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Introduction
The current critical attention paid to affect (or emotion) is a peculiar phenomenon.1 As Sienne Ngai and Rei Terada remind us, the death sentence has been passed on emotions by post-modern critics such as Fredric Jameson, who influentially characterizes one of the traits of post-modern art and culture as the "waning of affect," so it is perhaps not far fetched to hypothesize a kind of diachronic historicism: are we witnessing a return to the romanticist emotivism, in a time "after the death of the subject?"2 But first and foremost is affect the same as emotion or feeling? The academic, arcane and even artificial word - affect - is intriguing, for, as the French psychoanalyst André Green reminds us in Le discours vivant , affect is not a French word before the translation of the psychoanalytic concept from German (Green, 1973, p. 13). Even Freud himself is inconsistent in the use of the word "affect": for one thing he uses ambiguous terms such as "psychical affects " and "sexual affects " in his early draft on anxiety (Freud, 1894); for another, he completely overthrows the idea that affect has to be conscious in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety , where he makes anxiety the signal or preparedness for an impending threat (see Freud, 1894, 1915, 1925). These simple questions - "What is affect?" and "Is affect emotion?" - conceal conflicting theoretical torrents that demand a zigzag - or, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, rhizomatic - way of reading. With the radical paradigmatic shifts in the post-postmodern, post-poststructuralist, or simply, post-human era, an unexamined adherence to a school of affect theory would most likely bypass the affective force behind this phenomenon.
What makes affect, rather than feeling or emotion, such an excitable idea is precisely the "quantitative leap" from the antiquated concept of emotion to the other scene of politics. I draw attention to two important theorists, whose works exemplify such a turn, in order to chart a trajectory of current affect studies and to showcase its forces as well as its possible limitations. The works and theorists in question are Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002; hereafter as Parables ) and Eve Sedgwick's Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003)....