Lacan famously said that affects lie, and the only affect that doesn’t lie is anxiety. The question of affect is of course a dense topic in Freud, not quite emotion, not quite drive, perhaps something repressed, perhaps some kind of oozing of the repressed, all of which seems to make and break social bonds. What is the relationship between affect and language? What is the difference between affect, psychoanalytically speaking, and the more conventional ‘feeling’? While it is true that affect theory is enjoying new prominence within philosophy, it is likewise true that affects have been a point of contention throughout psychoanalytic history. In this conversation— centered around Vladimir Safatle’s new book, The Circuit of Affects: Political Bodies, Distress and the End of...Read More