Teresa Brennan was an Australian feminist philosopher whose work crossed psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory, frequently placing her at odds with academic orthodoxy. She challenged dominant Lacanian interpretations by insisting that affect is not a linguistic effect or private feeling but a materially transmissible force that moves between bodies and across institutions. This stance drew resistance because it unsettled the ideal of the autonomous subject and exposed how Western epistemology depends on disavowed relational and energetic supports. Across major works including The Interpretation of the Flesh (1992), History After Lacan (1993), and The Transmission of Affect (2004), Brennan argued that modern social order stabilises itself by exporting affective labour, uncertainty, and regulation onto an externalised other, historically coded as feminine, while preserving the fiction of self-sufficiency.
Seen through a broader systemic lens, Brennan’s account of affect converges with the existentialist insight that existence precedes essence. What she names affect is the prior field of lived, relational pressure that precedes identity, meaning, or symbolic form. Systems do not begin with stable categories and then acquire motion; they begin in motion, tension, and dependency, and only later compress these conditions into descriptions that appear essential. Autonomy, coherence, and identity are therefore not foundations but outcomes—retrospective stabilisations of a field already doing work. Affect is that work: the unformalised substrate that carries systems before they can explain themselves, and without which their declared essences would collapse.
Brennan, T., 1992. The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity. London: Routledge.
Brennan, T., 1993. History After Lacan. London: Routledge.
Brennan, T., 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Daedelus Kite 