Moving subtly through a diverse range of thinkers and topics - aesthetics, affect, animation and film studies, bibliography, cognitive science, this book shows that a more sustained, less apocalyptic attention to ideas might lead to a richer discussion of our intellectual landscapes and the place of the humanities and social sciences in it.

Introduction. On the Side: Allocations of Attention in the Theoretical Moment / Jason Potts and Daniel Stout 1 Part I. Chronologies Aside 1. Writing the History of Homophobia / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 29 2. Late Exercises in Minimal Affirmatives / Anne-Lise Francois 34 3. Comparative Noncontemporaneities: C. L. R. James and Ernst Block / Natalie Melas 56 4. On Suicide, and Other Forms of Social Extinguishment / Elizabeth A. Povinelli 78 Part II. Approaches Aside 5. What Is Historical Poetics? / Simon Jarvis 97 6. The Biopolitics of Recognition: Making Female Subjects of Globalization / Pheng Cheah 117 7. Before Racial Construction / Irene Tucker 143 8. Archive Favor: African American Literature before and after Theory / Jordan Alexander Stein 160 9. What Cinema Wasn't: Animating Film Theory's Double Blind Spot / Karen Beckman 177 Part III. Figures Aside 10. Hyperbolic Discounting and Intertemporal Bargaining / William Flesch 199 11. The Primacy of Sensation: Psychophysics, Phenomenology, Whitehead / Mark B. N. Hansen 218 12. Reading the Social: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies / Heather Love 237 13. 13. Our I. A. Richards Moment: The Machine and Its Adjustments / Frances Ferguson 261 14. Needing to Know (:) Theory Afterwords / Ian Balfour 280 Bibliography 287 Contributors 299 Index

“This insightful collection of essays regarding the use and place of theory in a post-theoretical realm dares to imagine how theory may successfully challenge and illuminate understanding of the world. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” 

"Theory Aside is filled with surprising analytic moves that feel absolutely necessary. The contributors seek the undetonated futures of past and current theoretical paradigms, stepping to the side of where we think we've been to open up new ways of thinking. Their essays are distinguished by a probing, lucid quality that makes them a real pleasure to read."