Abstract
The theme of this article is motivated by an interest in the affective density of the political and its effect on our understanding of political subjectivity. Taking up Spinoza's challenge to think about affect beyond corporeal embodiment, I argue that there is a modality of affectivity that cannot simply be inscribed within the borders of subjectivity. I theorise affect as an impersonal force anchored in a relational ontology that gives due recognition to the circulation of affects, as well as to their ambivalent structure in creating sites of identification, and I utilise this ontology to reflect on the dynamic of the political and the shape of political subjectivity. I argue that Spinoza's philosophy (through ideas of conatus and imagination) offers the conceptual resources to reconfigure the composition of affective subjectivity as a transindividual social bond and as an unconscious dynamic of ethico-political existence.
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Notes
Massumi's sources for his conception of affect are Spinoza, and the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon. Massumi establishes a clear demarcation between affect and emotion, where the former is irreducibly bodily and autonomic while the latter is a qualified, subjective, situation-specific experience. I utilise this distinction in my article, but I also draw attention to the Spinozist connection between affect, action and power. It should be noted that there remains an unevenness in definitional rigour adopted by theorists in discussions around affect. There still exists a tendency to treat affect rather as an emotional state than pointing to an important distinction between the two.
All references to Spinoza's Ethics in the text are taken from Curley's translation (Spinoza, 1985) and use the following abbreviations: EII (Part II of the Ethics); Def (definition); P (proposition); Dem (demonstration) Schol (scholium) and Cor (corollary).
I take the idea of a ‘process without a subject’ from Louis Althusser's anti-humanist reflections upon the nature of history. See Althusser (1984). Although it remains consistent with his own usage, the present reading pushes the formulation beyond a structuralist framework.
Freud readily admitted his ‘dependence on Spinoza's doctrine’ (cited in Yovel, 1989, p. 139).
Proposition 57 of Part III of Spinoza's Ethics appeared as an epigraph to Lacan's medical dissertation of 1932.
The present analysis shares, in several respects, the ontological framework of Kordela's synthetic approach towards Spinoza and Lacan. It, nonetheless, develops a somewhat different line of argument by pushing Spinoza's concepts of imagination and conatus in a direction that highlights their affective structure, as well as underscoring the anonymity of these processes.
Spinoza's thought has been associated with almost every philosophical tendency since his death in 1677; from atheism to pantheism, naturalism to materialism, fatalism to determinism. For a valuable assessment of different approaches, see Moreau (1996).
My understanding of relationality is indebted to the work of two authors in particular. Etienne Balibar (1997), from whom I develop the notion of the transindividual, and Brian Massumi's adventurous approach in Parables of the Virtual (2002).
Jean Luc Nancy (2000, p. 18) also makes a similar point, without any allusion to Spinoza: ‘I would no longer be human if I were not a body, a spacing of all other bodies and a spacing of “me” in “me”. A singularity is always a body, and all bodies are singularities (the bodies, their states, their movements, their transformations’.
Spinoza also famously comments, ‘Nobody has yet determined the limits of the body's capabilities; that is, no one has yet learned from experience what the body can and cannot do, without being determined by the mind, solely from the laws of its nature insofar as it is considered as corporeal’ (EIII, P2 Scol).
It was precisely through the diagrammatic form of the mobius strip that Lacan sought also to represent the relationship between the three registers of being (real, symbolic and imaginary).
It is interesting to note also that the term ‘emotion’ stems in the Latin original from e and invere, which means ‘to move out’, ‘to migrate’ or ‘to transform an object’ (Source: Metaphors in the History of Psychology Oxford, London (1990) cited in Terada (2001).
Judith Butler refers to the agency of desire as a ‘foreign object’ in her analysis of Kafka's The Punishment. See Butler (2005, p. 74).
For an interesting discussion of the ambiguous relation of Lacanian discourse to the concept of affect, as well as the later Lacan's utilisation of it, see Stavrakakis (2007, ch. 2).
For a probing discussion on the importance of affect to discourse analysis, see Glynos and Stavrakakis (2004) and Laclau's response in the same volume.
For fascinating discussions of this theme in general, although not with great reference to Spinoza, see Bennett (2004).
In her more recent ethical and psychoanalytical writings in which an account of the constitution of the subject and the internalisation of norms is developed (for example, in The Psychic Life of Power and, more recently with an attention to the ethical relation to the other, in Giving an Account of Oneself), Judith Butler has increasingly fleshed out her ontological commitments by drawing attention to a ‘passionate attachment to existence’, a ‘desire to be’, or ‘a striving to persist in being’, a potentia or possibility that governs the subject (2005, p. 44). This has its source, I would argue, in Spinoza's concept of conatus as much as it might in a Hegelian/Lacanian inspired idea of a desiring subject.
Johnston (2008) thus suggests, with Žižek, that we understand Lacan's theory of the subject as signifier, as non-reducible to any signifier and standing in excess of any symbol or signification as a trans-ontological excess of material being.
I take the term transindividual from Balibar (1997) who attributes it to Gilbert Simondon.
Spinoza distinguishes between a passion and an action. While the former are swayed by the influences of external and internal reaction, and hence increase or decrease man's affective power, an action requires that one understands the cause of any of the former passions. Thus, ‘By affect I understand affections of the Body by which the Body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the idea of these affections. Therefore, if we can be the adequate cause of any of these affections, I understand by the Affect an action, otherwise a passion’ (EIII, Def.3).
This is not to say that the dispersed subject presented here harbours some ontological lack or negativity within it. There is a sense in which (as Jean-Luc Nancy (1997, p. 33) also observes) Spinoza wants to think finite being in its immediate (immanent) relations without the mediation (transcendence), which ceaselessly reopens a gap, or hole, in the subject: philosophy, for Spinoza, as we have noted, is a meditation on life and not death.
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Acknowledgements
Some of the ideas forming the argument of this article were presented at the AHRC-funded Spinoza Network Conference entitled ‘Spinoza and Bodies’ at Dundee University in September 2009. I thank its participants for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank the two anonymous referees and the editors of this special issue for their valuable suggestions.
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Williams, C. Affective processes without a subject: Rethinking the relation between subjectivity and affect with Spinoza. Subjectivity 3, 245–262 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.15