ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of three key sources of the affective turn, each of which presents a different concept of affect (affect as autonomous virtual intensity, as drive amplification, and as unconscious psychic energy). It explains three of the important tributaries that contributed toward influencing the affective turn, each of which operates with a rather different concept of affect. Using one of Henri Bergson’s favorite distinctions, Brian Massumi defines affect as something virtual as distinct from something actual. Emotion is thus defined by Massumi in relation to the capture and taming of affect, and is associated with the higher order processes of meaning-making, consciousness, and communication that are often grasped with concepts of discourse. Massumi describes Baruch Spinoza as being “a formidable philosophical precursor on many of the points: on the difference in nature between affect and emotion.
