Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity.
Key takeaways
Not read beyond the publisher’s sample. The preface says the book’s concepts, among them “‘differential affective attunement’, ‘collective individuation’, ‘micropolitics’, ‘thinking-feeling’, ‘bare activity’, ‘ontopower’ and ‘immanent critique’”, “relay the base definition of affect with which the first interview begins”. The first interview (with Mary Zournazi, 2002) gives it after Spinoza: affect “is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity”, and “every transition is accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity”.
Why this is here
Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) take their definition of affect from it (p. 1353): affect is “a dimension of every event” (p. 47), “a power to affect and be affected [that] governs a transition, where a body passes from one state of capacitation to a diminished or augmented state of capacitation. This comes with the corollary that the transition is felt” (p. 48). They also cite p. 200 for “a field of relation” (pp. 1354, 1356). The definition was checked word for word against ch. 2’s first printing (LIT-1905, p. 1). Page 200 could not be checked. The parent’s use of the definition is discussed there and in THEORY-1282.