The Politics of Affect

Recent events both in Greece and all over the world signal the need to rethink politics. Solidarity, resistance, change notions and concepts heavily chraged from another era, from a completely different world, seem inadequate to provide a way to open up new domains of political intervention and collective action. The immence interest on the work of Deleuze and to certain extend of Spinoza brings me to think affect and radical empiriscism as practices that could frame a new productive model of politcs capable of opening up new possibilities. The following extracts are from Susan Ruddick's paper "The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the work of Negri and Deleuze" that best describe and frame my thinking on politics   


Ruddick poses a very interesting and up to date question: "How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own opression?"


"How we might engage difference and alterity wihtin our own political projects, our collective creations[?]"


Her work focuses on how Spinoza and his 'affect and be affected' approach to Nature has been assimilated by thinkers like Negri and Deleuze. 


"The coherent sense of self is literally ungrounded in the first encounter with the wave, but later replaced by a new social body: swimmer/surfer/wave, the combination and enhancement of active powers." and as Ruddick will point out further at her notes "the simplicity of this example also allows us to think about a potentially limitless array in combinatorials in a social body of both human and non-human dimension."


Deleuze and Guattari would ask: Why the masses "chose to fight for their servitude as if it was their freedom"? They give a possible answer in Anti-Oedipus: "No, the masses were no innocent dupes; at a certain point, under certain circumstances, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of desire for the masses that needs to be accounted for."... "the social field is immediately invested with desire"