Affective processes without a subject: Rethinking the relation between subjectivity and affect with Spinoza

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.