This study is organized into four major chapters. In the first chapter, the various grounds traversed by affect and the problems of writing 'about' affect are established. The second chapter reads across Continental philosophy to extract and expand upon the undertheorized spatio-temporalities of affect in terms of what Bergson and Deleuze call 'the virtual.' In the third chapter, the major emphasis is on the work of Sigmund Freud and his earliest theorizations of affect. Freud's theories are re-evaluated through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The fourth and concluding chapter examines the writings of Henri Lefebvre on everyday life and, also, the importance that Lefebvre's work has for new directions in cultural studies. The thrust of the argument concerns an almost completely neglected third term in Lefebvre's approach to questions of everyday life: everydayness. It is, ultimately, through everydayness that affect and 'the virtual' might find their most direct and important ways onto the theoretical terrain of cultural studies.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign