WHEN REASON OBEYS THE HEART: AFFECT, IDEOLOGY, AND THE LIMITS OF INTELLECTUAL INTERPRETATION: A CRITICAL READING OF AFFECTIVE CONDITIONING IN THE PRODUCTION AND RECEPTION OF CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

Abstract

This article investigates the role of affects — understood broadly as emotions, biographical experiences, ideological affiliations, and identity bonds — in the intellectual production of authors such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault, as well as in the reception and interpretation of their works by contemporary readers and commentators. The central hypothesis is that the production of knowledge rarely stems from a neutral reason: it is born from a situated subject, crossed by affects, reacting to their time, their family, their wounds, and their hopes. The same applies to interpreters: when reading these authors, they project onto them their own causes, reducing complex thoughts to ideological ammunition. The article proposes, in conclusion, an expanded hermeneutics of suspicion — directed not only at texts but at readers themselves — as a condition for intellectually honest and methodologically responsible interpretation.