ABSTRACT
Tatum's social psychology is not as smoothly an apology for dominant visions of Homo sapiens, but what is common to most psychology-though not to psychoanalysis, which the author defend strongly against long-standing attacks from the mainstream-is a deliberate dematerialization of the body-milieu nexus. In the chapter on the founding of public schools in the South, for example, it is clear just how strong a political role racist affects around the education of African Americans played. Affect theory is necessary to the author for countering the continuing prevalence of the mind/body, reason/feeling, individual/society, and human/nonhuman dichotomies in the social sciences, but the people should also investigate how that hegemonic episteme reproduces a system ever more disastrously ego-centered. In some countries, especially probably France, there remains a disdain on the left for talking about affect like this, as if they automatically reduce politics to the personal, to the consolidation of identities.
