Pathologies of Affect

Abstract

This essay juxtaposes the ontological variant of affect theorized by cultural theory with what Catherine Malabou terms the ‘new wounded’ – bodies defined by their inability to produce and experience specific neurological affects. Ontological affect theory positions the capacity of a body to affect and be affected as the foundation for relation both beyond and between individuals, often drawing on neuropsychology for the legitimation of its claims. The new wounded, however, exist as a form of life that cannot be acknowledged by these theories. The varied pathologies that comprise the new wounded are identified specifically by the inability to produce the affects that supposedly ground the ontology of relation. The first part of this essay examines how neuropsychology constructs and identifies the pathological other of the new wounded through discursive, medical and technological means. A body's capacity to experience affect is not something biologically given, but is instead produced through techniques that sort proper and improper bodies, defining the new wounded as less than fully human. The second part discusses the mobilization of neuropsychological norms in ontological affect theory. The turn to the biological in affect theory, often made in order to theorize a non-representational sphere of existence beyond the symbolic, relies on but cannot acknowledge the discursive and technological production of affective and affectless bodies in neuropsychology. The ontology of affect, consequentially, should be thought of as a normative political construct defined by the absent and erased other of the affectless body. I conclude by claiming that a politics of ontology must acknowledge how materialist and realist constructs of the ontological such as affect are inherently produced within and mobilized by historical contingencies, contexts and conjunctures.

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