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8Habits of affluence: unfeeling, enactivism and the ecological crisis of capitalismMind and Society 1-22. forthcoming.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 …Read more
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10Structural Apathy, Affective Injustice, and the Ecological CrisisPhilosophical Topics 51 (1): 63-83. 2023.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 …Read more
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4Affective Arrangements and Disclosive PosturesPhänomenologische Forschungen 2018 (2): 198-217. 2018.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 pertainin…Read more
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87Philosophy of Psychiatry, Special Issue of Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. (edited book). 2012.
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11Emotionen der Demokratie – Ein unerschlossenes Potential in krisenhaften ZeitenPhilosophische Rundschau 70 (4): 382. 2023.
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17Heidegger and the Affective Grounding of PoliticsIn Christos Hadjioannou (ed.), Heidegger on Affect, Palgrave. pp. 265-289. 2019.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…Read more
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8Veränderndes Verstehen dynamischer Gefühle (review)Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57 (5): 807-811. 2009.
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Emotion and agencyIn Sabine Roeser & Cain Samuel Todd (eds.), Emotion and Value, Oxford University Press Uk. 2014.
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33Introduction: The Role of Emotions in Epistemic Practices and CommunitiesTopoi 41 (5): 835-837. 2022.
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18Intentionality's Breaking Point: A Lesson from GriefJournal of Consciousness Studies 29 (9-10): 105-127. 2020.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 nu…Read more
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22On being stuck: the pandemic crisis as affective stasisPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (5): 1145-1162. 2023.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 a…Read more
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19Im Schattenreich der Institution: Eine affekttheoretische PerspektiveZeitschrift Für Kultur- Und Kollektivwissenschaft 8 (1): 137-164. 2022.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 framewo…Read more
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89The humanities as conceptual practices: The formation and development of high‐impact concepts in philosophy and beyondMetaphilosophy 53 (4): 385-403. 2022.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 norma…Read more
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29Expanding the Active MindJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53 (2): 193-209. 2021.What I call the active mind approach revolves around the claim that what is “on” a person’s mind is in an important sense brought on and held on to through the agent’s self-conscious rational activ...
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513Brain in the Shell. Assessing the Stakes and the Transformative Potential of the Human Brain ProjectIn Philipp Haueis & Jan Slaby (eds.), Neuroscience and Critique. 2015.The “Human Brain Project” (HBP) is a large-scale European neuroscience and information communication technology (ICT) project that has been a matter of heated controversy since its inception. With its aim to simulate the entire human brain with the help of supercomputing technologies, the HBP plans to fundamentally change neuroscientific research practice, medical diagnosis, and eventually the use of computers itself. Its controversial nature and its potential impacts render the HBP a subject of…Read more
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550in a nervous system of a given species. This chapter provides a critical perspective on the role of connectomes in neuroscientific practice and asks how the connectomic approach fits into a larger context in which network thinking permeates technology, infrastructure, social life, and the economy. In the first part of this chapter, we argue that, seen from the perspective of ongoing research, the notion of connectomes as “complete descriptions” is misguided. Our argument combines Rachel Ankeny’s…Read more
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13Schwerpunkt: Philosophie der PsychiatrieDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 60 (6): 883-886. 2012.
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95The brain as part of an enactive systemBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (4): 421-422. 2013.The notion of an enactive system requires thinking about the brain in a way that is different from the standard computational-representational models. In evolutionary terms, the brain does what it does and is the way that it is, across some scale of variations, because it is part of a living body with hands that can reach and grasp in certain limited ways, eyes structured to focus, an autonomic system, an upright posture, etc. coping with specific kinds of environments, and with other people. Ch…Read more
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381Affective ArrangementsEmotion Review 11 (1): 3-12. 2019.We introduce the working concept of “affective arrangement.” This concept is the centerpiece of a perspective on situated affectivity that emphasizes relationality, dynamics, and performativity. Our proposal relates to work in cultural studies and continental philosophy in the Spinoza–Deleuze lineage, yet it is equally geared to the terms of recent work in the philosophy of emotion. Our aim is to devise a framework that can help flesh out how affectivity unfolds dynamically in a relational setti…Read more
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7394Affective Societies: Key Concepts (edited book)Routledge. 2019.Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts engender insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or loca…Read more
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61Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended MindsTheory, Culture and Society 32 (1): 33-59. 2015.The concept of a socially extended mind suggests that our cognitive processes are extended not simply by the various tools and technologies we use, but by other minds in our intersubjective interactions and, more systematically, by institutions that, like tools and technologies, enable and sometimes constitute our cognitive processes. In this article we explore the potential of this concept to facilitate the development of a critical neuroscience. We explicate the concept of cognitive institutio…Read more
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348Affekt Macht Netz. Auf dem Weg zu einer Sozialtheorie der Digitalen Gesellschaft (Hg. Breljak/ Mühlhoff/ Slaby) (edited book)transcript. 2019.Shitstorms, Hate Speech oder virale Videos, die zum Klicken, Liken, Teilen bewegen: Die vernetzte Gesellschaft ist von Affekten getrieben und bringt selbst ganz neue Affekte hervor. Die Beiträge des Bandes nehmen die medientechnologischen Entwicklungen unserer Zeit in den Blick und untersuchen sie aus der Perspektive einer kritischen Affekt- und Sozialphilosophie. Sie zeigen: Soziale Medien und digitale Plattformen sind nicht nur Räume des Austauschs, sie erschaffen Affektökonomien – und darin l…Read more
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31Living in the Moment: Boredom and the Meaning of Existence in Heidegger and PessoaYearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy 2017 (2): 235-256. 2017.It was not only in his infamous speeches as NSDAP-approved Führer- Rektor of Freiburg University that Heidegger advocated what can be seen as an ‘activist’ understanding of human existence. To exist, according to this approach, means to be called upon to take charge of one’s life - actively, responsibly, authentically - whether mandated by Volk and Führer or not. Heideggerian resoluteness amounts to being active in a deep sense, a view articulated during the Rektoratszeit in the form of an outri…Read more
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66Steps towards a Critical NeurosciencePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (3): 397-416. 2010.This paper introduces the motivation and idea behind the recently founded interdisciplinary initiative Critical Neuroscience ( http://www.critical-neuroscience.org ). Critical Neuroscience is an approach that strives to understand, explain, contextualize, and, where called for, critique developments in and around the social, affective, and cognitive neurosciences with the aim to create the competencies needed to responsibly deal with new challenges and concerns emerging in relation to the brain …Read more