Definition
Affect is a term used in psychology to denote the broad field of emotional- and mood-based experience of the human subject and is a concept deployed in the poststructural theory of Deleuze and Guattarri (1987) and related fields of social and cultural theory, to describe the means of visceral communication which invests the experience of relationship between an organism and its environment with meaning, in the broadest possible sense. Protevi writes, “An affect is that which a body is capable of, and so the affectivity of conceptual personae becomes materially grounded in what Alliez will later not hesitate to call a ‘biology of intellectual action’” (Protevi 2005).
When we consider that affect involves embodied, visceral perception that is intuitively apprehended (Bion), is object relational, and may be both generative of cognition and a product of cognition, or even precognitive (instinctual) or trans-cognitive (integrative), we can understand that affect mediates all...
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Nash, J. (2014). Affect. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_12
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