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Editorial
A Fecund Constellation of Ideas:
An Introduction to E-Co-Affectivity Book Symposium
Brian Hisao Onishi
Pennsylvania State University, Altoona, USA
Onishi, Brian. 2025. “A Fecund Constellation of Ideas: An Introduction to E-Co-Affectivity Book Symposium.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 2: i-v. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.winter.0i.
Abstract: This introduction to the book symposium provides a brief background on the project of E-Co-Affectivity and works to pull together the general threads of the conversation. I start by highlighting some of the major accomplishments by the initial work by Morjolein Oele, and then offer both a summary and analysis of each of the three respondents' work. More specifically, I demonstrate that the symposium project not only offers critical commentary on E-Co-Affectivity, but demonstrates the fecundity of connections at the heart of the work. The introduction ends by addressing Oele’s response to the symposium, and how that establishes the foundation for future work.
Keywords: editorial, affect theory, eco-phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty
While Marjolein Oele’s (2020) book E-Co-Affectivity is clearly rooted in the phenomenological tradition and works to extend the scope of eco-phenomenology, it is also not bound by the tradition. In the opening pages of the book, Oele identifies a desire to move from an anthropocentric phenomenology to one that is grounded in the fecund connections between material junctions and the affective traces folded into the interstices of bodily existence. That is, it seeks to break the disciplinary boundaries of phenomenology and allow for a new direction in phenomenologically driven environmental thought. The goal of this move is to highlight the fecundity at the heart of interfaces that “mediates and co-creates affective responses and emerging existences in ever new ways” (Oele 2020, 2). Something that is refreshing about Oele’s work is that the drive to get back to things themselves is accompanied by the rigorous project of connecting the fleshy sinews of the world. From the generative networks of feather and air to the soil-y fecundity of placental tissue, Oele’s work makes connections between material existences and demonstrates the relationality and co-creativity that drives the emergence of meaning in the concept of e-co-affectivity.
Oele’s move aligns her with phenomenologists who explore the intersection of phenomenology and environmental thought, such as the foundational work of Ted Toadvine and Charles S. Brown’s (2003) Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. Through that volume, eco-phenomen-
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ology promoted the idea that we want to be part of the earth, biotic communities, and abiotic communities. We want to join in a celebration alongside others in a way that is currently hindered by our common projections about how meaning works and how the world shows itself to us.
Ultimately, Oele’s work brings together the compost communities of Donna Haraway’s (2016) Staying With the Trouble, the intuition of phenom-enology, and the magical rationale of Aristotelian middle voice to drive us toward a more robust ecological understanding. By bleeding the lines between narrow disciplinary boundaries, she steers the topic of affectivity away from notions of human emotion or anthropocentrism and pursues an affective materiality where “what is active and what is passive seek to meet, but find themselves suspended in an undecidable space and time where affective processes endlessly overlap and withdraw” (Oele 2020, 30). Her focus on affectivity provides a fuller and deeper insight into the underpinnings of how living beings are always in motion, that is, how they come to be, grow, interact, react, suffer, and die.
What is beautiful about this book symposium on E-Co-Affectivity is how it enacts the ideas found in Oele’s text. It writes at the sinews and tissues of her thought and explores the world via the ideas she opens. More than analyses of E-Co-Affectivity, the essays here feel like a continuation of the project; a demonstration for how generativity manifests and emerges from the interactivity and entanglement of surfaces, albeit surfaces of thought. As such, it should be noted that neither Oele’s text nor the commentary provided by the authors of this symposium stand alone, but are joined together in a robust whole co-affected by the ongoing conceptual development.
In “Affective Communality,” Florian Grosser (2025) pushes Oele’s ideas further and invites a broader engagement with both Heidegger and Aristotle to generate political connectivity. Ultimately, the concern is about how communities promote justice, and how that specifically applies to political ideologies that keep people separated. While organized around a set of “clarifying” or “critical questions,” this entry in the symposium identifies two major aspects of Oele’s work: 1) like any work that is expansive and interdisciplinary, there is room to develop the ideas further, and 2) doing so does not deny the importance of the text but shows how practical the philosophical work that Oele is doing can be. Specifically, Grosser highlights an expansion of attention to both Heidegger and Aristotle and shows how E-Co-Affectivity can be fruitfully engaged on questions of social justice. While the author does not think that Oele has fully expressed the extent to which her concepts can be politically and practically applied, they boldly claim that “her work is central for developing a cogent critique of, as well as conceptual alternatives to, the models of contractual consent, freedom of association, and self-determination that are all too often deployed in the service of a democratic right to exclude” (12).
In “Hope for a New Us/Earth via E-Co-Affectivity and Jeong (정 情),” Jea Sophia Oh (2025) offers a critical reading of vulnerability, affect theory, and Oele’s use of the middle-voice. Important to Oh’s contribution is the idea that affect theory connects a multitude of issues, from animal ethics to social justice to the COVID-19 pandemic. Oele’s work offers an opportunity to imagine how these disparate issues are intertwined by providing the framework of e-co-affectivity. Oh takes this opportunity and applies it to ongoing issues, thus amplifying both the fundamental framework for understanding the world via affect and the applicability of affect theory that reveals the connective tissues of often siloed discursive topics. In part, Oh’s emphasis on skin as representative of human affectivity highlights the relationship between Oele’s ideas and phenomenology more broadly. This leaves room to fold in something like Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) notion of the flesh, found in The Visible and the Invisible. There, Merleau-Ponty claims that, “Each landscape of my life, because it is not a wandering troop of sensations or a system of ephemeral judgments but a segment of the durable flesh of the world, is qua visible, pregnant with many other visions besides my own” (123).
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To both Oele and Oh’s points, the connective tissue of each segment of reality allows for the revelation of each other. It doesn’t demand that revelation but admits for each pregnant possibility. This language of pregnancy calls back to Oele’s use of the placenta as a primary example for her affective theory. Oele offers an “account of pregnancy, as analyzed with and through the placenta, [that] focuses on this organ of the in-between that builds, constitutes, and regulates the (emergent) living conditions for the pregnant ilieu” (Oele 2020, 81). Again, this highlights the fecundity of Oele’s work and its ability to draw connections and to amplify the discursive generativity of multiple philosophical roots.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Oh’s contribution is her discussion of jeong. According to Oh, the Korean term jeong is incredibly complex and difficult to translate into English. However, she ultimately claims that jeong is “like a relational embodiment of intimacy or familiarity rooted in compassion and solidarity” (21). This loose definition includes the broader concepts of “emotion, feeling, love sentiment, passion, human nature, sympathy, heart, and so on in an inclusive sense, including all of the connotations of these terms” (21). What jeong brings to the conversation is a kind of care and ethical embrace that includes a “complex web of entangled and sticky feelings” (21). I read the stickiness of this concept not only as an indication of messiness (what is causing the stickiness?) or surprise (why is this sticky?), but as an adhesive that collects things together that would otherwise remain separated. Entanglement is always messy, but if it is also sticky then it keeps things loosely held together.
Miguel José Paley’s (2025) “Affectivity, Continuity, and Separation” largely moves away from the social and political applications of E-Co-Affectivity. Instead, Paley offers two significant contributions to the symposium. First, he provides a clear and concise overview of the project and situates it within a broader philosophical and interdisciplinary context. This helps to clarify how Oele’s work is both part of and a migration from a historically rich discussion about affect theory. Paley highlights the use of material interfaces as a major point of departure and uses this as an opening to his productive critique of how affect works according to Oele.
At the heart of Paley’s critique is the worry that the priority given to “connection, continuity, and co-community” (25) collapses the temporal into the spatial. Paley appeals to Bergson’s understanding of time and articulates the “heterogenous multiplicity” of temporality that makes time “a fundamentally continuous process whose ‘moments’ are always variable, never equal to one another, and never truly separated from the process itself” (26). The problem arises when Oele describes the temporality of material interfaces, which conflates the measurable quantity of space with the immeasurable “quality” of time.
Paley, however, does not view this critique as fundamental to Oele’s project or a reason to dismiss the contributions it makes to the development of affect theory. Instead, it offers an opportunity to return to phenomenology and seek potential connections with thinkers like Merleau-Ponty, whom I introduced above. According to Paley, “Second generation French phenomenology is thus uniquely sensitive to issues of temporality, separation, and affectivity in ways which might suit the program of E-Co-Affectivity” (28). Such a return does not indicate a failure of Oele’s work. Instead, it is only because of how Oele treats affectivity via Aristotle and material interfaces that we can go back to phenomenology as generative interaction for future work.
Finally, what is particularly impressive with Oele’s concluding replies is how she embraces the commentaries provided by each of the three respondents, demonstrates an appreciation for their specific insights, and uses that to further articulate her ideas. She uses the opportunity to clarify her use of Heidegger and Aristotle, and how expanding her treatment of those two thinkers would have changed the focus of her book. In so doing, she offers a kind of alternative speculation for ways that affectivity could be considered through a reading of Heidegger’s later work and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Oele also responds to questions about racial justice and the inequitable distribution of vulnerabilities by articulating how her book offers insight into “how certain bodies are more negatively affected than
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others” (2025). More importantly, she points to how this issue is more fully examined and analyzed in her forthcoming book Beyond Elemental Loss. Finally, she responds to the question of time by restating her desire to move beyond the subject-object dichotomy while at the same time embracing scientific research on material interfaces. The interaction helps to both elucidate the distinctions at play and to invigorate the discussion of time as it develops across material surfaces.
Ultimately, this book symposium as a whole is also remarkably fecund and demonstrates the generativity of thinking alongside others. At the interface of these four thinkers Oele’s ideas gain even more depth and weight. By itself, Oele’s work offers a path forward for affect theory, especially in relation to environmental thought. However, alongside the three respondents, the concepts present in E-Co-Affectivity are given room to grow into a constellation of ideas with a broad reach for affect theory and beyond. On display is the discursive communality and us-ness at the very heart of her project.
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References
Brown, Charles S., and Ted Toadvine. 2003. Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Grosser, Florian. 2025. “Affective Communality.” Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 2: 6-14. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.winter.2.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Logical Investigations. Edited by Dermot Moran. London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Oele, Marjolein. 2020. E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life's Material Interfaces. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Oele, Marjolein. 2025. “Replies to Grosser, Oh, and Paley.” Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 2: 31-41. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.winter.5.
Oh, Jea Sophia. 2025. “Hope for a New Us/Earth via E-Co-Affectivity and Jeong (정 情).” Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 2: 15-22. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.winter.3.
Paley, Miguel José. 2025. “Affectivity, Continuity, and Separation.” Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 2: 23-30. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.winter.4.
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Brian Hisao Onishi © 2025
Author email: byo5042[at]psu[dot]edu
