Every interpretation of Scripture has come from a human body. The cultural, ethnic, and contextual aspects of embodiment are frequently considered in most modern hermeneutical approaches. However, what is often overlooked—and what frequently operates beneath, as a response to, and in light of these varying contextualized bodies—is affect. Affect theorists typically define affect as encompassing emotions, physical sensations, and the power dynamics that are passed from body to body below conscious awareness (Gregg & Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 1). While affect often includes emotion, it is not merely emotion. Donovan Schaefer describes affect as “the shapes and textures that inform and structure our embodied experience at or beneath the threshold of cognition” (Schaefer, Religious Affects, 23-24). Because scriptural interpretation is an embodied human experience, affect is always at work, influencing our hermeneutics. How are these affects, as an aspect of our human embodiment, informing scriptural hermeneutics? The field of “affect theory” within literary critical theory can help answer this question. I will argue that a scriptural hermeneutic can be strengthened by incorporating aspects of affect theorists’ approach to literary analysis. To this end, I will outline a brief history of contemporary affect theory and analyze what, if any, “method” it employs to interpret literary texts. After this, I will propose some preliminary strategies for how affect theory can supplement scriptural hermeneutics to more effectively address the embodied nature of scriptural interpretation.
I will accomplish this by tracing the two primary streams of affect theorists: those following Deleuze who views affect as intangible, ineffable “becomings,” distinct from later emotion, and those following Tomkins who identify affect both as the pre-cognitive motivators of human behavior and the feelings and emotions that these pre-cognitive forces produce. This brief history will allow me to identify something of a method for affect theorists’ literary interpretation based on their premise that how texts generate embodied feelings in their readers substantiates how texts generate meaning. After considering the two most prevalent critiques of affect theory’s literary interpretive method, I will turn to apply affect theory in biblical interpretation. I will propose two preliminary ways in which affect theory can strengthen a scriptural hermeneutic: by applying embodied conceptual metaphors in conversation with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work Metaphors We Live By and by better understanding the affective components of “reading cultures” in conversation with Kevin Vanhoozer’s Mere Christian Hermeneutics.