Veit Schwab

Gesamtscheiße. Overall shit. This is the term that popped up when I was working on a collective piece on materialist discourse analysis with a friend. We were looking for ways to refer to the totality of messed-upness around us, the oppressive structures within (and sometimes against) which we move every day, and the feelings of anger and frustration that we’ve allowed to become all too familiar. A popular term in German left jargon to affectively (and, I would argue, not less descriptively) grasp an impalpable totality of, well, – shit! What does this PhD do with me? If, to rephrase a famous feminist slogan, the academic is political, what does that mean exactly? Working on conceptual borders, on the EUropean border regime always already means working within and against bordering practices and structures, and the oppression they emanate. This leaves traces, and it wouldn’t be an appropriate representation of my PhD journey to silence them. In my paper, I explore three affective dimensions that I have lived during my PhD: Desperation, responsibility, and hope.  I am using non-fictional and fictional narrative writing to break with the treacherous comforts of abstract and impersonal analysis. This excursion through the landscapes of my affective conditions of knowledge production is personal; but its movements connect to, and interlace with broader processes of affectionate positioning and processes of in-/exclusion, troubling the idea of affects as something that is ‘internal’ to a subject.