Affect seeps into thought, derailing its linear course and exposing it to an open-ended movement of thinking. Disturbances are more than interruptions; they are resistant gestures that unsettle the habitual flow and crack open the surface of knowing.
Title: A Short
Note on Rupture
Affects permeate thought.^1 They seep into its movements, diverting it from linear trajectories and opening it onto a dynamic that resists closure or final resolution.^2 Whereas thought typically follows ideals of clarity, coherence, and purposeful direction, affects introduce a moment of unrest — an energy that escapes the order of the rational.^3
his unrest is more than mere disturbance; it constitutes resistance.^4 Disruptions do not simply interrupt the flow but enact gestures that challenge the habitual and destabilise the familiar. In this sense, they are productive fissures in the fabric of knowledge, cracking open the smooth surface of understanding and revealing forces usually kept in the background — uncertainties, emotions, and corporeal resonances.^5
The philosophy of affect conceives thought not as purely intellectual but as embodied and relational.^6 Affects operate at the interface of bodies, atmospheres, and meanings.^7 They connect the individual with the social, the internal with the external. In them, it becomes evident that knowledge emerges not solely from reason but also from mood, resonance, and movement.^8
Thus, “resonant
ruptures” mark those moments when thought is
thrown off course — not in order to fail, but to
reorient itself.^9 In irritation, in affect, in
the unfinished, another form of knowing comes
into view: one that seeks openness rather than
closure, that treats not-knowing not as a
deficit but as possibility.^10
Footnotes 1. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 23.
2. Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 8–9.
3. Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, in: The Collected Works, Vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
4. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 12.
5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 17.
6. Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London: Sage, 2012), 41.
7. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1–2.
8. Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 56.
9. Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 72.
10. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the
Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 4.