The Affect Theory Reader Quotes

“When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Affect Theory Reader

“Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear-in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion”
― Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader

“Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Affect Theory Reader

“The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence.”
― Lauren Berlant, The Affect Theory Reader

“Shame is a painful thing to write about. It gets into your body. It gets to you.”
― Elspeth Probyn, The Affect Theory Reader

“Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces-visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion-that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise”
― Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader

“while affect in the Deleuzian sense is asubjective and anti-representational, operating across the boundary between the organic and the nonorganic, Tomkins's affect theory enables the specification of the energetic dimension of affect in very precise ways.”
― Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader

“The felt reality of the threat is so superlatively real that it translates into a felt certainty about the world, even in the absence of other grounding for it in the observable world.”
― Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader

“Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.”
― Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader