Affect and Affirmation

Abstract

This chapter considers the stakes of the affirmative drive of affect theory. It argues that the insistent affirmationist drive of affect and its foreclosure of the negative is mirrored by and intertwined with the structuring absence of blackness within its precincts. Affect theory's investment in terms of affirmation (potential, becoming, capacity) is, fundamentally, a move against and foreclosure of blackness's essential negativity and all that it portends for the question of affect. Against the affirmationist logic of worlding, a reckoning with blackness and/as negativity presents a mode of thinking/feeling affect in antagonism with worldly creation and its corollary terms—relation, becoming, and so forth. In identifying blackness as the figure that affirmationist theory constructs itself against, this chapter considers what might be gleaned from a fidelity to the negativity that blackness brings to bear on the world of possibility and the possibility of world(s).