Affect in the Writing of Denise Riley

The subject of this article is the philosophical concept of affect as it comes into focus in major work in different genres by the British writer, Denise Riley (born 1948). Riley, who teaches at the University of East Anglia, UK, and currently holds the title of A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (as does Hélène Cixous), is the author of important contributions to the philosophy of language and several volumes of poetry, including her first book, Marxism for Infants (1977) and Selected Poems (2000). Her name is sometimes associated with the Cambridge poets’ syntactic experimentation and materialist critique, but her protean poetic “voice” more often recalls the complicatedly self-dramatizing poetics of Frank O’Hara (though this comparison perhaps risks obscuring her work’s markedly feminist discursive character). This essay begins by considering the way the word “affect” functions in some works by Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari, since this has important implications for Riley’s own use of the term. A unifying concern in her most recent collections of essays, The Words of Selves (2000) and Impersonal Passion (2005), is with what she calls “the forcible affect of language,” by which is meant the relatively autonomous emotionality that dwells in the words which we use and which, with often disastrous psychosocial consequences, use us. In the poems, too, we find a determination to acknowledge the extent to which the mutable self is an “inrush of others’ voices.” A final section of the essay lingers with the long poem, “Outside from the Start,” and its phenomenological treatment of the perilous and affirmative process of becoming to which our language exposes us.