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LIT-1919: The Autonomy of Affect

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StatusUnfetched — registered 2026-10-31, not read. A copy of the published article (the JSTOR scan of Cultural Critique 31, pp. 83–109) sits on a faculty site, http://www.davidbardschwarz.com/pdf/massumi.pdf, a lawful copy under ADR-064. A reprint as chapter 1 of Parables for the Virtual sits on a University of Tartu course page, https://sisu.ut.ee/wp-content/uploads/sites/172/massumi._the_autonomy_of_affect-1.pdf. On 2026-10-31 this session's permission system refused the download of both, and the refusal was not worked around. JSTOR (10.2307/1354446) is closed; OpenAlex reports no open copy. A browser and a minute should reach the first address.
Tagsemotion-and-affect, metaphysics

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Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31, 83–109. doi:10.2307/1354446.

Key takeaways

Registered from metadata, not a reading. The essay is standardly cited for a distinction between affect, as intensity not yet owned or qualified, and emotion, as intensity “owned and recognized”, and for the thesis that affect is autonomous of signification. These are not checked.

Why this is here

Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) cite it twice. “Affect is a response to another’s action on one’s body, prior to one’s attribution of meaning and signification to that action (Massumi, 1995)” (p. 1354). People try to work out how an action affects their individuation “un/intentionally, un/consciously, in/voluntarily, and so on (Massumi, 1995)” (p. 1358). Both are paraphrases, not quotations, and could not be checked against the essay. The later interview (LIT-1905, read) agrees that affect comes before content and before the subject (“in the instant of the affective hit, there is no content yet”, p. 5). It also warns against reading affect as between already-formed subjects, which “a response to another’s action on one’s body” comes close to.

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