From Apocalypse Fear to the “Power to Be Affected”: Affect and Agency in Catastrophic Times

How to face the loss of agency constitutive of our catastrophic times? Building on Deleuze’s writings about affect and Guattari’s writings about mental ecology, my communication seeks to offer a contribution to the axis of the call that asks how affect theories reorient our understanding of politics as an exercise in becoming terrestrial. Indeed, I want to argue that terrestrial politics need a conception of human agency as embedded, embodied, and affected. In diametrical opposition to imperatives of happiness and dominant narratives of progress (Ahmed 2010; Illouz and Cabanas 2018), the rising number of ongoing and expected ecological catastrophes trigger emotional responses including anger, fear or grief (Head 2016; Van Dooren 2014). As affects have been rehabilitated as essential drivers of human behavior (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Lordon 2016; Massumi 2015), I argue environmental scholars and activists ought to give a close look to these affective states. Indeed, they can result in political apathy, when they don’t morph into political movements of denial or deferral (Adams 2017; Hamilton 2010; Norgaard 2011; Randall 2005). How to then face the loss of agency constitutive of our times? Whereas liberal accounts of the subject condemn those experiencing these negative emotional states to powerlessness, passivity, and manipulation, a growing body of affect theories offers new possibilities for analyzing the politics of embodied, embedded, and affected subjectivities. The first part of the communication argues pathologizing theoretical frameworks are a dead-end when it comes to understanding and conceptualizing the subtle interplay between fear, political reflections, and actions that could take (and sometimes already takes) place in ecological politics nowadays. Drawing on Deleuze’s and Hardt’s reading of Spinoza, the second part explores alternative visions of what fearful and angry bodies can do. Their spinozist philosophy helps understanding how difficult affective states can play a role as ethical compass and become source of political agency, if they are subjected to a critical emotional reflexivity and turned into the “power to be affected” (Deleuze, 1978). Finally, the writings of Guattari and ecofeminist philosopher Joanna Macy help us to explore more concrete steps towards this power to be affected, through practices and spaces of “mental ecology”. The practices Macy describes are in the same time called “despair and empowerment work” and “work that reconnects”. To this extent, far from being identified with invulnerability, agency requires just the opposite—openness, vulnerability. The power to be affected and our power to affect are the two sides of the same coin: our interconnectedness. Throughout the communication, I explore how anxiety, fear and despair become symptoms of our interconnectedness, recreating and reminding ties and forms of belonging that have been destroyed or forgotten. If expressed in collective reflexive settings, they can thus become a resource for terrestrial collective agency. Keywords: Anthropocene; micro-politics; affect; agency; social movements