Comfortable Bodies: Sedentary Affects

Abstract

Whilst to be comfortable is often equated with conservatism and complacency, this paper considers the various and often complex configurations of comfort as a desirable corporeal sensibility. Subsequently, this paper considers what corporeal comfort as an affective sensibility is and can do to theorisations of the sedentary body. The sensibility of corporeal comfort induced through the relationality between bodies and proximate objects is explored to trace through some of the affectual circulations that flow through the sedentary body. With this in mind, forms of subjectivity engendered through the fragility of comfort are at once both active and performed, and folded through the inactive susceptibilities that are beyond activity. Drawing on such an immanent materialism enables us to take more seriously these susceptibilities of the sedentary body and the new moments and spatialities that emerge.