Jan Slaby

Affektivität erschließt Bedeutsamkeit, ermöglicht Bezugnahmen auf evaluative Aspekte der Wirklichkeit und verknüpft die Anliegen fühlender Personen mit jenen Begebenheiten, die dafür relevant sind. Dies gilt für das Gefühlserleben von Individuen, aber auch auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene, insofern die sozial eingespielte Affektivität Muster der Bedeutsamkeit anlegt, die den Rahmen des Angemessenen abstecken und das Fühlen gesellschaftlicher Akteur:innen orientieren. Weniger Aufmerksamkeit hat bisher erfahren, dass Affektivität auch an der Abwehr oder Neutralisierung möglicher Weltbezüge beteiligt ist. Vieles, das Anteilnahme verdiente und in der Reichweite affektiver Bezugnahmen liegt, wird affektiv abgeblendet, auf Distanz gehalten, ja regelrecht ‚entwirklicht‘. Der vorliegende Beitrag schlägt für diese affektive Wirklichkeitsabwehr auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene den Begriff des Ungefühlten vor. Ziel des Textes ist es, dieses Konzept als Reflexionsbegriff einer kritischen Sozialphilosophie der Gefühle zu profilieren. Den Bezugspunkt bildet die eskalierende Klima- und Umweltkrise, deren gesellschaftliche Thematisierung auch Konflikte um das „richtige Fühlen“ umfasst.

This text maps out a territory for political philosophy of mind, with emphasis on habit, affect and an expanded notion of the social niche. We first survey the historical development of classic philosophy of mind towards the articulation of political philosophy of mind and discuss further influences for the field. We then outline commitments to relationality, dynamism, and emergence, to adopt a post-cognitivist view of cognition as embodied and situated, as ongoing dynamic interaction with the environment. We propose to move beyond the user/resource framework dominant in extended mind approaches and to surpass what Jesper Aagaard calls the “dogma of harmony” prevalent in 4E approaches. Moving beyond the individual subject, towards situated agents shaped by institutional procedures, social domains and subjectification practices, we highlight the role of affect and habit in processes of societal mind-shaping. We propose a critical methodology: inverting key concepts from philosophy of mind to bring out their ambivalent standing amidst oppressive and exploitative social structures, thereby expanding the purview of the socio-material niches in which cognitive and affective capacities are developed and expressed. We discuss work on habit in the enactivist and pragmatist traditions to put our method of concept inversion and niche expansion to work. The article is meant to be an introduction and invitation to join an emerging scholarly effort at the intersection of philosophy of mind, 4E cognitive science and social as well as political philosophy.

In this text, I discuss the role that a range of habits in affluent societies play in upholding as well as masking an unsustainable status quo. I show that enactivism, as a philosophical approach to the embodied and embedded mind, offers resources for bringing into focus and critically interrogating such habits of affluence and the environments enabling them. I do this in the context of a critical theory of the unfelt in society: the systematic production of lacunae of emotive concern in social collectives. The lack of proportionate affective and practical responses to the ecological crisis epitomizes this. The article starts with considerations on societal unfeeling, then reviews key elements of enactive approaches to habit, before a fuller picture of habits of affluence is developed, informed by Brand’s and Wissen’s concept of the imperial mode of living. Finally, two dimensions of habits of affluence are discussed in some detail, which will help flesh out a thematically expanded, politically engaged version of enactivism.

What I call the unfelt in society refers to different ways in which certain events or conditions fail to evoke affective responses or give rise to merely sporadic or toned-down modes of emotive concern. This is evident in public (non)responses to the ecological crisis in the Global North. I sketch an approach to the unfelt, drawing on work in phenomenology and on the situated affectivity approach. I focus on structural apathy as the condition of spatial, social, and cognitive-affective distance from the devastation and suffering caused by capitalist modes of living. Most members of affluent societies live their lives spatially and ‘existentially’ removed from the dehumanizing living conditions of those whose exploited labor and (stolen) land enable and sustain that affluence. The resulting apathy amounts to a constitutional inability to grasp, fathom, and sympathize with the plight of those who are forced to endure those conditions. I hold that structural apathy is an underdiscussed baseline of affective injustice. Its analysis can generate insights into the conditions that make forms of affective injustice so pervasive and seemingly ‘natural’ in Western modernity. While the present text broadly contributes to the debate on affective injustice, it also voices some reservations about this debate and its guiding notion.

In this paper, I explore links between the phenomenology-inspired philosophy of emotion, especially discussions of affective intentionality and situated affectivity, and those strands of work in the field of cultural affect studies that take their inspiration fromSpinoza and Deleuze. As bridges between these fields, I propose the concepts ‘disclosive posture’ and ‘affective arrangement’. ‘Disclosive posture’ condenses insights from phenomenological work on affectivity, especially those pertaining to what Heidegger calls Befindlichkeit. ‘Affective arrangement’ is a descendant of Deleuze and Guattari’s term agencement. It refers to heterogeneous ensembles of elements coalescing into a sphere of heightened affective intensity in a local setting. I develop this notion into a tool for analyzing situated affectivity. As it does not yet figure prominently within debates in the philosophy of emotion, I will outline what is meant by ‘affective arrangement’ in some detail. Throughout, I discuss a productive tension between these two conceptual strands.

Many democracy theorists have long been skeptical about the political potential of emotions. Their skepticism, especially with regard to negative emotions such as resentment and anger, has enabled populist movements to pioneer the harnessing of political affectivity. Nevertheless, research suggests that even negative political emotions are not a priori anti-democratic; such feelings can point to real democratic deficits like an increasing lack of political representation. In this paper we compare recent studies on the probable causes of populist resentment with investigations on the democratic potential of affectivity. This interdisciplinary approach allows us to develop a novel framework for a comprehensive and timely theory of democratic emotions.Brigitte Bargetz, Ambivalenzen des Alltags. Neuorientierungen für eine Theorie des Politischen, Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 294 S. – Josef Früchtl, Demokratie der Gefühle. Ein ästhetisches Plädoyer, Hamburg: Meiner, 2021. 183 S. – Pierre Rosanvallon, Das Jahrhundert des Populismus. Geschichte – Theorie – Kritik, Bonn: Bpb, 2021. 265 S. – Armin Schäfer/Michael Zürn, Die demokratische Regression. Die politischen Ursachen des autoritären Populismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021. 246 S.

Heidegger’s ontological account of affectivity provides an interesting angle to consider questions of politics. On the one hand, one might take some of what Heidegger wrote on affectivity in the late 1920s and early 1930s—usually couched in the idiom of Stimmungen and Befindlichkeit—as a foreshadowing of his involvement with Nazi politics, culminating in his time as Führer-Rektor of Freiburg University. On the other hand, Heidegger’s views on affectivity might be taken as a starting point for an ontological perspective on the political as such. His perspective on Befindlichkeit as disclosive postures can prepare such a reading, while especially his views on the ontological character of anxiety and boredom lead into the founding dimension of the political as such.This is because these affective orientations reveal the ungroundedness and thus radical contingency of existence. The flip side of this ungroundedness is the inevitability for self-determination—in other words: the need for deciding the undecidable. Although Heidegger’s own politics—at least in the early 1930s—did not explicitly relate to the affectively disclosed ungroundedness of existence, but rather curtailed this openness and indeterminacy in an individualistic and decisionistic closure, we argue that Heidegger’s view yields to a radically political reading. Not least, this is evidenced in much of French political thought since the 1960s which heavily draws on Heidegger’s ontological difference. The political as such does not refer to politics as a sub-system of society, but to the questioning of the foundations of politics, which turn out to be necessarily “contingent foundations”. It is our aim to trace this line of thought back to its origins in Heidegger’s works, in order to assess the potentials and pitfalls of ‘Heidegger on politics’.

This chapter develops and defends the claim that human emotions are best understood as active engagements with the world and not, as mainstream philosophy of emotion believes, as passively undergone experiences. It shows how the active nature of emotion sheds light on the way emotion relates to value. Emotional engagement is what lets value manifest and become concrete. Value, it is held, is both constituted and detected by emotional engagements—a view whose paradoxical initial appearance will be strongly mitigated by the account proposed. The argument commences from the perspective of the socially engaged person and her situated affectivity, subsequently discusses Aristotle’s notion of ‘hexis’ as an active hold a person can have over her emotions, and closes with remarks on the active-affective ‘minimal self’, whose erosion in conditions like severe depression lends phenomenological credibility to the proposed account.

This paper develops elements of a phenomenological account of how interpersonal care contributes to the structure of intentionality. It does so by reflecting on a first-person account of parental grief by the poet and thinker Denise Riley. Her autobiographical notes on the aftermath of the death of her adult son revolve around a marked experience of altered temporal flow. By relating what she considers to be an almost unspeakable alteration in her experience of time, Riley unearths a level of nuanced phenomenological reflection that can inform philosophical studies of lived time and intentionality. The paper will build on Riley's observations on altered temporal experience in grief to explore the entanglement of temporality and intersubjectivity in the constitution of intentionality. By doing so, the paper demonstrates that and how a phenomenological study of grief can directly speak to key concerns of the philosophy of mind and of interdisciplinary consciousness studies.

The Covid-19 pandemic put forth a new kind of affective exhaustion. Being forced to stay at home, diminish social interactions and reduce the scale of their everyday mobility, many people experienced boredom, sluggishness, and existential immobility. While state-imposed pandemic policies changed rapidly, everyday life remained strangely unmoving. A sense of being stuck unfurled―as if not only social life, but time itself had come to a halt. At the same time, there was a latent sense of tension and increased aggressiveness which became manifest not only in protests and riots, but also in the texture of everyday life. In this contribution, we argue that both of these states―the feeling of being stuck, and the feeling that this putative tranquility is nothing but the calm before a storm―can be conceptualized as affective stasis. Through a rearticulation of the ancient concept of stasis, we show that these two at first glance incongruous affective conditions are intricately entangled. In Ancient Greek, the term stasis meant “stand, standing, stance”. Being used in a wide variety of contexts―politics, navigation, sports, rhetoric, medicine, and others―stasis took on different meanings which can be semantically organized around two opposite poles: one is the total absence of motion, and the other is an event of radical and often violent social and political change. Drawing on affect theory, phenomenology, and ancient Greek semantics, we propose affective stasis as a novel conceptual framework for political phenomenology.

Although affect and emotion are often discussed in institutional and organizational research, they are rarely studied systematically and in accordance with their overall relevance. To investigate the decisive but subtle, sometimes barely noticeable or taken-for-granted power of institutions, we need to achieve a better understanding of the close intertwining of institutional rules, operations, and spaces with complex affective dynamics. In this article, we therefore develop an analytical framework that allows to investigate the countless affective dynamics that characterize institutions. First, this framework can help to come to terms with the multidimensionality of institutional affect and thus inform empirical studies of institutions. Second, our approach allows scholars and researchers to make visible those developments and modes of agency that run counter to the official functions and self-understandings of institutions. As a an initial step, we propose a conceptual clarification of „institution“ and „organization“ that incorporates various references to social theory which already foreshadow some dynamics of institutional affect. Further detailing this perspective, we develop an analytical grid that focuses, first, on what we call the „guiding affects“ of institutions and, second, on the internal affective dynamics of institutions. The proposed framework provides a variety of links to discussions of institutions in cultural studies and the social sciences.

This paper proposes an analysis of the discursive dynamics of high-impact concepts in the humanities. These are concepts whose formation and development have a lasting and wide-ranging effect on research and our understanding of discursive reality in general. The notion of a conceptual practice, based on a normative conception of practice, is introduced, and practices are identified, on this perspective, according to the way their respective performances are held mutually accountable. This normative conception of practices is then combined with recent work from philosophy of science that characterizes concepts in terms of conceptual capacities that are productive, open-ended, and applicable beyond the original context they were developed in. It is shown that the formation of concepts can be identified by changes in how practitioners hold exercise of their conceptual capacities accountable when producing knowledge about a phenomenon. In a manner similar to the use of operational definitions in scientific practices, such concepts can also be used to intervene in various discourses within or outside the conceptual practice. Using the formation of the concepts “mechanism” and “performative” as examples, the paper shows how high-impact concepts reconfigure what is at issue and at stake in conceptual practices. As philosophy and other humanities disciplines are its domain of interest, it is a contribution to the methodology of the humanities.