Search

There are three possible ways of access to phenomena of suffered violence: the first is the experience of those who have suffered violence themselves; the second is the experience of eyewitnesses; the third, which is the most frequent one, is an indirect access through the testimony of people belonging to the first two categories. Each way of access has advantages but also serious difficulties, both in terms of the objectivity of the experience and of the possibility to express it in language. No one is free from an affective and a normative dimension; this implies that there is a certain tension with regard to the phenomenological reduction. The paper offers an analysis of these ways of access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the issue of trance in anthropology, ethnomusicology and dance studies through the problem of the role of music and dance in achieving a trance state. The paper focuses on two important studies of trance. The first among them is the study Music and Trance by French ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget. In this study, Rouget examines the connection between trance and certain music and dance practices by discussing the key question: do certain musical instruments necessarily lead to trance? The second study represents the recent work of an ethnomusicologist Judith Becker, called Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing, in which Becker explores the synergy between music, emotion, and trance in an intercultural context. Although these two studies have a lot in common with each other, the key difference would be Becker's reliance on recent research in psychology and neuroscience, that led to new research approaches to music and dance. Therefore, although Becker relies on Rouget's pioneering study, almost twenty years of the difference between these studies has led to recent dialogues between anthropological and culturalist approaches on the one hand and psychological and biological research on the other. The paper will present contemporary outcomes of these debates in anthropology through recent approaches to ritual, in dance studies through the question of kinesthesia, in ethnomusicology through the affect theory, and interdisciplinary interactions between them as well.

Copyright of Activités is the property of ARPACT and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), a novel situated in Chechnya between 1994 and 2004, focusing on the poetic status of details and their role in the representation of violence and the circulation of affect. The descriptions, inventories and portraits reveal the filter of a subject's gaze and frequently rely on lists and enumerations, the better to convey a sense of loss and absence. Incongruous or poignant details function as weapons of resistance, drawing our attention to effects of contextualization and inviting us to perceive the complexity of experience through a dynamics of defrel figuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnography analyses the construction of personhood in relation to tattoos and their removal by exploring the affective response the author had during his first tattoo removal experience. Influenced by Renato Rosaldo’s imperialist nostalgia, the paper explores how this response was negotiated through the memories of a younger self in conjunction with present circumstances as a graduate student. In doing so, the paper reflects on the ever-changing relationship between the author and the tattoo and the role this connection has played and continues to play within the constitution of the author’s subjectivity.

The goal of this paper is to provide an example of how multidimensional scaling (MDS) can be used for stimuli development. The study described in this paper illustrates this process by developing affective mental imagery stimuli using the circumplex model of affect as a guide. The circumplex model of affect argues that all emotions can be described in terms of two underlying primary dimensions: valence and arousal (Russel, 1980). We used MDS to determine if affective mental imagery stimuli obtained from verbal prompts could be separated by arousal and valence to create four distinct categories (high –positive, low-positive, high-negative, and low-negative) as seen in other stimuli. 60 students from the University of South Carolina participated in the first experiment to evaluate three sets of stimuli. After being analyzed using MDS, selected stimuli were then assessed again in a second experiment to validate their robust valence and arousal distinctions. The second experiment was conducted with 34 subjects to validate 40 of the best stimuli from experiment 1. It was found that mental imagery stimuli can produce a reliable affective response for the dimensions of valence and arousal and that MDS can be an effective tool for stimuli development.

At the intersection of medical, political and cultural geography, this paper investigates colonial blues (cafard colonial), a kind of homesickness, which appeared among the French Foreign Legion and African colonial army during the 1880s. At first, the cafard colonial was considered specific to these troops and claimed as one of their identifying characteristics. Then, in the 1910s, physicians defined this form of nostalgia as a colonial pathology. During Word War I, the cafard affected as well French soldiers in the trenches and in the 1920s eventually became nothing but a kind of blues that may be experienced by anyone in French Society. In French colonies, cafard crises often resulted in explosive violence, easy to excuse because of its medicalization. The cafard is indeed consubstantial with colonization and its contradictions, which make finding a rightful place impossible for the colonizers. This paper calls for a critical analysis of geographical affects.

A “lost” 9/11 photograph re-surfaced publicly in 2005/2006 and triggered some revealing debate in the United States about what 9/11 images “should” show. The paper unpacks the image and some key responses to it in order to describe a contemporary “Machiavellian moment” in which civic humanist ideals turn out to deny a reality that the image briefly hinted at, a reality recovered in the paper via discussion of a YouTube commentary thread concerned with a 9/11 “tribute” mashup video derived from comic books. Contrasting the latter with “proper” debate in The New Yorker and elsewhere, the paper argues for the necessity of hearing a different conversation that is discernibly “out there”. The result of doing so will be a better understanding of the materialization of affect in images and speech acts. It is argued that this will help us better grasp the nature of the “hot cognitions” that focus around a major event such as 9/11 and the ways in which those are mediated.

Résumé Objectifs La théorie de l’attachement dans le domaine du vieillissement propose une approche nouvelle et pertinente pour comprendre la clinique du sujet âgé et les enjeux de ses relations à autrui. La vieillesse rend parfois le sujet vulnérable physiquement et psychiquement et l’inscrit dans une relation de dépendance à autrui. Cet article pose l’hypothèse d’une spécificité de l’attachement chez le sujet âgé. Méthode Cet écrit rend compte des premiers résultats d’une étude en cours visant à évaluer l’attachement chez des sujets âgés de plus de 65 ans. En utilisant une procédure d’analyse d’entretiens semi-structurés, inspirée du paradigme de l’attachement (Edicode), deux situations cliniques parmi les vingt situations rencontrées sont présentées pour illustrer deux profils d’attachement particuliers. Les sujets de cette étude ont participé à un entretien clinique semi-structuré enregistré, retranscrit puis analysé selon la méthode d’évaluation Edicode en double cotation, ont rempli avec l’aide du chercheur une échelle d’attachement (Questionnaire des Échelles de Relations), une échelle de santé (Indicateur de Santé Perceptuelle de Nottingham) et une échelle d’anxiété et de dépression (HAD). Résultats Les données issues de ces deux illustrations montrent l’importance de considérer les formes d’énonciation du récit et la mise en forme des expériences subjectives souvent douloureuses chez le public âgé. Ce récit permet d’évaluer le niveau d’élaboration des pertes liées à l’âge et la capacité pour le sujet d’y associer des affects. Nous observons également un lien entre ce degré d’élaboration des pertes et le profil d’attachement du sujet. Discussion À partir du constat d’un grand nombre de sujets détachés au grand âge comparativement à la population générale, nous discutons l’hypothèse d’une spécificité de l’attachement détaché dans la vieillesse. Le détachement serait une tentative plus ou moins opérante pour le sujet de lutter contre l’effondrement et la dépression liés aux pertes mais aussi à la raréfaction des relations. Conclusion Il n’existe pas d’effet de causalité simple du passé sur le présent dans l’attachement et le détachement peut s’entendre comme un mécanisme de dégagement ultime. L’aidant doit entendre l’angoisse que suscite la relation pour ces personnes contraintes de dépendre des autres. Objectives The attachment theory in the area of gerontology offers a new and relevant paradigm for the clinical understanding of the elderly and their style of relationship. Old age can sometimes make subjects more vulnerable physically as well as psychologically, while ageing people tend to be more dependent on others. This article hypothesises that attachment in the ageing process has specific features. Method This paper shows the first results from a recent study assessing attachment among people aged 65 and over. The approach is based on the attachment paradigm (Edicode protocol), and implemented semi-structured interviews. Two examples selected from 20 cases encountered are presented to illustrate two specific attachment styles. The semi-structured interviews were transcribed and analysed following the Edicode method, with double scoring. Respondents also completed different scales under supervision by the researcher: an attachment scale (Relationship Scales Questionnaire), a general health scale (Nottingham Health Profile) and an anxiety and depression scale (HADS). Results The results for the two examples used in this article show the interest of taking into account the different forms of enunciation of the narrative, as well as the way subjective, often painful experiences are told. The narrative enables an assessment of how far the elderly subject is able to cope with various age-related losses, and how they express their emotions about these losses. We observed a link between the level of representation of losses and the attachment style. Discussion Given the numbers of people with detached attachment style in old age compared to attachment in the general population, we can hypothesise that attachment during ageing has particular features. Elderly people may try to fight off collapse and depression by a detached attachment style helping them to endure losses and waning relationships. Conclusion The past attachment style does not always explain the current attachment style, and the detached style can be seen as a final attempt to escape. Caregivers should be aware that dependent persons may fear relationships because they generate anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circulation of a literary quotation in the public space raises a number of questions: what are the intrinsic characteristics of the segment that explain its separation from the initial text? What are the different vectors of its dissemination? But also, what does this emerging formula consist of in the course of its different public, notably political and commercial, iterations? We explore these questions through the wanderings of a René Char quotation in the public space in order to shed light on the affective mechanisms at work in its popularity, but also on the resulting emotional effects of its iterative and palimpsestic reception. I build on the logic of vagueness and the notion of nexus to shed light on the affective power attached to the indeterminacy of a set of words. However, the paper also shows the role played by the precision of the contours of a specific phrasing. This combination of factors plays an essential role in our attachments to certain statements.

Mapping new administrative domains for integrating conservation and development, and defining rights in terms of both new policy and the citizenry governed thereby, have been central to postcolonial neoliberal environmental governance programmes known as Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM). Examples now abound of the complex, ambiguous and sometimes contested outcomes of CBNRM initiatives and processes. In this paper I draw on archival, oral history and ethnographic material for north-west Namibia, particularly in relation to indigenous Khoekhoegowab-speaking Damara / ǂNūkhoen and ǁUbun peoples, to explore two issues. First, I highlight the significance of historical colonial and apartheid contexts generating mapped reorganisations of land and human populations for memories of access and use that exceed these reorganisations. Second, I foreground a nexus of conceptual, constitutive and affective relationships with lands now bounded as CBNRM administrative units or ‘conservancies’ that have tended to be disrupted through both past events and as economising neoliberal governance approaches have taken hold in this context. Acknowledging disjunctions in conceptions and experiences of people-land relationships may assist with understanding who and what is amplified or diminished in contemporary globalising trajectories in neoliberal environmental governance. In particular, oral histories recording individual experiences in-depth, especially those of elderly people prompted by return to remembered places of past dwelling, can historicise and deepen recognition of complex cultural landscapes that today carry high conservation value.

Mapping new administrative domains for integrating conservation and development, and defining rights in terms of both new policy and the citizenry governed thereby, have been central to postcolonial neoliberal environmental governance programmes known as Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM). Examples now abound of the complex, ambiguous and sometimes contested outcomes of CBNRM initiatives and processes. In this paper I draw on archival, oral history and ethnographic material for north-west Namibia, particularly in relation to indigenous Khoekhoegowab-speaking Damara / ǂNūkhoe and ǁUbu peoples, to explore two issues. First, I highlight the significance of historical colonial and apartheid contexts generating mapped reorganisations of land and human populations for memories of access and use that exceed these reorganisations. Second, I foreground a nexus of conceptual, constitutive and affective relationships with lands now bounded as CBNRM administrative units or ‘conservancies’ that have tended to be disrupted through both past events and as economising neoliberal governance approaches have taken hold in this context. Acknowledging disjunctions in conceptions and experiences of people-land relationships may assist with understanding who and what is amplified or diminished in contemporary globalising trajectories in neoliberal environmental governance. In particular, oral histories recording individual experiences in-depth, especially those of elderly people prompted by return to remembered places of past dwelling, can historicise and deepen recognition of complex cultural landscapes that today carry high conservation value.

The philosophical reflection on non-existence is an issue that has been tackled at the very start of philosophy and constitutes since the publication in 1905 of Russell’s “On Denoting” one of the most thorny and heated debates in analytic philosophy. However the fierce debates on the semantics of proper names and definite descriptions which took off after the publication of Strawson’s ‘On Referring’ in 1950did not trigger a systematic study of the semantics of fiction. In fact, the systematic development of a link that articulates the approaches to fiction of logic; philosophy and literature had to wait until the work of John Woods, who published in 1974 the book Logic of Fiction: A Philosophical Sounding of Deviant Logic. One of the most exciting challenges of Woods’ book relates to the interaction between the internalist or inside-the-story (mainly pragmatist) and externalist or outside-the-story (mainly semantic) points of view. For that purpose Woods formulated as first a fictionality operator to be read as “according to the story …” in relation to the logical scope of which issues on internalism and externalism could be studied. The discussions on fiction that followed Woods’ book not only seem not to fade away but even give rise to new and vigorous research impulses. Relevant fact for our paper is that in the phenomenological tradition too, the study of fiction has a central role to play. Indeed, one of the most controversial issues in intentionality is the problem of the existence-independence; i.e. the purported fact that intentional acts need not be directed at any existent object. Influenced by the work of the prominent student of Husserl, Roman Ingarden (1893-1970), Amie Thomasson develops the phenomenological concept of ontological dependence in order to explain how we can perform inter- and transfictional-reference - for example in the context of literary interpretation. The main claim of this paper is that a bi-dimensional multimodal reconstruction of Thomasson’s-Ingarden’s theory on fictional characters which takes seriously the fact that fictions are creations opens the door to the articulation between the internalist and the externalist approaches. We will motivate some changes on the artifactual approach – including an appropriate semantics for the fictionality operator that, we hope, will awaken the interest of theoreticians of literature. The paper could be also seen as an overview of how different concepts of intentionality might yield different formal semantics for fictionality. We will provide a dialogical framework that is a modal extension of a certain proof system developed by Matthieu Fontaine and Juan Redmond. The dialogical framework develops the inferential counterpart to the the bi-dimensional semantics introduced by Rahman and Tulenheimo in arecent paper.

Copyright of Societes is the property of De Boeck Universite and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, the author explores the clinical presentation of two patients who have recourse to fetishistic solutions. In one case, that of addictive sexuality, the patient is a foot fetishist; in the other, the fetishism takes the form of cross-dressing. In her discussion of the clinical material, the author develops issues raised by contemporary psychoanalysts concerning the Freudian metapsychology of perversion, the paradigm for which is fetishism. Contemporary ideas on fetishism have much less to do with sexual issues as such and more to do with the vicissitudes of primary narcissism: the fetishistic solution involves, above all, a primitive sense of identity that goes beyond sexual identification and object choice. The author then shows how some forms of so-called perverse sexual behaviour may in fact be an attempt to rebuild earlier deficiencies in the self's relationship with the primary object. With non-neurotic patients, the therapeutic process consists in bringing to the fore what was missed out in the primary organization of self-identity and in restoring the dimension of affect-failures that evoke the absence, in the primary environment, of any sharing of affect or mirroring potentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue Anthropologie et Sociétés is the property of Anthropologie et Societies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cioran's discontinuous, fragmental writing has a philosophical, as well as an affective and literary value, which makes any attempt of classification uneasy. While exploring the general idea of literature outside traditional theories of mimesis and representation, this paper argues that Cioran's work is neither philosophical nor confessional but is instead a way of staging and dramatizing (and not representing) the author's thoughts and affects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers Internationaux de Psychologie Sociale is the property of Presses Universitaires de Liege and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: The question of time in psychoses has been studied more often as lived time (perceived) than as discursive time (abstract). The specificity of lived time in psychosis can disturb the modes of “intrigue setting” (‘mise en intrigue’ according to Ricœur seems to translate lived time into a narrative process), particularly as concerns lack of dating or excess of dating. In this paper, the authors study the phenomenon they have named “hyperdating” and its defensive function in psychosis. “Hyperdating” would be a function of overdating, illustrating the distance between the patient who “hyperdates” and the affective charge he feels. “Hyperdating” would then consist in a radical lack of the dating function. The purpose of dating would not be to tag events temporally in order to organize the narrative chronologically, but to proceed to evacuate the meaning out of the event by designating only its date. In fact, we suppose that the affect would be shifted onto this date, and thus disconnected with the representation of the event for which there are representational deficiencies and probably a very intensive original affective load. Dating is a vehicle of chronology, and is the manifestation of a faculty for the narrative of self to become an autobiography as temporal experience. We suppose that in psychosis, this process is inefficient. In fact, there is either a lack of dating of narrative events, or a “hyperdating” which overloads narrative with temporal pseudo-indicators, in particular through quasi-sacred dates. “Hyperdating” would therefore be a defensive psychic process against the traumatic load connected to the remembrance of the event, transferring the central characteristics to the date itself, which would then be exterior to any meaningful chronology. The authors propose to define this “hyperdating” phenomenon, and to investigate its psychic function. The methodology is qualitative, and based on two clinical cases, one of schizophrenia, the other of mania. A single case of schizophrenia: We think that in schizophrenia the “hyperdating” phenomenon could be underlain by a schism between affect and representation. This is an isolating process which fits into a psychotic dissociation, recalling the break characterising schizophrenic temporality. The speech is centred on a time-based accuracy to the detriment of experience narration and its affective expression. It then seems that “hyperdating” enables the person to avoid the huge traumatic load related to the factual content in order to shift the affective load on the dating itself. A single case of mania: Here “hyderdating” would be the expression of a game with dates in an omnipotent process. This game appears as a mosaic, a disjointed and blurred control attempt lacking a linear temporal trajectory. In mania, a cumulated series of dates does not ensure either temporal links or any necessary “temporalisation” for “intrigue setting”. Time is one of the forms of “discontinuity and hopping” frozen in instantaneity. “Hyperdating” reveals a need to control the temporal flux which can only fail and it is, under a chronological appearance, an expression of a temporality frozen on the return of the same. The lack of temporal succession and of alternatives to “temporalisation” of events by means of a date which freezes them and removes their affective dimension can only render the reflexive capture of an identity through a biographic narrative problematic. Conclusion: Thus, other than the discrepancies related to the specificity of the “hyperdating” process in the psychic economy of psychotic patients, there would be some similarities concerning “hyperdatation” in psychoses such as abortive attempts of intrigue restoration, deadlock of the chronological function of dating, but also freezing of temporalisation on a number. These illustrate the schism or the instantaneity, devoid of any temporal flux and therefore of any link with “withholding” (apprehension of what has just occurred) and with “protention” (intuition of the immediate future), which characterise time experience according to Husserl. The limits of our study are rooted in the difficulty of identifying this phenomenon as it seems to occur less often than those concerning forgetting or lack of dating. Furthermore the links between “hyperdating” and the affect management process as well as the differences of those links within the different types of psychosis will need to be investigated more thoroughly. That is why the prospects of this study could be the following ones: interrogating the links between “hyperdating” and memory in psychoses. (Is the “hyperdating” phenomenon a failed attempt to recover memories, and/or an attempt to shape raw mnesic traces?); further investigations of the psychotic temporality issue; therapeutic contributions in the management of time and affects could be based on these previous points as far as it seems that it is only through the flexibility of such a defence that the patient will reach the affects and integrate them in an intersubjective relationship with the therapist. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Cahiers Internationaux de Psychologie Sociale is the property of Presses Universitaires de Liege and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Desire is woven into the ways in which people ‘do things with things’, that is, culture. Indeed, Karl Marx and David Ricardo’s initial value theories deliver meaningful insight into the social relations of production. But, today, it isn’t simply workers that supply and consumers that demand; immaterial products increasingly derive value through the psychic dynamics of a range of engaged ‘players’ irrespective of categories of worker, employer, consumer, audience, follower, passer-by, owner, or investor et cetera, and individual labor is evermore entangled with, and inseparable from, the life of the mind. Importantly, in contemporary conditions, the law of value is an especially necessary measure for allowing such invisible affected labors to be socially revealed and appreciated. Drawing on Melbourne, Australia, as an example of a ‘liveable’ metropolitan centre that is built of immaterial labor, this conceptual paper examines the separation, or disconnect, between culture and production in formal economics, compared with the integration of subjectivities, affect, audiences, and cultures that actually make and re-make (immaterial) values, to reimagine a new theory of value grounded in affect.

That Stella Benson’s Living Alone (1919) has received little critical attention can probably be explained both by its paradoxical articulation of absurd comedy, fantasy and psychological realism, and by the overwhelming influence of exceptional patterns and instances within the diegesis. The novel triangulates humour, magic and distress; it relies on two exceptional characters, an unnamed witch (whose magic powers jar with her inability to feel any emotions) and the heroine, Sarah Brown, who fails to interact with people around, partly because of her declining health and limited social skills. In this paper, I thus aim to contextualise the exceptionality of Benson’s novel and, drawing from affective and disability studies, to explore the ways in which the exceptional experiences of these two marginalised female characters, a seemingly all-powerful witch and a particularly perceptive disabled female protagonist, are constructed, conveyed and interrogated.

The author argues that commemoration is more complicated than simply “connecting” people to the past, promulgating particular political agendas or reinforcing collective rituals of national identity. Instead, she proposes that the we need to approach it from how it is felt and experienced, rather than focus only its history, discourse or symbolism. She advocates for an approach to commemoration that focuses on atmospheres, conceptually and empirically. In this paper, she suggests the use of methodologies that, by attending to atmospheres, consider how people feel in and about commemorative sites. She shows how digital, sensory and/or visual ethnographic approaches can be used, and explains how these are helping to extend understandings of commemorative spacetimes. Finally, she considers two areas of possibility offered her approach. If such moves can make possible new understandings of commemorative sites and events in peoples’ lives, it is because they help illuminate the relationship between individual and collective experience, identifying how shared affects can amplify events and make them more meaningful, but also how feelings can be subverting or loosening our connection to state narratives. Attending to the experiential alongside the discursive, in other words, helps us understand both the durability and the fragility of shared identity narratives.

Copyright of Commposite is the property of Les Editions Electroniques COMMposite and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the interrelation between literature, photography, and public memory under the conditions of authoritarian and neoliberal state control. Focusing on a fictionalized photograph of the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany in Uwe Johnson’s novel The Third Book about Achim (1967), I explore the performative capacity of photo-literary spaces to open up, and disrupt, institutionalized productions of public memory. Whereas official memorial technologies tend to close down alternative interpretations of history, this essay shows how small-scale, clandestine, or itinerant photographs embedded in literary archives animate historical impasses and possibilities, which persist to be responded to by future readers. More specifically, drawing on affect theory and political philosophy, I aim to rehabilitate photography’s indexicality as a performative register that enables human proximities across the boundaries of time and space.

Revisiting the pointless Falklands war for the stage, over three decades after it took place, was a very timely endeavor for the Argentinean director Lola Arias. By comparison to the larger and more devastating wars of our time, the Falklands conflict was a minor incident in international military history. However, it had a high toll for both nations involved—and all for a futile, absurd cause. By recruiting three Argentinean and three British veterans who actually fought in this war, Arias lets a polyphony of remembered experiences from the conflict rewrite the story from the point of view of individuals who actually confronted each other in the battlefield and had to reconsider afterwards their position vis-à-vis their own nation and government and the rest of humanity. The rehearsal period (longer than the actual duration of the war) and the performance itself brought up a real “minefield” of traumatic memories and repressed emotions which kept reeling and reformulating the stories shared among the veterans and narrated to the audience. Arias combined authenticity with psychoanalytic techniques, devised theatre with personal narrative, digital technology with live music and she trained her recruited war veterans enough to change crude documentary drama into participatory theatre. The paper will make a twofold analysis of the production, on the one hand focusing on the idea of nationhood and identity and on the other hand examining the efficacy of the specific form of verbatim theatre aesthetic employed.

This paper discusses the relation between landscape and affect in the works of Virginia Woolf, by tracing the influence of pastoral elegy in her writing. The most beautiful pastoral elegies in the English language echo throughout her works: ‘Lycidas’ in the first section of A Room of One’s Own; ‘Adonais’ in The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway; ‘Thyrsis’ in The Waves. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf drew on and reinterpreted some of the conventions of the genre to redefine the landscape/soundscape as a poetic medium for the circulation and metaphoric capture of affects, transitory states of being, abstract blocks of sensation, unattached to any specific subject, but related to fragments of the traditional landscape of elegy and tapping into the figurative pools of collective memory. Seasonal changes, which mark the passing of time and the work of mourning in pastoral elegies, are transposed in Virginia Woolf’s novel as micro-variations in light and shade, gradual changes in the weather, the quality of the air, or the intensity of colours, which convey an image of the elegiac landscape, not as a fixed pictorial frame, but as process, the process through which the conversion of loss into artistic creation can be effected.

This paper seeks, based on examples, to make work psychology questionable by philosophers. With Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who died in 1934, we support a position that borrowed a lot from Spinoza, particularly on the question of the affect. With regard to work, the link between ethics, psychology and politics is explored.

The present paper first refers itself to the difference between affects (immediate and nearly unconscious) and emotions (more conscious and liable to distance). It then analyses two series of textual facts. First, the taboo attached to death and its representation in contemporary England, and the repression of emotion caused by it in the protagonists, and second the narrative means used to render what amounts to a near blockage: seven narrators, the surprises of memory, the series of objective correlatives corresponding to it and interruptions and silences. It ends on remarks about the delicate mixture in the text as a whole between emotion and distance that might be said to call up Proust.

T.S. Eliot was a prominent poet-critic of the modernist period whose theories have still as much penetrating influence on contemporary thinking as his poetry. Eliot cannot be confined to a single period such as modernism when his affinity with various opposing schools of thinking is considered. The same is true for Gilles Deleuze who, as a unique and idiosyncratic philosopher resists any categorization. We identify postmodern tendencies in the modernism of Eliot in the same way as we identify modernist sensibilities in the poststructuralism of Deleuze. A comparison between Eliot’s views of time, memory and perception and those of Deleuze may bring to light some resemblances. One major element behind these resemblances is their indebtedness to Henri Bergson in the formation of their thought. Eliot’s concepts such as “objective correlative,” “dissociation of sensibility,” and “impersonal voice” echo the Deleuzean concept of art as the producer of “affects and percepts.” Gilles Deleuze is known for his analyses of modernist literature and Eliot, somehow, was not among his focus points. This paper will be a revisiting of T.S. Eliot’s ideas on art and time with Deleuze in mind, to illustrate the common points of the two figures.

I have frequently justified my participation in the printemps érable by addressing the structural forces, including the politico-economic climate in Québec, the legacy of strike action by students in Québec, and the global neoliberal project. But as my fingers find patches of skin, once blue with abrasions and inflamed with anger, I wonder how I arrived at my class consciousness. In this paper, I explore my involvement in the Quebec student protest movement through a political economic analysis of the proceedings, but consider how the inclusion of affect and embodiment theory can build on our understanding of why and how people engage in political activism and social movements. By combining these approaches, what can we learn about the affected body and political dissent? This exploration of affect and embodiment in the context of neoliberal structures of power does not exist in a vacuum, but draws on a significant body of research that seeks to place the personal within the political, the subjective within the system. While affect and political economy are distinct types of theoretical questions that lead to specific theoretical outcomes, I am interested in how these approaches might play together, and coexist in one academic pursuit. As such, this autoethnography is an exploration in how, we can bring in to dialogue a political economy analyses with an analysis of my phenomenological and deeply affected experience of the protest movement, and the visceral and continuous existence of my class consciousness and protest body.

This article proposes to describe and analyze a central emic notion of contemporary Vietnamese society, the tình cảm, which refer to the emotional charge involved in a relationship. This affect is described through the lens of the flow of ceremonial gifts which constitute one of the principal means of expressing tình cảm in northern rural Vietnam. By testing the Spinozist approach of Lordon in The Society of Affects (2013), this paper shows how tình cảm are expressed, how they are a driver of social action and in which social structures they are produced.

Copyright of Activités is the property of ARPACT and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay approaches the complex triadic relation between concepts, body, and culture from an angle rooted in the empirical cognitive research of the past three decades or so. Specifically, it reviews approaches to how the body shapes conceptualization, reasoning, and communication. One main section examines how the body contributes to cultural learning and another how abstract cultural concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience, perception, and inner somatic states. Their purpose is to survey and briefly critique different theoretical frameworks, probe into their complementarity, and summarily evaluate to what extent higher cognition is embodied. The third main section outlines elements of an epistemological framework that connects culture, concepts, and the body in a sensible way. The paper closes with a discussion of how the embodied cognition paradigm advances a rapprochement of different areas both within cognitive research and beyond.

This paper examines the relationship between affectivity and activity during psychology interventions at work, particularly in terms of clinical activity. Different from emotion, affect is defined as a conflict within the activity, as a balance of power between what is expected and unexpected in the activity, the unpredictable future of which oscillates between two orientations, either more active or more passive. Based on an example from an intervention in the automotive industry, we show that the intervention causes movements in affectivity. During these movements, activity and passivity can be reversed, and one might eventually mutate into the other. Indeed, the dialogic clinical setting can be the source of a potential development of the affect, leading to an active orientation towards one condition: when the affect is the subject of repetition in another context, where repetition is not only permissible but specifically solicited by the intervention. In causing the affective movement, the intervention might regenerate it by "reloading" it with its own dialogical

B.S. Johnson’s ‘novel in a box’, The Unfortunates, is an original and moving elegy to the memory of his best friend who died of cancer at the age of 29, but the unbound format of the book and the unusual use of blanks have been dismissed by some critics as a mere manifestation of playfulness, a collection of tricks or gimmicks. My contention in this paper is that Johnson’s techniques, far from excluding affectivity and ethics, actually offer new ways of expressing emotion and giving a truthful account of feelings of pain, loss and mourning. On the one hand, the narrator is careful never to over-sentimentalise his discourse, hence instances of self-reflexive irony, mockery or derision to keep pathos at bay. On the other hand, this chronicle of a death foretold is a deeply-felt homage that involves narrator and reader in an ethical encounter with the absent Other.

Much of the academic finance theory is based on the assumption that individuals act rationally and behavioral finances treats investors’ choice based by behavioral biases. In contrast, neuro-finance (as a blending of psychology, neurology and finance) attempts to understand behavior by examining the physiological processes in the human brain when exposed to financial risk. Scientists map the mind to learn how fear and greed drive the financial markets. The paper, will briefly present why neurofinance is important and how will be able to provide in the near future a number of effective tools for improved financial decision making.

For many students, learning a Second Language (SL) can either be a rewarding or a threatening experience. Recent studies claim that this is caused by the role that the affective domain plays in the learning process. Since the affective variables are considered the least understood by researchers in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), this paper focuses on them. The main purpose in this research is to study the connection among anxiety, attitude and motivation and their effect on the academic performance of sixty-six Spanish students who are learning English as a SL. Teachers are also observed to know to what extent they alter those students’ attitudes, feelings of anxiety and motivation towards their language classes. Since the students who take part in this research share the same teacher, other two teachers are observed in order to analyze whether they have the same effect on their students or not. Results point out that there are clear contrasts between bilingual and non bilingual students and the different performances of the three teachers who were observed. DOI: 10.20420/rlfe.2015.0003

This article aims at introducing emotion into the scope of social facts sociology deals with. It is not a question to add a new class of phenomena to those already studied by sociology. The objective of the paper is to combine action analysis with emotion analysis and to show that emotion is a crucial parameter of sociological explanation. The analysis of emotions is made from a « cognitive sociology of action » point of view : we try to retrace the cognitive skills of actors in order to explain achievement and effects of social action. Exploring some aspects of the interactions between emotions and cognitions offers a way to explain how individuals concretely act in social life.

Grounded on a distinction between the mental component and the linguistic component of metonymy and metaphor, this study, after a brief survey of their essential mental characteristics, proposes the outline of a typology of the two tropes. Le last section of the paper revisits the mental component and examines a set of phenomena which can be collectively called metonymic identification and whose nature is not fundamentally linguistic – they pertain to cognition and affect.

Semantic theorists of fiction typically look for an account of our semantic relations to the fictional within general-purpose theories of reference, privileging an explanation of the semantic over the psychological. In this paper, we counsel a reverse dependency. In sorting out our psychological relations to the fictional, there is useful guidance about how to proceed with the semantics of fiction. A sketch of the semantics follows.

The Amie Thomasson’s paper continues to explore the thesis she developed in Fiction and Metaphysics about the problems of reference. More precisely, the issues are about the problems that a realistic view of abstract objects can encounter. Here, the question has to be written in a particular way: if there are fictional characters, why do we quite naturally say that such or such character doesn’t exist? How can a realist overthrow such difficulties explaining the claims of non-existence can be true when we are for such a view? The author presents three approaches of these claims: the restricted quantification approach, the metalinguistic approach and finally the application conditions approach. The first approach is about spatial and categorical restrictions in order to outline the field the reference is applied. The second approach is the way the direct reference theorists choose. The strategy consists in using the metalanguage that is to say to pass by a higher semantic level. The last approach which is the condition application approach is constructed with the virtues of the previous approaches. Finally, the author will show how the last view can be used for the metaphysics discussions.

The aim of this paper is to lay emphasis on the connection between the mind-body problem and the theory of language which is developed in early-modern philosophy by Descartes and post-cartesian philosophers such as Arnauld, Lancelot and Nicole, and also Géraud de Cordemoy. Whereas human psychophysical identity becomes a theoretical enigma, in the mechanistic and “dualistic” framework of the seventeenth century, new conceptions of linguistic activity are worked out, which deal with the “arbitrary nature of the sign”, that is with the notion of a non natural association between the material dimension of signification (sounds, letters) on the one hand, and mental representation, or meaning, on the other hand. The main paradox, which is at stake in these conceptions of language, is such as follows : speech acts are essentially conceived of, in Descartes’ philosophy, as inner acts, in so far as their function is to express an inner principle in man, i.e thought, and not as outer acts, that define the merely physical operations of beasts or machines. In that respect, language, as any kind of mental activity, seems to be theorized within the general framework of substance dualism, and of the distinctio realis which divides human mind from human body. Yet, the very notion of a linguistic activity, as public expression of mental states, involves the embodiment of the speaking subject, that is of the “real man”, consisting of a mind and a body. This association of mental and physical, this psychophysical unity, which is postulated in the conception of human identity, seems also involved, for instance, in the theory of linguistic signification, such as it is set out by Port-Royal philosophers. But the relationship between the material and the “spiritual” sides of the linguistic sign, in this philosophical tradition, cannot be a natural one, as it is precisely an artificial and “arbitrary” one, the result of an institution which links together two different natures. Thus, the paradoxical institution of linguistic signification turns out to be the theoretical experimentation which leads to the comprehension of the non natural, yet metaphysically constituted, unity of mind and body in man.

The article presents several reflections on interventions by researchers and practitioners in the Clinique de l'activité (clinic of activity) team focusing on the affects, emotions, and sentiments taking place in a work environment. Interventions using analysis activity, dialogical activity, and transferential activity are discussed. Topics include professional relationships, a secretary suffering from depression, and interpersonal conflict.