More than a Feeling: Affect as Radical Situatedness

Martin Heidegger’s perspective stands out among the many proposals for understanding affect in the phenomenological tradition. One reason for this is that Heidegger is the most thorough antiCartesian among the phenomenologists. He rigorously disbands affectivity from notions of psychological interiority, inner states, or other individualist allegiances, construing affect instead as a form of being open to the world in a radical sense. Another reason is that Heidegger places affect in the thick of everyday social and interpersonal commerce—within the warp and weft of all our days. With this orientation, he manages to combine a sense for ordinary comportment and experience—a phenomenological and cultural analysis of the everyday—with a profound sense for the ontological depths of human existence. Rarely have the mundane and the metaphysical been so thoroughly coarticulated; and yet Heidegger works from an acute sense of the massive discordance between these two distinct but interwoven layers of existence. Despite this promising outlook, there is much one should take issue with in Heidegger’s work, above all and most strikingly his dubious politics. My way of dealing with this problematic is not the usual one of trying to identify fascistic or protofascistic tendencies in Heidegger’s philosophy (I made a start at that elsewhere, see Slaby forthcoming). Rather, in the final section of this article, I will indicate how the perspective on affect and historicity developed here might help us turn Heidegger’s insights against his own putative political orientation. I will mainly focus on two aspects of Heidegger’s view, as these might help orient critical work on affect in philosophy and the humanities today.