Affective Judgement

I recently had the pleasure of presenting a conference paper at the Eschatology at the Beginning of the Third Millenium organised by the University of Notre Dame Australia, and I am now in the process of editing it.

In the first draft of the conference paper, I made use of a scene in Babette’s Feast as an eschatological case study of looking at loss as a lived eschatology, and primarily looking at it through Romano Guardini’s coverage of death - in this case biographical death - in his The Last Things.

Following the presentation, I came across another movie that could be another unlikely yet nonetheless interesting case study on the same theme of loss, namely the 2015 Pixar movie Inside Out.

In the course of doing more research into the movie, someone suggested I look into Affect Theory, which focuses on trying to organise the world of affect, feeling and emotion. Affect Theory began its life in the Psychoanalytic literature (the pioneering work here done by Silvan Tomkins), and has also received interest from other literatures, particularly those in Critical Theory and postmodern philosophy in the tradition of Michel Foucault’s work on power.

One of the key insights that I got from reading the Foucauldian thread was that power is an exercise of affect, and the institutions that channel that power are also channeling affects not of one’s own making. In moving through these institutions, we would also experience being at the receiving end of those affects. This helped me make sense of what was going on in Riley, one of the main protagonists of Inside Out, who not only has emotions driving her actions, but also goes through experiences that in turn translate into changes to her own interior life.

The reason for my fascination was because I saw an overlap between this experience of affective transfer and what Foucault called “governmentality” in which institutions transmitted what we deemed to be rational. This overlap, I thought, paired nicely with another last thing, namely that of judgement. Insofar as affects orient what is rational, and insofar as we experience these affects, we find ourselves at the receiving end of some kind of judgement not of our own making.

In every move and passage through myriad institutions, we stand at the threshold of someone else’s judgement. More importantly for the Christian, every step can take one at the threshold of divine as well as human judgement.

But an important turning point comes when Riley, finally realising her loss of her childhood home, finds herself in the embrace of her parents. For me, this also signalled something about judgement. Unlike Foucault’s notion of “governmentality”, judgement can also be personal, and the Christian must remember, as Joseph Ratzinger wrote towards the end of his life, that divine judgement also brings us face to face with the person of God.

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