Posts Tagged ‘Ernesto Laclau’

August 29th, 2011

Affect vs. global totality

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The tricky thing about global imaginaries unlike other social imaginaries is the issue of totality. Whereas other kinds of social imaginaries (e.g. nations, publics, counterpublics, commons, etc.) can shore up identity by posing an external or excluded other, there are few possibilities of exclusion in the global. That does not mean, however, that we are doomed to some global apolitical homogeneity. Affect, when understood as a mode of investment through which social meaning is organized, opens a field of difference without succumbing to the closure of totality or the sedimentation of oppositional identity.

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