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79 CHAPTER SEVEN After Teresa Brennan ‫ﱡﱣﱢﱡ‬ Kalpana Rahita Seshadri In the spring of 2000, Teresa sent me her manuscript, The Transmission of Affect1 and asked me to respond to it. This followed on a series of exchanges we had at first about the concept of race as a fictional device within the sociology of medicine, which then led to other related issues. Teresa had proposed that we work on an essay together, maybe even a book, on race and intelligence . She was riveted by the debates over Herrnstein and Murray’s controversial some would say noxious, study of intelligence and race in America, The Bell Curve. Teresa suggested that we launch a different kind of attack on Herrnstein and Murray that would not offer a refutation, but would begin by accepting their findings. Rather than focusing, as others had done, on their manipulation of statistics and questionable epistemological assumptions, Teresa wanted to make the argument that IQ variants could be directly traced to environmental and material factors. If children of certain ethnic groups perform less well in cognitive aptitude tests, we could show that this was because of their inadequate or unequal access to resources that aid in cognitive development, such as environmental and psychical factors that condition the subject’s place in the world, as well as to material factors such as nutrition, schooling, parenting, health care, and pre-natal care. For those of us who are familiar with Teresa’s work, this mode of analysis , what we may term as a social biologism, is her signal achievement—the interrogation of the nature/nurture binary to demonstrate the intricate ways in which social, material, and environmental factors incarnate the flesh and produce the biological. Though I am very much in sympathy with Teresa’s brand of constructionism , when it came to actual collaboration, I found it a hard act to follow, as, it required a mode of interdisciplinary study and forms of belief, about the good, or about health, for instance, that were beyond me. More precisely, to do good Brennanian work, requires that one be able to translate sociological analyses into tools for ethical and political argumentation based on normative judgments about the social. I also found that it requires a great deal of philosophical muscle to utilize the blunt statistical instruments of sociology to excavate the subtler layers of identity production. To be honest, I found my stamina and optimism duly waning. I was also dead set against granting anything to Herrnstein and Murray because it seemed too much like a capitulation. For me, the very concept of race is founded and implicated in a pernicious logic of human differentiation and ranking. It was within the context of my withdrawal from the essay project, and gradual flagging of collaborative possibilities that she asked me to read her manuscript. I am several months late with my response, but I share it with you now in this volume not because I feel a sense of unfulfilled obligation and yearn for closure, though the denial is no doubt symptomatic, but because handling the manuscript with its typographical errors and pagination mistakes positions me in a time before closure, before the book was complete, and revives for me a Teresa who is still writing, revising, thinking and arguing. It was an inexplicable pleasure to work with the manuscript. The errors took on an unexpected affect, not that of a veiling over or of forgetting, but they revealed a materiality and a liveliness, whose loss we all collectively mourn. ‫ﱡﱣﱢﱡ‬ Dear Teresa: Your bulky manuscript arrived by Fed Ex and I have finally finished reading it with great interest and pleasure. My grasp of your concepts is no doubt tenuous, but for what it’s worth, I thought I would take up your invitation to share some observations and moments of coalescence with my own ongoing work on otherness. There are several surprising and unsettling propositions in your work, which I found a bit baffling at first, until I came to appreciate and recognize them for what they were. The work as a whole is a significant intervention into fundamental psychoanalytic concepts that I, with my propensity for textual fidelity, have accepted unquestioningly. Your overall argument that affects are intersubjective, that they are not confined to the skin boundaries of a subject, but are transmitted to others causing concrete bio-symptomatic effects seems wholly reasonable to me. I can offer as an example the physical nausea I experience every...

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