"Exhalation," a 2008 science fiction short story by Ted Chiang, virtuoso of the genre and the form, begins with a truism, refuted: "It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end" (37). The narrator's promise is so (...) alluring—knowledge of life's origin, knowledge of its expiration, and knowledge of the relation between the two—that we may be forgiven for overlooking the parenthetical. Argon amounts to less than one percent of the air breathed within Earth's atmosphere. The narrator specifies that "others call... Read More. (shrink)

This article generates an affective hermeneutics of the political. The research question, What is feeling political? is, at first, refined through the oeuvre of political theorist Simone Weil, whose focus on experience, involvement and attention highlights the role of sentience in political life. The inescapable normativity of Weil’s texts calls for an alternative approach to the question at hand, one that acknowledges the inevitability of the phenomenon of feeling political. In order to produce such an approach, the realm in which (...) said phenomenon occurs is spatialized as an indefinite series of rhizomatic affective atmospheres in which the negotiation of one’s involvement, resistance, association, and isolation prompts a variety of orientations. The work of Lauren Berlant is subsequently considered as a means to stress the interplay between noise and ambience on one hand, and the notions of citizenship and community on the other. Ultimately, a reflection inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emphasizes the humanist undertone of this investigation, reposing the question of feeling political as an ontological query. (shrink)