Some Avenues for Feeling

Abstract

What can an attention to affect offer those of us who continue to be engaged by criticism, who do it for a living or find it indispensable for some other reasons? For one thing, thinking about affect can change what counts as material and what material might do. I am using word material in psychoanalytic sense to mean the patient's words and behaviour as a whole, in so far as they offer a sort of raw material for interpretations and constructions.1 Affect is part of what an analyst or critic considers in order to build a convincing interpretation (of a lived scene, of a literary or cultural text): one sign that I am performing a good reading or interpreting well is if this reading helps me to understand why I feel a certain way, or why a text makes me feel this way. This is especially case if a feeling is counterintuitive or perverse in sense that it undermines or is simply outside of what I recognize to be my own desires or wishes. Affects or feelings fit psychoanalytic bill perfectly when they are felt to be, as Laplanche and Pontalis put it, somewhat alien ... as far as conscious subject is concerned (246); when they are considered incommensurate with [a subject's] conscious motives (246), they become material for analysis, symptomatic of unconscious wishes, for example, or structures.