Do you recall your first encounter with affect as a concept in theory? One important backdrop to the emergence of affect in the 1990s and 2000s, sometimes overlooked today, was the broader attention to, and the buzz around, neurolinguistics and the brain/emotion-nexus. This brought notions of cooperation and empathy into focus, which are still with us, even though often under a different sign. Looking back, how would you describe this moment and its dynamics? What was the promise of affect?

I cannot authoritatively tell the story of how I first encountered affect (as a concept), but one credible account starts from the work I was doing at the intersection of performance studies and narrative theory in the 2000s (towards An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance, 2012). In this context, I was thinking through, not least, the ways in which narrative form can produce effects of affective immediacy and intensity. I was also doing some collaborative work on empathy with my colleague Fritz Breithaupt in Bloomington, Indiana, at the time, which was both prompted by and more fully turned my attention to the buzz around cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to narrative and the arts more generally. Whereas Fritz really got into neuroscience, my inner (perhaps both paranoid and wise) critic did not respond well to a number of these approaches’ presuppositions and implications. With my background in Critical Theory, gender, queer, and postcolonial studies, I was rather triggered by the evolutionary underpinnings of much of this work, sometimes adopted in ways that seemed to amount to a surrender of critical conceptual authority on the part of humanities scholars. At its worst, this evolutionary modelling resulted in a very heteronormative focus on questions of reproduction in social and aesthetic theory, along with the tendency towards transhistorical accounts aiming to summarily make sense of, say, all of literary history in one strike (for example Hogan 2011). Sociopolitical frameworks often seemed to be neglected in this scholarship. Thankfully, this has changed, but even in cognitive and neuroscientific work with well-developed sociohistorical layers, I have remained dissatisfied with the ways in which social identities tend to be introduced as given —more or less stable—factors rather than critical concerns or—changeable —effects.

For me, then, much of the promise of affect as a concept was in how it facilitated alternative approaches to these questions. Just like neuroscientific scholarship (and overlapping with it, see below), the emerging paradigm of affect studies offered the productive challenge to take questions of embodiment, feeling, and sensation seriously. This was in fact a crucial challenge to my earlier scholarly self who had been trained in literary studies at the height of the so-called linguistic turn and now had to plea guilty to some charges of one-sided focus on discourse as well as underappreciation of the affective charges of my own (hyper)critical interventions. But the affect studies scholarship I was drawn to—including by Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, and Eve Sedgwick—forcefully put history and the sociopolitical front and centre. It asked critical questions, for example, about empathy (or “compassion”) as “a term denoting privilege” and “a social and aesthetic technology” all-too-readily called upon as a market corrective in the neoliberal present (Berlant 2004, p. 4-5).  However, this scholarship also conceptualized the dynamic, complex affective processes that constitute sociopolitical phenomena, including identities, underlining movement and instability as a promise of—possible—change. While some affect scholarship too quickly equated the “potential” in “a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, p. 2) with a tendency towards political liberation, my own work has been invested in conceptualizing under which conditions, and how, these dynamics of affect can in factbe oriented towards inclusion, equality, and solidarity in the relational ecologies that humans are embedded in.

You were among the first to introduce concepts from affect theory to the analysis of narrative in literary theory. Given that affect studies emerged to a large degree from research in queer and feminist literary studies, how would you describe its relation to—and contribution to—narratology, i.e. the study of narrative structures?

Importantly, there has long been overlap between these fields. Sue Lanser’s and Robyn Warhol’s seminal work in feminist and queer narratology have been crucial to my own thinking, including Robyn’s early foray into affect studies in Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (2003). That said, it is also true that feminist and queer theory more generally have not been terribly invested in narrative, and often actively opposed to its presumed normativity, and that vice versa, narratology as a whole was slow to open up to the challenge of “contextual” cultural studies approaches. Perhaps this sluggish cross-fertilization contributed to the curious fact that the terminology of affect was then claimed, and for a while near-monopolized, by neuroscientific approaches in narratology. I say “curious” because this scholarship partly uses the word “affect” for what has more commonly be called “emotion,” and often opposed to affect as such, namely relatively stable, plot-bound and closure-oriented, categorizable feelings (co)induced by cognitive evaluations, entirely anathema to, for example, Brian Massumi’s influential definition of affect as unqualified intensity.

My own work intervenes into this theoretical configuration with a syncretic model, which challenges neuroscientific orientations toward stability along with the sharp delineations of affect and sensation versus emotion and signification that Massumi upholds from the other angle. In effect, his “Deleuzian” approach can’t account well for the ways in which affects get enmeshed with ideologies, either. In Making Worlds and various smaller publications in its orbit, I approach narrative as a realm of affective encounters: a performative process of worldmaking that encompasses not just (more or less linear) plot and closure, but also the anti-cohesive, variously “vertical,” “horizontal” and “orthogonal” vectors of affect and sensation along with—and attached to—form elements, fantasies, memories, and intertextual associations. To me, part of affect studies’ contribution to narrative theory lies in attending to this complexity, which explodes traditional definitions of narrative, underlining not least how narrative’s ideological functioning is rarely as straightforward as its (feminist, queer, and other) critics have assumed. Another part is, again, taking seriously questions of embodiment and material-ecological entanglement in the study of narrative. With Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Rita Felski, among others, I conceptualize affective worldmaking processes as undertaken collectively by a broad range of human and nonhuman actors in the loops of composition/production and reading/experiencing.

This entails that narrative worldmaking is a thoroughly “non-sovereign” activity, even in the context of literature, which, in opposition to film and theatre, has long been conceptualized as a sphere of individual writing and reading. My model redistributes agency, including between authors (who are networked with computers and cultural fantasies and not in control even of their fictional worlds), narrators (who are not well described through the classical narratological dichotomy of reliable and unreliable), characters (who have an imaginative life of their own, with real-world ties of all kinds), and different kinds of audiences (whereby professional critics are not always smarter than lay readers). The ethos underlying this model of distributed agency is one of taking seriously the agency of different worldmaking participants: the ways in which their affective attachments and compromised fantasies matter, and the ways in which novels, films, or performances can do significant cultural/political work in activating, reshuffling, or working through affects in complex narrative configuration. In Eve Sedgwick’s terms, this is a reparative approach—although I interweave it with continued critique. It also underlines what narrative offers to affect studies: a taking seriously of form, temporality, and configuration, including layered, discrepant affects in specific scenarios, with which we can do much more than diagnose disruptive subversion, or ideological capture, or open-ended ambiguity.

In your Hirschfeld Lecture, published as Nach dem Sex? in 2014, you reflected on the changing position of sexuality within discussions in queer and feminist studies. You identified the turn to affect as a catalyst for feelings of discontent in regard to epistemological and political issues. While your lecture contributed in important ways to introducing these discussions to the German-language context, how would you describe the discussions that have developed since?

In Nach dem Sex, I attempted an (early, tentative) historicizing of the affective turn itself, drawing, not least, on Lauren Berlant’s own comments about their shifting theoretical and methodological commitments, from queer theory’s critique of normativity (and embrace of sexual pleasure) to a recognition of people’s attachments to the “normal” and to ideological fictions of belonging, in the context of political depression and the profound exhaustion produced by increasing precarity and what Berlant has called neoliberalism’s “crisis ordinariness.” Rereading my own piece today, it feels simultaneously rather dated and oddly current. As neoliberalism’s slow undoing of democratic norms and institutions has tilted into the transnational ascent of unabashed right-wing authoritarianism, the affective dominance of exhaustion may have only intensified, and, for all we know, so has the “epidemic of celibacy” cited by Berlant (2011, p. 79), in particular among young people (see Tolentino 2025). At the same time, the role and instrumentalization of sexuality in public discourse have spiked, mostly with a restrictive bent, between #MeToo and the Epstein files saga, and the AfD’s oscillation between the embrace of bikinis and tradwives, old tropes of immigrant hypersexuality, and renewed debates around Homoehe.

This political moment clearly calls for renewed attention to sexuality in its imbrications with political affect and ideology, at the intersection with gender, racism, religion, and class. I have been glad to follow ongoing and new discussions on all of these questions, from the multiple volumes detailing transnational “anti-gender” movements to Dagmar Herzog’s recent Der neue faschistische Körper (2025), and from scholarly discussions on queer relational ethics (Bradway, ed. 2024) to emerging trans narratologies. Methodologically speaking, I think this range of work shows that there is room, and need, for a combination of approaches. On the one hand, this moment of rightwing dominance—not fueled by one coherent ideology but sure bursting of old and new ideologemes—does seem to call for a partial reversal of “postcritical” emphases. On the other hand, the embrace of more “affirmative” perspectives in affect studies continues to resonate, for example, in work on queer relationality. The “phenomenological” method of slowing down judgment in a stance of queer attentiveness, which I outlined with Berlant and Magnus Hirschfeld in Nach dem Sex? for untangling complex amalgamations of sexuality and affect, could also be helpfully adapted to a range of contemporary issues, from tracing the (potentially complex) motivations of disaffected voters to the task of sorting out how culture wars around gender and sexuality have coalesced into aggressive transphobia above all else in 2025, and what this entails for LGBTQ+ coalition building and scholarship.

You mentioned the methodological challenges that this implies. The question of “reading” has been a particularly important site of debate. To provide some context here: Reflections on reading have always been an import question for literary studies, for sure, but in the context of affect studies thinking about reading has meant to reconsider the role of interpretation and criticism for critical scholarship ‘at large’, ultimately calling for less critical readings and more careful approaches towards the objects of study that variously acknowledge, or embrace, the reader’s affective response to them. However, rather than moving beyond the critical project, or even abandoning it, I understand this as having been a shift in register and also towards a different mode of relating to institutions, including those of higher education. Proponents of the “critique of critique” like Eve Sedgwick or Bruno Latour put forward a vocabulary of care, repair and reconstruction and their calls for “reparative reading” (Sedgwick) or “reassembling the social” (Latour) used a language that was in some ways similar to that of infrastructural reform. It seems to me that the debate on reading that has been unfolding in German literary studies more recently, while sharing many references, has a somewhat different tone.

First, I really like that you frame it in this way. The U.S. debates about post/critique at times became quite polemical, so not everyone may agree. But I understand my own contributions precisely in this way, as redeveloping the critical project through shifts in register. As for the recent German debates, I have been wondering myself, although I should preface my comments by underlining that from my New York angle, I haven’t been fully immersed in these discussions and would be happy to stand corrected. A longer-standing observation of relevance here is about how different German Germanistik has been, and remains, from North American German Studies, and by extension much humanities scholarship across the Atlantic. In German academia, disciplinary boundaries have often been defended against the critical perspectives, in particular those of Gender, Queer, Postcolonial, and Critical Race Theory. Perhaps it is also true that even today there is some lingering Emotionsskepsis (scepticism towards emotion) in the wake of National Socialist affect politics (Ekardt, Fehrenbach and Zumbusch 2021, p. 9).  Take, for example, the ways in which Moritz Baßler’s attack on the supposed “midcult” in and of contemporary literature played scholarly professionalism against affect, that is, against both the emphasis on feeling in nonprofessional reviews and the embrace of affect in postcritical scholarship, and in his further alignment of affect with “identity” (politics) in his critical focus on recent works by minoritized writers. I know that Baßler’s original article stirred significant controversy in Germany, and that he subsequently nuanced his mapping of contemporary literature in his book on Populärer Realismus (2022). But the underlying thrust seems to resonate across different corners of German academia. In sociology, to draw in another example, Andreas Reckwitz’s Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten characterizes our late modern condition in part through „Affektintensivierung“ (intensification of affect, Reckwitz 2017, p. 17). Reckwitz locates the genealogies of contemporary identity politics in the U.S. civil rights movement and the social movements of the 1970s, which thus appear as forces of singularization. To my mind, this underestimates their forcefully universalizing dimensions, especially in the demand for full equality. This critical alignment of affect and identity also resonates as quite ironic from the perspective of (non-cognitive) affect studies, with its emphasis on opening up identificatory enclosures or at least tracing their performative constitution.

To me, the more recent reading debates in the German context sometimes sound like an effort to maintain and defend a certain status of academic or “professional” reading. While there might certainly be some good reasons for doing that, or having a conversation about it, I also sense a growing feeling of discontent with the older long-term projects of infrastructural reform and democratic expansion that aimed to make institutions of education more inclusive (Bildungsexpansion).

This makes a lot of sense to me. An emphasis on democratizing our concepts of reading has certainly been a key element of the North American debates. With those in mind, I noticed the rhetorical hesitation with which Baßler’s book dances around the idea that contemporary literature operates as a force of democratization, partly through grappling with the question of whether Adorno’s elitist critique of Kulturindustrie can still be defended. And I am also troubled by how Baßler claims to represent “die Stimme kritischer Literaturwissenschaft” (Baßler 2022, p. 207) with his aesthetic defense of a particular style of (post-)ironic, pop-affiliated fiction, which, as he acknowledges, has developed its own particular reader (fan) community, one that he happens to be part of (see also Colvin 2023).

Eva Geulen’s response to a different provocation in contemporary German method debates, Erhard Schüttpelz’s Deutland (2023), offers an indirect—and to me more promising—answer to some of these questions. I won’t dwell on the overall exchange, which fits the established battlelines between critique and postcritique less neatly, except to indicate that Geulen’s defense of literary theory concludes by emphasizing continuity between (affect-based) popular and professional reading practices, situating the latter as an “intensification” achieved precisely through professional procedure (Geulen, 2024, p. 64, with reference to John Guillory). I find this reshuffling of post/critical motifs helpful for a continued probing of professional practices that can let go of the fear of affect, whether in our own critical reading practices, where not admitting affective undertones does not make them go away, or in assessing popular literature (which my own inner Adorno at moments also struggles with) along with the intricate ways in which modernist and experimental texts, including much contemporary literature by minoritized authors, assemble complex affectscapes towards complex political or ethical investigations.

How did your own engagement with the term affect change over the course of time? And, in this context, which future challenges do you see for conceptual work on affect?

None of what I just said is to imply that an unconditional embrace of affect is the answer to all questions, and the stakes of that caveat have certainly become even clearer over the past decade. In the original “Midcult” article, Baßler evokes a derisively laughing (“höhnisch lachenden”) Adorno to counter the anticipated objection that democratization is necessarily a good thing, reminding us of the contempt (“Verachtung”) for education and knowledge that has acquired increasing social hegemony in contemporary right-wing populism. I certainly concur with the latter diagnosis, while, again, not wanting to play democracy against education. Baßler’s argument also links to broader concerns about the reign of affect in the current political moment, articulated at least since Trump’s first election victory in 2016, with calls to “think beyond the affect” (Alain Badiou) or to deploy “rational/sensible critique” against “impulsive feelings” (Carolin Emcke). Today, these concerns have taken on new resonances, including in discussions about campus politics, where feelings have in fact been broadly weaponized. Arguments about student “discomfort” are used as justification for censoring speech not only about Israel/Palestine but, in Republican states, also discussions of gender and race. Given this state of affairs, many of my colleagues heartily agree with Baßler’s insistence that we cannot let in-groups and “their genuine feeling” function as the “final authority” in adjudicating claims (Baßler 2021, n.p.).

And so do I. The current political moment has certainly made me double down on methodological insistences that the idea of taking seriously everybody’s affective worldmaking practices does not entail endorsing anybody’s feeling as the truth of a particular matter. In teaching my course on affect in German film at Columbia, I encourage students to take note of their affective viewing responses and then evaluate, develop, modify, or even discard these responses by confronting them with other people’s (spontaneous and scholarly) takes and with the evidence provided by various elements of film form and narrative. But the importance of coupling attentiveness to affective responses with methodological rigor and an ethos of multiperspectivity, for me, does not amount to a turning away from affect. The negative intensities haunting contemporary public spheres, as well as our classrooms, will not be conquered by appeals to reason alone. Instead, we need sophisticated accounts of the complex affectscapes that govern this political moment to better ground political, scholarly, and pedagogical responses that live up to the ethical and political challenges of our time.

In this context, what could the promise of affect be today? In what way can affect theory still help to critically illuminate a future that arguably has changed so drastically?

Starting from the Adorno jokes, in my own work I have found myself returning to the aesthetic and social theory of Frankfurt School-affiliated thinkers these past few years. Rereading the work they developed in the face of historical fascism through the lens of affect—and in multivectoral dialogue with twenty-first-century perspectives more generally—certainly highlights Adorno’s critical paranoia. But it also brings out unexpected moments of tenderness and hope, more than derisive laughter, in his work, and more broadly much of interest for a continued intertwining of (undogmatic) psychoanalytic and affect-theoretical perspectives that really might help us make sense of our current moment.

In this vein, I am very interested in the growing body of scholarship on affect and political populism, authoritarianism, and fascism, and, again, I believe these analyses are essential for finding a way out of the current political impasse, even if I don’t always agree to everything. This includes all the interdisciplinary work on affect and new media, recent emphases on Zerstörungslust (2025), as Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey have aptly titled their study, as well as studies on hate and anger in literature and the arts. With Audre Lorde, we might further pursue potentially useful distinctions between (destructive) hate and (productive?) anger. I am also interested in exploring how hate and destructive intensities link to, or amalgamate with, indifference, contempt, and disaffection in contemporary affectscapes. Focusing on such linkages might help disaggregate, and potentially intervene in, broader affective ecologies in which everyday experiences of late capitalism’s “crisis normal” tilt into negative intensity and violence directed at immigrants and minorities. Attention to indifference and contempt could also lead us back to new takes on the long-standing topic of empathy, which I do believe remains important, especially in this moment of unabashed political cruelty in which Christian evangelicals have been trying to rebrand empathy as a “sin” or “toxic” (see Bouie, Cottle, and French 2025). As Clare Hemmings has detailed for feminist theory, and recently revisited on this blog, empathy, even where it does work, does not equal or necessarily translate into solidarity, but this recognition might guide us in continuing to ask where and how feeling with others can be converted into solidarity.

Amid all of this, we can continue to entwine questions about affect with new perspectives. As you alluded to, one critical keyword, that has been getting a lot of attention recently, is that of infrastructure. Lauren Berlant’s last book On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022), also pivots in that direction.  I am interested in exploring the shifting contours of dynamic affectscapes in relation to (per se “harder”) social infrastructures, which may be crumbling all around us today but can be reimagined and potentially reconstructed in ways that offer anchors or scaffolds for more supportive collective affects. The resigned diagnosis, shared by the older Freud, much of twenty-first century science, and many of my students, that “human nature is just not benign” was always too easy, and a dead end in how it lets us off the hook. In-between the simple answers about either our wolfish species bent and our quintessentially human capacity for empathy is plenty of room for imagining and creating conditions under which we might reconfigure complex affectscapes in less destructive directions.

References

Baßler, Moritz (2021). „Der Neue Midcult: Vom Wandel populärer Leseschaften als Herausforderung der Kritik.“ Pop. Kultur und Kritik 18, 132-149 (online version:
28.6.2021).

—– (2022). Populärer Realismus: Vom International Style gegenwärtigen Erzählens. München: Beck.

Berlant, Lauren (2004). “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding).” Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Ed. Lauren Berlant. New York: Routledge. 1-14.

—– (2011b). „Starved.“ After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker. Durham: Duke Univ. Press. 79-90.

Bouie, Jamelle, Michelle Cottle and David French, „Why Politics Feels So Cruel Right Now“ New York Times 2 June 2025.

Bradway, Teagan (ed., 2024). „Unaccountably Queer“ (special issue). Differences 35.3 (2024), 1-236.

Colvin, Sarah (2023). Besprechung von Moritz Baßler, Populärer Realismus.Arbitrium 41.2, 228-236.

Ekardt, Philipp, Frank Fehrenbach and Cornelia Zumbusch (2021). “Politische Emotionen in den Künsten: Zur Einleitung.” Politische Emotionen in den Künsten. Berlin: de Gruyter, 7-24.

Geulen, Eva (2024). “Professionalisierungsschicksale der Neuphilologien. Replik auf Erhard Schüttpelz und Thomas Steinfeld.” Merkur 78 (Heft 897): 57-65.

Hogan, Patrick Colm (2011). Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.

Reckwitz, Andreas (2017). Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten: Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg (2010). “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke Univ. Press. 1-25.

Tolentino, Jia (2025). „Are Young People Having Enough Sex?“ New Yorker, 23 June.