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)

This chapter argues that contemporary literary criticism suffers from a reflexive faith in things, conceived broadly as static objects that reflect wider political, social, and cultural practices. Literature is re-imagined here as an open-ended event that demands an immanent materialism in which distinctions between literary objects and human bodies no longer stand up. By reflecting on the ambiguous “thing-ness” of Shakespeare, Vallelly draws attention to the elusive nature of things in theatrical spaces, and explores how this enigmatic materiality can (...) be applied to literary experience more generally. To do so, he draws on Roberto’s Bolaño’s 2666, affect theory, and new materialism to construct a new literary materialism, one in which literary meaning is located neither in the human nor in the non-human world, but in the affective correspondence between these worlds. To illustrate this point, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between characters and stones in Shakespearean drama. (shrink)

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)

Spinoza speculated on how ethics could emerge from biology and psychology rather than disrupt them and recent evidence suggests he might have gotten it right. His radical deconstruction and reconstruction of ethics is supported by a number of avenues of research in the cognitive and neurosciences. This paper gathers together and presents a composite picture of recent research that supports Spinoza’s theory of the emotions and of the natural origins of ethics. It enumerates twelve naturalist claims of Spinoza that (...) now seem to be supported by substantial evidence from the neurosciences and recent cognitive science. I focus on the evidence provided by Lakoff and Johnson in their summary of recent cognitive science in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999); by Antonio Damasio in his assessment of the state of affective neuroscience in Descartes’ Error (1994) and in The Feeling of What Happens (1999) (with passing references to his recent Looking for Spinoza (2003); and by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues in the neural basis of emotional contagion and resonance, i.e., the neural basis of primitive sociality and intersubjectivity, that bear out Spinoza’s account of social psychology as rooted in the mechanism he called attention to and identified as affective imitation. (shrink)

Philosophers tended to identify happiness with either subjective psychological states or conditions (feelings, emotions or a set of judgments), or with the objective conditions of a life—how well the life is going for the person living it. Each approach captures different but important features of our intuitions, making it difficult to accept either a purely subjective or objective view. This has led some philosophers to suggest that these are not competing accounts of one thing, ‘happiness,’ but accounts of several different (...) things. Others propose that happiness is a matter of possessing both the relevant subjective and objective properties. I think this latter view is right, but that we need to better understand why or how these two elements are important and how they might be linked. In this paper I argue that an affect theory of happiness is best able to reconcile both the subjective and objective strands of our intuitions about happiness. (shrink)

:Recent attempts to engage and develop modes of ethological practice that avoid deterministic and mechanistic accounts of animal action have often relied on affect as a way of articulating how animal bodies affect and are in turn affected by the animate and inanimate bodies around them. In this context affect has often functioned as an instigating site of change that opens up the experience of a particular animal to new possibilities for action and relation. This paper seeks (...) to bring the significant role that affect has played in opening up new directions in ethological theory and practice in contact with a discussion of two currents in affect theory – one shaped by the genealogy of philosophical thought that stretches from Spinoza, through Gilles Deleuze, to contemporary thinkers such as Brian Massumi, and the other emerging from the reception of the American psychologist and cybernetics thinker Silvan Tomkins, in the context of queer theory, through the work of Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank. The locus of intersection for these different modes of theoretical practice is the site-specific case study of monk parakeets who have drawn on and incorporated the ornamental elaborations of human architecture into their own complex architectural nest constructions at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. (shrink)

Solidarity is crucial for realizing justice, securing public goods, and reducing domination. Yet there have been few theoretical studies of its threats and vulnerabilities. In this paper I fill this lacuna, outlining four approaches to what undermines solidarity and considering their implications for contemporary political theory. I begin by reviewing the empirical literature on solidarity, noting that its focus on diversity and individuation has yielded inconclusive results. I then develop four alternative threats to solidarity by drawing from the (...) history of political thought, social theory, and religious studies: interpersonal dependence (Jean-Jacques Rousseau); radical evil (Immanuel Kant); self-dissolution (Émile Durkheim); and moral spectatorship (Emmanuel Levinas). Taking these threats into account, I conclude, should significantly impact our normative theorizing about solidarity. In particular, it should encourage a research agenda that attends to solidarity’s affective, esthetic, and non-rational sources. (shrink)

In Spinoza’s philosophy affects illustrate the way human beings interact with each other and the world, where the necessary meetings with other particular things define their being and its expressions. Most human beings don’t know themselves, are not conscious of their affects and, even less, do they know what the affects of others are. Although, they are by their definition as particular things obliged to exist in society and create a minimum of consensus. According to Spinoza, this consensus is built (...) upon the biological substrate defined by human body’s physiology, through the mechanism of imitation and is supported by empathy. Leading researchers in affective neuroscience argue for a theory of embodied cognition and recent research in neurosciences attributes human capacity for empathy to mirror neurons, recognising in Spinoza’s texts the philosophical roots of current scientific thinking on body, mind and feeling. Keeping in mind the debate concerning how different levels of explanation can be related to each other or how different disciplines can form the context for interpreting neuroscience’s data, we attempt to promote an implicit dialogue between Spinoza’s psychological theory and the neuroscientific findings, supporting that is legitimate and necessary to examine these questions from the point of view of philosophy and formulate new research questions that can promote further theoretical and empirical study of the complex phenomena concerning human nature and society. (shrink)

This article explores how Jean François Lyotard reflects on affect as unrepresentable in relation to contemporary affect theory and specifically post-Deleuzian perspectives and non-representational theories suggesting that we need to invent new theoretical ways of addressing our more-than-textual, multisensual worlds. The essay leans on this conversation to make a political and pedagogical intervention into the terrain of addressing affect in the classroom. It is discussed how Lyotard adds his own contribution to the work of other (...) affect theorists, who are not saying that if we find the right vehicle—literature, art, etc.—we can translate or represent affect, but rather that pedagogy is itself always already an affective event that exceeds representation. Pedagogies of ineffability, as it argued, are those pedagogical practices that do not fall pray into the rhetorics of standardization and homogenization in the name of ‘emotional intelligence’ or ‘effectiveness’, but rather invent affective spaces of learning in which educators and students are opened precariously to the unknown. (shrink)

Historians of psychology have described how the ‘introspection’ of early Wundtian psychology largely came to be ruled out of experimental psychology settings by the mid-20th century. In this paper I take a fresh look at the years before this process was complete – from the vantage point of early ethnographic and psychological field expeditions. Beginning with the psychological research conducted during and after the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to theTorres Straits Islands(CAETS) in 1898,Iwill discuss the importance of the CAETS in the (...) history of anthropology and psychology and explore some possible ways of approaching experimental cognitive psychology ethnographically. I describe the experience of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Cambridge experimental psychology lab founded after the CAETS by C.S. Myers, focusing on its implications for Wittgenstein’s later thought and for contemporary ‘affect theory’. (shrink)

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction that illuminates the field of theory through a variety of useful and relevant examples. Covering all key theories and theorists, this book looks at the relation of theory to form, discourses, subjectivity, media and networks, and environments. Organized thematically, Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory illuminates the field by focusing on the concepts and methodologies of key thinkers, while also providing (...) historical introductions that contextualize the latest developments with regard to forms; discourses; subjectivities and embodiments; media, networks, and machines; and animals, affects, objects, and environments. Each chapter includes examples from a canonical novel, a contemporary text, and a new media artefact, while textboxes regularly introduce additional emerging or overlooked theorists of interest. An ideal guide for undergraduates studying literary theory, this book will give readers the background they need to continue their own fruitful explorations of this vibrant field of study. (shrink)

A dogma of contemporary ethical theory maintains that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is the very same as the nature of normative support for actions. The prevailing view is that normative reasons provide the support across the board. I argue that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is importantly different from the nature of normative support for actions. Actions are indeed supported by reasons. Reasons are gradable and contributory. The support relations for affective (...) attitudes are neither. So-called reasons of the right kind for affective attitudes are facts that make those very attitudes fitting. Unlike reasons, fit-making facts for affective attitudes do not conflict with each other or combine in the explanation of further normative facts. More fit-making facts just make a more complex set of reactions fitting. This result undermines various analyses and unity theses in the philosophy of normativity. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to show that the relationships between individuals, including the intersubjectivity inherent to the body politic, are also affective relationships, so as to reconstruct Spinoza’s minimalist theory of tolerance. According to Spinoza’s concept of affectivity and bodily life, affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, while affect refers to the transition from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of affective (...) bodies, that is, the affect is always a passage or variation in the intensity of our power to exist and act—the increase or decrease, the favoring or the restraint of our power to exist and act. We argue that Spinoza’s geometry of affective relations decisively contributes to a political theory of democracy, insofar as it anticipates modern, liberal conceptions of tolerance. (shrink)

Materialist and fundamentalist reductive ideologies obscure our capacity to directly experience the numinous. Thus, importantly, given the weight of the observable and measurable in orthodox science, and oftentimes a dismissal of both the soul and the subjective, a viable means of reconciling science and religious experience has continued to elude us. As a counter-measure to this obscuration, Jungian-oriented depth psychology has developed as an empirical science of the unconscious, researching both subject and object and offering theories and practices that foster (...) the psychospiritual development of the personality. Despite cultural and epochal differences, comparable evidence to Jung's process of psychospiritual development can be found in the Eastern liberatory tradition of Patañjali's Classical Yoga. However, given the elevated presence of neuroscience, no psychology, and especially no psychology that supports the soul, seems likely to survive much longer without finding an alliance with the objective measures of brain science. When considering the radically empirical measures of Jung and Patañjali, affective neuroscience may offer us a contemporary and objective means of languaging the bridge between the transcendent and immanent and fostering a contemporary science of the sacred. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between two phenomena and their respective concepts circulating in contemporary affect theory, i.e., ‘affective resonance’ and ‘affective atmosphere.’ Identifying the main aspects of the two concepts clarifies how the phenomena differ from each other, as well as how they may relate in a dynamic interplay. In light of a distinction between and a conjunction of the aspects of ‘affective relationality’ and ‘affective spatiality,’ the paper proposes a conceptualization of this dynamic interplay through (...) the concept of ‘affective attunement,’ in which resonance and atmosphere are held to converge. As part of this endeavor, the paper further investigates the diverging philosophical traditions to which the two concepts of affective resonance and affective atmosphere originally belong, respectively Spinozist affect theory and New phenomenology. (shrink)

This fine book is a comprehensive and careful survey of the current situation in the methodology of economics. It is directed primarily at economists and students of economics. Indeed, the economist who reads it with the care it deserves will have a better grip on matters of methodology in economics than most philosophers of science, but philosophers and historians of science will also find the work rewarding and interesting. Though a few examples may be beyond the economically untutored reader, they (...) are not essential to the exposition, and other examples are accessible and enlightening: the brief discussions of Paul Samuelson's revealed preference approach and Julie Nelson's criticism of Gary Becker's work on economics of the family are good instances. Chapter 2, “The Methodological Tradition in Economics,” is a calm and brief introduction to its subject.Until quite recently practicing scientists, economists among them, and philosophers of science presupposed several strong theses about science and knowledge: that all genuine knowledge is scientific; that the objects of this knowledge are eternal and free of context; that all knowledge and all science is one, unified at least by a common scientific method; that, though not infallible, this method is progressive—it approaches truth as a limit—and operates in independence of the nonscientific beliefs and values of its practitioners. These principles cannot be presupposed today. Those who would accept any of them must be ready to meet serious criticisms. The import of this contemporary Methodenstreit as it affects economics is the dominant theme of Reflection without Rules. The reader is left with the conviction that the science of economics and the study of its methodology are inseparable and that it was only dedicated and myopic attachment to The Legend that kept this messy business at bay. Nor can there be any return to the age of innocent division of labor—economists to economics, philosophers to methodology.There are too many topics treated in the book even to list in a brief review. There are calm and clear accounts of Thomas Kuhn's work; of logical positivism ; of the deep effects of the collapse of The Legend on Walrasian equilibrium models; of Daniel Hausman's work on the nature of economics; of the strong program, which strives to reduce scientific activity to the effects of the social interests of scientists; of Alvin Goldman's reliabilism and social epistemology ; and of the important differences between pre‐ and post‐Legend views of science and knowledge.The question of values in science arises for economics in a special and pointed way, for economics studies many sorts of values. It also, at least since Adam Smith, deals in the unintended collective consequences of individual intentional actions. Economics evidently consists in the largely unintended consequences of the intentional actions of individual economists, and, once The Legend is discredited, economics is seen to navigate the very currents that it studies. This opens the door to the virtuous possibility of self‐criticism in tune with the strong naturalism of contemporary epistemology.It is not the least virtue of Reflection without Rules that its author wears his impressive erudition gracefully and well. The book is sophisticated and at the same time naive in the best sense. It will fortunately be the standard reference for work in the methodology of economics for some time to come. (shrink)

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical (...) and semiotic models. Renewing and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to problematise and complexify scholarly accounts of contemporary emotional repression in Western contexts by presenting counterevidence in the form of two examples of post-secular collective affectivity and their ritual expressions. It argues that both narratives of emotional repression and expression fail to capture the non-linear complexity of processes of cultural transformation, which have resulted in the simultaneous expression and repression of ritualistic affects that are products of our evolutionary embodied history. Drawing on insights from affect (...) theory, this paper seeks to illustrate how contingent yet nonetheless residual ritualistic affects have become repressed in the nominally secular public sphere in modernity. This has presented certain obstacles to the open communal display of religious ritual, and, as a corollary, the expression of certain religious affects, which have subsequently re-emerged in post-secular ritual spaces that are both publically private and pr... (shrink)

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)

In recent years, after decades of largely avoiding engagements with political economy, discussions of the new forms of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the information society have become central again to critical theory. Following this recognition of the importance of political economy, this article aims at honing our conceptual tools to examine the political and social economies of contemporary capitalism, which I understand with Yann Moulier Boutang as "cognitive capitalism."1 I am particularly interested in how changing economic and social practices (...) inflect our political institutions and political and social practices and sensibilities, while at the same time these changes are not necessarily reflected in the... (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)

Scholastic theologians made the Virgin Mary increasingly perfect over the Middle Ages in Europe. Mary became stainless, offering an impossible but ideologically useful vision of womanhood. This work offers an implicit theory of the utility and feelings of women in a Christian salvationary economy. The Virgin was put to use as a shaming technology, one that silenced and effaced women's affective lives. The shame still stands to this day, although in secularised mutated forms. This Element deploys the intellectual history (...) of medieval thought to map the moves made in codifying Mary's perfection. It then uses contemporary gender and affect theory to consider the implications of Mary's perfection within modernity, mapping the emotional regimes of the medieval past upon the present. (shrink)

This book evaluates the major debates around which the discipline of international relations has developed in the light of contemporary feminist theories. The three debates (realist versus idealist, scientific versus traditional, modernist versus postmodernist) have been subject to feminist theorising since the earliest days of known feminist activities, with the current emphasis on feminist, empiricist standpoint and postmodernist ways of knowing. Christine Sylvester shows how feminist theorising could have affected our understanding of international relations had it been included in (...) the three debates. She elaborates a feminist method of empathetically cooperative conversation which challenges the identity politics of IR, and illustrates that method with reference to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and the efforts of Zimbabwean women to negotiate international funding for their local producer cooperatives. (shrink)

This article analyses some of the governmental issues at stake in contemporary institutional politics in its confrontation with the challenges of digitalisation. Through notions such as algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy and Berns), platformisation (Bratton, Stiegler), extractivism, and the affect theory (Massumi), and following a symptomatologic method, we will try to establish and discuss some key points that could be useful in order to update certain concepts regarding micro- and biopolitics (Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault), the public sphere, and the (...) management of social and individual bodies. Finally, we will try to understand how the manipulation of affects via the staging of possible catastrophic futures (Parisi) is used as a powerful neurosensory weapon, with performative effects for governing and modelling behaviours. If contemporary capitalism is capable of abstracting and extracting affects, of accumulating them and of creating value through this, which policies should we apply in this situation of uncertainty and of the manipulation of affectivity? Is there any place left for public institutions, or is the market the sole political actor left? (shrink)

The problems of contemporary states are in large part “affective disorders”; they are failures of states to properly understand and coordinate the emotions of the individuals within and in some instances outside the state. By excluding, imprisoning, and marginalizing members of their societies, states create internal enemies who ultimately enervate their own power and the possibility of peace and freedom within the state. Spinoza’s political theory, based on the notion that the best forms of state are those that (...) coordinate the power and emotions of those within a state, offers us both a diagnosis of and a cure for these affective disorders. In this paper I will outline Spinoza’s notion of the power of the state as a function of the power and coordination of the emotions of its citizens, and show that when the state contracts an affective disorder, such as excessive crime, rebellion, terrorism, etc. the state has failed to properly empower, include and coordinate the passions of the multitude of its citizens and subjects. (shrink)

Affect is a high-stakes topic in psychoanalysis, but there has long been a misperception that Lacan neglected affect in his writings. We encounter affect at the beginning of any analysis in the form of subjective suffering that the patient hopes to alleviate. How can psychoanalysis alleviate such suffering when analytic practice itself gives rise to a wide range of affects in the patient’s relationship to the analyst? Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, is (...) the first book to explore Lacan’s theory of affect and its implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice. In it, Colette Soler discusses affects as diverse as the pain of existence, hatred, ignorance, mourning, sadness, "joyful knowledge," boredom, moroseness, anger, shame, and enthusiasm. Soler’s discussion culminates in a highlighting of so-called enigmatic affects: anguish, love, and the satisfaction related to the end of an analysis. Lacanian Affects provides a unique and compelling account of affect that will prove to be an essential text for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, and social workers. (shrink)

[This paper is written in Czech.] The aim of this article is to briefly introduce and critically analyze the dialogue between phenomenology and contemporary theories of embodied cognition in relation to the study of affectivity. The author explains how these theoretical approaches interpret the dynamic relationship between affective experiences on the one hand and bodily behavior and intersubjectively observable processes taking place in the environment on the other. He first summarizes the positions of Joel Krueger and Giovanna Colombetti, who (...) draw on the theories of extended cognition and enactivism, and then compares them with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach. In this way, there are found to be inconsistencies in Krueger’s and Colombetti’s approaches, whose resolution, in the author’s opinion, requires the working out of a rigorously “relational” interpretation of affectivity. From this point of view, affectivity is not understood as an internal phenomenon causally linked to external material factors, but strictly as a dynamic relationship between a sense-making agent and his or her meaningful environment. (shrink)

This article outlines the main tenets of affect theory and links these to Sloterdijk’s spherology. Where affect foregrounds prepersonal energies and posthuman impulses, spherology provides a lens for considering how humans congregate in constantly reconfiguring socialities in their pursuit of legitimacy and immunity. The article then explores the relevance of “affective spheres” for contemporary social science research. The article’s main argument here is that research of contemporary organisational and professional practices must increasingly be spherogenic, or (...) seeking to build “affective spheres.” The basis of this argument are the in situ complexity and fast-changing nature of practices, and the increasing challenges involved in objectifying or ‘freezing’, and analysing or dissecting such practices. The article draws for its case study on a video-reflexive project conducted in a U.S. health service. The article concludes that the notion of research as spherogenics counterbalances the conventional methodological emphasis on a predetermined stance —whether neutral or political—in our construction and enactment of social science research. (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)

Brings the figure of the voice and the problem of mimesis in Heidegger and post-Heideggerian continental thought to bear on the dismissal of language by the affective and aesthetic turns of contemporary critical theory.

This article intervenes into contemporary scholarship on affect by bringing different affect theories into the same analytical frame. Analysing commercial surrogacy in India through three different conceptualizations of affect found in the work of Michael Hardt, Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi reveals how affect emerges as a malleable state in the practice of, as a circulatory force in the debates around, and as an ephemeral intensity in the spontaneous resistance to surrogacy. Based on this analysis, (...) I suggest that integrating different theories of affect enables more holistic examinations of corporeal regulation by opening our understanding to the multiple lives of affect that operate on the level of political economy, cultural signification and material intensity simultaneously. (shrink)

This paper brings attention to the notion of ‘religious affects’, namely, the affects, emotions and feelings related to religion and religious experience. It is argued that educators and students have a lot to gain from paying attention to and exploring the meaning and role of religious feelings in the context of controversies and debates surrounding Islam in the West. In particular, the paper suggests that by exploring the affective dimensions of religious injury (e.g. irritation, dishonour, insult, injury, offense, outrage), educators (...) and students can enhance their understanding of how religious emotions are involved in religious controversies such as the recent cartoon controversies in several European countries. It is argued that a richer comprehension of affective dimensions of religious controversies will help promote inter-religious understanding and respect, an important educational aim in contemporary times, especially in school subjects such as religious education. (shrink)

The book introduces the reader to western ethics as a subject, along with its three standard subdivisions. Although the book is written with university students, policymakers, and professionals in mind, the book is lucid enough to be accessible to most adult readers. The book begins with introductions to the basics of ethics. These chapters are meant to provide the reader with the background knowledge necessary for understanding the more technical chapters on metaethics, normative ethics theories, and applied ethics, the three (...) well-known subdivisions within ethics. The chapters that follow take up core ethical issues from each of these areas. The sections focus on explanation and a critical understanding of the ethical issue. The chapters also have examples, cases, and exercises to encourage critical thinking and to enable the reader to grasp the issue better. The book has tried to bring contemporary issues, such as ethics of human organ transplantation, and contemporary theories, such as Amartya Sen’s concept of Justice and Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach, to engage the readers with ethics in the real world. The book concludes with applied ethics, but with the example of ethics of artificial intelligence. The aim is to keep ethics as a future-driven activity and to emphasize the need to understand the real-world ethical situations and dilemmas that will affect the stakeholders all around the world in the coming years as artificial intelligence and data-driven technologies change our everyday life. (shrink)

One desideratum for contemporary theories of emotion both in philosophy and affective science is an explanation of the relation between emotions and objects that illicit them. According to one research tradition in emotion theory, the Evaluative Tradition, the explanation is simple: emotions just are evaluative judgments about their objects. Growing research in affective science supports this claim suggesting that emotions constitute (or contribute to) evaluative judgments such as moral judgments about right and wrong. By contrast, recent scholarship in (...) two historical emotion theories, Augustinian and Thomistic, emphasize their sharp distinction between cognitive judgments and affectivity or between reason and emotion. For these historical models, reason, not emotion, is responsible for moral judgment. Are the evaluative and historical models at irreconcilable odds? Should we discard old models that fail to satisfy intuitions about the intricate role of emotions in moral judgment? This paper compares these research programs and suggests a roadmap for collaboration. (shrink)

We argue that A. Damasio’s (1994) Somatic Marker hypothesis can explain why humans don’t generally suffer from the frame problem, arguably the greatest obstacle facing the Computational Theory of Mind. This involves showing how humans with damaged emotional centers are best understood as actually suffering from the frame problem. We are then able to show that, paradoxically, these results provide evidence for the Computational Theory of Mind, and in addition call into question the very distinction between easy and (...) hard problems in the contemporary philosophy of mind. (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)

The contention in this paper is that the theological-political disputes Spinoza was concerned with 350 years ago are similar to the conspiratorial disputes we experience today. The world in Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, a political intervention in his time, serves as a “mirror image”, that is to say, it deals with the same problem we face today albeit in a different mode. Understanding our contemporary condition under the auspices of a Spinozist perspective, problems in countermeasures to the conspiratorial disputes come (...) to light. Scholarly work and practice focus on the epistemological dimension of conspiracy theories, tying in the extent to which they are problematic to the degree in which they deal in untruth. However, the lesson from Spinoza’s analysis of the theological-political disputes is that such theories do not deal in truth, but, in affect, they do not spring from a lack of education but a lack of certainty. The work of Spinoza opens up a different approach, and if our aim is like that of the TTP, to defend political life against the threat of civil war, such a different approach is in order. (shrink)

Recent epistemology and value theory have become more open to the role played by affectivity in the constitution of human knowledge of value. In this paper, two figures important to the phenomenological and personalistic traditions are retrieved as precedents for this contemporary development: Edith Stein and Dietrich von Hildebrand. In the first part of the paper, Stein’s phenomenology of affective acts is adapted as an account of the structure of “value-grasping acts.” The second part of the paper identifies (...) two difficulties that arise on the basis of Stein’s account: how do we know that an emotion constitutes a response to intrinsic value, and how do we know an emotional response to value is most attuned to its object? The remainder of the paper responds to these difficulties, thereby legitimating the account as a viable moral epistemology. These responses draw inspiration from von Hildebrand’s phenomenological accounts of value-response and freedom. (shrink)

Recent epistemology and value theory have become more open to the role played by affectivity in the constitution of human knowledge of value. In this paper, two figures important to the phenomenological and personalistic traditions are retrieved as precedents for this contemporary development: Edith Stein and Dietrich von Hildebrand. In the first part of the paper, Stein’s phenomenology of affective acts is adapted as an account of the structure of “value-grasping acts.” The second part of the paper identifies (...) two difficulties that arise on the basis of Stein’s account: how do we know that an emotion constitutes a response to intrinsic value, and how do we know an emotional response to value is most attuned to its object? The remainder of the paper responds to these difficulties, thereby legitimating the account as a viable moral epistemology. These responses draw inspiration from von Hildebrand’s phenomenological accounts of value-response and freedom. (shrink)

Depersonalization is a pathological condition consisting in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, his mind and even from himself. In this article, I argue that the study of depersonalization raises three challenges for recent theories of the sense of bodily ownership. These challenges—which I call the centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge and the grounding challenge— thwart most of these theories and suggest that the (...) sense of bodily ownership hinges on a phenomenal mark of mineness that can not be accounted for in terms of our sensory, interoceptive, agentive, cognitive or affective dispositions and that is psychologically primitive. In short: that mineness is first. (shrink)

In this paper, the aim is to explore how there can be a role for expression of affect in illocution, drawing upon some ideas about expression put forward by Karl Bühler. In a first part of the paper, I map some active discussions and open questions surrounding phenomena that seem to involve “expression of affect”. Second, I home in on a smaller piece of that larger puzzle; namely, a consideration of how there may be non-conventional expression of (...) class='Hi'>affect. I provide some examples of what I take that to involve and set out some premises for approaching it. In a third section, I motivate such an interest by pointing to a question in speech act theory concerning ‘force conventionalism’. This is whether and how illocution can be performed non-conventionally—that is, whether (at least some) utterances can be communicated with illocutionary force without need of convention. I propose that where expression of affect may occur non-conventionally, it may in turn constitute one important route through which at least some kinds of illocution are achieved. In the fourth part of the paper, I sketch an account of such non-conventional expression of affect for the purposes of illocution, by exploring a broadly Bühlerian account of some affects; namely, that some affects are teleological in character, that coordinations may be involved in their satisfactional states, and that uptake of the expressed affect constitutes one subset of such satisfactional states. That exposition points to the contemporary relevance of the “action theory of expression” proposed by Bühler. (shrink)

Despite the recent rise in articles by American philosophers willing to deal with race, the sophistication of American philosophy's conceptualizations of American racism continues to lag behind other liberal arts fields committed to similar endeavors. Whereas other fields like American studies, history, sociology, and Black studies have found the foundational works of Black scholars essential to "truly" understanding the complexities of racism, American philosophy-driven by the refusal of white philosophers to acknowledge and incorporate the foundational works of Black scholars at (...) the turn of the century, as well as the relevant insights of contemporary race theorists-remains in a very real sense underdeveloped .. (shrink)

This article deals with the feeling of strangeness in the human being. When it comes to being human, it is traditionally understood as beings containing reasons and emotions. Thus, to better understand the feeling of the foreigner, its context is analyzed on the perspective of humean moral sentimentalism and on the intertwining, proposed by Husserl, between the intellectual and affective spheres. From these philosophers one can see the convergence between the intellectual and affective spheres, as well as between reason and (...) emotion. Therefore, contemporary emotional theories bring an explanatory gain for understanding the feeling of the foreigner in the face of new environments and cultures, as both cognitive and non-cognitive elements are perceived. Therefore, Goldie and Husserl contribute to the analysis of the foreigner's feeling of strangeness in its various peculiarities. (shrink)

This article identifies philosophical tensions and limitations within contemporary intersectionality theory which, it will be argued, have hindered its ability to explain how positioning in multiple social categories can affect life chances and influence the reproduction of inequality. We draw upon critical realism to propose an augmented conceptual framework and novel methodological approach that offers the potential to move beyond these debates, so as to better enable intersectionality to provide causal explanatory accounts of the ‘lived experiences’ of (...) social privilege and disadvantage. (shrink)

At the focal point of contemporary biopolitical knowledge and power is human life in its contingent, evolutionary and emergent properties: the living as adaptive and affective beings, characterized in particular by their capacity to experience stress and fear that works together with vital survival mechanisms. This article addresses new techniques of psychiatric power and therapeutic epistemologies that have emerged in present-day military-scientific as well as media technological assemblages to define and capture the human in its psychobiological states of emergency. (...) Specifically, the focus of this article is on one special kind of screen medium, called Virtual Iraq, a virtual reality device designed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder among war veterans. The article analyses Virtual Iraq as an example of new forms and strategies for the management of affectivity and memory that have been developed in conjunction with contemporary neuroscientific discourses on the evolutionary origins of emotional life and its neurobiological functionality among humans qua species. Furthermore, it discusses Virtual Iraq as an example of the biopolitical work of contemporary screen media in which the reality of images starts to concern the organism’s internal functioning instead of being anthropological or communicative, tapping into the brain’s capacity of self-organization as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of psychological immunity. (shrink)

A prominent number of contemporary theories of emotional experience—understood as occurrent, phenomenally conscious episodes of emotions with an affective character that are evaluatively directed towards particular objects or states of affairs—are motivated by the claim that phenomenally conscious affective experience, when appropriate, grants us epistemic access not merely to features of the experience but also to features of the object of experience, namely its value. I call this the claim of affect as a disclosure of value. The aim (...) of this paper is to clarify the sort of assumptions about experience that we ought to avoid if we want to be able to argue that for the claim of affect as a disclosure of value. There are two core arguments in this paper. First, I argue that Mark Johnston’s account of affect as a disclosure of value, due to its naïve realist commitments, relapses into a position that is vulnerable to the same objection put forward by some naïve realists against intentionalist accounts of perceptual experience. Second, I argue that Michelle Montague’s account, due to its phenomenal intentionalist commitments, relapses into a position that is vulnerable to the same objections put forward against qualia theories of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. The upshot of the paper is that the core assumptions embedded in the three dominant models of experience—namely naïve realism, different versions of intentionalism, and qualia theory—are problematic as found in contemporary accounts of affect as a disclosure of value. (shrink)

The ethical criticism of art has recently begun to address the subject of immoral artists, with two questions seeming to dominate discussion. How does moral misconduct on the part of artists affect their work’s aesthetic value? How should the art world respond to cases of artists who have been accused of morally outrageous behaviour? Such value and policy debates are important, but they leave aside a pressing question towards which this article proposes a reorientation: What is the possible impact (...) of an artist’s moral ill repute on how we understand the meaning of their work? I argue in this paper that an artist’s bad moral reputation can lead (i) to participatory resistance to an art work, as viewers abstain from a response to the work’s illocutionary force, (ii) to the isolation of the work from the ‘quality context’ that normally allows propositions expressed by the work to be taken as sincere, (iii) to the reinterpretation of the work’s propositional content against the background of new knowledge about the author, and (iv) to the perception of the work as a lie. To illustrate, I look at works by Chuck Close and Jan Fabre, contemporary artists whose reputation has been affected by a scandal. (shrink)

Orientation affective, différence et « écrasante proximité » dans l’analyse merleau-pontyenne de la profondeur pureJe montre ici que la théorie de Merleau-Ponty sur l’expérience particulière d’une « profondeur pure » peut être comprise comme une orientation affective précédant l’orientation perceptive, et explique son rôle dans la proposition d’une « nouvelle conception de l’intentionnalité ». Le corps-monde comme relation de différenciation est repensé comme la différenciation intime et pré-objective de cette dimension affective. Je pense, contrairement à Toadvine (2009), que la position (...) de Merleau-Ponty dans la Phénoménologie de la perception, peut être distinguée de la conception sartrienne de l’intentionnalité comme annihilation. La dimension provocatrice de ma lecture sur la profondeur pure vis-à-vis des discours érudits sur Merleau-Ponty est discutée en conclusion, et je pose en particulier la question de savoir s’il peut être utile de lire Merleau-Ponty comme un penseur de la différence.Orientamento affettivo, differenza e “schiacciante prossimità” nell’analisi merleau-pontyana della pura profonditàNel mio saggio, illustro la descrizione che Merleau-Ponty propone della particolare esperienza della “pura profondità” come un’orientazione affettiva che precede l’orientamento percettivo e ipotizzo il suo ruolo nel quadro del progetto merleau-pontiano di costruire una “nuova concezione dell’intenzionalità”. La relazione differenziante tra corpo e mondo è riformulata come quella differenziazione intima e pre-oggettiva che caratterizza tale dimensione affettiva; ciò supporta la mia ipotesi, in opposizione a Toadevine (2009), che la posizione sostenuta da Merleau-Ponty in Fenomenologia della Percezione può essere distinta dalla proposta sartriana d’intendere l’intenzionalità in termini di annichilamento. Concludo il saggio con una discussione delle possibili provocazioni che la mia lettura della teoria della pura profondità potrebbe sollevare nella comunità scientifica merlau-pontiana, soffermandomi in particolare sull’interrogativoriguardo alla possibilità di leggere produttivamente Merleau-Ponty come un pensatore della differenza. (shrink)

Orientation affective, différence et « écrasante proximité » dans l’analyse merleau-pontyenne de la profondeur pureJe montre ici que la théorie de Merleau-Ponty sur l’expérience particulière d’une « profondeur pure » peut être comprise comme une orientation affective précédant l’orientation perceptive, et explique son rôle dans la proposition d’une « nouvelle conception de l’intentionnalité ». Le corps-monde comme relation de différenciation est repensé comme la différenciation intime et pré-objective de cette dimension affective. Je pense, contrairement à Toadvine (2009), que la position (...) de Merleau-Ponty dans la Phénoménologie de la perception, peut être distinguée de la conception sartrienne de l’intentionnalité comme annihilation. La dimension provocatrice de ma lecture sur la profondeur pure vis-à-vis des discours érudits sur Merleau-Ponty est discutée en conclusion, et je pose en particulier la question de savoir s’il peut être utile de lire Merleau-Ponty comme un penseur de la différence.Orientamento affettivo, differenza e “schiacciante prossimità” nell’analisi merleau-pontyana della pura profonditàNel mio saggio, illustro la descrizione che Merleau-Ponty propone della particolare esperienza della “pura profondità” come un’orientazione affettiva che precede l’orientamento percettivo e ipotizzo il suo ruolo nel quadro del progetto merleau-pontiano di costruire una “nuova concezione dell’intenzionalità”. La relazione differenziante tra corpo e mondo è riformulata come quella differenziazione intima e pre-oggettiva che caratterizza tale dimensione affettiva; ciò supporta la mia ipotesi, in opposizione a Toadevine (2009), che la posizione sostenuta da Merleau-Ponty in Fenomenologia della Percezione può essere distinta dalla proposta sartriana d’intendere l’intenzionalità in termini di annichilamento. Concludo il saggio con una discussione delle possibili provocazioni che la mia lettura della teoria della pura profondità potrebbe sollevare nella comunità scientifica merlau-pontiana, soffermandomi in particolare sull’interrogativoriguardo alla possibilità di leggere produttivamente Merleau-Ponty come un pensatore della differenza. (shrink)