Affective Impingements in Nina Cristante's The Richest Man in Babylon (2024) and Ilona Sagar's Correspondence O (2018)

Focussing on two case studies: Nina Cristante’s The Richest Man in Babylon (2024) and Ilona Sagar’s Correspondence O (2018), this chapter explores how affective life in neoliberalism harnesses body and psyche to an extractive system. The chapter explores how artists’ moving image installations might generate moments of intensity, or what philosopher Brian Massumi calls ‘affective impingement’, that might evade or unsettle this harnessing. I examine affective impingement as being both hysterical and critical in a changing climate of neoliberalism in which the notion of emotions as commodities to be controlled and exchanged as capital has transmogrified into affects as diseased residues that metaphorically leak out of a resistant body.