Consider affect in the technical sense of observed expression of emotion or desire, where 'observation' includes self-observation; this connotes both a distortion of awareness, a decentreing, and also a basic sign of life. The self as auto-affection: forget qualia, to be alive is to experience affections, to collapse the irony inherent in being affected. It is to experience vividly but to be unable to fully claim that experience until it is recollected, and thus to be spaced out in time, on the altar of the real, which is time. So it is to be scattered to the winds, as if the internal currents of being as appetites and evaluations, as fundamental motion, as the vectorial nature of being, is suddenly aligned, forced or drawn into alignment by a coincidence of outward circumstance with latent inclinations, so that the working stability of the self is compromised in the face of something more real than itself. Every self or persona is a situated commitment, and commitments crystallize in the universal form of judgments; what you feel to be your good is what you believe to be good tout court, you are the arbiter and proof of all categories, what you want is good even if it is unacceptable - and it does not cease to be unacceptable even if it is good. Affect can and does turn on a dime. The persona knows it is unreal, is the working knowledge of its own unreality.