spinoza

I was never able to finish this here it goes to be continued...

I want to make at least a couple of notes with ideas about Spinoza before  keep on reading more about him. So i finished a  more detailed reading of the Ethics on January the 5 th. I was simultaneously reading Spinoza o la Prudencia a recent book from Ch. Jaquet I bought in Buenos Aires , Spinoza para principiantes (written by the translator of the former book, A. Cherniavsky), Spinoza practical Philosophy from Deleuze and his courses on Spinoza.  I did not finish any of them but I also piled Deleuze on Expresionism and a book by Kaminsky Rendija is reading. Anyways here a few points:

- Affect as taken in contemporary debates seems to be this post-representation, post dualistic relations  space of roughly speaking freedom, an alternative to resistance and the traps that have been widely  showed after Foucault. It seems to be the cool thing in media studies, a film is politically mobilizing  if it affects its multicultural audience into processing their condition (something like this in Laura Marks), we can talk of the active dimension of a book if it generates a circulation of affect, and so on. Affect thus is rightly confronted to habit and the structuration of life (Beasley Murray and Bourdieu), but in many authors is maybe too soon opposed to power and locate as new redemptive space.  However in this explorations I still find it a bit obscure how affect is present in the ordinary and the everyday (K Stuart make a very interesting experiment but remains in the experimental) and how it assembles the social (Latour seems to be getting to it even when he does not talk about affect). I need to reread Mazzarella who seems to be doing a good job making an ethnography of affect and beyond his book had a very good paper on the AAA 2009.

But what I want to say is that Spinoza is much more discrete about affect than most (not all) of this celebratory approaches seem to be doing. It seems than the current uses of affect either mistake it for emotion, only that they give it a stronger social force (A panel I heard in the aaa in 2008 was about the erotized affect to god of a particular religious community - for me that was emotion-, the affect of suicidal widows - emotion again-) and of course the aura of emancipatory force in itself, seems to be used as a "post" and "flexible" concept. Of course Massumi who is a strong reference in this turn into affect, shows that power is becoming affective (also Nigel Thrift, although not so clear), thus they are alert to show that not all about affect is about. I think that both lines are a bit confusing, the one that takes affect as a new turn in how to talk about emotions, and the one that stands on affects as the new concept for resistance.  

Back to Spinoza he interestingly gives us this concept that allows us to think in a physics of bodies, but he does not take affect as the space of redemption, contraryly for him is action (in the dimension of the body) and adequate ideas (the active dimension of mind) what create freedom. For him we need to understand affects, accept them and and strive to increase bodies capacities.

On the Affects
Thus I find in Spinoza a more challenging proposal on how to think the bodies and affect as a domain of the transformations of the bodies, transformations of which they are not the adequate and only cause, but they cannot avoid. Affect is about how the external bodies interact with an assembled and stable body. His chapter on the affects is a list of them in which he stresses how affects transform the capacities if the body and in which sense. One point I take is how he understands the transformation of the body at each moment. Thus a glass of wine can elevate your joy but as you get stuck in it and want to repeat the joy without having appropriate knowledge of the consequences one can keep on drinking and finally poisoning (a word he uses a lot) the body.

The final point of the chapter is however to propose the remedies for the affects and in a way to learn how to flow with them taking as much joy as possible until "one" can learn to be adequate  cause to joy, a kind of enlighted, or all consious, type of action - knowledge.


Mind and body as one and the same

On knowledge 
The book is a lot about knowledge, for him the main action of the Mind.       
Mind
Adequate Ideas

Physics
God or Nature.
Body and the two dimensions : a) stability of movement of the parts, motion and rest and b) capacity to affect and be affected. 
Action (when one is the only cause of it)

One difference with Nitsche