The proposed workshop will deal with the relation betweeen affectivity and language, especially the languages of modern literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. During the last two decades, the so-called “affective turn” has largely influenced and interconnected different humanities such as sociology, film studies and cultural anthropology. The affects have been meticulously explored within fine arts, visual studies, and cognitive sciences, yet a consistent analysis of the affective operations in literary language has been undertaken only rarely. The reason might be that affects are often overlooked as unanalysable experiences, mere affections of the reader. However, one might object that the very sharing and/or transmitting of an affective effect is often the primary aim that the literary text strives to attain. To put it in even more radical way, the effect of literature displays affectivity as something primarily shared, exteriorized, ontologically dynamical, as – to use Eugenie Brinkema’s words – “a self-folding exteriority” which is based on its textual or visual form. Thus, various questions concerning the relation between affects and language can be raised, such as: Whence the capacity of the literary language to grasp and mediate affects? Or is it rather that affect could be perceived as a linguistic medium? What does the affective force of literary language consist in, and how does it shape its formal structure, its narrativity and/or performativity? In what ways does subjectivity interfere with affects? Besides our attempt to answer these questions, and along with a few case studies upon which the aesthetic as well as the figural and epistemological force of affects will be demonstrated, the workshop will ask questions about the potential use of other concepts which shed light on the link between language and affects, such as Roland Barthes’ notion of “punctum” and George Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the visual symptoms.
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