Prolegomena to the Writing of Affect

Abstract

The article is a critical discussion of the concepts of “affect” in some of those positions of contemporary political theory that are based in (a critique of) psychoanalysis. Freud’s definition of “identification” – the key notion in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego – as both a psychic mechanism and an affect – helps to elucidate the aporetic status of affects (and mechanisms) in psychoanalysis and thus in psychoanalytically informed political theory. Instead of providing a link or shuttle between psychoanalysis and political thought and practice, affect, understood as the fundamental “Hilsfslosigkeit”, and as the enigma of identification, severs psychoanalysis from the political. This cleavage is a place of incalculable invention: writing might be a name for it.