Deleuze and the Passions

May 16, 2014
Erasmus University of Rotterdam

Rotterdam
Netherlands

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Speakers:

Jason Read
University of Southern Maine

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In recent years the humanities, neuroscience and the social sciences have
witnessed an ‘affective turn’, especially in discourses around post-Fordist
labour, the economic and ecological crisis, populism and political
sentiments, cultural identity, mental health, citizenship, agency and
political struggle, contemporary artistic practice, and new configurations
of bodies and technologies. While no one quite agrees what affect is, this
new awareness of affect would be unthinkable without the pioneering work of
Gilles Deleuze, who defined affects as pre- and transindividual becomings,
i.e. processes or passages that augment or diminish our capacity to act and
engage with others and that are therefore primordial to, albeit inseparable
from, sensations, emotions, feelings, tastes, perceptions, meanings and all
other, ‘higher’ forms of cognition. Working along the naturalist axis of
Lucretius-Spinoza-Nietzsche, Deleuze famously replaced judgment with affect
as the very material movement of thought. Besides entirely active affects,
the highest practice of thought, there is no thought without passive affects
or passions. According to his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, thought
finds its own necessity in ‘isolated and passionate cries’ that deny what
everybody knows and what nobody can deny : ‘every true thought is an
aggression’. More concretely speaking, whether we are dealing with emotions
in psychology and sociology, sensation in art, passion in theology, or the
struggle with opinion in philosophy, the aim of thought is always to
denounce the sad passions, their causes, and those who derive their power
from them. Sad passions are affects that join desire to the illusions of
consciousness and separate us from our power to act. While joyful passions
increase our power, sad passions enslave us. The essential problem of
politics, according to Deleuze, is the ‘tyrants’ and ‘priests’ who inspire
sad passions in us. His work can thus be read as a critical and clinical
encyclopedia of the sad passions that constitute the affective
infrastructure of contemporary capitalism: illness, shame, spitefulness,
guilt, bad conscience, stupidity, neurosis, mistrust, weariness, fatigue,
fatalism, cynicism, ignorance, hope, anguish, disgust, contempt, cowardice,
hatred, laziness, avidity, regret, despair, mockery, malversation, and self-
abasement.

This one-day symposium will consist of three panels each of which features
three speakers, one keynote address, a catered lunch and a concluding
reception.

Scientific committee: Rosi Braidotti, Rick Dolphijn, Andrej Radman, Sjoerd
van Tuinen

This symposium is organized by Sjoerd van Tuinen (www.svtuinen.nl) and the
Centre for Art and Philosophy (CAP, www.caponline.org) with the financial
support of the Netherlands Scientific Research Organisation (NWO) and the
Trust Fund foundation.

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