Mauricio García: Let’s start with the general reflections you’ve been developing in philosophical terms—reflections that deal with affects, anger, the question of the body, and related issues. Today, whether in psychology, in education (our own field), or even in other modes of reflection that strike me as having a decidedly corporate bent—coaching, mindfulness, the kind of pop stoicism in vogue—there is endless talk about emotions, affects, and above all the importance of expressing them. If we stay specifically within education and how it is managed, it is becoming ever more necessary to take this entire emotional realm into account—as a way to understand both ourselves and everyone with whom we interact. However, there's a problem: we do not really know what emotions or affects are. It is often assumed that we already understand them. So, my first question is: could you offer us a definition or initial reflection on what emotions or affects are?

Laura Quintana: Yes, what interests me is to underscore how the language of emotions is tied to a history closely bound up with the emergence of psychological knowledge—how we understand the human psyche, how we study the human being and what moves it. Even more, it is a notion historically rooted in the concern to comprehend and regulate deviant behavior. Hence it has frequently lent itself to practices of behavior management framed by functionalist approaches aimed at social integration, even though this is not the only way to address emotions. Critical perspectives have examined emotions beyond individual regulation and control, emphasizing their collective dimension. However, I believe the term has tended to favor processes of individualization and psychologization of affective life, aligning with management discourses, psychological practices, pedagogical frameworks, and audiovisual/advertising products seeking to govern individual behavior.

From these regulatory perspectives on behavior, emotions are often viewed as something that can be categorized and classified. Emotions are objectified (distanced, specified, identified) and studied through neuroscientific experiments, psychological studies, and behavioral analyses. This often leads to their organization into frameworks with rigid, value-laden boundaries: good or bad emotions, social or antisocial ones.  Hence the emphasis on 'emotional management,' 'emotional intelligence,' motivation, and rational control—all aimed at avoiding disruptive or negative emotions in the name of social integration and functionality. This reinforces the idea that emotions belong to the individual's psychic life, influenced by their environment but controllable through personal responsibility.  As a result, disruptive emotions (like sadness or anger) may be labeled as 'bad,' and by pathologizing or localizing them in specific individuals or contexts, broader, more corrosive social dynamics—difficult to replicate in a lab or reduce to fixed cultural identities—are rendered invisible. This approach ultimately promotes conformist models that reaffirm the status quo.

The notion of affect points in a different direction, invoking a vocabulary in which—following Spinoza—affect is understood as the effect one body produces on another. This perspective, rooted in vitalist philosophy, highlights relationality: bodies (conceived not as isolated entities but as complexes of biological, cultural, and historical ties) are always vulnerable, mutable, and codependent, perpetually interacting with other bodies, spaces, technologies, and practices.  Affect, in this sense, cannot be reduced to what an individual subject feels or to mere interactions between pre-constituted subjects. Instead, it arises in heterogeneous assemblages of mutually affecting conditions. What matters is its generative nature: an affect never emerges from nothing but from prior conditions that, in turn, enable new transformations. Thus, the affective manifests in historically situated chains of emergence, where interactions between bodies, institutions, and technologies shape modes of subjectivation, forms of bodily memory, and relational habits.

Now, these affective assemblages cross boundaries that cannot be fixed: the biological and the cultural, the individual and the collective, the intimate and the political constantly interpenetrate. This is why affects cannot be objectified or classified in rigid terms as 'good' or 'bad.'  So-called 'sad' affects, such as anger or sadness, can be vital in fostering the recognition of injustice or the processing of loss; while affects considered 'positive,' like love, compassion, or joy, can become toxic when they impose unattainable ideals, deny vulnerability, or reinforce forms of control and condescension. In reality, affects shift, contaminate, and transform: love for family or nation can turn into hatred, the desire for success into a sense of failure, anguish into a creative drive.  There are no universal or pure affects, only situated passages and becomings, shaped by historical and social conditions that render them inherently unstable and contentious. Understanding this historical emergence of the affective is key to politicizing these phenomena and grasping their conditions of emergence.

García: Much of what you’re saying—especially on the side of the affects—rests on their historical and social conditions, something you’ve stressed repeatedly in your interventions, books, articles, and elsewhere. My first question, then, beyond its introductory role, is to think, on the one hand, about the classic philosophical distinction between body and soul. Bringing affects back to their historical and social condition, how do they manifest in everyday life—for example, in Colombia?

Quintana: There are several questions here. I’m not sure I follow the link between the body-and-soul issue and the last point you raised, but to speak of the affective in the sense I’ve just outlined presupposes a monism: only the body exists, its materiality. The soul is not something separate; it is an effect of material and bodily arrangements, of relations that are themselves material. That materiality, however, is not uniform but heterogeneous and complex; it is traversed by multiple interactions that produce diverse effects and can unfold in more or less unexpected or intensive ways. It is a conception of materiality as process, in which relations configure always variable effects.

What we call the soul is, then, a configuration of subjects produced through processes involving biological, social, and historical dimensions. Biology itself is shaped by social and historical factors, making any distinction between these spheres somewhat artificial: the biological is always social, and the social is always biological. Drawing boundaries is merely a way of naming processes that are, in reality, multiple interactions.  Analyzing all this means recognizing that our bodily experiences and the forms of subjectivation tied to them are inscribed in social arrangements sedimented over time—heterogeneous and complex. In a country like Colombia, these arrangements refer to colonization practices that shaped its history, the modes of economic exploitation linked to those processes, the republican orderings that continued them, and persistent dynamics such as racism and machismo. At the same time, more contemporary practices are added, such as computer-mediated management mechanisms that also reproduce logics of racialization. Thus, social arrangements generate variations through constant interactions, but also persistences amid transformations. As corporeal beings, we are affected both by these long-duration dynamics and by more recent ones, and our bodily experiences are traversed by all of it. This does not mean there is no room for singular modifications: every life is unique, but it rests on a common ground of shared conditions, albeit modulated by differences of biography, life-place, or privilege.

In this sense, affects are shaped within historically situated relationships that span places, temporalities, and experiences, generating differentiated yet always mutable subject positions—since subjects are not static, nor are cultural configurations. Thinking in affective terms means considering how biographical, communal, or historical experiences in a particular context condense affects that influence economic and social life, but also aesthetic and sensory experiences, as well as forms of recognition between subjects.  It is, therefore, an approach attuned to the relationships that animate phenomena and can be oriented in diverse directions.

García: I believe that one of the most important elements Colombian philosophy has reflected upon is violence. When you talk, for example, about common ground, the configuration of affects, I think that begins to speak—just a little, or rather quite a lot—about the experience we have of ourselves, but also about the experience of the other and how these are interrelated. And as an introduction—or to complicate things a bit—I wanted to bring up a thesis regarding the philosophical reflection that has been done on violence and the experience of the other, a thesis of a phenomenological and also anthropological nature. The thesis asks why perpetrators are capable of committing violations. And the conclusion says it has been possible because the perpetrators see others, that is, their victims, as animals. In other words, they strip them of all humanity. And it is by stripping them of that humanity that they are, so to speak, 'authorized' to violate these people, since it doesn’t matter—because they are not human. But beyond this thesis, what I want to ask you is: what analysis do you make, or what reflections can you offer us, about Colombians—why we are the way we are, how we are—in relation to social, political, and economic violence? And how would you describe our experience of others?

Quintana: Undoubtedly, there are many hypotheses about how certain forms of violence are especially brutal. As we know, violence takes many forms. These are always interrelated: all symbolic violence is material, and all material violence is symbolic. In that sense, it is impossible to think of the absolute elimination of violence, since even the symbolic kind inevitably accompanies human existence. This does not mean that human beings are naturally violent, but rather that living in a relational world implies that these relationships—always fragile—can break. Because they depend on vulnerable subjects and forms of co-dependency marked by conflict, the possibility of harm and destruction is always present. From my perspective, violence has to do with the capacity to destroy the relationships that sustain and give meaning to a person’s life, something that can manifest in very diverse ways.

Certain forms of violence, however, are more destructive than others—such as those that seek to shut down the very possibilities of a body, or that affect not only individuals but entire communities and specific social groups. There emerge forms of dehumanization that can be described as processes of animalization or even objectification, in which the other is reduced to the point of becoming expendable and eliminable. This contempt is learned, taught, and reproduced, feeding the perception of the other as a threat or danger, which facilitates the justification of extreme violence. Therefore, it seems wrong to me to claim that Colombians are naturally violent, since that essentializes a phenomenon that has historical and social roots, and reproduces a harmful stigma.

Colombia has indeed been a country structured by systematic and cruel forms of violence that have often been normalized and naturalized, making them harder to criticize. The origin of these violences lies in the colonial configuration, where power was exercised by appropriating territories and bodies, radically and violently determining their fates. Later, as various studies have shown, the country did not question those colonial hierarchies; instead, it organized itself on the basis of powers that reproduced social, racial, and gender inequalities, ensuring the domination of some bodies over others.

These systematic relations of inequality have shaped sensory and affective life, teaching people to despise certain bodies and to assume that some lives are worth more than others. They have also fixed territories as peripheral, destined for abandonment, without the same infrastructure afforded to those deemed 'central'. This institutionalized contempt has reproduced violences that in turn have generated retaliatory or revolutionary responses. Some of these responses have sought to transform the country, but they have done so by resorting to militaristic structures also linked to the exploitation of resources and to practices of territorial appropriation. Thus, institutional experience in Colombia has configured not only relations among subjects but also relations with nature, which have been equally violent.

What is surprising is that, despite everything, numerous efforts to counter these violences have existed. Colombia has been traversed not only by structures of oppression but also by emancipatory practices and resistances. These, however, must not be idealized, since they have at times reproduced dynamics of machismo, racism, or warrior hierarchies. Even so, they have represented attempts to dismantle systematic forms of violence and to build more egalitarian projects.

In my view, the worst violence in Colombia is the naturalization of inequality. That tacit acceptance of hierarchies underpins much of the everyday violence, the aggressions, and the gestures of contempt that form the ground on which social life in the country unfolds.

García: Although related to the previous reflections, but if one wants to be much more specific, I would like to ask about the very exercise of philosophy. In Philosophy World Democracy, there is an interest in reflecting on new ways of doing philosophy, and what I have seen of your reflections is that they cannot be detached from a very specific context, a kind of Colombian philosophical tradition – however philosophy has often been seen from the outside, perhaps even with a hint of disdain by those who have never studied it, And from within the academy itself, the philosophical exercise has been reduced to an exegesis of authors and opinions philosophical opinions. Yet when one looks at the very history of philosophy, one realizes that this same history belies the idea that philosophy remains confined to classrooms, or in abstractions, or speculations. Just to give one example, when one talks about Plato’s theory of Forms, which is like pure abstraction. This is always learned from the famous myth of the cave; it seems to me, however, I find it very hard to understand that myth of the cave unless one bears in mind that Plato apparently wrote it thinking of the salt mines that existed in ancient Athens. He could just as easily have done it in a house, in a dark living room…

In that sense, do you think it is possible today to speak of a Colombian philosophy?

Just as today one studies Greek philosophy, the Stoics, modern philosophy—or do you think this kind of generalization makes no sense at all? Do you think it is possible to speak of a Colombian philosophy?

Quintana: It’s a good and difficult question, and I think it admits two answers. On the one hand, one might understand by 'Colombian philosophy' the philosophy produced in this country, whether or not it deals with the concrete circumstances of Colombia. Someone who works on Descartes, for example, can be Colombian, and yet his reading will not be identical to that of a Frenchman or a German. In that sense, every philosophical exercise carried out from here bears a mark of situatedness.

However, there are those who, even while devoting themselves to Greek philosophy, seek to make explicit that place of enunciation and to recognize the way it influences their thought. There are also those who try to intervene directly in that place in order to produce interpretations of realities that specifically concern Colombia, and in addressing problems that concern this country.

That said, I do not believe that thinking from here simply means elaborating a 'philosophy of Colombian identity' or a philosophical 'Colombianism.' To situate oneself does not mean shutting oneself up in a fixed or closed location, but rather recognizing that one inhabits a complex place already traversed by multiple logics. What we call the 'Colombian reality' is also constituted by global dynamics; every local space is affected by them. Understanding many of this country’s problems therefore requires relating them to those broader dynamics.

For this reason, I am interested in establishing dialogues with perspectives that come from other spheres, not strictly philosophical ones, such as literature, cinema, technology, or art. To situate oneself also means opening up to those intersections and encounters. In this sense, there is indeed a Colombian philosophy, but it can take very diverse forms: from those who think about problems global from here to those who focus on issues more directly linked to our historical and social reality.

García: There is always the question about the way philosophy is done, perhaps because of the very way philosophy has traditionally been taught, with very specific divisions between currents and moments. And in that same sense, and making reference to an idea of yours, for many people today there is, so to speak, a certain fatigue with these self-help speeches and books. In the face of that, you see that people are looking for another kind of discourses —reflections that are at least more developed—and perhaps that has led to the buzzword 'stoicism' being used a lot as a form of philosophical reflection. I’m a bit skeptical about the fact that people are looking for another kind of reflection—not because they can’t do it or don’t really want to, but rather there’s a tendency to see philosophy as a kind of self-help tool. I believe that many of those discourses are a way in which capitalism reproduces itself as a kind of device, for this system has a great capacity, an astonishing one moreover, to reproduce itself in multiple ways. In this same sense, I find two related questions, and that is why philosophy cannot be considered self-help, and, if faced with people’s criticism that it is useless, if one can speak of any usefulness of philosophy. 

Quintana: Before answering those two questions, I would like to address what you mentioned about your skepticism regarding capitalism’s capacity for capture. It is clear that capitalism-a heterogeneous regime that spreads through multiple discourses and practices-has a great capacity for capture, even of what is dissident. Nevertheless, I believe that this capture is never total: there is always a crack left for agency, which can assert itself in unnoticed ways. I have seen many people recognize this experience, though not the majority, since the hegemonic forms of self-understanding and desire-production are very powerful. Even so, I perceive a certain weariness—even in unexpected people—in their everyday interactions: in the face of working conditions, media narratives, or the forms of life they endure. That exhaustion tends to translate into resignation or powerlessness, an inertia that assumes there isn’t much to be done. But when people manage to access more complex narratives—for example, interpretive media or chronicles that thicken reality—I find that many people, even without academic training, discover there a space for reflection. That’s what I meant when I drew the distinction between philosophy and self-help.

Self-help, now rebranded as ‘well-being narratives,’ remains a discourse centered on resilience. It starts from acceptance that there will be harm and suffering—not just pain, but pain without reason and intensified—and proposes integrating them as opportunities for growth and self-affirmation. The problem is that it never questions the conditions that produce that harm: it justifies it as a chance for personal fulfillment. Thus, a confirmatory vision of the social world is consolidated, in which the subject must absorb everything that happens to him to reaffirm himself as someone oriented toward self-empowerment, autopoiesis and growth, never questioning either himself or the world he inhabits. These are simplifying, uncritical discourses that flatten the complexity of experience.

Philosophy, on the other hand —even in its most conservative strains, if it is good philosophy —introduces complexity. Plato, for example, may uphold a model of undemocratic society, yet he is still an author who does not reduce reality, who opens up nuances, possibilities for rereading and spaces of poeticity. Philosophy answers to a place of slowness, reflection and thickening—precisely the opposite of the flattening characteristic of self-help.

As for the question of usefulness, under capitalist logic a functionalist cost-benefit, performance-maximizing mindset has taken hold. Everything must prove useful within those narrow parameters. Paradoxically, that utilitarian discourse turns out to be not very useful in a broad sense, since it is destroying the planet. It would be more appropriate to question how vitally useful a model that presents itself as the measure of all usefulness can be. From another conception, usefulness should be thought in terms of what enhances life: relationships that do not destroy, capacities that are expanded, possibilities of understanding that grow. Under this logic philosophy is profoundly useful, for it allows us to complicate experience, to submit what harms to critique and to question that narrow notion of usefulness that has enclosed life within a logic of destructive and impoverishing performance.

García: The last question I have is, in relation to the above, and it may be redundant, but now I want to appeal to you as the professor: why keep teaching philosophy? Facing those very discourses or ways in which the system operates, that same logic you mention before on the question of usefulness and in the face of other kinds of problems—such as funding issues, even life-planning itself—one can obviously ask: if I study philosophy, what do I do afterwards? From your experience as a teacher, why keep insisting on teaching philosophy?

Quintana: I believe that philosophy, in general, can be profoundly useful in a vital sense, especially in a world dominated by productivism, which imposes an accelerated rhythm of performance and manic consumption, leaving no room to stop and think. Yet stopping to think is fundamental—not only to understand the world we inhabit, but also to adopt ethical behavior. Many of the problems we face today —whether in interpersonal relations or in politics—stem from banal mindsets accustomed to repeating whatever the times and others dictate, without questioning it.

That is why it remains crucial-even if it sounds like a cliché- the act of daring to think. Since Kant’s Enlightenment, it has meant calling into question what we take as evident merely because it has been established as such. That critical training, so often invoked in textbooks, programs and institutional mission statements, is rarely put into genuine practice. In school and university classrooms, questioning what is given to strip it of its supposed naturalness is seldom encouraged. Not all philosophy achieves this, but many currents and thinkers have made precisely this their task: to denaturalize what presents itself as common sense.

This function is vital for everyone, and its wider spread in the present would be highly desirable. In my teaching experience, I am troubled to find that basic-training students struggle to sustain attention —a phenomenon widely studied in connection with new media and the habits they have instilled. There is little patience for tackling difficulty, for reading carefully, for listening at length, and a persistent dread of boredom. All of this has eroded cognitive habits essential for understanding themselves and understanding the world.

Philosophy demands exactly the opposite: texts that, though difficult, require patience, attention and reflection to be understood and digested. In addition to this general educational value, philosophy also furnishes more specialized abilities: conceptual analysis, conceptual production and creativity, abilities that today have become more indispensable than ever.

Translated by MARICIO GARCÍA