Author’s Replies

Replies to Grosser, Oh, and Paley

Marjolein Oele

 Radboud University, NL

Oele, Marjolein. 2025. “Replies to Grosser, Oh, and Paley.”

Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 2: 30-40. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.winter.5. 

Abstract:  My book seeks to carve out a new way to examine affectivity, by using interdisciplinary methods for scholarship of affectivity, and by focusing on specific, concrete, material interfaces: in plants, birds, placentas, human skin, and, finally, soil. In my response to Florian Grosser, Jea Sophia Oh, and Miguel José Paley, I emphasize this focus on local material e-co-affectivity because it explains in large part why I, strategically, (1) have or have not used certain sources or ideas in Aristotle and Heidegger, and (2) how I see my new research developing and addressing some of the concerns of the respondents regarding the need to tend to the inequities of vulnerability. Moreover, I will try to address (3) questions regarding post-human agency, as well as (4) cross-cultural comparisons with the Chinese concept of wuwei and the Korean concept of jeong (emotions or feeling). I conclude (5) by addressing concerns regarding the meaning of temporality as it is lived on the skin.

Keywords:  affectivity, suffering, biology, ecology, phenomenology, new materialism, science, temporality, elements, loss, Aristotle, Heidegger, pathos, Dagognet, interface, plants, birds, placenta, skin, soil, ontogenesis, wu wei, jeong 

My book seeks to carve out a new way to examine affectivity by using interdisciplinary methods for doing scholarship of affectivity, and by focusing on specific, concrete, material interfaces: in plants, bird feathers, placentas, human skin, and finally soil. Accordingly, my book tries to think through the interfaces where life emerges. My model of affectivity is one of stratified layering following the logic of materiality, thereby moving us away from a thinking of affectivity in terms of intentionality or human emotion, focusing on affectivity beyond the agent-patient opposition, towards a thinking of post-human communities and on the way towards some prescriptive gestures. 

In the following, I will emphasize this focus on local material e-co-affectivity because it explains in large part why I, strategically, (1) have or have not used certain sources or ideas in Aristotle and Heidegger, and (2) how I see my new research developing and addressing some of the concerns of

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the respondents regarding the need to tend to the inequities of vulnerability. Moreover, I will try to address (3) questions regarding post-human agency, as well as (4) cross-cultural comparisons with the Chinese concept of wuwei and the Korean concept of jeong. I conclude (5) by addressing concerns regarding the meaning of temporality as it is lived on the skin. 

USING OR OMITTING CERTAIN SOURCES IN ARISTOTLE AND HEIDEGGER

The Early Heidegger as an Important Source for E-Co-Affectivity 

As Florian Grosser articulates, we might find helpful “pathic moments” in the later Heidegger to clarify “potential human contributions” to realizing “new e-communities,” and specifically “more productive insights for a re-conception of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity” (Grosser 2025, this issue, 8). Grosser locates such insights predominantly in concepts such as Geschick (“a sending that addresses and elicits answers”) and Ding (“as that by which mortals are be-dingt, be-thinged, or conditioned”), which not only work in “opening up and displacing individual Dasein, as well as Being-with,” but “stress their pathic background, emergence, and constitution; and, therefore, transport a more unequivocal recognition of what might be designated as extra-subjectivity” (8).

I do indeed see advantages in turning to the later Heidegger, and specifically in thinking of the broader community, of considering a people and an epoch being affected, rather than Heidegger’s (1962) earlier focus on singular Dasein as thematized in Being and Time. In this regard, the later Heidegger’s account of attunements that span an era and a people, and destine them to a certain way of disclosing the world are productive and foreshadow the current interest in affect studies that span body, culture, technology, and power (Hardt 2007, ix). 

I also see a possible fruitful way to think through the later Heidegger’s account of releasement (Gelassenheit), which thematizes “releasement toward things,” and is a meditative comportment that says both “yes” and “no” towards things, as a particular comportment (Heidegger 1995, 54-55). A similar way of thinking of affectivity in Heidegger can be found in his Country Path Conversations, where he addresses the need to go beyond willing (Heidegger 2010, 70), and he is searching for a “higher” state of being affected: one which lies “beyond the distinction between activity and passivity” (Heidegger 2010, 70). There, he encourages us to go on the path towards waiting (Heidegger 2010, 76), which is the key toward releasement (Heidegger 2010, 80). What these meditations on releasement show is that a new thematization of affectivity, beyond the usual paths of active and passive, is worthwhile and can overcome stifling categories that simply conceive human beings in the world as thinking, willing beings. Rather, concepts such as releasement open us up to see ourselves as engaged and immersed within phenomena that escape thinking and willing. This could indeed allow us to think of affectivity as emerging in broader eco-constellations. 

Despite these advantages that this conceptual turn toward attunements and Gelassenheit may provide in the later Heidegger, there are important disadvantages to using the later Heidegger, and these disadvantages are particularly apparent once put in contrast with the advantages of using the early Heidegger. First, readings of the later Heidegger have already saturated contemporary scholarship (e.g., in terms of poststructuralism) and have already been widely critiqued, hence dampening the need to address these topics. Secondly, to find traction in notions of temporality, the early Heidegger and his account of the various ways of temporalizing remains key for my understanding of the temporality of interfaces, particularly in the chapter I devote to skin. Specifically, for my sense of rethinking the famous Heideggerian “moment of vision” in terms of a communal sense, it is helpful to use and critique the early Heidegger, precisely to clarify my new turn toward seeing temporality in a more communal key. Thirdly, the later Heidegger has a mystical tone to his thinking, which is not in line with my own thinking of concrete, material interfaces in E-Co-Affectivity. Thus, in step with the 

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concrete reality that I seek to engage in E-Co-Affectivity, Being and Time’s turn to the concrete reality within which Dasein operates seems to open up more helpful venues. Fourthly, and most importantly, it has been the early Heidegger whose reading of pathos (suffering, feeling, passion, illness and qualitative change) in Aristotle provided such a constructive sense to grasping the plurality of meanings of this term, and thereby offered an important impetus to Heidegger’s own thinking on affect, being, and becoming (Oele 2012a). For those four reasons, the early Heidegger has been more fundamental and relevant to E-Co-Affectivity. 

A Strategic Use of Aristotle to Decenter Human Affectivity

Grosser suggests using Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as “it sheds light on the temporality of what Oele, with Jacques Rancière (see Oele 2020, 159), calls a revolution of the senses: rather than resulting from a sudden turnaround, modified beliefs, attitudes, and comportments (such as required for the new, enlarged con-sensus Oele appeals to) can only be brought about through a steady progression from mimetic to internalized praxeis (actions) and, subsequently, to a reliable hexis (stable disposition or habitus) or ethos (character, moral character) that is transmitted in widening communal circles” (Grosser 2025, this issue, 9). I agree with Grosser about the importance of Aristotle’s account of dispositions (hexeis). In fact, I have written about the emergence of passive dispositions from Aristotle’s perspective (Oele 2012b), noting that it is important not only to think about how “active” dispositions come about (i.e., dispositions that turn around so-called “actions”) but also dispositions related to that and how we are affected (for instance, that and how we feel fear). 

However, while I am distinctly interested in further thinking about passive dispositions in Aristotle, I also thought that appealing to Aristotle’s notion of passive dispositions for E-Co-Affectivity would have distinct disadvantages. My reasoning is that Aristotle’s account of dispositions is focused on the discrete person who experiences those affects and related dispositions, while my account of affectivity, rather than building out from the individual to the wider culture seeks to find a foothold in the material in-between: the interface. Affects are thus implied, and dispositions as well, but I try to access them through the material interfaces that produce them. 

To return to the example of the birth of our daughter, which I describe in a personal vignette in chapter 4 on skin, it is naturally the case that emotions were felt. However, the vignette puts emphasis on the skin, and on how the formerly pregnant skin itself “was left empty” after birth (108); simultaneously I highlight how, in having skin-to-skin contact, there was an opportunity for a new spatial and temporal reconfiguration. The focus here is on the materiality of the interface that generates human emotions, but is also much more than that. Beyond extending from oneself to the environment, the interface itself creates the emergence of beings and environment. It is a task for a different book to focus on human emotion; here the strategy is to make it part of the account but not to emphasize it or draw particular attention to it so as to allow the matter itself, that is, e-co-affectivity, to come to the fore.

Secondly, as my account unpacks the various strata of affectivity—in plants, bird feathers, placentas, human skin, and finally soil—I am seeking to avoid focus on human affects. I think that the need to specifically define human emotion or individual dispositions would have distracted from the effort to emphasize the broader, stratified powers of affectivity. Thus, Grosser’s suggestions to analyze individual human emotion and the consequent focus of reaching a personal mean would, in my view,  have inserted too much of an anthropocentric and individualized lens, which, in a work devoted to the materiality of both human and non-human interfaces, would have distracted from the main focus.

THE NEED TO ADDRESS THE INEQUITY OF VULNERABILITIES 

Florian Grosser and Jea Sophia Oh both address the need to reflect on the notion of how vulnerabilities associated with affectivity are unequally distributed. Oh speaks of the “sufferings of black and brown bodies [that] are closely related to the 

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phenomena of environmental racism” (Oh 2025, this issue, 19). Referencing the dehumanization of Asian women during Covid, Oh asks: “Could we think of affect theory in relation to these intersectional sufferings and pains, along with interspecies interconnectedness?” (19). Grosser also points to the need to think through the inequity of vulnerability, stating eloquently and precisely: 

Against the assumption of pathos as an equalizing phenomenon that seems to underlie [Oele’s] account, it is important to recognize that social-political status and positionality essentially determine by what and to what degree individuals, groups, or, on a global level, societies are affected. This differential distribution of being affected and vulnerable and, conversely, of capacities for self-protection, although often veiled behind ideological slogans like “We’re in this together!” has become abundantly clear during the ongoing pandemic. It is also playing out under conditions of climate change where it manifests itself in vastly differing degrees of exposure to, e.g., rising sea water levels or temperatures and their effects on, broadly speaking, life prospects. It is therefore critical to differentiate along the lines of race, gender, class, and age between strong(er) and weak(er) affectivity; between resulting, unevenly scaled strong(er) or weak(er) communal bonds; and between the non-uniform responses given in concrete instances of we-building. (Grosser 2025, this issue, 10)

Florian Grosser and Jea Sophia Oh raise a crucial point: that an account of e-co-affectivity needs to take into consideration the uneven effects in which some bodies, more than others, are negatively affected by that which happens to them. I am in full agreement that any account of affectivity needs to do so with precision and with attention to the specific details of the affective matter that it studies. I would argue that, in many ways, my book E-Co-Affectivity precisely (1) does such work, (2) prepares such work for others to do, or (3) continues this work in the form of my new book manuscript Beyond Elemental Loss (2025). 

In the first place (1a), an example of my turn to how certain bodies are more negatively affected than others can be found in the book’s first chapter, where I argue that certain native plant species, more than other (invasive) plant species, seem to suffer from anthropogenic climate change and industrialization (Oele 2020, 46). While this is not the central focus of the first chapter, the first chapter enables this viewpoint of the inequity of plant affectivity, precisely by turning to the concrete lives of plants and their co-emergence in polyphonic communal places and temporalities. 

Additionally (1b), and this is a broader point, my focus on the concrete embodied lives of more-than-human existence (e.g., plants, birds, soil) or “forgotten” or understudied organs, such as the placenta or human skin, seeks to offer a correction to a philosophical discourse that prioritizes human rational life. Thus, while I am in agreement that we need to pay attention to the inequity of suffering, my research in E-Co-Affectivity does precisely that, but sidelines purposefully the focus on human suffering, to index the importance of learning from more-than-human forms of affectivity. Thus, similar to Irigaray’s (2001) call for restoring justice to forgotten elements such as air (in Heidegger) or earth (in Nietzsche), my act of paying attention to forgotten living interfaces seeks to correct a philosophical idiom steeped in anthropocentrism and forgetful of the shared ecological constellations of which we are part. 

Thirdly (1c), I argue that the simple act of paying attention to, describing, and analyzing the relational affectivity in plants, birds, placenta’s, skin, and soil offers the very beginnings for an ethics of responsivity. Following Gabriel Marcel’s account of the importance of testimony for ethics (Marcel 1967, 102), the act of offering philosophical testimony to the material interface is in itself, in my view, a valuable and ethical beginning, and offers ample opportunities to consequently think through notions of human responsiveness. 

(2) In terms of preparing the work that is so necessary to rethink the inequity of suffering, E-Co-Affectivity precisely enables and prepares, through its very set-up, the question of the inequity of suffering. In the first place, (2a) the research that is done in E-Co-Affectivity is, methodologically, placed at the very intersection of material-biological, cultural-political, and semantic questions. This means that notions of inequity can acquire both nuance and depth based on this approach. 

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Secondly, (2b) I show exactly how this may be prepared, such as in the chapter on skin. In that chapter, I use Aristotle against Aristotle’s own theory (namely that shame is only a temporary reaction) to argue instead that shame can be dispositionally imposed upon some skins more than others. By turning Aristotle’s theory against himself, I allow for a historical redirection of the philosophical discourse, and argue that we would do well to look at skin and shame not just through the notion of temporary affect, but through the lens of affective dispositions that certain bodies are placed into, informed and realized through social-economic structures with a long historical genealogy. 

Thirdly (2c), this means that E-Co-Affectivity could open up many more productive trajectories, which others could take on, but which, in themselves, lie outside the purview of my project. For instance, one may think through how, in various cultures and in different registers of race, class, and gender, the meaning of soil may differ, and what this means for the kinds of human inequities produced. Thus, rather than closing off those options to think through human affectivity and the inequity of suffering, my book explicitly refers to and rejects pernicious “epidermal death zones” (133) associated with race, class and gender, and thus opens up to these important dimensions that others may pursue in their research. 

(3) Beyond E-Co-Affectivity, the research in my new book manuscript Beyond Elemental Loss reflects thematically on the unevenness of human suffering and loss,[1] specifically as caused and brought to light by the current ecological crisis. As the Covid-19 crisis of the past years has illuminated, we need to reach beyond what is immediately visible or present to rethink the accumulated vulnerabilities that have been built, slowly and incrementally, over time and that have come to underpin our life-worlds. In order to grasp the accumulated weight of histories underpinning loss in times of climate change, I have been drawn to theorists such as Lauren Berlant (2007) and Peter Sloterdijk (2016) to examine these so-called atmospheric conditions; and I have been rendering these conditions in terms of elemental constellations. As I redefine the elements of water, fire, air and earth—with historical precursors in the Presocratics—I radicalize the elemental as a primary condition for the world’s appearance and meaning. However, instead of static, atemporal, and purely natural, I view the elemental as a space of flux in constant interaction with our social-political institutions. Under the pressures undergirding the Anthropocene, incremental changes have had major effects across various scales, both within the realm of the material-causal and the logical-semantic. I argue that to investigate this site of incremental change by way of the elemental allows for focus both on the micro level (e.g., as particles of water) and on the macro level (e.g., as larger global forces that change our interface with the sea, i.e., seascape). 

Thus, the research that began with E-Co-Affectivity in its pull towards the minute and the material directness of interfaces has found another direction and home in Beyond Elemental Loss, in seeking to investigate the broader ontological-ecological, historical-cultural interface that I call the elemental. This means that, for instance, rather than focusing on the liminal in-between space between the feathers that co-create the sensitivity of the avian body, as I did in E-Co-Affectivity, I focus in Beyond Elemental Loss on the mediated, liminal space of our relationship to the seashores that has undergone significant historical changes, enabling and foreclosing opportunities for our co-existence with the ocean and our sense of being-at-home. Said differently, where E-Co-Affectivity centered on the depth of the minute, concrete material interface, Beyond Elemental Loss traces historical, incremental changes within the broader (ecological-social) elemental interfaces of water, fire, air, and earth that have left in their wake a sense of loss.[2]

In its examinations of affectivity, loss, and grief, Beyond Elemental Loss offers a more prescriptive lens than E-Co-Affectivity did. This  does not undermine the validity of E-Co-Affectivity; it  shows that questions of ethics that emerge from E-Co-Affectivity have continued in a different shape and matter. While E-Co-Affectivity only turned to the prescriptive in its last chapter, Beyond Elemental Loss offers a more sustained account of ethical and political issues in investigating the broader questions of engagement that rule our 

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relationship and behavioral interplay with the elemental. Thus, where E-Co-Affectivity showed (biological) adaptation at the level of the co-emergent interface (for instance of the bird feather), Beyond Elemental Loss seeks to investigate (cultural-historical) adaptation (or the lack thereof) at the macro level. Thus, where E-Co-Affectivity asked, “In what sense can avian bodies be adapted to trauma?” Beyond Elemental Loss asks, “In what sense can certain systematic political-insurance systems be maladapted to fire risk or flooding, and in what way can we, prescriptively, rethink the locus of adaptation and change?” 

Thus, as this overview shows, my thinking on affectivity has been evolving along the lines of thinking through the inequity of suffering, but this thinking does not supersede the main lines of E-Co-Affectivity: rather, it has been extending those lines in ever-new directions, speaking more and more to the issue of ecological-social crises that have transformed our lives. 

THE FOCUS ON PATHĒSIS (VS POIĒSIS) AND THE ROLE OF (POST-HUMAN) AGENCY 

The question of agency is indeed the question of poiēsis (making, shaping), more generally, and the interface, I argue, is the broader launching place for examining this issue, as it enables the co-generation of material-causal and social-cultural aspects of living beings. E-Co-Affectivity ends for a specific reason on tending to the soil, with the gesture of the post-human brought forth both by the metaphor and the ontology of the soil. This interface is the space of interaction: we may engage with it and be changed through it with our interaction. For this reason, I turn the notion of the human into one of the post-human, yet-to-be-imagined. Similar to Haraway’s account of wanting to envision us through the chthulucene as different chthonic, tentacular beings (Haraway 2016, 2), the task here is to stretch the imagination, and perform the act the soil chapter imagines: attentiveness to the material, messy interface. And, more specifically, I mean the term “interface” here as entailing various different ontologically, biologically, and socially tiered levels. As I indicate in the soil chapter, I am curious what role a post-human affectivity might look like, and in what way it may be produced by, and interact with, the world around it. This means that when Grosser speaks of a “primarily human task” that we have to engage in, I think it is necessary to build in a moment of pause and modification; I want to outline that the kind of being I want to see produced through an act of attentiveness being born out of the soil is not a human, but a post-human being who takes responsibility, and who does not rule and master the earth in the way the Cartesian subject has done.

By articulating the interface across species and scales, and kinds of affectivity, culminating in soil (which folds into those layers), we have to rethink what community means, which allows for the opening up of the space within which political decisions are produced. Within the context of the Anthropocene, I am trying to articulate that it is not yet so clear what decisions and actions have to be undertaken, but that we would do well to think through the broader material, scientific, and semiotics of the interface we are immersed in. The act of paying attention to this is the first step, which, as I articulated earlier, is already an ethical step. 

CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONS TO WU WEI AND JEONG 

Oh provides a careful consideration of cross-cultural connections, such as between the middle voice in plants and the Chinese concept of wuwei. Wuwei literally means “not (wu)-trying (wei) or not (wu)-acting with effort or deliberation (wei).” In a more general way, this means “a kind of effortless, spontaneous, in the zone, skillful action.” In uncovering the meaning of wuwei as connected to nature, Oh cites the Dao De Jing, pointing at the meaning of wuwei as “yielding, letting nature do what nature does” (Oh 2025, this issue, 17). This offers helpful comparative insights, possibly allowing convergence with Aristotle’s ideas on physis (nature), as having its own goals and purposes. However, what is different here in comparison to Aristotle is the idea of “letting” and “yielding.” With my chapter on plants, I have tried to show mostly the internal logic of a plant, and how through the middle voice we might get closer to 

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understanding a plant’s organization and way of becoming. 

We may speculate what the ethical repercussions of this are as follows: Since plants are part of our biosphere, they are part of our diet, of our gardens, of our way of life. “Yielding” is interesting, but possibly too vague to give us an ethical direction. Here, more than anything, I first plead for attention to the interface, and to grasp how certain plants more than others have been affected by our actions in the last few centuries. In other words, we may need to yield more to some (e.g., indigenous species) than to others (e.g., invasive species), thinking through the ecology of which plants are a part. Since the vulnerabilities are not shared across plants, but are uneven, the question of respect for plants, for their resilience and adaptivity, is also at the same the question of rethinking our alliances. Perhaps, of course, the concept of wuwei may include such an option for discernment, since it is not just any effortlessness that is practiced, but, as others have argued, a skillful effortlessness (Slingerland 2003). If that is the case, then wuwei may offer a possible complementary ethical practice to perceiving plants and their community, on the way to a more fruitful cohabitation. In this regard, Baptiste Morizot’s claims in Rekindling Life speak to the power of skillful human retreat which aim to “leave—that is restore—wild life to itself” (2022, 11) by setting boundaries upon human intrusion, and letting plants, for instance in the form of a forest, regrow: “Letting an ecosystem express its powers, use its capacity to regenerate itself after it has been transformed by humans” (11 ). However, we still need to caution against a form of skillful effortlessness that is wuwei-like, but that includes habituated patterns that are problematic, given immoral intentions or insensitivities towards relevant distinctions on the way toward living together. Moreover, I would add that sometimes direct action and interference is needed, such as in the case that I cite of humans grafting rootstock from one (e.g., Texan) vine to protect another (e.g., Californian) vine in order to gain immunity against the insect disease Phylloxera (Oele 2020, 43). Thus, while at certain times yielding is needed, at other times certain modes of eco-engineering may be asked for to aid the plant community. 

Oh also offers a very thought-provoking commentary on the meaning of the Korean term jeong, and its resonance with the notion of my use of the term “affectivity” (pathos) in general, and E-Co-Affectivity in particular. Oh states that jeong is a difficult term to translate, and includes senses of “emotion, feeling, love sentiment, passion, human nature, sympathy,” and also more general basic feelings such as “attachment, bonds, and affections” (Oh 2025, this issue, 21). I find particularly the relational, embodied quality of this affect intriguing, as conveyed by Oh, since it is exactly on this relational, embodied aspect of pathos that I focus as well in E-Co-Affectivity. 

Yet, I also want to warn against too much of an emotional interpretation of affect, for I want to cover the more embodied, relational aspects of affectivity that occur in the broader e-co-affective web of which we are part. Thus, while I do think that there are helpful intersections in terms of human pathos with Oh’s notion of jeong, for the general outline of my project—strategically decentering human pathos to make way for consideration of a broader e-co-affectivity—jeong should not be prioritized. 

THE MEANING OF TEMPORALITY AS LIVED ON SKIN IN E-CO-AFFECTIVITY

I agree that it is interesting to think along the notion of a body’s impulses and efforts, and to think of a living being’s experienced time as duration. However, my attempt in this book is to understand life’s dynamism less in terms of (individuated) intentions and thus duration, but to show how life’s dynamism comes about in the material cross-intersections through which we become who we are. It is for this reason that I turn, for the human material interface, not to the brain (usually associated with perceiving time and thus duration) but to the skin. Rather than postulating top-down agential intentionality, skin offers us a chance to look at the living body as it has emerged and is co-emerging along evolutionary lines and in interaction with the environment. Skin thus affords a look at the emergence of the human’s active, inquisitive lifestyle (Oele 2020, 115), without inserting a hierarchical model of brain-directed

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consciousness. Instead, skin points the way toward a fluid, affective, co-emergence of human sapient affectivity. Focusing upon skin allows us to witness a place for transformation: “One that allows both inner and outer, self and world, to emerge and respond to each other through its protective yet vulnerable mediation” (Oele 2020, 113). 

It is crucial to point out this focus on co-emergent sapient affectivity since this undermines, from the very beginning, Paley’s assertion that my account of temporality as lived on the skin follows the contours of clock-time, or, as worded by Paley, provides “descriptions of temporality [that] are in fact describing space rather than time” (Paley 2025, this issue, 26). Moreover, Paley claims that, with respect to my account of events occurring on the skin, “One does, no doubt, experience one’s scarring and the processes of one’s skin, but these experiences, as experiences, are qualities of the subject in duration rather than the skin itself” (Paley 2025, this issue, 28). My rebuttal consists in arguing that Paley’s statements misunderstand my project, largely based on their own reinsertion of the problematic dichotomy of subject versus object, translated here in terms of so-called inner subjectivity (“qualities of the subject”) versus a so-called outer objectivity (“the skin itself”). 

By grasping lived time merely as inner consciousness and duration, and skin merely as outer physical clock-time (or, as spatialized time), Paley repeats the problematic dualistic statements of Bergson, who thinks that scientific accounts can only “forecast and measure: now we cannot forecast physical phenomena except on condition that we assume that they do not endure as we do; and, on the other hand, the only thing we are able to measure is space” (Bergson 1959, 230; emphasis added). As this quote shows, Bergson operates with a stark dichotomy that I seek to reject in that I see skin not as “outer” nor as “inner.” So, rather than my own account being subject to accusations of viewing time in terms of spatialized temporality, as Paley argues, I find that Paley’s views on the workings of the skin return us to problematic subject-object dichotomies that I seek to reject. 

To add on to this: in engaging the materiality of the interface that is skin, I seek to use scientific and evolutionary insights on skin as they actually inform us about human sapient sentient affectivity. These scientific insights do not just return us to quantum, but inform the qualities of living embodiment.[3] This implies that I reject notions that see the “true” temporality as lived through (inner, conscious) duration; rather, skin has an inner qualified “logic,” offering “choices” we live daily. And it has been precisely the task of this book to think through the various complex layers of the reality of the affective materiality that we are, which means to create space for scientific insights regarding our skin; and to do more than proverbially “scratch the surface,” more precisely, by deepening the so-called “material surface” of the e-co-affective beings that we are. 

Overall, in closing, I am most grateful to the editors of this journal and to Grosser, Oh, and Paley  for having had the opportunity to respond to their ideas and to explain my work. The care bestowed on my work speaks to the dedication, the thoughtfulness, and the power of the discipline I humbly belong to, and which forever seeks that which it cannot attain: wisdom. 

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Notes

Acknowledgements: Some of my answers in the main text above are indebted to the conversations I had with David Kim and Dorethea Olkowski. Thank you!

[1] Some of the chapters that are part of Beyond Elemental Loss (Oele 2025) have precursors in earlier, independent publications, for instance as “Philosophizing Extinction: On the Loss of World, and the Possibility of Rebirth through Languages of the Sea" (Oele 2021). 

[2] In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed turns to the background conditions for our perception, and argues that “what puts objects near depends on histories, on how things arrive, and how they gather in their very availability to do things with” (Ahmed 2006, 81). She argues that heterosexuality acts as a historical background condition, “and that insofar as it is behind does not come into view” (87). It is precisely Ahmed’s focus on the diachronic trail of perception that shows overlap with my project in Beyond Elemental Loss, in that I similarly seek to move away from synchronicity towards diachronicity to carve out historical paths through which the elemental has come to appear the way that it does. However, differently than Ahmed, in Beyond Elemental Loss, I research those background conditions not just as human-social productions, but as emerging in the material-social-ecological interface that I call the elemental. 

[3] Refer, for instance, Mikhail Geyfman and Bogi Andersen (2009), whose analysis focuses on the way in which the skin “tells time” in that its skin cells employ an active circadian clock. 

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References

1. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2. Bergson, Henri L. 1959. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London, UK and New York, NY: The MacMillan Company. 

3. Berlant, Lauren. 2007. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33 (4): 754-780. https://doi.org/10.1086/521568.

4. Dagognet, François. 1982. Faces, Surfaces, Interfaces. Paris, FR: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. 

5. Geyfman, Mikhail, and Andersen, Bogi. 2009. “How the Skin Can Tell Time.” Journal of Investigative Dermatology 129 (5): 1063-1066. https://doi.org/10.1038/jid.2008.384.

6. Hardt, Michael. 2007. “Foreword: What Affects Are Good For.” In The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley, ix-xiii Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

7. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

8. Heidegger, Martin. 1995. Discourse on Thinking. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

9. _____. 2010. Country Path Conversations. Translated by Bret Davis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

10. _____. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 

11. Irigaray, Luce. 2001. “From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two.” In Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, edited by Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington, 309-315. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 

12. Marcel, Gabriel. 1967. “Testimony and Existentialism." In The Philosophy of Existentialism, translated by Manya Harari, 91-103 New York, NY: New Citadel Press. 

13. Morizot, Baptiste. 2022. Rekindling Life: A Common Front. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, UK and Medford, OR: Polity Press. 

14. Oele, Marjolein. 2012a. “Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Concept of Pathos.” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (2): 389-406.

15. _____. 2012b. “Passive Dispositions: on the Relationship between Pathos and Hexis in Aristotle." Ancient Philosophy 32 (2): 351-68.

16. _____. 2020. E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces. Albany: SUNY Press.

17. _____. 2021. “Philosophizing Extinction: On the Loss of World, and the Possibility of Rebirth through Languages of the Sea." In Contesting Extinctions: Critical Relationality, Regenerative Futures, edited by Suzanne M. Mccullagh, Luis I. Prádanos, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, and Catherine Wagner, 85-104. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 

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18. _____. 2025. Beyond Elemental Loss: Shifting Constellations of Water, Fire, Air and Earth. Albany: SUNY Press. 

19. Slingerland, Edward. 2003. Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 

20. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2016. Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). 

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Marjolein Oele © 2025

Author email: marjolein[dot]oele[at]ru[dot]nl