Isobel&Gillian&Julia&Hélène&Camille&Judith&Eve&me

Reading the Affective Contours of the Río de la Plata:Aira, Levrero, Strafacce, and Umpi Matthew Bush What are affects and what do they do? These two seemingly straightforward questions have spawned a proliferating number of works of social and aesthetic critique over the last twenty years. If indeed we may speak of a generalized recognition in critical theory of the presence of affect in our everyday interactions and as a mediating factor in our perception of the social, the ramifications of that affect, its potentialities, its limitations, and its relation to a broader emotional experience are analyzed in widely differing ways by scholars from a host of fields. Collaborative volumes such as The Affective Turn (2007) edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough or The Affect Theory Reader (2010) edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth offer a glimpse of the variety extant in Affect Studies, and this only within a primarily Anglophone academic setting. The rhizomatic flows of affect make any attempt to delimit its study a frustrating exercise, though we may be able to track broad theoretical tendencies that aid in mapping the general contours of affect theory. In their aforementioned study, Seigworth and Gregg outline eight different trajectories of the study of affect that display points of contact among themselves, spanning political, psychological, scientific, and cultural analysis (6–8). More succinctly, Brian L. Ott condenses a multiplicity of approaches into two primary lines of affect theory: 1) that influenced by the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, later revisited in the works of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi; and 2) the [End Page 411] psychologically-based analyses of Silvan Tomkins and their adaptations in the works of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Teresa Brennan (1–8).1 The first of these two approaches, based in Spinoza's consideration of the body's capacity to affect and to be affected, regards affect as an intensity that mediates between bodies as they come into contact; such a comprehension of affect is also patent in Massumi's reading of Deleuze (Parables 27, 32–34).2 The second formulation understands affect as a set of responses, recognizable cognitive states that, differing from Freud's conceptualization of drives, appear as reactions to external stimuli. Tomkins proposed eight such states that while not directly acting as feelings per se, may be recognized in the outward manifestation of emotion; Brennan, for example, regards feelings "as sensations that have found the right match in words" (5). From this brief distillation of a vast theoretical field, we may ask what these distinct approaches to affect offer by way of aesthetic analysis? What does affect provide as a hermeneutic tool to examine text? If, as Sedgwick writes, "Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects" (19), how can these gaseous intensities be engaged to sharpen our modes of reading? A fortuitous example of affective reading may be found in Sianne Ngai's understanding of the "tone" of a given work, taken as a "cultural artifact's feeling tone: its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world"; such a category renders "affective values meaningful with regard to how one understands the text as a totality within an equally holistic matrix of social relations" (28).3 In this way, we come to better understand [End Page 412] how aesthetic objects, and specifically the written word, may be read as sites of the confluence of codified affects—"archives of feelings" to borrow from Anne Cvetkovich's terminology—and of an intensity that passes through that object, thus placing the work of art in contact with the body.4 Following Massumi's Deleuzian designation of affect as a "prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act" (Notes xvii), I would propose here a bridge between the Spinoza and Tomkins paradigms of affect to consider the text as a space where latent intensities are activated through readerly interaction with the text.5 An affective transaction occurs when the...

Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko is most often referred to as a brilliant historian of phi­losophy, the author of the original concept of the evolution of science, but her work clearly shows interest in ontological and “existentialist” topics, which sug­gests the existence of a certain coherent philosophical project that demonstrates elements of the Christian worldview. Dealing with the issues of the genesis of European rationality, Gaidenko as philosopher was always guided by the task of overcoming the “paradigm of thinking” that was born at the beginning of the Modernity and was associated with the figure of a knowing and creative “subject” who denies the complexity and multidimensionality of the world, who undertakes to rebuild in a revolutionary way. To put an end to the dominance of “deontologized subjectivism”, leading to anthropological, ecological and other crises, is possible only through the restoration of the damaged reputation of ra­tio, through a new understanding of the collision of knowledge and faith, which reflects the tragedy of Western European culture, which has forgotten about God and being. According to our hypothesis, behind the standard designations of such Soviet philosophical topics as “criticism of European rationalism”, “criticism of bourgeois aesthetics”, “criticism of non-Marxist concepts of dialectics”, etc. – a peculiar cultural-critical approach is traced, which, on the one hand, can be compared with the German Kulturkritik of the 20th century, and on the other hand, demonstrates the ontologism which is typical for the Russian philosophical tradition. We single out three elements of the philosophical project of P. Gaidenko: 1) criticism of mass society and the “tragedy of aestheticism”, 2) criticism of technocracy and “breakthrough to the transcendent”, 3) appeal to the ontologi­cal roots of reason and values. We propose to clarify them, outlining the ways of typological comparison with special discourses within the conservative criti­cism of modernity – in particular, criticism of massification, criticism of techno­logy, problems of value and worldview orientation.

This chapter takes up the challenge that emotional rhetoric is inappropriate to politics. The first move of the argument is genealogical, as it revisits a postwar concern about emotional rhetoric summarized under “denazification.” Then, the dominant philosophical rejoinders represented by Jürgen Habermas and Martha Nussbaum (following Rawls) are contrasted with a different rhetorical tradition available under “political pathology,” which indexes the basic rhetorical structure of politics beyond techniques for rabble-rousing. Finally, the recent “affective turn” proper, along with a variety of philosophical projects meant to tame emotion for political purposes, is briefly sketched through this alternative rhetorical tradition in order to demonstrate what sort of new analytic possibilities thereby become available.