Fichaje textual skin#

Rejecting the ways in which percept and affect (defined following Deleuze) have been “subordinated to textuality and the Law of the signifier,” Shaviro instead insists on attending to the “immediacy and violence of sensation that powerfully engages the eye and body of the spectator.” He shares with theorists such as Brian Massumi the sense that intensities are necessarily and utterly divorced from all that signifies. xiv)Īffect is not where reading is no longer needed. Indeed, in some cases the affection for affect has itself been subsumed by a more powerful theory that demanded the deep attention required for interminable difficult reading. Thus, even some of the most radical theory coming out of the humanities today begins with the premise that affects and feelings are the forgotten underside of the linguistic turn.

What I claim in this book is not only that this desire is retrogade and reintroduces an untheorized notion of affect (specifically, one that is fundamentally incapable of dealing with textual particularities and formal matters), but that the return to affect on the part of critics from wildly divergent disciplinary backgrounds is, in most cases, a naïve move that leaves intact the very ideological, aesthetic, and theoretical problems it claimed to confront. xii-xiii)Ĭritical positions that align with what generally and amorphously resists (structure, form, textuality, signification, legibility) hold on the notion of a transcendental signified, hold fast to the fantasy of something that predates the linguistic turn and that evades the slow, hard tussle of reading texts closely. One of the symptoms of appeals to affect in the negative theoretical sense–as signaling principally a rejection: not semiosis, not meaning, not structure, not apparatus, but the felt visceral, immediate, sensed, embodied, excessive–is that “affect” in the turn to affect has been deployed almost exclusive in the singular, as the capacity for movement or disturbance in general (When Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie succinctly declare “affect is not form ,” it is because they align affects with “ transitions between states” and the very essence of what is dynamic and unstable, against and impoverished notion of form as inert, passive, inactive.) (BRINKEMA, 2014, p. Thus, turning to affect has allowed humanities to constantly possibly introject any seemingly absent or forgotten dimension of inquiry, to insist that play, the unexpected, and the unthought can always be brought back into the field.

Fichaje textual skin#

“ Affect”, as turned to, is said to: disrupt, interrupt, reinsert, demand, provoke, insist on, remind of, agitate for: the body, sensation, movement, flesh and skin and nerves, the visceral, stressing pains, feral frenzies, always rubbing against: what undoes, what unsettles, that thing I cannot name, what remains resistant, far away (haunting, and ever so beautiful) indefinable, it is said to be what cannot be written, what thaws the critical cold, messing all systems and subjects up. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2014.