© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004397712_005 Chapter 3 Relational Affect: Perspectives from Philosophy and Cultural Studies Jan Slaby Abstract Philosophers of emotion tend to understand affective phenomena as individual men- tal states with intentional content. In this essay, I will contrast this with materials for an account of affectivity that construes affect as relational dynamics between indi- viduals within social domains. ‘Relational affect’ does not refer to individual feeling states but to affective interactions in relational scenes, either between two or more interactants or between an agent and aspects of her environment. In developing this proposal, I draw on work in cultural affect studies and bring it in conversation with approaches to emotional intentionality in philosophy. In particular, I attempt to trans- pose parts of the normative-pragmatic approach to emotional intentionality devel- oped by Bennett Helm into a transpersonal relational framework. I argue that this re- orientation can help make visible micro-dynamics of affect in social settings that often have problematic political implications. Introduction Philosophers usually do not pay much attention to work on affect in cultural studies.1 Cultural ‘affect theory’ aligns with the tradition of Spinoza, Nietz- sche, Bergson and Deleuze in that it construes affectivity as a pre-personal, dynamic relationality between bodies of various kinds.2 With this orienta- tion, it operates at some remove from the dominant philosophical view that 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in 2016 as part of the Working Paper series of the crc Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin, entitled “Relational Affect.” See http:// www.sfb-affective-societies.de/publikationen/workingpaperseries/wps_2/index.html. The present text is a shortened and in some ways (hopefully) sharpened version of that earli- er paper. 2 A good overview over these strands of work is provided by Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth in their introduction to the seminal Affect Theory Reader (2010).