Abstract

This dissertation concerns the affects, defined as bodily intensities and as pre-personal productive or creative feelings. Here, the affects are not simply passions; they precede the distinction between activity and passivity. These definitions correspond to the intuition expressed in philosophies of time and experience, that something is always happening in or to bodies. According to this intuition, events and processes always pertain to bodies, and what happens to bodies is experienced as affects: corporeal intensities, blocks of lived timespace, which can also be called duration-location . These definitions likewise interlace with the contentions of some recent continental philosophers according to whom our subjectivities are produced within relational networks of power and desire. The importance of these redefinitions is twofold: first, the affects are constitutive of subjectivity and not the inverse. Psychological or private personal emotions are derivative of a larger circulation of affects. Secondly, the constitution of subjectivity by the affects, here denominated a production of subjectivity, implies that social forms are inherently plastic and in process. Thus there is always an opening to other forms of individual and group subjectivity, and along with this conclusion comes the corollary: how to engage that opening most fruitfully? The ontological productivity of desiring intensities in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, presented with an exemplary mixture of philosophical and political concerns, serves as the starting point for this redefinition of the affects. Here the affects are seen in the context of extreme experiences, powerful hallucinations of our participation in history. In Spinoza's Ethics, especially Parts 2 and 3, a detailed analysis of the relation between affections and affects allows us to see the ramifications of a systematic philosophy which makes affective modification its primary logic. Guattari's later writings, especially Cartographies Schizoanalytiques and Chaosmosis, develop in a very different sense the possibility of a logic of intensities or of affects, using it as the basis for an examination of the production of subjectivity in determinate social and historical systems, and proposing the possibility of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm of enunciations beyond the current desingularization of subjectivity. The entire project rests under the sign of a double Spinozist affirmation: of speculative thinking , and of the power of the affects.