Encounter, Agency and Feeling: Few Remarks on (the critique of) The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism and Andalucia (2020)

This article, in reviewing Charles Hirschkind’s The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalucia (2020), makes an attempt at expanding on the notion of feeling. This attempt is partly motivated by various critical reviews of the text that operate in the distinction between feeling and thinking as a disciplinary requirement for doing history. In challenging that distinction, I propose to understand feeling as ‘encounter’ that a subject is affected by in her present. A conception of encounter requires a particular tradition of feeling in order to be ‘affected’ by it (here that tradition is Andalucismo). This particular activation of subject in her encounter with the past needs to be understood in distance with the conventional wisdom of subject as an author of her history (or agent/agency). Drawing on Talal Asad and Ananda Abeysekara, this paper further illuminates on the idea of feeling as a disciplining practice situated within a horizon of time. In the process, it exposes how the critics of The Feeling of History fail to understand the dynamic of feeling and takes refuge in the conventional secular strategy of capturing it as the major property of right-wing political groups in engaging past.