In the new episode of Paradigma podcast, Christian von Scheve and Jan Slaby join hosts İrem Karamık and Erman Ermihan to explore how affect shapes what captures our attention, moves us, and prompts us to act—or leaves us strangely unmoved.

Taking their opening chapter in The New Key Concepts in Affective Societies as a point of departure, they discuss affect not as a private state contained within an individual, but as a relation connecting people, institutions, media, material environments, and structures of power. Moving from political mobilization to social media and AI-generated emotional content, the conversation examines “surrogate emotions,” socially produced forms of unfeeling, and the ambivalent power of affect to both expand and diminish our capacity to act.