In memory of the truly amazing Feminist, Teresa Brennan PhD. The Sealing of the Heart: Negative or pacifying affects as affective judgments were once known as demons and sins. Such affective judgments increasingly dominate life in the West, where the assumed self-contained subject maintains itself by projecting out the affects that interfere with its agency (anxiety and any sense of inferiority) in a series of affective judgments that find a carrier, in the other. We carry these affective judgments in the earliest recesses of memory, but we also encounter them in the street. These pacifying affective judgments threaten the directness of people and divert their soul from its distinctive path, by the ego‘s repressions Pacifying constellations of affects persist in their internal effects regardless of present realities or relations. One does not free one‘s soul simply by severing draining relations. One frees it by unlocking the affective constellations of repressed images in which it is enmeshed in fantasy and memory, as well as projective judgments. The task is formidable when one considers how the affects are likely to be split-off from conscious thought by the myth of the self-contained individual. They are likely to be split-off, as this mechanistic notion of self-containment assumes that thinking can be clear of emotion and that affects can be studied as purely “objective” physiological states. (p, 113.) In mechanistic observations of objective thought, the heart has become sealed off, as a sense organ. The heart as an affective receptor-organ is impaired by our lost ability to understand ourselves organically, at the level of both internal and external sensory awareness, and the heart has become weakened as a transmitter-organ of affective power for the true intentions of the soul. (p, 114.) Excerpts from “The Transmission of Affect” by Teresa Brennan, PhD.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 23:45:03 +0000
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