The Interruption: Investigating Subjectivation and Affect

Abstract

This paper contributes to current debates concerning affect and the nonrepresentational subject by introducing the concept of the interruption as a means of exploring the politics both of experience and of the feeling body. By thinking about the way in which affect is theorised in Spinoza's Ethics alongside a critique of the subject that draws on Foucault, I position the interruption as an event that elicits a mode of critique that enables an interrogation of both the sociality of affect and the somatisation of politics. This paper explores three events that I describe as interruptions, and demonstrates the utility and scope of such a concept.