We Have Never Been Rational: A Genealogy of the Affective Turn

Politics and Culture

2007

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

Affective Turn." The publisher cut this portion of the paper because it was already covered in the anthology. (I obviously need a new introduction, but I wanted to get some feedback. I have not looked at this is months.) The Contemporary Affective Turn: Vitalist and Evolutionary Affect. If we can think of the moral interpretation of affect as arguing for the primacy of representation and the supplementary status of affect and the romantic interpretation as striving to synthesize the two into a harmonious whole through art, then we can think of the contemporary interpretation of affect as arguing for the primacy of affect and the secondary or supplemental status of representation. Of course, this characterization may be an oversimplification since for many theorists who adopt this orientation the relationship between affect and symbolic activity is quite complex; nonetheless, it is a useful heuristic for situating the contemporary interpretation of affect, which argues that affect somehow conditions our ways of thinking, reasoning and judging the world. If affect potentially distorted reason inside of rationalist morality and if it needed to be recovered beneath the wreckage of civilization in its romantic interpretation, then affect, in its contemporary interpretation takes center stage, becoming both logically and temporally prior to any form of conscious symbolic activity. In this section, I will focus on two main theoretical approaches which take this contemporary position: the vitalist and the evolutionary notions of affect. One of the major figures of the vitalist interpretation is Brian Massumi. While Marcuse insisted that every authentic work of art would stimulate a form of affective cognition which would be subversive of understanding and perception, an indictment of the established reality principle, Massumi locates affect "between perception and language," arguing that affective experience involves the ongoing production of different modalities of thought and perception (Massumi

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2017

This chapter historicizes four divergent but historically contemporaneous genres of affect theory – romantic, realist, speculative, and materialist. While critics credited with the turn to affect in the 1990s wrote largely in the wake of poststructuralism from the perspective of gender and queer theory, a second wave of affect theory has exposed some of the potentially inconsistent assumptions and ambitions of the field. Neurological and economic investments in affect have generated as much anxiety about the category as enthusiasm (Tompkis, Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato, Massumi). This chapter's claim is that affect in this second wave has been stripped of its critical materialism in order to make it immediate with matter, or more specifically neurological and economic raw material. In response to this critical tendency, we reconnect affect theory with the politicization of bodies through a materialist critique of immediacy. To do so, we catalogue key interventions and divergences amongst the four genres of affect theory named above before returning finally to the problem of affect's material history.

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.

Affect is what hits us when we walk into a room and inexplicably sense an atmosphere, an ineffable aura, tone or spirit that elicits particular sensations. It is what is evoked by bodily experiences as they pass from person to person, in a way that is contagious but remains unspoken. A yawn or a smile can travel between subjects, often increasing in its intensity as it does so . Hence affect is a force that places people in a co-subjective circuit of feeling and sensation, rather than standing alone and independent; affect highlights our interdependencies .