The affective turn in photography theory takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s move from semiology to affective phenomenology in Camera Lucida. This article, however, considers the way affective phenomenology is itself grounded in the semiological structure of photography. It looks at how, before Camera Lucida was even written, Thierry de Duve had already discussed the affective implications of Barthes’s understanding of photography’s indexical nature. The article then proceeds to rethink the structural affectivity of (...) photography beyond Barthes’s and de Duve’s emphasis on a direct relation between indexicality and loss. Reconsidering photography through Jacques Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime of art, the article rather puts emphasis on the indeterminacy of photography, which results from the way the camera captures and isolates a spatio-temporal fragment. Shifting the focus from indexicality to indeterminacy sheds a different light on the loss implied by the structure of photography, parallel to how Freud understood the difference between mourning and melancholy. (shrink)

This special issue of Parrhesia has developed from the 2010 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy’s Conference at the University of Queensland on the theme of the philosophy of affect.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of “the look” has generally been understood as an argument for the impossibility of mutual recognition between consciousnesses. Being-looked-at reveals me as an object for the other, but I can never grasp this object that I am. I argue here that the chapter “The Look” in Being and Nothingness has been widely misunderstood, causing many to dismiss Sartre’s view unfairly. Like Hegel’s account of recognition, Sartre’s “look” is meant as a theory of successful mutual recognition that proves (...) the existence of others. Yet Sartre claims that such an account is plausible only if recognition is affective, not cognitive. Situating Sartre’s account of the look within his technical understanding of affect’s distinctness from cognition not only enables a better understanding of Sartre’s view, but also reveals a compelling alternative to the understanding of self-other relations in contemporary affect theory. (shrink)

The well-known metaphor on the banality of evil, used by Arendt on the trial of the Nazi hierarch Eichmann in Jerusalem, can also be reviewed in the light of the so-called "affective turn" in the social sciences. Eichmann's tragic obedience to the creators of the Holocaust does not only derive from the renunciation to implement an autonomous thought, in the context of the Nazi system, but also from a deep inability to feel emotions and to develop empathic relationships. (...) This allows a process of identification with the manipulation of emotions and feelings put into practice by the regime and at the same time a process of pathological detachment towards the politically persecuted by the regime itself. Keywords: Symbolic politics; Affective Turn; Political communication La ben nota metafora sulla banalità del male, usata dalla Arendt nel processo al gerarca nazista Eichmann a Gerusalemme, può anche essere rivista alla luce della cosiddetta "svolta affettiva" nelle scienze sociali. La tragica obbedienza di Eichmann ai creatori dell'Olocausto non deriva solo dalla rinuncia ad attuare un pensiero autonomo, nel contesto del sistema nazista, ma anche da una profonda incapacità di provare emozioni e di sviluppare relazioni empatiche. Ciò consente un processo di identificazione con la manipolazione delle emozioni e dei sentimenti messa in pratica dal regime e allo stesso tempo un processo di distacco patologico nei confronti dei perseguitati politicamente dal regime stesso. Parole chiave: Politica simbolica; Svolta affettiva; Political communication. (shrink)

Resumen Este trabajo intenta esbozar ciertas reflexiones en torno al papel de los afectos en la práctica de la autotraducción en la poesía mapuches. Vemos en el “giro afectivo” una posibilidad de comprender la producción literaria bilingüe de autores mapuches como un proyecto ético de reapropiación lingüística y de transgresión de límites culturales originado en afectos de “pulsión genealógica” que ponen en cuestión la autoridad de la lengua del colonizador, a la vez que resultan en la generación de los llamados (...) “afectos activos”, propios de un aumento del grado de potencia expresiva y de agenciamiento de los sujetos. Para ello trazaremos una cartografía de conceptos de distintos pensadores que han reflexionado acerca de los afectos y la lengua, desde Jacques Derrida a Gloria Anzaldúa, pasando por el ineludible Gilles Deleuze en su estudio de los afectos en la Ética de Baruch Spinoza. Asimismo, pondremos estos conceptos en diálogo con las propias reflexiones de varios de autores mapuches: Liliana Ancalao, Adriana Paredes Pinda, María Teresa Panchillo, Leonel Lienlaf y Elicura Chihuailaf.In this work we wish to analyze the role of affects in self-translation in Mapuche poetry. We see in the “affective turn” a possibility to understand the bilingual literary production of Mapuche authors as an ethical project of linguistic reappropriation and transgression of cultural limits originated in affects of “genealogical drive” that question the authority of the language of the colonizer, as well as resulting in the generation of “active affects”, inherent to the increase of the degree of expressive potency of the subjects. For this purpose, we set out to trace a cartography of concepts by different thinkers who have reflected upon the relationship between affects and language, from Jacques Derrida to Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as the inescapable contributions of Gilles Deleuze on the study of affects in Spinoza’s Ethics. Also, we will link such concepts with the reflections of five Mapuche poets, Liliana Ancalao, Adriana Paredes Pinda, María Teresa Panchillo, Leonel Lienlaf and Elicura Chihuailaf. (shrink)

This article considers how the concept of desire can be theorized in light of recent work on emotion and affect. In so doing, it questions what desire does and how desire can be theorized, particularly within cinema. Instead of arguing that we must move away from a psychoanalytic interpretation of desire, I ask how this approach can be revitalized and reconsidered through work on affect. This article also highlights the way in which Lacanian and Deleuzian models of desire are constantly (...) set in opposition to each other; in so doing, it seeks to move beyond this impasse and gesture towards alternative ways of theorizing desire. One of the central issues foregrounded within psychoanalytic theory is the process of remembering and forgetting: the method through which the subject can ‘let go’ and move forward. This relationship is figured primarily in terms of the discourse between self and other. Marguerite Duras’ work questions this process of ‘letting go’ and offers an alternative conceptualization of desire through her use of melancholia. Beyond an intrinsic interest in her work, because Duras has been admired by psychoanalytic, feminist and Deleuzian scholars, her films present an opportunity to rethink a theorization of desire in light of competing interpretations. In discussing melancholia in terms of Duras’ work, this paper also considers the extent to which her use of Hiroshima as a backdrop to the affair presented in the film colonizes desire and its transformative potential. (shrink)

Edward S. Casey invites us to rethink our emotions as fundamentally emerging from outside and around the self, redirecting our attention from the subjective sources of emotion to what reaches us from outside the domain of the subject.

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects--or passions, as they were also called--formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn't apparent that musical tones (...) could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall. Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music's physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory's common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects. (shrink)

This article explores the psychological logics underpinning key perspectives in the ‘turn to affect’. Research on affect raises questions about the categorization of affective states, affective meaning-making, and the processes involved in the transmission of affect. I argue that current approaches risk depopulating affecting scenes, mystifying affective contagion, and authorizing questionable psychobiological arguments. I engage with the work of Sedgwick and Frank, Thrift, and Ahmed to explore these points and suggest that the concept of affective (...) practice offers a more promising social psychological grounding. Notions of affective practice are more commensurate with trends in contemporary psychobiology, explain the limits on affective contagion, and emphasize relationality and negotiation, attentive to the flow of affecting episodes. A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships. (shrink)

This essay offers a critique of the philosophical ‘turn to affect’, a formation represented here by the work of Brian Massumi and Mark Hansen. In such discourses, affect is celebrated as an entity that is inimical to conceptualisation, subjective intention and linguistic transcription. However, insofar as it boasts such qualities, affect cannot, I argue, be celebrated or made the object of a critical ‘turn’. In drawing on Deleuze's work, contemporary scholarly discourses on affect dispense with Deleuze's most profound (...) proposition: of an order of philosophy, perception, reflection and thought that originates outside, or is no longer dependent upon, a human perspective. (shrink)

When experiencing personal distress, people usually expect their romantic partner to be supportive. However, when put in a situation to provide support, people may at times be struggling with issues of their own. This interdependent nature of dyadic coping interactions as well as potential spillover effects is mirrored in the state-of-the-art research method to behaviorally assess couple’s dyadic coping processes. This paradigm typically includes two videotaped 8-min dyadic coping conversations in which partners swap roles as sharer and support provider. Little (...) is known about how such dyadic coping interactions may feed back into one another, impacting the motivation and ability to be a responsive support provider. In three behavioral studies, we examined how sharers’ experiences may spill over to affect their own support provision in a subsequent dyadic coping interaction. We hypothesized that the extent to which sharers perceive their partner as responsive to their self-disclosure increases the quality of their own subsequent support provision, whereas sharers’ lingering negative affect reduces the quality of their own subsequent support provision. In line with our first hypothesis, perceived partner responsiveness predicted the provision of higher-quality support, though primarily as perceived by the partner. Sharers who perceived their partner to have been more responsive were somewhat more likely to subsequently engage in positive dyadic coping and were rated as more responsive by their partners. Negative dyadic coping behavior was unaffected. Evidence for our second hypothesis was mixed. While lingering negative affect did not affect positive dyadic coping behavior or perceived support, it did increase the chances of negative dyadic coping behavior. However, given the very low occurrences of negative affect and negative dyadic coping, these findings should be interpreted with caution. Taken together, these findings suggest that support interactions may feed back into one another, highlighting the complex and interdependent nature of dyadic coping. The strongest and most consistent findings concerned the spillover effect of perceived partner responsiveness on subsequent perceived support quality, speaking to the key role of believing that one’s partner is responsive to one’s needs in promoting healthy relationship functioning. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a focus on feeling as a topic of reinvigorated scholarly concern, described by theorists in a range of disciplines in terms of a “turn to affect.” Surprisingly little has been said about this most recent shift in critical theorizing by philosophers, including feminist philosophers, despite the fact that affect theorists situate their work within feminist and related, sometimes intersectional, political projects. In this article, I redress the seeming elision of the “turn to affect” in (...) feminist philosophy, and develop a critique of some of the claims made by affect theorists that builds upon concerns regarding the “newness” of affect and emotion in feminist theory, and the risks of erasure this may entail. To support these concerns, I present a brief genealogy of feminist philosophical work on affect and emotion. Identifying a reductive tendency within affect theory to equate affect with bodily immanence, and to preclude cognition, culture, and representation, I argue that contemporary feminist theorists would do well to follow the more holistic models espoused by the canon of feminist work on emotion. Furthermore, I propose that prominent affect theorist Brian Massumi is right to return to pragmatism as a means of redressing philosophical dualisms, such as emotion/cognition and mind/body, but suggest that such a project is better served by John Dewey's philosophy of emotion than by William James's. (shrink)

This article investigates how the turn to affect within the humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of (neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps characterizing the (...) taking up of scientific literature. While neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The article interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of the hold of habit and embodied history. (shrink)

The “affective turn” is by now long established, part of a wider surge of interest in emotion playing out in a range of disciplines. In literary studies, the conversation about how affect theory might help us to interpret literature is still emerging. The goal of the present discussion is to provide a critical overview of work by scholars who draw on the insights of recent theory to read literary texts written in English. At the same time that the (...) discussion offers an appraisal of the current state of scholarship, it also seeks to identify emerging new directions in research. (shrink)

I argue that there is an affective injustice in gendered and racialized oppression. To account for this, we must deny the opposition of affect and intentionality often assumed in the philosophy of emotion and the affective turn: while affect and intentionality are not opposed in principle, affective intentionality may be refused uptake in oppressive practices. In section 1, I read Merleau‐Ponty’s theory of the body schema as a theory of affect that accommodates my account of (...) class='Hi'>affective injustice and aligns with accounts of affect transmission and circulation in feminist philosophies of the affective turn. This is crucial for understanding Fanon’s contribution to the theory of the body schema, in which it is susceptible to historical‐racial “affective disorders.” In sections 2–4, I distinguish three types of affective injustice: affective marginalization, exploitation, and violence. In section 2 I develop an intersectional feminist account of this distinction drawing on Lorde and Lugones and raise questions about the limits of framing the issue of affective injustice in terms of intentionality as opposed to a more psychoanalytic conceptual vocabulary that accommodates the displacement of affective force. In sections 3 and 4, I explore these affective injustices through an analysis of Fanonian concepts, showing how the theory of the body schema can accommodate not only affective intentionality but also the oppressive disjunction of affect and intentionality, as well as forms of affective injustice that exceed the oppressive disabling of sense‐making and involve the exploitative and violent displacement of affective force. (shrink)

Studies of affect and emotions have blossomed in recent decades across the humanities, neurosciences, and social sciences. In music scholarship, they have often built on the discipline's attention to what music theorists since the Renaissance have described as music's unique ability to arouse passions in listeners. In this timely volume, the editors seek to combine this 'affective turn' with the 'sound turn' in the humanities, which has profitably shifted attention from the visual to the aural, as well (...) as a more recent 'philosophical turn' in music studies. Accordingly, the volume maps out a new territory for research at the intersection of music, philosophy, and sound studies. The essays in Sound and Affect look at objects and experiences in which correlations of sound and affect reside, in music and beyond: the voice as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made, and our responses to them. As argued here, far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars including both established as well as a wealth of new voices. The essays are grouped thematically into sections that move from politics and ethics, to reflections on pre-and post-human "musicking," to the notions of affective listening and music temporalities, to are examination of historical understandings of music and affect. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersection with affect and emotions. (shrink)

The ‘Affective Turn’ has generated a change in the production of knowledge based on certain philosophical trends recognized as ‘process philosophies’. Giles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead are some exponents of those philosophies that have strongly influenced over the affect studies within social sciences. Their thinking has been even a condition of possibility for the current ‘Affective Turn’. I will start this paper by arguing that these three authors of the process philosophies have shared (...) a source of inspiration in the work of Baruch Spinoza. Later, I will present the ideas of Deleuze, Bergson and Whitehead that have been taken up -and recycled- by contemporary affect theorists. I will exemplify each case with a recent study from what I recognize as ‘vintage affective theories’. I conclude with some reflections on the probabilities and improbabilities offered by this return to the process philosophy in affect studies developed by social sciences El ‘Giro Afectivo’ ha generado un cambio en la producción de conocimiento sobre la base de ciertas tendencias filosóficas reconocidas como ‘filosofías de los procesos’. Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson y Alfred N. Whitehead son algunos de los exponentes de estas filosofías que han influido con fuerza en los estudios del afecto al interior de las ciencias sociales. Su pensamiento ha sido incluso una condición de posibilidad para el actual ‘Giro Afectivo’. Comenzaré este artículo argumentando que estos tres exponentes de las filosofías de los procesos tienen una fuente de inspiración compartida en la obra de Baruch Spinoza. Posteriormente expondré algunas de las ideas de Deleuze, Bergson y Whitehead que han sido retomadas -y recicladas- por los teóricos contemporáneos del afecto. Ejemplificaré cada caso con un estudio reciente de las que reconozco como ‘teorías afectivas vintage’. Concluyo con una serie de reflexiones sobre las probabilidades e improbabilidades que ofrece esta vuelta a la filosofía de los procesos en los estudios del afecto que desarrollan las ciencias sociales. (shrink)

The deep influence of affectivity on learning is now widely acknowledged (Keefer et al., 2018; Sánchez-Álvarez et al., 2021). For instance, it has been shown that affect influences key learning-relevant processes, such as motivation, perception, behavior, and critical thinking (Izard, 2002; Mayer & Salovey, 1997). Evidence also shows that emotion and mood strongly influence attention, which in turn drives learning and memory (Elbertson et al., 2010; Elias et al., 1997). Intersubjective phenomena, such as the degree of affection and respect (...) between child and teacher, also affect the child’s learning processes, academic outcomes, and brain development (Kusché & Greenberg, 2006; Ryan & Patrick, 2001). However, the relevant literature is not paying attention to increasing evidence showing that affective phenomena are rooted in interoceptive and homeostatic self- and co-regulatory processes within and between people’s living bodies (Barrett, 2017; Carvalho & Damasio, 2021; Craig, 2015, 2018; Fotopoulou et al., 2022; Fotopoulou & Tsakiris, 2017; Seth & Friston, 2016). In this theoretical chapter, we explore this connection and its importance for learning. We argue that affective experience plays a fundamental role in learning, and that affective experience is rooted in the homeostatic self-/co-regulation of living bodies. Therefore, the homeostatic self-/co-regulation of living bodies plays a fundamental role in learning. In other words, there is an intra- and interpersonal somatic dimension of learning that demands explicit consideration in educational contexts. In this way, we aim to contribute to an understanding of learning and education that moves away from an individualistic, brain-centered information-processing conception toward one centered on sentient, interdependent living bodies. (shrink)

A central doctrine of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason holds that the content of human experience is rooted in an affection of sensibility by unknowable things in themselves. This famous and puzzling affection doctrine raises two seemingly intractable old problems, which can be termed the Indispensability and the Consistency Problems. By what right does Kant present affection by supersensible entities as an indispensable requirement of experience? And how could any argument for such indispensability avoid violating the Critique's doctrine of noumenal (...) ignorance? This essay develops a new solution to both problems, setting out from the continuity between Kant's early and mature views on sensibility and mind-world relations. Kant's early writings subscribe to an interactionist cosmology opposed to both Leibniz's preestablished harmony and Malebranche's occasionalism. The modern debate on mind-world relations shaping Kant's early cosmology points us to a widely recognized motivation for interactionism, turning on a constraint on agency within certain noninteractionist cosmologies. In particular, Kant's early conversion to a libertarian theory of freedom, together with his rejection of occasionalism, provides the basis for a compelling argument for the indispensability of world-mind affection relations. Extended to the transcendental idealist framework, the same argument reveals noumenal affection as an indispensable presupposition of some knowledge claims consistently upheld by Kant. This leads in turn to a satisfying solution to the Consistency Problem, showing that the doctrine of noumenal affection is not merely consistent with, but is partly motivated by, Kant's commitment to noumenal ignorance. (shrink)

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what (...) a turn to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)

Edited by Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies, this is the first book to name and characterize—and therefore consolidate—a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and (...) geophysical systems. The nonhuman turn in twenty-first-century studies can be traced to multiple intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth century: actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, cognitive sciences, new materialism, new media theory, speculative realism, and systems theory. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and methodologies. However, they all take up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first-century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Unlike the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman. Rather, the nonhuman turn insists (paraphrasing Bruno Latour) that “we have never been human,” that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is identified precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman. Contributors: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke U; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Brian Massumi, U of Montreal; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana U. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer an account of affective experiences within Predictive Processing, a novel framework that considers the brain to be a dynamical, hierarchical, Bayesian hypothesis-testing mechanism. We begin by outlining a set of common features of affective experiences that a PP-theory should aim to explain: feelings are conscious, they have valence, they motivate behaviour, and they are intentional states with particular and formal objects. We then review existing theories of affective experiences within Predictive Processing and (...) delineate two families of theories: Interoceptive Inference Theories and Error Dynamics Theories. We highlight the strengths and shortcomings of each family of theories and develop a synthesis: the Affective Inference Theory. Affective Inference Theory claims that valence corresponds to the expected rate of prediction error reduction. In turn, the particular object of a feeling is the object predicted to be the most likely cause of expected changes in prediction error rate, and the formal object of a feeling is a predictive model of the expected changes in prediction error rate caused by a given particular object. Finally, our theory shows how affective experiences bias action selection, directing the organism towards allostasis and towards optimal levels of uncertainty in order to minimise prediction error over time. (shrink)

In AFTERLIVES OF AFFECT, Watson considers the life and work of Mayanist Linda Schele (1942 - 1988) as an entry point to discuss the nature of cultural inquiry and the metaphor of decipherment in anthropology. Watson figures Schele as a trickster guide in his experimental, person-centered ethnography, reanimating the work of decipherment and drawing upon an "affect of discovery" that better expresses the affective engagement of anthropologists and their subject of study. Through her archive, Watson finds an archaeologist wholly (...) animated by her fieldsite and immersed in a more "spiritual science," though nonetheless still imbricated in a system of settler-colonial knowledge production. By holding Schele's work in conversation with both her own interlocutors and prominent voices in the field today, Watson refocuses on anthropologists who are engaged as individuals; carrying their own attachments with them as they describe, interpret, and decipher what they observe, and in doing so, positions affective engagement as a constitutive element in a more reflexive anthropology. The book is organized into six chapters that progress thematically through Schele's life and Watson's autoethnographic reflections on his own research. In Sacrilege (chapter 1), Watson draws together moments throughout his research where he felt his exhumation of Schele's work veered too closely to disturbing what was laid to rest-much like Schele's own work, which relied on the unearthing of sites long laid to rest, reanimating long-dead Mayan rulers and artists. The chapter sets the tone of the work as always toeing the line and risking the introduction of the mystical and affective into scientific interpretation-edgewalking with Schele. In Animals (chapter 2), Watson draws upon metaphors in the animal world, as did Schele when she sought inspiration for her next moment of insight; spider webs present a Geertzian metaphor for webs of signification, while rabbits are trickster guides, a transtemporalizing technology, drawing Schele (and Watson) forward and back through time. Through these reflections, Watson builds iteratively on arguments throughout the book that return to themes more recognizable in contemporary theory conversations: more-than-human worlds, the question of modernity, and the social conditions of knowledge production. This book will be of interest to readers in anthropology, especially those engaged in the ontological turn and more-than-human worlds, as well as the history of anthropology and anthropology theory more broadly. This book will also be of interest to readers in science studies, the posthumanities, and affect theory. (shrink)

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich's recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues (...) that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice. (shrink)

Stolorow and his collaborators' post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective – intersubjective-systems theory – is a phenomenological contextualism that illuminates worlds of emotional experience as they take form within relational contexts. After outlining the evolution and basic ideas of this framework, Stolorow shows both how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds enrichment and philosophical support in Heidegger's analysis of human existence, and how Heidegger's existential philosophy, in turn, can be enriched and expanded by an encounter with post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. In doing so, he creates an important (...) psychological bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existential philosophy in the phenomenology of emotional trauma. (shrink)

Asian workplaces are often characterized by cultures that require more overtime than other cultures. Although predictors for overtime work have been rigorously studied, it is still meaningful to investigate specific aspects of Eastern cultural values that stem from Confucian ethics and may influence overtime work among Asian employees. We suggest that four major Confucian orientations are positively associated with employees’ affective and normative motives, which in turn affect working overtime. This article extends management literature on the subjects of (...) cultural ethics and workaholism. It also suggests how Eastern cultural values lead to working overtime. We hope that our research effort on Confucian cultural value and its associations with other managerial outcomes and theories is a small cornerstone that allows management researchers to explore interesting and meaningful ways to apply Confucian culture and orientations in the workplace. (shrink)

Jean-François Lyotard's work remains a largely untapped resource for film-philosophy. This article surveys four fundamental concepts which indicate the fecundity of this work for current studies and debates. While Lyotard was generally associated with the “theory” of the 1980s which privileged language, signs, and cultural representations, much of his work in fact resonates more strongly with the new materialisms and realisms currently taking centre stage. The concepts examined here indicate the relevance of Lyotard's work in four related contemporary contexts: the (...) renewed interest in the dispositif, new materialism, the affective turn, and speculative realism. The concept of the dispositif (or apparatus) is being rehabilitated in the contemporary context because it shows a way beyond the limiting notion of mise en scène which has dominated approaches to film, and Lyotard's prevalent use of this concept feeds into this renewal. While matter is not an explicit theme in Lyotard's writings on film, it is nevertheless one at the heart of his aesthetics, and it may be extended for application to film. Affect was an important theme for Lyotard in many contexts, including his approaches to film, where it appears to subvert film's “seductive” (ideological) effects. Finally, the Real emerges as a central concept in Lyotard's last essay on cinema, where, perhaps surprisingly, it intimates something close to a speculative realist aesthetics. Each of the fundamental concepts of Lyotard's film-philosophy are introduced in the context of the current fields and debates to which they are relevant, and are discussed with filmic examples, including Michael Snow's La Région centrale (1971), Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di Dio, 1950), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), and neo-realist cinema. (shrink)

This study describes the ways in which professionals in two contexts of health care: general practice and homeopathic consultations, respond to patients' affective expressions of a trouble or a problem. The focus is on the turns of professionals that display understanding, compassion or agreement with the patient's account. Different types of affiliative turns are described and their consequences for the following interaction are scrutinized in relation to the institutional task of solving the patients' health-related problems. It is shown that (...) in both contexts, affiliation is oriented to as working towards closing the sequence of troubles-telling and serves to shift back to problem-solving activity, whilst in homeopathy, it may also serve as a means to problem-solving and thus help to complete the institutional task at hand. Some implications of these observations for professional—client interaction will be described. To conclude, the role of emotion in institutional interaction will also be discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading its wings so that this fellow (...) creature might fly away to its freedom. Or the report of a cat in a nursing home who curls up around dying elderly patients, and remains steadily by their side as they, unbeknownst to the medical personnel, pass away.1 Or of a sacred moment of silence by a stream for baboons in East Africa.2 Or of the ethics that spontaneously emerges among wolves at play.3 On the basis of extensive studies, biologist Frans de Waal argues that such anecdotes are far from rare, and that some core elements of moral understanding and compassion occur among a significant range of nonhuman as well as the human animal species. Apes, monkeys, and perhaps all nonhuman animals fail to display a distinctly human capacity for abstract moral reasoning. As de Waal (2006) remarks, it is difficult to tell (173–75). But our furry and feathery kin do without a doubt demonstrate rich elements of ethical response, and they often enough extend their moral concern to creatures beyond their own species. Of course, they will also bite each other’s heads off or eat their own young as well. But this is just to say that animals are neither natural [End Page 111] innocents nor savage brutes. Like us, they belong to what post-Nietzschean philosophers might frame, somewhat ironically, as a postlapsarian world of good and evil.What kind of philosophical approach could account for these postlapsarian genealogies of ethics? Biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists are drawing upon investigations of prosocial behavior to remap the boundaries of ethics, as for example in Isabelle Stengers’s call for cosmopolitical ecologies of relationships (2010, 33). Such a cosmopolitics aims to encompass our kin and kind from diverse species within the ethical boundaries of common worlds. Donna Haraway discovers an opening for Stengers’s ecology of relationships in the intimate encounters among co-evolving species, especially those she calls companion species (2008, 83). She argues, following Derrida, that the abstract reasoning processes of Stoic and Kantian cosmopolitan ethics remain closed to the participation of nonhuman animals as anything more than dependents, failing to observe the ways in which they act as companions, if not moral subjects. But then, what normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato (for discussions of this tradition, see Bergoffen 1997; Huffer 2009; Willett 2001)—but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects” in the infant-caregiver relationship (Stern 1985). As we shall see, this... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Philosophy of religion has recently made a turn to lived religion, an approach which seeks to understand lived religion as it is experienced concretely by individual practitioners. However, this turn to lived religion has seen limited engagement with the notion of belonging. Belonging here refers to the felt sense of being part of a group – of insidership – along with the development of positive social ties and mutual affective concern. It is my contention in this (...) paper that reflection on this experience of belonging can improve our understanding of lived religion. In particular, I argue that human beings have an affective need to belong – a fundamental and affective need for belonging and positive social relationship which is felt in the body and rooted in human biology and evolutionary history. This paper makes the case for the affective need to belong, before examining its implications for understanding religion. It finds that the affectivity of belonging is capable of raising the affective salience of certain in-group beliefs, as well as creating affective hurdles to dissent, and in so doing can help to explain processes of religion conversion, sustained religious adherence, and religious disaffiliation. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical rejoinder to affect theories prevalent in the humanities since the 1990s. In film and media studies, affect theories display an opposition to ‘screen’ and apparatus theory of the 1970s and 1980s alleged to have marginalised the spectator's body and affects and privileged cognition over affection. Yet film and media studies’ turn to affect came with its own set of problems: in emphasising the affective over the cognitive aspects of cinematic experience, theories of the (...) affective turn invert and reproduce the dichotomies they seek to contest. Critically reconsidering the turn to affect and its place within film and media studies, this article challenges the relation of affect theories to Gilles Deleuze's concept of affect, highlighting these theories’ failure to account for Deleuze's indebtedness to Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and his theory of the faculties. Suggesting a conception of cinematic affect beyond dichotomies of body and mind, affect and thought, this essay instead shows how cinematic experience instigates transformations in spectators that are simultaneously affective and cognitive. (shrink)

How does human agency relate to the good? According to a thesis with ancient pedigree, the connection is very tight. Known as “the Guise of the Good” (GG), it states that human action or motivation to act, of some special kind or another, is only possible insofar as the agent performs or is motivated to perform the act because of the good she sees in so acting. But how might agents see their actions as good? Recent research in moral psychology, (...) the philosophy of mind, and the cognitive sciences suggests that affective states may play a deep role in cognition and action as representations of value: for instance, pain may represent an injury as bad for one. This dissertation begins by defending just such an evaluationist account of unpleasant pain from an objection, and then develops and defends an affect-based version of GG. The first part of the dissertation (Chapter 2) considers a foundational problem for an evaluationist theory of affect. The theory is motivated by its ability to make sense of our aversive intentional responses to pain as responses to value, but the shooting the messenger objection charges that it is unable to make sense of our aversive behavior to the sensations themselves. I propose a solution to this problem on behalf of the evaluationist: when we introspect our pains we also turn our emotional distress inwards, enabling it to represent our pains as bad. One crucial question GG theorists must face is just what the good of GG is. Chapter 3 argues that, lest the thesis be too weak, it must hold that actions must appear to their agents to meet a standard of practical reason. The chapter then shows how the intelligibility motivation for GG can lead naturally to the view that the standards so presented are shared publicly. Chapter 4 argues against the standard understanding of GG in terms of essentially evaluative desires and contends that it should be replaced by hard-line affectivism, the view that GG is true because actions are based on affective states that represent there as being reason for those actions. (shrink)

Critical Affect explores the emotional complexity of critique and maps out its enduring value for the turn to affect and ontology. Through a series of vivid close readings, Ashley Barnwell shows how suspicion and methods of decoding remain vital to both civic and academic spaces, where concerns about precarity, transparency, and security are commonplace and the question of how we verify the truth is one of the most polarising of our age. Weaving together both the critical and affective (...) dimensions of 'paranoid reading', Critical Affect opens crucial questions about the ethics of practicing theory and offers a new route into the critical study of affect.a. (shrink)

Christian Lotz shows in this book that Husserl's Phenomenology and its key concept--subjectivity--is based on a concrete anthropological structure, such as self-affection and the bodily experience of the other. The analysis of the sensual sphere and the lived Body forces Husserl to an ongoing correction of his strong methodological assumptions. Subjectivity turns out to be an ambivalent phenomenon, as the subject is unable to fully present itself to itself, and therefore is forced to allow for a fundamental non-transparency in itself.

For nearly fifty years the humanities have been confined by a series of critiques: of the subject, of representation, of the visual, of modernism, of autonomy, of intention, of art itself. In their place various “materialities” have appeared: signs, identities, bodies, history, and works. _Against Affective Formalism_ challenges these orthodoxies. “What I am after, above all, is expression,” Henri Matisse declared. Matisse believed that through the careful arrangement of line and color he could transmit his feelings directly to the (...) minds and bodies of his viewers. Yet Matisse continually struggled with the reality that his feelings were misunderstood—or simply ignored—by viewers of his art. Matisse oscillates between a desire for expressive command over the viewer and a sense of the impossibility of making himself known. _Against Affective Formalism_ confronts modernism’s dissatisfactions with representation. As Todd Cronan explains, a central tenet of modernist thought turns on the effort to overcome representation in the name of something more explicit in its capacity to generate bodily or affective experience. Henri Bergson was one of the most influential advocates of the antirepresentational impulse; his novel theories of memory and freedom gripped a generation of writers, philosophers, psychologists, and artists. Matisse and Bergson worked within and against the context of form and expression that remains in force today. Writing in opposition to prevailing theories and assumptions about the relation of intention and form—most of which accept the “death of the author” as a basic fact of interpretation—Cronan argues that the beholder’s response to art, outside a framework of intentionality, is irrelevant to a work’s meaning. Intentions are not a matter of _method_ at all: no letter, biography, document, archive, or key will recover an intention. What matters is that intentions make works of art different from objects in the world. (shrink)

What makes it possible to affect one another, to move and be moved by another person? Why do some of our encounters transform us? The experience of moving one another points to the inter-affective in intersubjectivity. Inter-affection is hard to account for under a cognitivist banner, and has not received much attention in embodied work on intersubjectivity. I propose that understanding inter-affection needs a combination of insights into self-affection, embodiment, and interaction processes. I start from Michel Henry's radically immanent (...) idea of self-affection, and bring it into a contrastive dialogue with the enactive concepts of autonomy and (participatory) sense-making. I suggest that the latter ideas can open up Henry's idea of self-affection to inter-affection (something he aimed to do, but did not quite manage) and that, in turn, Henry's work can provide insights into underexplored elements of intersubjectivity, such as its ineffable and mysterious aspects, and erotic encounters. (shrink)

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well-known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the (...) latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics. (shrink)

Theories of practical reason must meet a psychological requirement: they must explain how normative practical reasons can be motivationally efficacious. It would be pointless to claim that we are subject to normative demands of reason, if we were in fact unable to meet those demands. Concerning this requirement to account for the possibility of rational motivation, internalist approaches are distinguished from externalist ones. I defend internalism, whilst rejecting both ways in which the belief‐desire model can be instantiated. Both the Humean (...) and the Kantian instantiation of that model fail to account for the internal connection between normative and motivating reasons required by internalism. The two classes of reasons rather come to be seen as mutually exclusive. Opposing the belief‐desire model, I argue that rational motivation can only be established by reference to emotion. Emotions are affective perceptions. They have motivational force so that they can contribute to the explanation of action. At the same time they can rationalise actions because they have an intentional content which resembles the content of sensory perception in being representational. Because of this, the emotions can noninferentially justify judgements, which in turn can justify actions. I conclude by outlining the Aristotelian account of practical reason and ethics that emerges from integrating the emotions into practical reasoning. Doing the right thing is much more a matter of seeing things right than of drawing the right inferences. Seeing things right, in its turn, is not only to justify an action: it necessarily implies to be motivated to act accordingly. (shrink)

This essay explores a philosophical encounter between Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin framed by the problem of the affect of shame. In particular, this essay asks how the affect of shame functions simultaneously as the accomplishment of regimes of anti-black racism and the site of transformative, revolutionary consciousness. Shame threatens the formation of subjectivity, as well as, and as an extension of, senses of home and belonging. How are we to imagine another subjectivity, another relation to home, and so another (...) kind of social and political order? For both Fanon and Baldwin, imagining the future requires an engagement with memory and history that purges black subjects of shame. The two thinkers part ways at that moment, however, with Fanon advocating a forgetting of abject history and Baldwin arguing for a retrieval of meaning and place won through pain and suffering. At the heart of this parting of ways, then, lies a conflict over the meaning of history across the black diaspora and its relation to cultural production, which, in turn, reflects important, differing conceptions of home. (shrink)

The paper considers the problem of various different forms of pre‑cognitive affective appraisal and their role in the process of gaining self-knowledge. According to the phenomenological approach, if we are to understand our inner states (our emotional experiences), these cannot be extracted from the context within which they arise. Emotions not only refer to the inner states of the subject, but also to the outer world to which they are a form of response. Brentano, Husserl and Scheler claimed that (...) emotions are directed towards values. It is to this essential feature of emotional experience that I would like to turn. I shall therefore re-examine Sartre’s views concerning affectivity (i.e. the capacity to reveal evaluatively significant qualities of one’s environment), as well as the dual-aspect theory of (reflective and non-reflective) consciousness. The main argument of this paper is that a plausible account of the essential role of affectivity in the emotions may be provided on the basis of a phenomenological theory of pre-reflective consciousness and its relation to reflexivity. I will focus on three different claims about pre-reflective (affective) consciousness. According to the first of these, a large part of cognition is of a prelinguistic (pre-reflective) nature; I argue that the evaluative content of emotion is not only conceptually determined, but may also take a non-conceptual form (as affective appraisal). The second claim refers to the notion of affect, which ought to be distinguished from (unintentional) bodily sensations. The third conceives of the relation between pre-reflective (affective) consciousness and reflective consciousness (propositional attitudes) as normative (rather than causal). I aim to demonstrate that a plausible view of emotional affectivity must appeal to a phenomenological account of the pre-reflective aspect of consciousness. (shrink)