Description

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Since the mid-1990s, affect has become central to the social sciences and humanities. Debates abound over how to conceptualise affect, and how to understand the interrelationships between affective life and a range of contemporary political transformations. In Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson explores why understanding affect matters and offers one account of affective life that hones in on the different ways in which affects are ordered. Intervening in debates around non-representational theories, he argues that affective life is always-already 'mediated' - the never finished product of apparatuses, encounters and conditions. Through a wide range of examples including dread-debility-dependency in torture, ordinary hopes, and precariousness, Anderson shows the significance of affect for understanding life today.

About the Author

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Ben Anderson is a Reader in Human Geography at Durham University. In addition to numerous articles on affect and emotion and the politics of contemporary security, he is the co-editor of Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography.