Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect

Abstract

As the previous chapters have attempted to show, affectivity is not just an element of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies—affectivity as such plays a crucial orientating role. Now the details of this role have been outlined, three interrelated factors behind this ‘affective turn’ or orientation can be drawn out. Firstly, they are both committed to the ineluctable transience of living experience—experience that is always-already significant and felt as moving from and towards various relations. Seeing, as Nietzsche puts it, is always seeing-something and never a pure, immaculate gaze upon an external world, while the transience of this seeing is always-already carried well or badly in terms of euphoric or dysphoric transitions—joy and sadness in Spinoza’s terms, good or bad translations in Nietzsche’s. Their philosophical commitment to the immanence of affectivity means that the image of philosophy as a search for knowledge that can provide ultimate answers as to what is good, evil, right or wrong is thus dispensed with, for these are ultimately signs that bear witness to certain affective relations, and it is this that is important for philosophy.