For that reason, the dry
affectlessness of Camus appealed to me.
Javanese rituals call for a 40-day mourning period, followed by 100- and 1000-day ceremonies, including for stillborn babies, and are the means by which people manage grief and strive towards ikhlas, a state of "willed
affectlessness", when members of the bereaved family are expected to quiet their true emotions and become detached.
His
affectlessness in these matters, inside and outside the book, is sometimes chilling--in a forum broadcast on the ABC's Late Night Live, speaking of the massacre in the Barman diaries, he referred to a disputed number of 'kills'.
Affectlessness in action disturbs him only afterwards, and alternates with sudden anxieties about being watched and losing control.
Now, trudging on, past methane pits and the occasional Star of David that marked a spot where human ashes had been unearthed, I felt something like a return of the numbing
affectlessness that had descended upon me two decades before.
Under the generally economic law of affective thermodynamics, the total amount of emotion cannot be diminished by the
affectlessness of a noble mind.
Unlike prior examples of modernist alienation, however, fun does not evoke "anxiety or dread" but
affectlessness (Seguin contrasts the emerging "fun" of the 1950s, for instance, with the violence that mass alienation produces in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust).
Indeed, Fritsch's objects court another kind of ugliness; they take their forms as perfect, smoothly contoured icons that rebuff the eye through a kind of
affectlessness or, perhaps better said, through a kind of aloofness.