The Affective Bind.

This essay examines the concept of affect within the framework of psychophysics and affect studies, focusing on how affect functions as a metaphysical substance that resists full scientific explanation. It traces affect theory’s origins to psychophysics—a 19th-century science exploring the relationship between body and soul through sensory experience—and highlights its ongoing tension between empirical measurement and metaphysical claims. The essay introduces the notion of "anaesthetics," an art of slight living characterized by states of diminished or nonconscious experience, as depicted in Nella Larsen’s *Quicksand* and Ottessa Moshfegh’s *My Year of Rest and Relaxation*, where such states serve as responses to historical and social crises of agency. By situating affect as a mediating structure between materiality and consciousness, the essay argues that nonconsciousness and insentience offer alternative modes of subjectivity that challenge conventional narratives of feeling and selfhood.