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A number of developments over the last two decades or so make it timely for Body & Society to host a Special Issue on the theme of affect. A number of concepts have appeared in the social and human sciences, as well as in the natural sciences, that emphasize the fact that social and natural phenomena are complex, processual, indeterminate, relational and constantly open to effects from contiguous processes.Additionally, interest in the theme of 'affective labour' and the capitalization or economization of affect and emotion through teletechnologies and a multitude of therapies have drawn attention to affect as a phenomenon in need of fresh study. 1 Advances in the fields of genetics and biological sciences, mathematics, quantum physics/the physics of small particles, neurosciences, narrative analysis, media and information theory have contributed to this epistemological shift. In its wake, a common ontology linking the social and the natural, the mind and body, the cognitive and affective is beginning to appear, grounded in such concepts as assemblage, flow, turbulence, emergence, becoming, compossibility, relationality, the machinic, the inventive, the event, the virtual, temporality, autopoiesis, heterogeneity and the informational, for example. One important focus of this Special Issue is to spark interest and ongoing engagement in questions of method and experimentation in light of the common ontologies emerging across the humanities, and the natural, social and human sciences.

Technology is always limited to the realm of means, while morality is supposed to deal with ends. In this theoretical article about comparing those two regimes of enunciation, it is argued that technology is on the contrary characterized by the `ends of means' that is the impossibility of being limited to tools; technical artefacts are never tools if what is meant by this is a transmission of function in a mastered way. Once this modification of the meaning of technology is accepted, then it is possible to relate technology, in a totally different way, to morality which is not about values, but about the exploration of ends.

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This article searches for a way of theorizing the interconnectedness of processes of individuation, relationality and affect, with the aim of clearing the ground for an approach that establishes the basis of this interconnectedness by reference to mechanisms common to all living things. It establishes a number of shifts that enable us to think the categories and concepts like the individual, the subject, the group, the threshold, relationality, co-implication and so on according to a fundamental decentring, finally breaking with both subject-centredness and its privilege of the individual as model or starting point; the same epistemological shift implies the rejection of the anthropocentric divide between humans and animals, while avoiding species of sociobiologism, pre-formationism, geneticism and other monocausal paradigms. What the new problematic of life enjoins us to rethink are the standpoint of singularity rather than that of the individual, coupled to the standpoint of relationality as a principle enabling us to think the self—other, human—animal, nature—culture and human—world in terms of compossibility and complex becoming. This view about the co-constitution of all life has major implications regarding responsibility for the other and responsibility for the world, grounded in the standpoint of the temporality and historicity of being as existential condition circumscribing the relation to the other. This shift at the level of ontology is explored via an engagement with the work of Simondon and his conceptual apparatus, particularly ideas of psychic and collective individuation, the pre-and transindividual, the associated milieu; this perspective is re-articulated by way of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, Ettinger’s concept of the ‘I—other plurality’, and cognate concepts that point to a new terrain for theorizing affect.