Reviewed by: Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment by James Noggle Alex Eric Hernandez James Noggle, Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 282; 3 b/w illus. $47.95 cloth. In a celebrated conversation near the end of Pride and Prejudice, a lovestruck Elizabeth asks Darcy about what it was that first led him to fall for her. Darcy's answer offers perhaps the most famous instance of what James Noggle identifies as "the insensible" (2, passim), even if the novel never quite uses that phrasing: "I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. . . . I was in the middle before I knew I had begun." Readers might recognize the moment as counterpart to a scene that had played out just a few pages earlier, when Elizabeth clarified that her love for Darcy "has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began." Hardly, but Elizabeth does know. She can locate love's beginnings with an almost stunning precision, in fact, to the moment at which she first laid eyes on "his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." By contrast, Darcy's affections are different, much more opaque. They have grown imperceptibly, unnoticed until suddenly they were unmistakable. Surprised by their power over him, in vain he struggles; his feelings will not be repressed. Yet how is it, we might ask, that such undeniably forceful sensations could have been nursed without their being perceived? How is it that intense feeling emerges from that which is unfelt? In his engaging recent study, Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment, Noggle argues that eighteenth-century prose takes up questions like these with striking regularity. As he points out, the era draws upon a rhetoric of insensibility in order to explain how feeling secretly underwrites the dynamism of a wide range of social forces. Affects surge "insensibly," deep undercurrents of nebulous intensity, shaping processes as various as one's coming into consciousness, to the nation's cultivation of manners, to global economic self-organization. Such language might initially call to mind contemporary affect theories associated with Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Nigel Thrift, inheritors of a Spinozist tradition who tend to imagine feeling as "autonomic intensities" detached from the larger neurological work of cognition, intention, and cultural representation (not without some controversy).1 As some influential critics have pointed out too, that school's more speculative theorizations approach forms of dualism even in their insistence on the materiality of affect, and can thus appear ungrounded in the particularities of actual historical bodies.2 Noggle sidesteps most of this debate, but his account has the distinct advantage of showing how eighteenth-century thinkers similarly took up affect's ineffable power as a stylistic tool. He cites John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Frances Burney, and Edward Gibbon, among several others, showing how their almost paradoxically "casual" and "load bearing" (5) use of the insensible allows them to describe how complex states of being emerge out of the soup of prepersonal, and sometimes contrary, feeling. Indeed, by Noggle's own admission, "insensibly" is a strange key word. On its face, it seems a mere adverb, a term for describing how something occurs that is oddly devoid of the positive content of the affect itself. When we say that Darcy's love for Elizabeth has grown insensibly, we describe his feeling by its privation, by the unfeeling with which those feelings unfold. Or, to take another example, when David Hume describes acts of mental association as relying upon the mind's "pass[ing] easily and insensibly along related objects," he's saying [End Page 133] that the fusing of that link depends upon its not actually being registered. Yet, as Noggle clarifies, in both cases we also mean something more than a simple lack of feeling—perhaps even the opposite. To describe a feeling as having arisen insensibly may flag its imperceptibility that is, but it also insists upon that affect's existence even within such elusiveness. Darcy might not have felt the change, but it was happening, "insensibly." The mind can't...