectionality endemic to queer of color intellectual and political projects (Muñoz 2009; see also Cohen, 1997). Refusing both kinds of romance, Muñoz turns to Felman’s (2003) account of a radical negativity that goes so far as to negate the positive/negative opposition itself. In dialog with that radical negativity, Muñoz develops a conceptualization of queerness in which a relentless critique of the present is linked to a very particular kind of hope for another kind of time and place (for a different perspective on queer of color negativity, see Benedicto, 2019). Similar impulses can be seen across feminist geographic work where, for example, Koopman (2011) discusses the need to ‘push back against what I do not want in the world in order make space for nurturing what I do want’ (p. 276).

What is important here is not resolving tensions between affirmation and negativity. Retaining this tension, this ambivalence, allows us to sit closer to an impasse, in which ‘there is no certainty, no guarantee, no external point from which to anchor our politics’ (Secor and Linz, 2017: 571), and to acknowledge the undecidability in the worlds we research (Kern and McLean, 2017). We seek to inhabit this undecidable impasse while engaging with the difference and politics that already exists within affirmative and reparative projects, as well as with the productive tensions within varying approaches to affect (cf. Hitchen, 2019; Lim, 2007; Seitz and Farhadi, 2019). ² Hemmings (2005) argues that the language of affect theory has too often ignored some of the complexities and rich histories of feminist, queer, and postcolonial thought in order to make a case for itself. But it is also the case that work on affect, and by extension affirmation (and negativity), often emerges directly from feminist, queer, and postcolonial work, even if this work is not always centered in disciplinary conversations about the affirmative. The project to question modes of critique, to think otherwise, and to embed thought as an embodied activity indelibly connected to the researcher’s positionality is one that can be broadly associated with feminist geographies since their inception, albeit in myriad and changing forms (England, 1994; Militz et al., 2019; Rose, 1997; Sultana, 2007). From this perspective, it is not surprising that feminist and queer geographers have developed some of the most productive approaches to affirmative and reparative modes of inquiry precisely because, at their best, they bring to the fore questions of difference and politics.

Gibson-Graham’s (1996, 2008) work is of central importance in understanding the possibilities and prospects of affirmative and reparative modes of geographic scholarship that are attuned to difference and that offer alternative moods and modes of inquiry as a politicizing project. They pose a critique of Marxist political economy, arguing that this approach has become dogmatic and masculinist, unnecessarily representing capitalism as totalizing, dominating, and inevitable, and thus, as the sole cause of social phenomena (see also Deutsche, 1991; Massey, 1991). In representing capitalism in monolithic terms, academics mistheorize the economy and reproduce the notion that the only economic relations that matter are capitalist ones. Their diverse economies framework rethinks epistemological attitudes toward the economy as an object of geographical thought while explicating how capitalist and non- or not-only-capitalist economic activities exist alongside other dimensions of social life. By rhetorically diminishing capitalism as an object of inquiry, Gibson-Graham (2008: 614) seek to evade tendencies in other critical accounts that ‘seemed to cement the world in place rather than readying it for transformation’. In this affirmative move, Gibson-Graham do not ignore the fact that myriad forms of global structural violence are linked to capitalism in complex ways; they instead generate plural accounts of economic life that are meant to open up, rather than shut down, critical energies and political action. They offer practices of ‘reading for difference’ as alternative modes of inquiry that have been taken up across the range of geographic research to problematize singular narratives of critique that only read for dominance at the expense of the political possibility present in actually existing heterogeneity (e.g., Brown, 2009; Dombroski, 2016; Wynne-Jones, 2014). At the same time, it remains important to not set aside the ways in which this heterogeneity is itself structured unevenly, as Bledsoe et al. (2019) discuss in their recent work on diverse economies and racial capitalism.

More generally, theorizing affirmation has become a mode of thinking otherwise and focusing attention on capacities to act politically. Ruddick has developed affirmative thinking in geography through rigorous work on its philosophical roots. She examines affirmation as ‘potentia—that is, the impulse to preserve and expand out powers to act’ (Ruddick, 2008: 2589). She suggests instead of a negative framing of the dialectic we might, through Spinoza, find a positive dialectic-as-becoming that deals with difference in terms other than through opposition, contradiction, recognition, and representation (see also Deleuze, 1994; Smith, 2012). Ruddick’s (2008: 2601) understanding of affirmation approaches joy as a form of ‘congruence between others and ourselves[,] […] a knowledge produced in common’ rather than an individually-experienced emotional state. Thus ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ emotions may both be affirmative, if they increase our capacities for action or our set of available affects (Ruddick, 2010). In this vein, feminist geographers have theorized affirmation as not about individual positivity but as instead about imagining other worlds, accounting for difference in its myriad forms, and insisting that transformation is possible.

Moss (2014), building on the work of Braidotti (2011), exemplifies the idea that transformation cannot be conceptualized as incidental to our epistemological strategies as researchers. Her impersonal view of affirmation-as-transformation sees affirmation as being about mediating limits, intervening in the world, and finding a sustainable ethics of survival (Moss, 2014). In their writing on collective biography, feeling, and affirmation, Moss et al. (2018) develop a complex account of the relationship between emotions and the expansion or diminishment of embodied and structural capacities for action in the academy. Their conceptualization of affirmation emphasizes the dissolution of the ‘I’ into the ‘we’ through collective biography as a mode of inquiry (Hawkins et al., 2014). These authors emphasize affirmation in terms of capacities for action and carefully theorize emotions like joy as ambivalent—that is, closely connected to and sometimes indistinguishable from other emotions (Falconer Al-Hindi et al., 2014; Kern et al., 2014). Yet, there may remain, as Ahmed notes, an implicit link between impersonal conceptualizations of affirmation and positive feeling: though Moss et al. (2018) rigorously theorize affirmation as not linked to any particular emotional stance, the focus in their work does remain on joyfulness—and not only in the strictly delimited Spinozan sense—even as they usefully insist on the interrelationality, complexity, and ambivalence of feeling. To build on Moss et al. (2018) in this article, we wonder how their project could be developed further when their affirmative politics is connected up with other less obviously positive kinds of feeling. Toward such an end, Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar’s (2019) reparative approach to weariness provides important insights into both the generativity of negative feelings and the political potential of (in)action.

Queer geographers have worked with a range of affirmative and reparative approaches to develop geographically sensitive and politically capacious accounts of the geographies of sexualities and queer politics. Working with Gibson-Graham’s approach to reading for difference, Brown (2009; 2015) has brought important attention to diverse gay economies beyond those captured by a rubric of neoliberalism, and Oswin (2007) points to the complex possibilities and complicities of queer globalizations. Responding to the difficulties of understanding spaces of people who have been marginalized that are also themselves exclusionary, Browne (2009) draws on Sedgwick to emphasizes the value of local and fragmentary ways of knowing that cannot be defined by a single totalizing theory or affective state (also see Brown and Browne, 2011). Lim (2007) emphasizes how theories of affect and Sedgwick’s reparative position both suggest different ways of relating beyond normative understandings of identity, what bodies can do, and how we can feel about politics. In resonance with the writing on affirmation cited above, repair in Lim’s rendering does not seek to diminish oppositional forms of relation but to render them livable—without setting up an unnecessary opposition between ethical openness and political critiques of power and normativity (also see Hutta 2016 on paradoxical affirmation).

Seitz (2017a) draws on Sedgwick’s writing on paranoia and repair to highlight the messiness of objects that are often framed negatively by queer and other critical scholars. Far from being objects that people uncritically accept as sites of belonging and inclusion, Seitz draws on fieldwork in a queer church to highlight the multiplicity of feelings that people may have in relations to complex, imperfect objects, and their capacities to integrate structural critique with capacious modes of relating. He highlights how people work variously with and around these objects, try to change them, believe in them, disavow them, negotiate with them, and take with them what they need while leaving what they do not in complex ways. A reparative approach for Seitz is not about positivity, and neither can it be reduced to the cruelty of optimism in Berlant’s (2011) framing. It is about the ambivalent mediation of expectation, survival, and the coalescence of relationality. Seitz’s work moves reflexively in the muddled middle ground between affirmation and negation, and emphasizes that relation cannot ever be only one thing. It is complex, and sometimes, though relations may be damaging, people find ways to survive them, at least in the meantime. Repair in these writings means managing good-enough relations with always-imperfect objects. Further, Seitz (2017b), acknowledging and responding to Eng’s critiques of reparation outlined earlier, emphasizes differences among those objects and foregrounds the differences between, say, a troubling reparative impulse toward colonial power compared to a reparative impulse toward messy projects of anti-colonial coalition building.

All this work opens up important questions about the kinds of stories we tell, often only implicitly, about what we study, how we can or should feel about it, and about how these stories make us and others feel. Much reparative and affirmative work—especially insofar as it engages with discussions about critique—shares a focus on telling stories that feel better to their tellers or their readers or that motivate or capacitate action in some way, often with an implicit assumption or explicit claim that feeling only one particular way (i.e., feeling better) promotes action in ways that feeling in any other way or in a multiplicity of ways does not. There is, to be sure, often a compelling rationale to such claims, but the movement from story to feeling to action may be neither so straightforward nor so singular, shaped as it is by difference (Gammerl et al., 2017). On this score, we think feminist and queer geographic currents within affirmative and reparative projects have tended to be better at understanding the way that these stories, feelings, and actions are constituted by a politics of difference and point toward the necessary ambivalence involved in the attempt to tell better stories. This engagement with difference and ambivalence is also central to the genealogies of the affirmative and reparative in thinkers like Sedgwick and Deleuze, for whom the affirmative and the reparative are not a retreat from politics, but rather embedded with political critiques of fascism and heteronormativity.

Complicating depressive/reparative critique

Sedgwick’s (1997, 2007) account of paranoid and reparative critique continues to reverberate in and beyond queer theory. She describes paranoia as the prevailing tenor of critical theory, as an approach that views text and event as structured by meaning hidden to most, but not to the learned reader. Paranoia’s logic is anticipatory and functions through exposing how oppressive mechanisms are hidden behind every social structure and phenomenon. Paranoid critique, as Sedgwick explains it, defines the structural inevitability of oppressive mechanisms like capitalism and patriarchy and represents those mechanisms as totalizing and monolithic. The critic thus situates herself as epistemologically in command of and master over her object—as in a position of sovereignty with relation to her object. Sedgwick’s argument is that, while vitally important in the history of feminist and queer thought, paranoia has problematically become the only (or at least the most privileged) strategy for the pursuit of critique (Wiegman, 2015). She suggests another critical relationship to the object—the reparative—that is more capable of dealing with the messiness, ambivalence, and complexity of our never monolithic relation to objects.

Reparative reading seeks to operate through a less totalizing model and attempts to not situate the author in a position of mastery with relation to her objects. It challenges the relationship between academic inquiry, everyday knowledges, and practice to form what Sedgwick (1997: 23) calls ‘local theories and nonce taxonomies’. She describes reparation as associated with the exploration of multiple affects, rather than privileging only one affect, thus seeking to highlight the value of multiple epistemological strategies and not having to decide on a single strategy (i.e., a paranoid one) in advance. However, this multiplication does not emerge out of a view-from-nowhere kind of pluralism, but rather emerges squarely within the particular time and space of queer theory and literary criticism, the specificities of the psychoanalytic traditions with which Sedgwick is engaged, and, most importantly for our purposes, within Sedgwick’s long-term political project of mobilizing difference as multiplicity against the violent devaluations of homophobia. Insufficiently engaging the complexities of those contexts, commentators on reparation have tended to frame her claims as posing an abstract choice between paranoid and reparative critique (e.g., Barnwell, 2015; Stacey, 2014). In practice, Sedgwick does not really advocate for one critical stance over others (Hanson, 2011). Instead, her position is one of interchangeability, inter-relationality, and ambivalence with relation to objects that cannot be apprehended otherwise than non-sovereignly, through an admixture of affects, which necessarily includes aggression, paranoia, and ‘negative’ feelings (Dean and Wiegman, 2013).

Sedgwick inherits and adapts her descriptions of paranoid and reparative critique from Klein’s writing on the paranoid/schizoid and depressive/reparative positions that form part of her model of psychic structure and object relations. Klein’s position is an adaptation of the psychic stages found in Freud’s (1962 [1905]) Three Essays. But while (at least in some readings) Freud’s stages are linear and totalizing, Klein’s positions emphasize the itinerancy of the psyche so that these stages become interrelated and overlapping. The subject can thus move between them—albeit not necessarily as a function of individual ‘choice’—rather than moving from one to the next and never backwards (Sedgwick, 2007). Yet, for the Kleinian subject, the paranoid position does necessarily come first in the psychic structure of the infant, who apprehends the world first of all from the point of view of aggression and anxiety. A crucial—and underemphasized—element of the reparative position is therefore that what is being imperfectly repaired is an already-split partial object. The reparative depends upon the paranoid and cannot be conceptualized without it (Seitz, 2017a). For Sedgwick it is not a matter of simply switching epistemological strategies and approaching an object anew from a depressive/reparative rather than a paranoid/schizoid stance. The object has already been apprehended (perhaps unconsciously) by the subject in the paranoid mode, and this paranoid splitting cannot be undone. The task of the depressive/reparative mode is to gather back together the subject’s shattered object, but not necessarily in a way that resembles some ‘original’ object prior to its paranoid apprehension (Sedgwick, 2007).

Sedgwick’s alignment of the reparative and depressive provides one reason to be skeptical of a ‘reparative turn’ that would associate the reparative position only with positive affect (Love, 2010; Wiegman, 2014). Sedgwick (2007: 637) says that it offers both the ‘precondition of severe depression and also a quite varied range of resources for surviving, repairing, and moving beyond that depression’. That Sedgwick developed these theories following her own diagnosis with cancer is another key element of the ethics that she seeks. The reparative/depressive position purports an openness to the object and willingness to subsist alongside it, to live with it, and, perhaps, to change it and to be changed by it (Sedgwick, 2007). The interaction between the paranoid and reparative is such that the threatening objects of the former are reassembled (not into a pre-existing totality) in the latter (Sedgwick, 1997). This is, then, more an ambivalent than an affirmative enterprise. At most, it is about cultivating and, as best we can, trying to live within ‘good enough’ objects and relations.

In making these observations about the relations between the paranoid and reparative position in Sedgwick’s reading of Klein, we highlight three things. First, paranoia and repair are related and do not exclude one another. Second, the reparative/depressive position does not equate to a singularly positive account of a particular object. Finally, we note the importance of recognizing Sedgwick’s concepts (like all concepts) as intellectual and political interventions within particular contexts. This is, of course, not at all to say that they should not be mobilized in other contexts, but only that the embeddedness of Sedgwick’s concepts within a project of contesting violent logics and promoting difference against normativity cannot be ignored.

Affirmation as critique in Deleuze

Just as we question the alignment of the reparative with positive feeling in Sedgwick, in this section, we seek to complicate readings of Deleuze that link his affirmative philosophy with positive affects as critiqued by Ahmed (2010) and Harrison (2015). Specifically, we draw on Deleuze’s (1983) writings on Nietzsche—in which Deleuze makes some of his clearest statements about his attitude toward critique—to claim that affirmation in Deleuze is far more ambivalent than is often acknowledged by those advocating for more positive critical affects.

To begin, it is worth examining how Deleuze uses the term affirmation in his work on Nietzsche, since it also cannot be neatly aligned with positive feeling. In Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, just as in Moss et al. (2018) and Ruddick (2008) above, joy is not aligned with a literal external emotional expression of joyfulness. As in Sedgwick, Deleuze (1983: 16) persistently contradicts this equation: ‘“those who suffer from the superabundance of life” make suffering an affirmation in the same way as they make intoxication an activity’. Enthusiasm, joy, hopefulness, enchantment, and so on, are affirmative only insofar as they allow a power to be aligned with what it can do. Affirmation is about a set of underlying forces that are not oriented toward the outward emotional expressions of a body. Rather than referring to an outward positivity, affirmation in Deleuze is about finding a new way of thinking that is aligned with chaos and the being of becoming. The affirmation that accompanies joyfulness is a set of physiological or unconscious psychic processes that may or may not be represented in consciousness by an actual feeling of joy. He writes, ‘it is no doubt more difficult to characterize these active forces for, by nature, they escape consciousness. […] Consciousness is essentially reactive; this is why we do not know what a body can do, or what activity is capable of’ (p. 41). In Deleuze, affirmation can in no way be equated with an outward emotional state, which he reads as an effect of other forces. Illness or depression may separate us from what we can do, but it also ‘reveals a new capacity, […] endows me with a new will that I can make my own, going to the limit of a strange power’ (p. 66). An apparently unmoving, ill, or mournful body may be just as prone toward ‘joy’ or affirmation as any other.

While Deleuze and Sedgwick come together in their valuation of non-dualistic difference, and the above paragraph highlights some other important affinities between affirmative and reparative positions, Deleuze’s understanding of critique cannot be neatly mapped onto Sedgwick’s categories. On the one side, we find descriptions of critique that resonate with what Sedgwick might call paranoid critique: ‘philosophy is at its most positive as critique, as an enterprise of demystification’ (Deleuze, 1983: 106). Yet, at other times, his understanding of critique is quite distinct from the politics of exposure that Sedgwick aligns with paranoid critique. The role of critique is one of creation, of producing new thoughts and new concepts. He writes, ‘but does not critique, understood as critique of knowledge itself, express new forces capable of giving thought another sense? […] Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life’ (p. 101, original emphasis). From this point of view, critique in Deleuze is both oppositional and creative. Much can be made of this as a general point, and Deleuze’s affirmative stance in relation to difference as positive multiplicity is often a key reference for those seeking to pluralize the moods and modes of critique beyond singular scripts. However, much work that centers Deleuze as a figure of positivity ignores the politics of his commitments to retheorizing and foregrounding the importance of difference in philosophical projects (Deleuze, 1994; see Cockayne et al., 2017, 2020). Thus, there is a need for such conversations to center the differentiating forms of violence and domination that from the outset unevenly shape possibilities of life, and the embeddedness of conceptual work within those uneven processes. From that perspective, conversations about critique, and its affirmations and negations, could be less between lively, positive affects and the privileging of negativity in relation to death in the abstract, and more about the multiple senses of difference, the politics of intellectual work, and the complex relations between and within positive and negative forms of feeling. McKittrick’s (2014) project of thinking a ‘nonlinear’ Black living against remunerations of Black death stands as an important example, as a position that grapples directly with the negativity of anti-Black violence precisely through an engagement with the otherwise possibilities of Black life occasioned, but not contained, by that violence (McKittrick, 2011).

Situated in its political context, Deleuze’s writing on difference can, we think, play a role in conversations about the politics of critique, but pursuing such a project also requires going beyond Deleuze in any number of ways. Yet new critical projects are not, for all that, necessarily at odds with his writing on critique. Critique for Deleuze is not an ahistorical method. He writes: ‘if philosophy’s critical task is not actively taken up in every epoch philosophy dies. […] This is why philosophy has an essential relation to time: it is always against its time, critique of the present world. The philosopher creates concepts that are neither eternal nor historical but untimely and not of the present’ (p. 107). Critique must always be refreshing itself and can never be said to be identical to itself. What was useful as critique for Nietzsche or Deleuze—what was capable of producing a new image of thought—may not have the same effects in our own present moment. One implication of critique being against or out of time with itself is that it appears at the surface to be always antagonistic. Deleuze (p. 106) writes that ‘a philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy’. This claim further complicates the use of Deleuze as the supposed philosopher of positivity and feeling good (see also Culp, 2016). In Ahmed’s (2010) terms—and somewhat against the grain of her own reading of Deleuze—what Deleuze suggests here is that the critic-philosopher has to be a killjoy.

The point here is not to reimagine Deleuze as a philosopher of negative feelings, which would not be particularly convincing in the broader context of his work, but to highlight a certain ambivalence that persists within Deleuze’s affirmative project. Indeed, it’s possible that through terms like affirmation and joy, Deleuze remains associated, perhaps by his own design, with ethically or epistemologically positive projects, in which, as in Ahmed’s critique, the joyful shapes what is able to count as desirable or good in a political sense. Like Sedgwick, Deleuze’s work needs to be understood in the context of its politics—where his thinking around difference as positive multiplicity is mobilized in implicitly or explicitly anti-fascist and anti-capitalist directions (most obviously in his collaborations, e.g. Deleuze and Guatarri, 1987). In that sense, a non-oppositional understanding of difference need not preclude and may even enable a politics opposed to an unjust political and economic order. Advocates of affirmative politics may find such an assertion obvious, but it bears repeating to the extent that moves to pluralize the moods and modes of critical work can veer in both politicizing and depoliticizing directions. In the final substantive section of this article, we clarify the relationship between critical ambivalence and politics, through engaging Georgis’s writing on queer affect, and suggest some of the implications of this approach for geographic scholarship