Affect Theory Dossier: An Introduction

Author(s): Marta Figlerowicz

Source: Qui Parle , Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2012), pp. 3-18
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/quiparle.20.2.0003

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 special dossier

Affect Theory

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Affect Theory Dossier
An Introduction

marta figlerowicz

There is of course no single definition of affect theory. In one of

its incarnations affect theory builds bridges between the humani-
ties and biology or neuroscience. In another it looks back to Søren
Kierkegaard and Baruch Spinoza (among others) to refresh our
definitions of subjectivity. Some affect theory defends the thera-
peutic value of embracing unpleasant feelings such as shame, sad-
ness, or loneliness. Its other branches highlight “ugly feelings” (to
use Sianne Ngai’s phrase) as sources not of self-knowledge but of
social critique. Affect theory can be a sociology of accidental en-
counters. It can be a psychoanalysis without end, both in leaving
no stone unturned and in not caring to achieve a stable outcome.
Affect theory can also refuse psychoanalysis and try to make feel-
ings speak for themselves, as if they will best do so if the conscious
mind does not interfere. Stylistically, it has encouraged intensely
personal scholarship as well as scholarship that tries to do away
with personality altogether.
In one sense, these various branches of affect theory are all theo-
ries of timing. They are theories of the self running ahead of itself:
of how much more quickly (fMRIs tell us) our brains might work
than we consciously know them to;1 of how often we start acting
on emotions before we recognize what they are; of how rapidly our

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4 qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2

boundaries and intimacies change with our evolving relationships

and settings. They are also theories of the self catching up with
itself: naming and acting on feelings it had previously refused to
own; revisiting its past psychoanalyses; redefining the very notion
of selfhood. They are, finally, celebrations of Proustian moments
when the self and the sensory world, or the conscious and the un-
conscious self, or the self and another person, fall in step with each
other in a way that seems momentarily to make a sliver of experi-
ence more vivid and more richly patterned than willful analysis
could ever have made it seem.
Another way to describe the preoccupations that affect theorists
seem to share is to say that affect theory is grounded in movements
or flashes of mental or somatic activity rather than causal narra-
tives of their origins and end points. Brian Massumi calls this shift
of perspective “fluidifying.”2 Teresa Brennan describes herself as
focusing on the momentary “transmission of affect” rather than
on the affective physiology of each particular person.3 Charles Al-
tieri emphasizes that the “rapture” of each feeling you act on ex-
ceeds and reconstellates your prior sense of who you are or what
you are driven by.4 It is in these movements or flash-like outbursts
that affect theory founds its most robust notions of knowledge and
subjecthood. It is also to these movements and to the philosophical
implications of singling them out as objects of inquiry that it points
as sources of its most persistent bafflement.
In studying these movements, flashes, or outbursts of feeling, af-
fect theory returns to several key philosophical tensions. The pur-
pose of this dossier is to highlight and explore some of these ten-
sions by juxtaposing against each other a variety of philosophical,
critical, literary, and investigative essays, as well as pieces of very
recent affect-oriented art. In this introductory statement I will by
no means attempt to exhaust the directions affect theory has tak-
en or to describe the whole range of scholarship it has inspired. I
merely want to raise several points that will help outline the stakes
and interrelationships of the articles this dossier presents.
The first, most basic among the core issues this dossier address-
es and exemplifies is the triple disjuncture among what could be
termed unconscious affect, affect as an immediate awareness of

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 Figlerowicz: Introduction 5

reality, and the self-conscious experience of affect as affect. The

differences among these three (postulated) ways of experiencing
affects will show more clearly in a series of examples. I can become
angry at or attracted to another person without knowing that my
attitude toward her has changed. This is to experience an affect
un- or preconsciously. I can also be aware of my anger or attrac-
tion and weigh it as a potentially reliable phenomenology, as a po-
tentially true indication of what this other person is like and how I
should treat her. This experience is what most theorists understand
under the term emotion. Or I can attend to my anger or attraction
without believing that the perspective it gives me is reliable, focus-
ing primarily on these feelings’ movement within me. Their move-
ment and the shapes it takes show me something about my degrees
of love, trust, and sensitivity, about my past and present experi-
ences of anger or attraction. This third attitude could be described
as aesthetic or post-therapeutic, depending on what practice we
believe gave us this combination of acceptance and detachment.
One aim of affect theory has been to ask what the relationship
is between unconscious affect and either of the latter two more
conscious experiences. Most basically, it is debatable whether these
three experiences are really distinct, whether they can be experi-
enced independently of each other, and which of them is “truest”—
whatever that might mean—to who we are. In more specific ways,
affect theory asks whether we should privilege knowledge of the
un- or preconscious derived from the subject’s gradual self-analysis
or from an fMRI. It asks whether and when an fMRI (or an equiv-
alent scientific instrument) is a tool of discovery or of Foucaultian
discipline, whether and when the conscious narratives we create
about what we or other persons feel are revealing or self-deluding.
Affect theory also opens up the question of whether and when we
ever experience or should ever try to experience present emotions
with the Proustian vivid detachment with which we can reconnect
to past ones. It finally wonders what the relationship is between af-
fect and consciousness in general—whether, as Antonio Damasio
has overtly hypothesized and as most affect theorists tend implic-
itly to assume, there is a special relationship between our capacity
to be conscious and our capacity to have emotions or feelings.5

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6 qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2

One early wave of affect theory centered around Silvan Tom-

kins, Brian Massumi, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (among others)
has aimed primarily to rehabilitate unconscious “intensities” of af-
fect as forces irreducible to the narratives of purpose and inten-
tionality that consciousness tries to rein them into.6 Ruth Leys has
recently accused these scholars of a combination of bad logic and
misuse of scientific evidence.7 She argues that there is no neuro-
logical proof that affects are indeed originally non-intentional. To
endorse uninhibited “non-intentional affects” without such proof
is sloppy and obscures our continued need for sharper philosophi-
cal and social criticism. “If you don’t understand try to feel,” she
quips. “According to Massumi it works” (“TA,” 434).
Leys’s specific criticisms of Massumi’s and Sedgwick’s use of
scientific data are often well grounded. But in generalizing her
conclusions about Massumi, Sedgwick, and Tomkins onto affect
theory as a whole, Leys neglects to consider that a critique of non-
intentional affects might precipitate a dialectical shift within af-
fect theory rather than a shift away from affect theory itself. Leys
herself acknowledges that the question of the relationship between
conscious and un- or preconscious knowledge has not yet been ad-
dressed in a way as to definitively resolve the current debate be-
tween top-down and bottom-up theories of mental activity (“TA,”
464–72). Especially following Massumi’s and Sedgwick’s early
publications, the turn to affect seems to have been an exercise not
so much in non-intentionality but in humility and caution toward
both our conscious and our unconscious selves. It has also been
the beginning of an attempt to describe the relationship between
the two in a way that does not necessarily reduce itself to a power
struggle. This more complex philosophical aim becomes explicit
in many books that appear shortly after Massumi’s Parables for
the Virtual. Heather Love’s and Lee Edelman’s versions of queer
affect theory both ask about how much choice the conscious self
has in privileging some affective states over others, and how much
value there is to exploring feelings that do not necessarily bring
the self long-term survival or conscious pleasure.8 Catherine Mala-
bou’s Les nouveaux blessés explores the relationship between the
conscious and the unconscious self both during periods of neural

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 Figlerowicz: Introduction 7

growth and in the wake of brain lesions that leave the self unaware
of the capacities and memories it has lost. In his response to Leys,
William E. Connolly notes signs of a similarly careful negotiation
of these questions in neuroscientific work on affect by, among oth-
ers, Walter Kaufmann, Antonio Damasio, and Giacomo Rizzolatti
as well as in many cultural theorists whose work these scientists
inspired.9 Rei Terada’s Feeling in Theory traces worries about emo-
tional awareness (awareness of your own emotions as well as of the
emotions of others) back to what may seem to be one of the least
affect-driven schools of criticism: the deconstruction of Jacques
Derrida and Paul De Man.10 Many other theorists who write about
affects, Kathleen Stewart and Charles Altieri among them, openly
allow the tension between conscious and unconscious affects to
remain unresolved, pointing to philosophical problems this uncer-
tain causality raises in our understanding of self-expression or em-
pathy.11 In this dossier, Catherine Malabou’s, Massimo Recalcati’s,
and Joseph Litvak’s pieces address this issue most directly.
A second major tension constitutive of affect theory concerns its
relationship to notions of aesthetic, scientific, therapeutic, or phil-
osophical usefulness. Damasio suggests (and Teresa Brennan and
Brian Massumi often imply) that the insights of affect theory can
ultimately be refolded into a scientific vision of the self, structured
by strong notions of causality, system, and evolution. Others, such
as Sianne Ngai and many of the authors whom Melissa Gregg and
Gregory Seigworth assemble in The Affect Theory Reader, seem to
work with the assumption that affect theory shares most of its aims
with political and social critique, opening up new spaces in which
this critique can be undertaken.12 Still others—Brennan, Steven D.
Brown, and Ian Tucker among them—seek to use affect theory
primarily to reinvigorate and to improve our current notions of
mental health and therapy.13 On the other hand, a branch of af-
fect theory related to queer studies and psychoanalysis seems either
unconcerned with or directly opposed to the linear usefulness of
affect. Heather Love, Anne-Lise François, Kaja Silverman, and Lee
Edelman suggest with various degrees of vehemence that by the
very nature of the experiences on which affect theory draws, the
pleasure and awareness it gives us deny the reality or usefulness of

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8 qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2

a diachronically (re)productive, well-bounded self.14 Finally, Philip

Fisher inverts the claim for affects’ usefulness to argue that our no-
tions of critique and justice are built out of and structured around
passionate experiences of anger.15
Whichever standpoint each of these theorists explicitly defends,
none of them seems fully comfortable claiming either that affects
are entirely useful or that they are—or should be—entirely useless
beyond the pleasure their movement might give. Love, François,
and Edelman acknowledge (in tones that range from melancholia
to provocation) that the impractical affects they celebrate are po-
tentially destructive and, for the sake of what they call sincerity
or self-knowledge, they privilege some form of the Freudian death
drive. With far greater optimism, Silverman claims that to enjoy
the process of desiring while no longer believing that any real ob-
ject is going to fulfill this desire will eventually become useful as a
foundation for a better system of ethics even if the exact rules of
this system have not yet been articulated.16 Fisher’s argument bal-
ances between making passions the reason why we find some social
institutions fulfilling and arguing that these institutions are use-
ful because they help restrain passions’ destructive potential. These
scholars’ hopes and hesitations all point toward what seems to be
a shared concern about affect theory’s relationship to cultural and
ethnic studies. It remains an open question whether affect theory
at its best is a tool for expressing diversity with an unprecedented
degree of precision, or whether in pretending to do so it locks cul-
tural politics into a relatively static neurological or hedonistic uni-
versalism. In this volume, Elizabeth Abel’s piece balances a double
aim of taking pleasure in small affective sensations and making
these sensations valuable as tools of social critique. Lauren Berlant
argues in her interview with Qui Parle that it is affects’ immediate
uselessness that makes them productive. Andrew Moisey’s essay
explores the tension between affective universalism and particular-
ity in governmental projects for long-term nuclear waste markers.
Embedded in this second question is a third, more abstract one:
Could affect theory really, as Silverman hypothesizes it eventually
will, ground a new ontology of the self and a new ethics. To try to
answer either part of this question now, or even to interrogate any

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 Figlerowicz: Introduction 9

affect theorist in search of such a system, seems premature. But

some shared sets of questions seem to recur within this field that
do not easily fold back into any prior philosophical systems. One
of these is affect theory’s struggle between affective multiplicity and
affective pastorality, between the value of (the right or imperative
to) mental travel and the value of (the right or imperative to) mental
lingering. There is a kind of self-awareness and a kind of empathy
(loved and feared by the Søren Kierkegaard of Fear and Trembling,
loved and no longer feared by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s
Own) that comes from having fallen into many affective experienc-
es and from being ready always to fall into a new one or to experi-
ence several affects at once.17 Yet there is also a form of intellectual
and emotional humility, a humility that seems similarly very much
like knowledge, to admitting that one’s boundaries and experiences
tend to return to the same simple core, that any happiness or satis-
fying self-awareness one seeks to attain will have to keep returning
to and lingering in the same small cluster of feelings. Affect theo-
rists tend to disagree with each other most forcefully in their beliefs
about which state—the most multiple or the most restrained one—
is the best state for a subject to be in, as well as about how this cho-
sen state can be achieved. Brennan and Massumi both favor an af-
fective multiplicity that, they claim, will come about spontaneously
once we stop artificially restraining it. They see this multiplicity as
conducive to both knowledge and happiness. For Stewart and for
Silverman, such multiplicity is also a form of knowledge and happi-
ness, but to experience it requires not spontaneity but a heightened
form of self-consciousness. Anne-Lise François and Heather Love
each in her way defends the self’s right to linger in a chosen affec-
tive condition and contemplates this condition in deepening detail
without seeking comfort in any other feeling or in any action by
which this condition could be altered. Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty
and Being Just argues that we will treat each other more fairly if we
learn to return to and to linger in experiences of aesthetic rapture.18
Lee Edelman’s defense of our right to keep falling into temporary,
unproductive affects vindicates affective multiplicity but also for-
bids us to expect this multiplicity to make our lives feel clearer or
more containedly meaningful in the long run.

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10 qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2

Rei Terada’s recent Looking Away gives the general anti-utilitar-

ian trend within affect theory (which she calls “phenomenophilia”)
an intellectual lineage stemming from Coleridge through Kant and
Nietzsche on to Adorno and Freud. Terada ends this book with
what she calls the utopia of eternal psychoanalysis—the fantasy of
being able to analyze each stray detail of our collective lives, with
no goal or end point in mind, into eternity.19 Paradoxically uniting
the desire for multiplicity with the desire for lingering, Terada’s
utopian model might be one of the first—but surely not the last—
philosophical tools affect theorists will keep producing to articu-
late this new ethical and ontological tangle around and toward
which affect theory’s most abstract formulations seem to gravitate.
These issues of the duration of each affect and of its relationship to
more permanent self-knowledge are raised by Cara Benedetto’s art
included in this issue. Massimo Recalcati’s reinterpretation of psy-
choanalysis, with which this dossier ends, might be a step toward
yet another way of formulating this question.
The dossier is bookended by two of its most abstract arguments:
Catherine Malabou’s reading of Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, and Apol-
linaire and Massimo Recalcati’s reading of Freud and Lacan. Be-
tween these pieces are included more detailed applications of af-
fect theory and meditations on its relationship to art, literature,
contemporary culture, and politics. Malabou’s “Following Gen-
eration” opens the dossier with a philosophical treatment of the
questions of precedence and causality inherent in affect theory’s
definitions of consciousness. Malabou’s is a multiply layered proj-
ect: she reads Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss’s reading of a poem
by Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire’s poem describes crocuses as
“mothers / Daughters of their daughters.” This phrase is a long-
standing biologists’ metaphor for a flower that sprouts before the
leaves do. Malabou uses this metaphor to interrogate the relation-
ship between deconstruction and structuralism, as well as more
generally between a text and its reading and rereading. Does de-
construction precede and create the structure its methodology al-
lows us to disclose? Or is structure the inherent stiffness of a text
whose undoing allows deconstruction to emerge? These are ques-
tions of logic, but also more materially of the relationship between

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 Figlerowicz: Introduction 11

residing in a pattern and being aware of this pattern, of the rela-

tionship between what we consider to be textual or worldly facts
and these facts’ rising into consciousness. Malabou claims that if
we persist in asking these questions, the notion of linear reproduc-
tion soon falls to pieces:

[O]ur starting question—what does “following after” signify?—

receives more and more complex answers that all point toward
the complicated problem of a reproductive dualism that seems,
through its excess, to bring reproduction to a halt, to arrive at
the impassible serenity of a full yet deconstructed presence, a
presence full of its own deconstruction.

“Plasticity” is, then, a capacity not for a linear movement of over-

coming but for allowing our origins and end points, our states of
awareness and of unawareness, to keep being inverted.

Plasticity, from the perspective of such an investigation, would

no longer be linked to the movement of an eternal post-post-
modern ruminating rehearsal, but to the eruption of a reversibil-
ity between before and after that modernizes posterity by giving
new forms to atomized, nuclear sameness—whether it be veg-
etal, logical, or ontological. Following this, it will be the atoms
that split us.

From Malabou’s piece we pass into a series of essays in which

the question of affective awareness starts to be interlaced with
or superseded by the question of affective productivity. Elizabeth
Abel’s “Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights
Photography” reclaims affects as at once politically useful and ir-
reducible to prior definitions of political action. Abel studies the
affects of photographs documenting the civil rights movement. In
an approach that extrapolates from Massumi and Sedgwick, she
seeks in these photographs “those feelings that function beneath
the threshold of conscious recognition and semantic legibility,
those inarticulate, subliminal sensations . . . that operate across
the boundaries between mind and body, action and passion, self
and other.” Abel claims that to follow and acknowledge these
“less legible features of the photographic medium” changes our

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12 qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2

understanding both of the civil rights struggle and of the photo-

graphic medium itself:

If seeing is not reading, and if the visual medium is neither trans-

parent nor exclusively visual, but also engages other senses,
as the obscured visual referent of the exhibit’s title suggests, a
photograph so painful that it can only be experienced, in Fred
Moten’s powerful reading, as the sound of “black mo’nin’,” we
may need to add a wrinkle to the seamless web of photography,
activism, and visibility.

Through such wrinkles, photography has the capacity not only to

represent but also to “touch” us. Abel derives this more positive
understanding of touch—as a form of contact that is not necessar-
ily a power struggle—from French phenomenologists such as Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty. In its final turn Sedgwick’s childhood photo-
graphs of her own “fat, white” body unresolvedly contrasted with
the darker and more muscular bodies of her cousins and siblings,
Abel’s piece poises itself on the brink between affects as a new
space of social critique and affects as primarily a space of self-dis-
covery and accidental empathy, precious precisely because it awak-
ens our attention without instantly transforming this attention into
a fact, stance, or deed.
Lauren Berlant, interviewed by Qui Parle’s Jordan Greenwald,
uses affect theory to critique several very recent moments in cul-
ture and politics. Berlant emphasizes that to view politics through
the lens of affect is to rethink not only the conditions of political
events but also the very concept of an event.

Something has an impact: What will happen? I call this process

the becoming-event of the situation. A situation gets its shape
from the way that it resonates strongly with previous episodes,
such as, in the case you offer, state-induced assassination, state-
and media-orchestrated collective experience, popular imperial-
ist revenge/repair fantasies, politicized erotophobia and so on.

Through close readings of newspaper headlines about Osama bin

Laden, of a YouTube video about Oprah Winfrey, and of a song by
Justin Vivian Bond, as well as through dialogue with other affect

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 Figlerowicz: Introduction 13

theorists such as Sedgwick, Berlant showcases affect theory’s po-

tential as a means of questioning, diagnosing, subverting, reclaim-
ing the culture we live in. She concludes with a commentary on
affect theory as such a tool of cultural attention, precious because
of how ambiguously it lets us balance between intentionality and
non-intentionality.

The reason so many queer theorists are interested in it, I think,

is because while one can’t intend an affect, one can become at-
tentive to the nimbus of affects whose dynamics move along and
make worlds, situations, and environments. In attending to, rep-
resenting, and standing for these alternative modes of being, we
seek to provide new infrastructures for extending their potential
to new planes of convergence. I hope so!

Cara Benedetto’s art included in this issue, introduced by Su-

zanne Li Herrera Puma in “A Nice Clean Space for a Panic At-
tack,” uses affects as a tool of social critique by pausing over their
specific qualities: their duration, their structure, their intensity. The
pieces are all part of a project on “body bags.” Li Puma reads this
project through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection.

Functioning in a manner not far from Kristeva’s description of

the abject, Benedetto’s work thus produces “imaginary uncanni-
ness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us,”
but it never, as it were, digests us completely. It leaves the reader
in a space of destabilization, “[d]iscomfort, unease, dizziness”
to be sure, and one in which the “twisted braids of affects and
thoughts” might never be fully unraveled from one another.20

Benedetto’s pieces combine moments of contemplation with mo-

ments of an affective intensity that seems unstable and unsustain-
able. She leaves us unsure, as Li Puma suggests, of what can be
done with the sensations her art depicts and tries to evoke—unsure,
indeed, if we would have wanted to experience these sensations if
we had seen them coming. Benedetto also highlights tensions be-
tween textual pathos and the pathos of an object these words are
meant to describe, in objects as expected as a photograph and as
unexpected as a snail shell.

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14 qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2

The affects Berlant studies are fleeting even though the conclu-
sions they allow her to draw seem far more universal. Andrew
Moisey’s essay explores a diametrically opposed pair of problems.
How do you make an affect last forever? How can you make sure
that an affectively marked object will eternally keep expressing the
content with which you believe you first endowed it? Moisey de-
scribes the efforts of two independent sets of governmental com-
mittees (Finnish and American) who try perpetually to mark as
unlivable sites at which these two countries intend to bury nucle-
ar waste. Nuclear waste takes thousands of years to decompose.
These sites therefore need to be marked in a way as to express
their danger and the repulsion they should provoke to any pos-
sible civilization that could inhabit these territories dozens upon
dozens of generations hence. Moisey reviews a recent documen-
tary on Finland’s nuclear waste committee and recounts his own
interviews with members of two American ones. He also studies
sketches of possible projects the two American committees con-
sidered implementing. Moisey emphasizes the instant difficulty of
expressing affect universally: most of the American team’s projects,
he says, look like “B-movie pitches” or like calques of war memo-
rials. He also notes the contradiction with which these committee
members constantly struggle, between a fear of atomic weapons
and a strange pride in having to protect others from them. His es-
say is thus on a most basic level another close analysis of the unex-
pected transformations affect can undergo as it filters in and out of
subjective awareness. It is also an at once frightening and comical
statement of affect’s troubled relationship to universality and to
selfless or even subject-less modes of being.
Joseph Litvak’s piece is similarly focused on negative affects and
on their capacity to act as structuring forces; yet his subject is not
nuclear warfare but Charles Dickens. Litvak’s essay reveals some
of the new questions and possibilities affect theory opens specifi-
cally for literary theory. He reads David Copperfield through the
prism of resentment. Resentment, he claims, is the crux of this
novel’s character construction as well as a prominent structur-
ing principle of its relationship to the reader. “Reading a Dickens
novel, after all, is nothing if not a labor of resentment: a vicari-

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 Figlerowicz: Introduction 15

ous reopening of narcissistic wounds as erotically rewarding as

its implicit retaliation for them, a rehearsal—as the French would
say, a répétition—of past injuries and future revenges.” By reading
Dickens through resentment, the essay accomplishes a double aim.
First, it illuminates the structural relationship between Dickens’s
famously repetitive minor characters and the protagonist. David
Copperfield’s psychological depth is, Litvak argues, built out of
and supported by an implicit self-righteous resentment toward the
repetitive, machine-like characters who surround him and do not
seem to notice his gentle, “eager” particularity. Litvak also dis-
cerns within David Copperfield moments of metatextual aware-
ness of and commentary on this way that resentment directed to-
ward others structures and solidifies the resentful person’s sense of
subjectivity. In the character of Uriah Heep and in episodes such
as Rosa Dartle’s suddenly successful singing performance, Litvak
shows how these secondary characters’ stiffness can suddenly open
up into a sense of wider possibility, into the possibility even of our
attending to these minor figures as if they were themselves protago-
nists of the novel we are reading. These possibilities open up when
we are made to notice that these other characters might rightfully
be resentful, too, both of their fates and of the narrator’s treat-
ment of them. To expose Dickens’s “resentment-machine” allows
us to appreciate his characters’ predictable structure but also their
“unctuous” instability, the fragility of the patterns through which
they are repeatedly constituted and melted away. The implicit no-
tions of character and novel structure with which Litvak is work-
ing point us back to an older, formalist understanding of the novel.
But Litvak also opens up ways of reconnecting this formalism to
socially and ethically driven literary readings with a new fluidity
and a heightened attention to the many possible social or ethical
meanings of each fictional detail.
The last piece in the dossier, Massimo Recalcati’s “Hate as a Pas-
sion of Being,” continues this interrogation of affect, society, and
ethics by rereading Freud and Lacan through an affective lens. Re-
calcati’s argument directly inverts traditional psychoanalytic ques-
tions. He does not ask how the self can understand its affects as
symptoms of an underlying structure of desire; instead, he claims

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16 qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2

that both Freud and Lacan define the desiring subject through the
experience of a single, specific passion: hatred. Hatred, Recalcati
claims, is the passion that registers the original splitting of the sub-
ject from its other. Its experience is the proof and the structure of
the self’s non-coincidence with its world. In this sense, hate is not
merely a symptom of what our selves are like, but seems also at
times to become its foundation. “[H]ate accompanies the subjec-
tive experience of the exteriority of the object; or rather, the ob-
ject’s ‘appearance’ implies a simultaneous movement of ‘hating.’”
As does Catherine Malabou, Recalcati keeps returning to possible
causal relationships between the structure of our subjectivity and
its affective experiences; but the purpose of these returns is to trou-
ble any such causal connection rather than to clarify it.

At stake, then, is an affective-bodily form of hate that does not

result from an encounter with the Other but seems, instead, to
determine the very conditions of the Other’s existence. Hate ap-
pears as a founding condition of exteriority, as a sort of passion
of the body that spits out the malignant excess of enjoyment to
constitute the very alterity—and exteriority—of the object.

Recalcati traces descriptions of hatred in Freud’s Totem and Taboo

as well as in Freud’s and Lacan’s writings on child development,
envy, and jealousy. In all these passages, hate emerges for Recal-
cati as an affect endowed with a particular “lucidity” about the
structure of the self, a “lucidity” that ultimately seems to make it
identical with this structure, or to make it the self’s most radical
confrontation with “life as such.” Recalcati thus continues Mal-
abou’s discussion of our relationship to our own self-awareness.
With Litvak, he also starts to pose a slightly different but equally
unsettling question. Recalcati asks us to imagine not only a self
overwhelmed by an affect, but a logic or grammar of subjectiv-
ity that treats an affective experience as its objective structure and
basis. His argument forces us to ask whether we do indeed always
think through the prism of one affect or another; whether it is true
that affects stabilize not only our systems of values but also the
rational structures through which we try to evaluate them. This es-
say thus finally also brings us back to the tension between affective

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 Figlerowicz: Introduction 17

multiplicity and affective closure. If affects do structure our think-

ing so intimately, then it may be—as Recalcati suggests—that we
will find our deepest forms of reasoning in the affect before whose
call we are particularly defenseless. Or it may be, instead, that to
prevent our reason from stiffening we need to seek out as many
different affective experiences as possible—and that the affective
returns Recalcati describes are not the goals but the final limits of
our thinking.

Notes

1. In neuroscience this question was first opened by Benjamin Libet’s

experiments conducted in the 1980s. See Benjamin Libet et al., “Time
of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Ac-
tivity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely
Voluntary Act,” Brain 106, no. 3 (1983): 623–42. Libet’s article has
since become quite controversial, but the broader issue it raises—how
we can learn about the brain in spite of or even through the sub-
ject’s lack of consciousness of its degrees of activity or malfunction-
ing—remains alive in neuroscience. Catherine Malabou’s recent Les
nouveaux blessés (Paris: Bayard, 2007) uses the double concepts of
positive and negative plasticity to describe some of the research neu-
roscience has since done on the relationship between the conscious
self and the changing neural structure of the brain. Libet’s experi-
ment was improved on and repeated in 2007 by Haynes et al. with
very similar results. See Chun Syong Soon, John-Dylan Haynes, et al.,
“Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain,”
Nature Neuroscience 11 (2008): 543–45.
2. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002), 6.
3. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2004).
4. Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2003).
5. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious
Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).
6. Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Her Sisters, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

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18 qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2

7. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no.
3 (2011): 434–72. Hereafter cited as “TA.”
8. Heather Love, Feeling Backward (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007); Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004).
9. William E. Connolly, “The Complexity of Intention,” Critical Inquiry
37, no. 4 (2011): 791–98.
10. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003).
11. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007).
12. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004). Elizabeth Abel, “Affective Wrinkles” in this issue; Melissa
Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2010). Hereafter cited as ATR.
13. Steven D. Brown and Ian Tucker, “Eff the Ineffable: Affect, Somatic
Management, and Mental Health Service Users,” in ATR, 229–49.
14. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2008).
15. Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2002).
16. Kaja Silverman, “Seeing for the Sake of Seeing,” in World Spectators
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
17. I have in mind particularly Kierkegaard’s descriptions of Abraham as
capable of experiencing intense joy and intense despair at once; and
Woolf’s praise of Shakespeare as having attained a state of androgyny
in which all selfish and selfless feelings are accessible to him. See Søren
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1943; Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1941); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; New
York: Harcourt, 1991).
18. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1999.)
19. Rei Terada, Looking Away (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2009).
20. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), 4, 19, 1.

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