Abstract
Lauren Berlant and Baruch Spinoza both maintain that our ethical and political projects must be formulated and conducted on the terrain of the affects. Key to both projects is to recongize our power to be affected as not a weakness but a strength and to realize, without regret, that we are nonsovereign subjects. Only by working through the affects can we proceed on a path to liberation and joy.
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Notes
I paraphrase here Berlant’s characterization of queer phenomenology, which certainly fits her own work well. “[Q]ueer phenomenology is involved not mainly with gathering up evidence of symptoms of affective damage, but with following the tracks of longing and belonging to create new openings for how to live, and to offer the wild living or outside belonging that already takes place as opportunities for others to re-imagine the practice of making and building lives” (2011, p. 198).
Berlant questions whether abandoning the rhetoric of the sovereign subject could undermine the struggles of subordinated populations and thus if something like a strategic claim to sovereignty might be justified and effective, although she does not take this path. “[O]ne might argue legitimately that renouncing a popular or civil society politics of sovereign persons or publics in self-relation and relation to the state would cede to the groups who benefit from inequality the privilege to define the procedures of sovereign representation, authority, and conceptualization of the human in a self-ratifying way” (2011, p. 98). It would be important to confront this question and explain why strategic claims to sovereignty are not politically productive, but that discussion extends outside the limits of this essay.
A racehorse and a workhorse, Deleuze explains, belong to the same species but from the perspective of the affects they are little alike. The power to be affected of a racehorse shares more with a greyhound, and that of the workhorse shares more with a cow (1978 “L’affect et l’idée”).
The human body is destroyed when it is “rendered completely incapable of being affected in many ways” (1985 Ethics, IV P39 dem).
Martin Joughin consistently translates “pouvoir d’être affecté” as “capacity to be affected.” I prefer the more literal “power to be affected” because it highlights the correspondence between this power and the power to act.
Deleuze cites both this and the subsequent passage in footnote 14, 383. Note that the “or” that Spinoza uses in these passages, “vel,” is different than the one employed in his famous formula, “deus sive natura,” god or nature, which is commonly recognized to signify an equivalence between the two terms. I think Deleuze is right to interpret an equivalence in these passages too.
My effort in this essay is, in part, to demonstrate, by focusing on the power to be affected, that a Foucaultian politics of pleasure and a Deleuzian politics of desire are not only compatible but also, in fact, intimately related. It would be interesting in this regard to return to “Desire and Pleasure,” the brief letter that Deleuze wrote to Foucault. In 1976, Deleuze read Foucault’s History of Sexuality, vol. 1, but since their friendship had recently been broken over a political controversy, Deleuze wrote a letter about the book and asked their mutual friend, François Ewald, to deliver it to Foucault. The letter highlights the contrast between Foucault’s thought and his own, and especially his and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which was published a few years earlier. Whereas he and Guattari focus on desire, which is constantly productive, he writes, Foucault looks to pleasures, which he reads as fundamentally passive. Deleuze links this to the fact that Foucault critiques notions of repression and instead conceives power as productive, whereas Deleuze and Guattari configure power as reactive, a response that represses and contains and recuperates desire. From the perspective of Deleuze’s work on Spinoza almost a decade earlier, however, one might view the two projects—desire and pleasure—as not divergent but corresponding paths. When Foucault defines bodies and pleasures as the rallying point for the counterattack, he is affirming the power to be affected and designating it as the primary field of political action. We cannot simply accept our power to be affected as it is, dominated by passive affections, but must instead struggle to make those affections active and thereby increase and sustain our joyful encounters. Here, it seems to me, a politics of pleasure and one of desire completely overlap.
I greatly abbreviate in this paragraph Deleuze’s articulation of the role of “common notions” in Spinoza, which is crucial for his interpretation. Here is Deleuze’s summary. “This whole process as described by Spinoza falls into four phases: (1) passive joy, which increases our power of action, and from which flow desires and passions based on a still inadequate idea; (2) the formation, by the aid of those joyful passions, of a common notion (an adequate idea); (3) active joy, which follows from this common notion and is explained by our power of action; (4) this active joy is added to the passive joy, but replaces the passions of desire born of the latter by desires belonging to reason, which are genuine actions. Spinoza’s project is thus realized not by suppressing all passion, but by the aid of joyful passions restricting passions to the smallest part of ourselves, so that our capacity to be affected is exercised by a maximum of active affections” (1992, p. 285). I discuss at greater length “common notions” and several other aspects of Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza in Hardt (1993).
References
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1992). Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza (trans: Joughin, M.). New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (1978). “L’affect et l’idée,” Course lecture at the Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes, 24 January. Available at www.deleuzeweb.com in the original French and English translation.
Hardt, M. (1993). Gilles Deleuze: an apprenticeship in philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schmitt, C. (2007). The concept of the political (trans: Schwab, G.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Spinoza, B. (1985). Ethics in collected works (trans: Curley, E.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Spinoza, B. (2002). Political treatise in complete works (trans: Shirley, S.). Indianapolis: Hackett.
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Hardt, M. The Power to be Affected. Int J Polit Cult Soc 28, 215–222 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-014-9191-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-014-9191-x