ABSTRACT

This chapter gives a brief overview of the (re-)discovery of feeling, emotion, and affect after the ‘emotional turn’ of the 1980s and the ‘affective turn’ in the early 2000s. The debates are the starting point for the conceptualisation of our own analytical vocabulary – centred upon the term ‘affect’ and with an emphasis on power relations. Our critical socio-theoretical approach conceives affects as complex experiences at the interface of corporeality, cognitive perception and knowledge, and psychic processes and social experiences. Affects are processes, forms of becoming rather than being, and thus are continuously changing. They structure behaviour and the capacity to act, but at the same time they are also structured by social norms and expectations. Our concept of affect focuses on embodiments of social experiences and on bodily capacities in the processes of subjectivation.