Affect, Provocation, and Far Right Rhetoric

Abstract

Many of those working within or along with the so-called affective turn in the humanities do so following the Deleuzian (cf. 1997) understanding of affect as a force or kind of intensity to be thought separate from processes of signification or discursive construction, indeed, as something that fundamentally disturbs or challenges the stability of such structures of meaning. As such, Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro both emphasize the distinction between affect and emotion, by insisting that, whereas emotions are meaningful and differentiated signifiers of affect, thus domesticated and segregated by the symbolic system (Massumi, 2002, p. 28), affect itself is ‘primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presub-jective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive’ (Shaviro, 2009, p. 3). A focus on the affective dimension of politics can therefore be part of the attempt to understand the nonsensical, bodily irrational, or in a sense ‘un-serious’ dimension of contemporary politics. This is a dimension which often escapes theories and methodologies focused on examining processes of ‘making sense’.