Spenserian Matchmaking: A Response to “Affective Companions”

Abstract

Affect” names the relational mode of living systems. Changes in the variable intensity of affect register the impact of events on those systems, and the resulting presentation and expression of those affects adjust and alter the surrounding world, in ways large and small. From the swoons and shocks of violent encounter within The Faerie Queene to the scenarios of seduction and complaint within the shorter poetry, Edmund Spenser is a preeminent poet of affective companionship. Spenser’s prismatic representations of affect range across a spectrum from hyperaestheticized idealizations of companionate bliss to gently comedic depictions of friendship and chivalrous service to darkly paranoid fantasies of betrayal and deception. Spenser’s very preeminence risks making him look singular, sui generis. How open to companionship with other intellectual interlocutors is he? The four essays that I have been asked to respond to here offer rich examples of the promise and the pitfalls of thinking affective companionship through the critical production of new relationships between Spenser and four generative companions: we are asked to reread Spenser “with”GillesDeleuze, Val Plumwood, SianneNgai, and Jean-LucMarion. It is a Lacanian truism that every two-term relationship in fact implies a third Other, triangulating the pairing from without. That is the case here, as these pairings have been brought about through the intercession of four scholarly matchmakers, each working to align their chosen pair at their most promising points of potential adhesion, hoping things will spark or stick or at