ABSTRACT
In affective life affects take hold, change, flow, resonate, dampen and excite. By talking about affective life, rather than, perhaps, an affective field, Ben Anderson points to the manner in which affect is incorporated, moving through bodies. The affective changes might simmer just below the consciousness, affecting one’s response to various events through mood but without reaching the level of perception. In particular, William Mazzarella suggests that the affective mediation of ‘resonance’ can explain the same phenomena, but without the autonomy of affect. In Cruel Optimism Berlant comments that ‘at least since Althusser, ideology theory has been the place to which critical theory has gone for explanations of affective realism, of how people’s desires become mediated through attachments to modes of life to which they rarely remember consenting, at least initially’. Anderson draws out a double sense of mediation: affective life is always-already ‘in the midst of’ relations and processes and inseparable from those relations and processes.
