affect

occupation / innovator as

philosopher

university teacher

nationality

French

religion

Catholicism

is, as a kind of 'presencing' of the body itself, literally unaffected by representation and instead serving as its foundation.

Perhaps because of the interpretive difficulties that accrued from attemptingto distinguish affect from repression, Freud stopped short ofa fully worked out theory of affect. But in France, Freudian affect hasexperienced a significant revival in the recent work of Michel Henry,whose 1985 book Genealogies de la psychanayse seeks a reconciliation between a philosophy of consciousness and psychoanalysis ''''with affect asthe mediating agent.'

is the limit-question of psychoanalysis (in that affect involves the body reacting to meaning while also bypassing representation).

Much like Henry, who summarizes affect as the 'limit-question of psychoanalysis,' the authors also acknowledge affect as 'the unique object of psychoanalysis' (197), a fundamental, bedrock principle that could serve as a new origin for psychoanalytic inquiry.

Michel HenryThinkers

Michel Henry