Affectation

To resonate with a person, but also with a landscape, a melody or an idea, means to be reached, touched or moved by him or her "inside", as it were.

This moment of affectation can also be translated as an "invocation": Suddenly something calls us, moves us from the outside and thereby gains meaning for us for its own sake. The thing or the person from whom we experience such a call appears to us to be "intrinsically" and not only instrumentally significant or important. Such touch can be recognised, for example, by the fact that a person's dull gaze suddenly becomes luminous, or that we suddenly have tears in our eyes. They indicate that the armour of reification with which we usually operate in a world oriented towards enhancement and optimisation, calculation and domination, has been breached for a moment and we have left Aggression mode.

From a phenomenological perspective, this means that the mode of resonance is distinguished from the state of Alienation by what is, as it were, a two-way movement between subject and world: on the one hand, the subject is afflicted by the world, that is, touched or moved in such a way that it develops an intrinsic interest in the encountered section of the world and feels, as it were, "addressed".

⇒ Response

ROSA, Hartmut, 2020. Unverfügbarkeit. Berlin: Suhrkamp. suhrkamp taschenbuch, 5100. ISBN 978-3-518-47100-5, p. 38–39.

Cf. Adressabilität als Grundbegriff der soziologischen Systemtheorie, 2005. In: FUCHS, Peter, Konturen der Modernität. Online. transcript Verlag. p. 37–62. [Accessed 6 October 2022]. ISBN 978-3-89942-335-8.