Feminist Theory After Deleuze by Stark Hannah

Feminist Theory After Deleuze by Stark Hannah

Author:Stark, Hannah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-10-14T16:00:00+00:00


What can bodies do?

Spinoza’s philosophy is undoubtedly the most important influence on Deleuze’s conception of the body and he repeats a slogan from Spinoza throughout his work: we do not yet know what the body can do (S: 125). This remark positions the body as neither a definable nor knowable entity, but as a site of knowledge production and the location of experimental practices. In his reading of Spinoza, the dynamism and capacities of the body enable it to forever exceed the determinations of knowledge. For Deleuze, it is Spinoza’s interest in the body’s capacities that enables ethical questions to be posed. When bodies come into contact with one another they express their differing capacities for affect. So when Spinoza asks what a body can do he is inquiring about what relations it can enter into and the capacity for affect that will be facilitated by these relations. Deleuze identifies two fundamental questions asked by Spinoza: what is the body’s structure in terms of the relations that compose it? And, what can it do in terms of its capacity for affect? (EP: 218). The Spinozist body is articulated on the two axes of the kinetic and the dynamic, which Deleuze also describes as the longitude and latitude of the body (S: 127). Kinetically, the body is defined in terms of its rest and the velocity of its movements. On the dynamic axis, the body is defined in terms of its capacity to affect other bodies and in turn be affected by them. The capacity for affection is not fixed but elastic: affects increase or decrease a body’s power to act (EP: 222). This takes two forms: sad passions result from a decrease in the body’s capacity for action, whereas joyful passions are the result of an increase (S: 27). To understand the significance of this rendering of the body we need to look at what happens when bodies interact.

Spinoza’s world is one in which bodies form aggregates with other bodies. These relations compose and decompose bodies in a flux of becoming. This means that the body is not fixed as a bounded and coherent entity but is constituted through the connections that it forms. The body, for Deleuze, is therefore elastic. What we imagine as the stable body is only a momentary sedimentation of this dynamic process of oscillating connections. New bodies are formed through these assemblages, which will in turn shift and give rise to newer bodies. This is why Deleuze works with a notion of bodies that are collectively constituted rather than individual. Looking to Spinoza, Deleuze writes that there are times when bodies come together and the arrangement is good and times when it is bad. Good here designates those encounters that are productive and increase the body’s capacity to act, while bad encounters diminish these capacities (S: 71). Deleuze describes good encounters as those that are ‘useful’ because the affect that is produced is agreeable to the body (EP: 239). A good mixture will produce joyful affect while a bad mixture will produce feelings of sadness.



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