ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an outline how questions of affectivity have become more important to scholars interested in thinking through and interrogating geopolitical cultures. Then, the attention registers through efforts to conceptualise how the affective nature of 9/11 was crucial to subsequent efforts to provide justification and legitimacy for military intervention. While O Tuathail's discussion arguably reinforces a suspicion of affectivity as something detrimental to argument and analysis, it nevertheless foregrounds the need to recognise that geopolitical cultures operate through and are sustained via processes that are always more than discursive. The interest in affectivity registers in discussions of how geopolitical intervention post-9/11 has been organised around particular imperatives, the most important of which is pre-emption. This interest in affectivity is also beginning to register in work on the relation between geopolitics and visual culture.
