On being affected: Desire, passion, and the question of conatus after Spinoza and Deleuze

Abstract

This paper introduces Spinoza's notion of conatus as the principle of desire that animates how we strive to persist in the world. Spinoza argues that our conatus is affected by the encounters and relations that make up socio‐spatial life, meaning that the desires that animate our striving are more often than not shaped by external powers. Centralising the notion of conatus therefore highlights how what geographers have come to term “affects” can be understood to be thoroughly imbricated in complex conditions of desire. The paper then pulls out the ethico‐political consequences of thinking with conatus. First, this involves engaging the political problem of the “passions” as the affective trace of the processes in which our desires are shaped by powers greater than ourselves and which, Spinoza argues, often leave us striving in ways that are contrary to our flourishing. Second, the paper turns to what Spinoza calls the ‘common notions’ as a way of thinking ethics as a practice for composing more joyful modes of persisting in common. Ethics becomes a practice of thought aimed toward the expression of the numerous ways in which the “I” that desires is inseparable from the powers of others – be they people, ideas, events, institutions, or anything else – such that the very identity of that “I” is thrown into disarray. Throughout, the paper draws on Gilles Deleuze's interpretations of Spinoza for the way that Deleuze foregrounds passivity, the capacity to be affected, not as necessarily a weakness but as a rich field of ethico‐political potential.

Immunological atmospheres: Ambient music and the design of self-experience

“…The first revolves around the turn to affect as an important concept for understanding thought and action outside of the terms of the deliberative subject. 11 Here atmosphere becomes a conceptual shorthand for foregrounding the diffuse yet palpable intensities of space-times in their affective power to impress upon bodies in sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic ways. 12 The second characteristic is a concern with materiality and especially the attempt to conceive matter in such a way that does not confine it to an ontologically distinct category to the immaterial realm of ideas, values and sensibilities.…”