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  • Adi Ophir has suggested that the political realm is an order of evils, producing and managing regular forms of suffering and violence rather than eliminating them. Thus, the political is always to some extent a corrupted order of justice. Emmanuel Levinas’ work presents in its focus on the face-to-face relationship a means of rethinking how to make the political more open to compassionate justice. Though Levinas himself doesn’t sufficiently take on this question, I argue that his work facilitates a way of thinking about commiserative shame that provides a means to connect the face-to-face to its potential effects in the political sphere. If such shame isn’t ignored or bypassed, it produces an unsettling relation to the other that in its adversity motivates a kind of responsibility and care for the other that can alter the public sphere.

  • The second volume of Annals of Cultural Psychology is dedicated to the affective nature of human social relationships with the environment. The chapters here included explore the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of the concept of affectivating originally introduced by one of us (Valsiner, 1999), as a potential tool of inquiry into the affective-sensitive dimension of psychological life within a cultural-psychological framework. The concept of affectivating involves two psychological dimensions often undervalued or even obliterated from contemporary cultural psychology, namely the affective involvement and the agentivity of people in their social encounters. Through several examples --‘feeling-at-home’, silence spaces and rituals, memorials, music and poetry, among others-- we show individual’s concrete actions in mundane everyday life aim to give an affective personal sense to the world around. This focuses on the primary affective nature of human meaning construction that guides the person in one’s continuing feeling-into-the-world. At a theoretical level the notion of affectivation challenges contemporary Cultural Psychology to rescue subjectivity, not only symbolism. Affectivation propounds a return to the long, but partially forgotten, organismic tradition, represented in the history by thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey, Jakob von Uexküll and Kurt Goldstein. Cultural psychology has to bring semiosis back to the vital background of human experience.

Last update from database: 3/13/26, 4:15 PM (UTC)

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