Re: affect, subjects, mastery, and more

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Wed, 08 May 96 13:19:57 EDT

As Judy notes, the psychoanalytic tradition offers us, so far
as I can see, about the _only_ serious and highly elaborated
theory of affect available. This issue has come up more and
more often for me in discussion with colleagues about how to
analyze and theorize (and feel!) the role of affect in social
processes. While one can try, for example, to start a theory
of affect from, say, its semantics in our languages, or from
some cross-cultural taxonomy of the semiotic/bodily analogues
in various cultures of what ours calls emotion/affect, I think
it is probably time for social-cultural theorists, including
CHATters and cultural psychologists, to reinterpret the
insights of psychoanalytic theory in more cultural, historical,
and semiotic terms. What is the best work that has already been
done along these lines?? JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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