Act și interacțiune (inter-afectivitate)

ACT AND INTERACTION (INTER-AFFECTIVITY). Language is both (generator of) language and affect at the same time; we understand, thus, that there exists an intimate link between the two. Aristotle’s Rhetoric demonstrates this coupling: the affect needs a symbolic justification. Obviously, one has to distinguish between so-called imaginary affects and symbolic affects. Can one speak, in the case of the human subject, about a type of communication that takes place exclusively in the imaginary register? What is the symbolic justification of the subject's affective disposition – is it not anguish, confidence, astonishment, and the spring of the act of language rather?

We become, after saying intersubjectivity, inter-corporeality or inter-affectivity – in a word, interaction –, sensitive to that prefix (inter), which seems to point to a mysterious in-between element that is capable of linking distinct consistencies. Intersubjectivity presupposes the existence of at least two already constituted subjects (whatever their nature). But isn't the relationship always already given (as an originary phenomenon), in the sense that it is impossible to conceive the subject outside of this relationship – introjected as a psychic structure? In other words, the above-mentioned prefix implies a relationship of (mutual) dependence, too.

In the same line, inter-corporeality or inter-affectivity presupposes the existence of at least two living bodies or affective dispositions that are already constituted, i.e. established in an intimate interconnection.

The particle in question also reveals the presence of a median (transcendental) domain – an activity that is demonstrable and sensitive in its effects. Thanks to modern science, we have gained a vast knowledge of the nature of the object, the value of which is confirmed by its ability to alter the very structure of the environment. We are still largely ignorant of the intermediate space that determines the ontological form of the (human) subject.

Phenomenology – and phenomenological psychopathology in particular – is a kind of science of subjective mechanisms, or rather of this transcendental space that provide thus a more authentic perspective on affectivity. Fuchs' (2013) effort is to demonstrate the thesis that a certain inter-corporeal resonance – more precisely, an inter-sensory (unconscious) one – is the condition of possibility of affective life, affectivity being, therefore, in fact, inter-affectivity. The argument would be convincing indeed if it did not ingrained in us the suspicion of a binary (circular) relationship that foreclosed the subject – in a similar way to that of positivism/behaviourism, whose proximity was probably contagious.

However, normal perception or normal affectivity is, as Fuchs (2005) tells us, the effect of the dynamic balance between the pre-reflexive intentionality of the resonant body and the Husserlian synthetic intentionality of transcendental consciousness – of the functional unity between a sensory meaning and a shared meaning, in short, between sensation and apperception. Dynamic equilibrium or functional unity imply, after all, a certain activity: the intentional component naturally tends, and succeeds, in limiting the wild (sensory) expressiveness of the signifier.

Why then do we suspect the phenomenological approach to be affected by the vice of occluding the subject? This is because synthetic intentionality cannot regulate sensory intentionality (corporeal bliss) in the absence of a castrated subject – divided in relation to the signifier. The subjective vacuole is precisely the linking element, and the space of conversion, between perception and consciousness.