In What We Tend to Feel Is Without History: Foucault, Affect, and the Ethics of Curiosity

This article considers how the affective turn in queer theory has been a turn away from Foucault and argues for a Foucauldian ethics of curiosity, looking to his strange prefaces-without-texts following an impasse in the Sexuality project. These reorienting outlines and abandoned analytics invite the reader to use them in resisting toxic patterns of thinking and feeling, revealing new scripts, relational virtualities, and attending with “care” to “what exists and what might exist,” to that which has been cast off in rendering ourselves intelligible.