My first introduction to the idea of Affect Theory was the scenario modeled by Teresa Brennan The Transmission of Affect. A person walks into a room and “feels” the atmosphere charged this way or that. The feeling or affect is not one’s own. “[S]omething is present that was not there before, but it did not originate sui generis; it was not generated solely or sometimes even in part by the organism or its genes” (p.1). This to me gave the best of affect as something not specific to the individual or to individual consciousness, but as socially transmitted and biologically or physiologically registered, on the skin, as it were. This stands against the modern or Cartesian notion of the ego as a self-contained unit severed from connection with other people and the environment. That concepts in Jewish philosophy should be recognizable already in Buber (pp.2, 18-19)

Methodologically, these claims are…