The Affection In-Between: From Common Sense to Sensing in Common

The Affection in Between approach to ethics emphasizes the overlooked ability to sense with others through expressive, moving bodies in everyday affective encounters. It challenges the traditional understanding of common sense as individual or communal and proposes a new perspective that unfolds between bodies in movement. By incorporating classical and contemporary phenomenology, empirical theories of social cognition, and affect theory, April Flakne offers fresh answers to skepticism about selfhood and the role of ethics in countering disorientation and division. Through an exploration of intimate experiences such as birth, death, caregiving, and mourning, she brings the ethical and political aspects of interbody interaction into lived experience.

Format: Hardback
Length: 252 pages
Publication date: 24 October 2022
Publisher: Ohio University Press

This innovative approach to ethics revolves around the overlooked ability to sense with others, focusing on expressive and moving bodies in everyday affective encounters. Common sense has yet to fully realize its potential, offering robust selves, a stable sense of reality, and strong bonds of solidarity. The Affection in Between contends that reimagining common sense requires tackling two challenging philosophical puzzles simultaneously: the problems of sensory integration and "other minds." Conceiving common sense as either an individual cognitive capacity or a collective body of beliefs and practices, as our tradition of philosophical and political thought has done for too long, limits possibilities for self and other, ethics and politics. Neither register alone can evade political manipulation and establish common ground between confident yet unavoidably porous selves.

April Flakne begins her exploration with a novel interpretation of the neglected Aristotelian concept of sunaisthesis, an embodied, interactive capacity to create overlapping meaning through the cultivation of a sensibility that exists between bodies in movement. By bolstering Aristotle's concept with classical and contemporary phenomenology, including critical phenomenology, empirical theories of social cognition, and affect theory, Flakne provides fresh answers to a pressing and legitimate skepticism about selfhood and the role that ethics might play in countering disorientation and manufactured division. Through an exploration of intimate experiences such as birth, death, caregiving, and mourning, Flakne brings the ethical and political aspects of interbody interaction into lived experience.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780821424964