Affect and Feeling: Special Issue

Politics and Culture

Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, Vol. 13: 1-13., 2011

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. The tradition of philosophies of affect is deep and wide, encompassing both denigration and celebration. For the Stoics, passions such as yearning, spite, grief, and fear were incorrect judgements which were excessive and contrary to reason and nature. However, not all affects were maligned: joy, caution, and goodwill, were to be cultivated. Plato, understanding the affective power of art, banished the poets from the Republic. Yet, famously, he found the origin of philosophy in wonder and the love of wisdom in eros. For Descartes the passions were associated with the animal spirits, with the substantive union of mind and body; if properly trained, they contributed to the good life. For Spinoza all human activity including cognition produces and is produced by affect. His account of the actions and passions of the human mind was crucial to his task of showing the connectedness of humans to nature and the naturalising of moral concepts that resulted from this view. In the ethical life Kant subordinated the affects and passions to reason. In Nietzsche's hands the denial of passion was rewritten and became a philosophy of affirmation. The philosophical tradition of affect became more focussed in the twentieth century, through the work of philosophers such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Foucault, and many others. Merleau-Ponty recognised that as different cultures variously express love, they express a variance to archetypal western conceptualisations as well, and this difference of affect is a difference in the emotion itself. Affects, according to Deleuze in his deployment of Spinoza's work, are independent of their subject. With Guattari he developed an anti-oedipal philosophy of desire and theorised art as a bloc of sensations, a compound of perceptions and of affects. The psychoanalytic tradition reads the life of the body into that of the mind: libido is in part embodied drive. Irigaray links wonder to an ethics of sexual difference. And for Foucault, far from being a mere descriptor of emotional states, affect is the site of the production of the modern soul. After a diverse history, containing so much variety, the question of affect remains firmly on the philosophical agenda: this issue explores recent developments in Continental philosophical approaches to affects.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2014

One of the more significant development in the humanities over the last few decades has been an increasing interest in the notion of affect, so much so that some have spoken and written about "the affective turn" in the humanities, a turn which challenges traditional ways of thinking about rationality, bodies, and the forces that drive human behavior. While this turn consists of a loose set of largely heterogeneous theories from a variety of disciplines, it can be understood as challenging a long-standing assumption within the western tradition that explicit symbolic processes such as conscious thoughts, beliefs and feelings are the primary agencies that drive human behavior.

… for Affective Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment in …, 2001

Performing Emotions: Historical and Athropological Sites of Affect. Historein, 8 (2008)

The theoretical engagement with emotions and affectivity in the mid-1990s -what Patricia Clough has identified as an "affective turn" in the humanities and social sciences 1 -draws on some of the most innovative and productive theoretical and epistemological trends of the two last decades of the twentieth century: psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity and subjection, theories of the body and embodiment, poststructuralist feminist theory, conversation of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory with political theory and critical analysis, queer theorisation of melancholy and trauma. Threading through these fields of scholarly work, one easily attests to the high degree of interest in the ways in which discourses of the emotions emerge, circulate, are invoked, deployed and performed. It is in response to this special attention given nowadays to the cultural politics of emotions that Kathleen Woodward has aptly argued that we live in a cultural moment in which a new economy of emotions is emerging. 2 Some of those theoretical trends draw on older genealogies of thought, from Baruch Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Others joined important anthropological work in illustrating that emotions should not be regarded as pre-social, pre-ideological and pre-discursive psychological and individual states, but as social and cultural practices. 3 Challenging the conventional oppositions between emotion and reason, and discourse and affect, these key trends of contemporary social and cultural theory have explored and reconfigured political and ethical (mis-)appropriations of emotions; the complex relation between power, subjectivity and emotion; the place of emotion, affect, sentiments and sentimentality within political and political theorising; the affective dimension of the normative; the affective as a condition of possibility for subjectivity; and the emotive and affective investment in social norms as a constitutive mode of subjectivation.

This Retrospectives collection offers a look at what the concept of affect has contributed to anthropology in the recent past and where it might take us in the near future. Although the practice of retrospection suggests its own affective character of being a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn, I hope to dial up the intensity some. Why? Because lately I get the sense that affect is escaping our theoretical grasp. Sure, this was one of the fundamental points of the affective turn (Clough and Halley 2007): if anthropologists of emotion throughout the 1970s and 1980s had shown how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse, anthropologists of affect shortly thereafter sought to show how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture. This proved incredibly stimulating for scholars who took this distinction between emotion and affect seriously, as it meant finding creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it. This held especially true for those working in and sometimes against the wake of the Writing Culture moment who understood that while poetics may quite possibly be all that we have,

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2018