Vacillations of Affect: How to Reclaim ‘Affect’ for a Feminist-Materialist Critique of Capitalist Social Relations?

In this paper, I elaborate on the value of the notion of affect and the related concept of affective labour for a feminist-materialist critique. The core argument is that an affective conception of the relationship between subject and structure would allow for a constructive intervention into the definition of ‘materialism’ that builds the ground for any critical social theory, but remains unfinished in the Marxist tradition. For that purpose, it will however be necessary to develop the concept of affect beyond the common, decidedly a-political interpretations that are part of the New Materialist Feminism, as well as beyond the overly em- phatic connotations that the post-Workerist tradition has attached to it with regards to its immeasurable characteristic that might allow for the creation a non- capitalist future from within our present.