The Affective Temporalities of Friendships

Kinneret Lahad

"When will we meet?" "It's been ages since we last spoke", or "We must catch up soon", are just some of the commonplace and seemingly insignificant sayings between friends. In this theoretical paper, which forms part of a larger research project on friendship relations, I suggest that these oft-repeated temporal expressions are telling examples of how friendships are done and felt. This paper suggests that friendships are created and operate simultaneously in several different temporal registers and thus asks not what friendships are but what friendships do. By bringing together affect and time studies and exploring the relationships between the psychic and the social, I argue that exploring friendship temporalities also needs to focus on the unmarked, hazy and affective intensities or detachments of these relations. The paper concludes by mapping a future research agenda for the study of friendships, time and affects.

Kinneret Lahad is a Senior Lecturer at the Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. She had been involved in various prestigious research projects, which merited international attention, praise, and materialized in publications in leading journals. Her book, A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time was published by Manchester University Press in 2017. Her current projects include independent and collaborative studies on friendships, aunthood, temporality, intimacy and affects. She is currently writing her next book on friendship temporalities.

Photo by Bia Andrade on Unsplash

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