Affective Leanings in Performance

In this chapter, the authors ask how, taken together, performance and affect studies gives posthuman ethics breath and flesh by expanding understandings of matter, discourse and enactment as they move in relational embodiment. They also seek to extend affect scholarship and its ability to reconceptualise the political promise of the collective and spatial relations through the lens of performance. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling is foundational to our understanding of affect and/as performance. Thinking performance as field attention also asks the reader to consider affect as that which brings together the social and the biological under the banner of posthuman performance: a dynamic encounter between bodies in/as an emplaced and always-material event. Craig Gingrich-Philbrook uses posthuman performance to examine the ways human beings both exercise and deny their relationships with animals, technologies and environments in his consideration of the execution of the healthy giraffe, Marius by the Copenhagen Zoo