ABSTRACT
Affectivity, sense, and affects: it is on the basis of these three terms that the author would like to begin a reflection on emotions that will be speculative; such a reflection would on the one hand think about the limits of what philosophical conceptuality can know, divulge, or reveal about emotions, and on the other hand, it would interpret the affective life in an experimental way in relation to biological thinking. The impression on the organism which constitutes the experience of being affected by something will always and without exception have some sense for the affected organism, even, and perhaps above all, when this sense remains below any possibility of linguistic meaning and below any operation of understanding or cognition that might be called superior or rational. All that exists is one and the same physical corporeal and mental reality that precedes the body–mind distinction.
