Abstract
This article offers an overview of the central arguments and theoretical contributions of affect theory insofar as they are interrelated to and connected with feminist thought. Necropolitics or the right to kill or to destroy is the theme of this two-part essay. This first section points to how the affective turn presents a return of critical theory to bodily matter. Of special importance is the argument regarding the specific manner in which affective studies enable a strong grounding for social action and change by centering its theorizations on interpersonal and relational issues. Whereas the first part of this essay traces a panorama of how the affective proposes a new methodology for thinking about sentience and responsibility, the second section pays special attention to the entanglement of violence and heteronormative affections. The focus is on political violence, with particular attention paid to the Basque situation, on the inadmissible "right to kill" claimed by the warrior that involves a peculiar destructive (mis)understanding of community and of the self. Contrary to the necropolitical logic, the authors propose a feminist ethos linked to an understanding of the affective interstices that open up when emphasis is redirected from the anchors of social bonds/affects to those of direct interpersonal negotiation. In order to outline some of the affective movement entailed in the rethinking of identity in feminist terms needed for an undoing of the necropolitical energy in political violence—what Roland Barthes, terms "the neutral" (2005)—we focus on restorative justice and its affective universe
Highlights
This article offers an overview of the central arguments and theoretical contributions of affect theory insofar as they are interrelated to and connected with feminist thought
The “affective turn” seeks to depart from abstract categories of analysis that traditionally have been used to describe social realities as constituted oppositional structures, and instead it turns the focus to the heterogeneous connections that are made possible through sensations and intensities of life as they are experienced by sentient beings
The central arguments found in Spinozian ethics inspired Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of the body as an “assemblage,” whose function or meaning lies “in its relation to the various capacities to affect other bodies or to be affected by them” (1988, 4)
Summary
Since the mid-90’s, “affect” has gained a high degree of centrality in debates over contemporary cultural theory, and it has become a significant site of reflection that allows a delineation of a more nuanced understanding of the social world. Moving away from identity based politics, affective encounters instead place critical attention on the question of ethics understood as an answerability to others based on an “unconditional and responsible openness to be affected by others–to be shaped by the contact with others” (Athena et al, 2008, 6) As part of this redefinition, the concepts of assemblage and affect are able to reveal a plasticity and texture of the social that arises from the corporeal ability to establish multiple connections with other sentient bodies. The so-called “affective turn” of critical theory attempts to move beyond a binary model of thinking (ie rational/emotional, public/private, self/other, etc.) towards a more intersectional framework of inquiry, whereby affect and emotional sensations are examined for their critical productivity The focus on these intersectional aspects opens up new forms of engagement and of critical creativity, as affective encounters operate in ways that are “endlessly changing, permeable, and entirely unsusceptible of any definite articulation” (Sedgwick, 2003, 6). Attention to affect implies the opening up of cognition to the emotional investment necessary for connectivity and intersubjective relations involving both the human and the non-human
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