For not limiting emotional and af f ectual geographies: a collective critique of Steve Pile's 'Emotions and affect in recent human geography'

摘要

Steve Pile's 'Emotions and affect in recent human geography' (2010) is a welcome addition to ongoing examinations, discussions and debates of the relevance of affect and emotion for geographical concerns. While Pile is most interested in identifying disciplinary geography's affectual and emotional 'conceptual underpinnings', clarifying the 'consistencies and disputes within this broad field of endeavour' and pointing to how psychoanalysis can offer vision in its 'conceptual blind spots' (2010, 5), we wish this short collective commentary to be less a defence or even clarification of disciplinary geography's treatment of affect and emotion (we leave this task to those geographers Pile cites) and more a critical rejoinder confronting certain problematic characterisations and conclusions we feel Pile makes about affectual and emotional geographies. We are particularly concerned with: (i) Pile's lending to affectual geography an ontological partitioning of mind and body, (ii) Pile's failure to confront the different political and geographical implications affect and emotion have for questions of identity and difference, and (iii) Pile's recourse to psychoanalysis, which misses much of the importance of discussing affect and emotion in the first place.