Tag Archives: affect

Anti-Politics of Israel and Palestine (Negative Affect in the Age of Misinformation)

Posted on February 21, 2025 by zjb

If the essence of “the political” is the binding together of a collective across social difference then what one would otherwise call politics today in the Age of Trump and Musk is distinctly anti-political. Anti-politics is fed by binary things. … Continue reading →

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Truth Lies Hate Trump (Binary Politics)

Posted on November 7, 2024 by zjb

Trump did what Bernie and the U.S. left could never do. All at the same time, he turbo-charged his base and captured the center of American politics. The effect was synthetic in character. He combined the anger of the base … Continue reading →

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Stochastic Anti-Semitism

Posted on January 2, 2020 by zjb

Of late, contemporary anti-Semitism has something like the character of a sucker punch when it manifests in physical violence. Always out there and ambient in the public sphere, anti-Semitism is brought together and aggregated online in environments where racial hatred … Continue reading →

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Affective Partisanship & Ideological Partisanship (Theories of Religion Redux)

Posted on November 6, 2019 by zjb

[h/t Joshua Garoon] This op-ed by Thomas Edsall here at the NYT about the relationship between group partisanship and ideology reminds me of arguments in theories of religion going back to Marx-Durkheim and Weber that touch upon contemporary affect studies. … Continue reading →

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Teshuva Love-Sick (Maimonides)

Posted on October 7, 2019 by zjb

Proving something about the sensual, even arabesque, core at the heart of Maimonidean rationalism by way of proving R. Akiva’s dictum that the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies is some over the top love-sick camp from Maimonides … Continue reading →

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Allies (Code Pink + Neturei Karta)

Posted on March 8, 2019 by zjb

The question is whether one should expect more from the anti-Zionist left than one would from the Neturei Karta in terms of political and moral judgment. Only a universe composed of infinite possibilities can do justice to the alignment of Ariel … Continue reading →

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Anti-Lachrymose Jewish History = A Lachrymose Theological & Reactionary Object (Salo Baron)

Posted on December 26, 2018 by zjb

Jewish Studies and the study of Jewish History in America begin to show their age. The older they get the weirder they look in retrospect.  Told as an origin story, one of the great founding moments of the discipline in … Continue reading →

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(Hatred) Tender Age Internment Camps

Posted on June 20, 2018 by zjb

It is entirely unclear which is the worse name to call these things. Are they “concentration camps” or “tender age shelters”? This is the searing picture on the front page of today’s New York Times. No words can quite match … Continue reading →

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Affect + Cognition = Affecognitive (Gail Hamner)

Posted on April 17, 2018 by zjb

Affect and cognition would seem to be an oxymoron. Colleague and friend Gail Hamner thinks otherwise, coining the term affecogitive to get at the imbrication of these two phenomena, namely the imbrication of affect into cognition and cognition into affect. … Continue reading →

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Affect & Potential (Aristotle)

Posted on March 16, 2018 by zjb

When defining affect, many will go back to Spinoza, the capacity for being affected.  More useful perhaps is this from Aristotle which I think should be read in tandem with this bit on potentiality. The first puts the emphasis on alteration, … Continue reading →

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