Surprisingly enough, Deleuze will bring to light this ontological kind of autoaffection both in Spinoza and Descartes. Instead of opposing the two philosophers, Deleuze—as is obvious in his reading of Descartes presented in The Movement Image and in What Is Philosophy?1—intends to show that the same move leads them both to discover a mapping activity in the economy of affects. Therefore, Deleuze’s interpretation of Descartes leads to a conclusion quite different than Derrida’s. The Cartesian subject is not autoaffected in the usual way, that is, self-touched. Autoaffection is, of course, present in Descartes’s thought as it is in Spinoza’s, but surprisingly, it does not designate the loop of subjectivity, namely, its self-reflexivity in the traditional sense.
From Spinoza to Descartes
Let’s go back to Spinoza for a moment. Again, according to Deleuze, affects are primarily ontological affections. He declares that, for Spinoza, “not only are all the passions affections of essence, but even among the passions, sadnesses, the worst passions, every affect affects essence! I would like to try to resolve this problem. This is not a question of discussing one of Spinoza’s texts; we must take it literally. It teaches us that, be that as it may, every affection is affection of essence. Thus the passions belong to essence no less than the actions; the inadequate ideas belong to essence no less than the adequate ideas.”2
There are, as we know, three kinds of ideas for Spinoza, which coincide with three kinds of knowledge.3 Knowledge of the first kind is divided into two parts. The first consists in knowledge from random experience (experientia vaga). This is knowledge “from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses in a way which is mutilated, confused, and without order for the intellect.” The second consists in knowledge from signs (ex signis), “for example, from the fact that, having heard or read certain words, we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them, like those through which we imagine the things.”4 What links both of these forms of knowledge is that they lack a rational order.
With the second kind of knowledge, reason (ratio), we have ascended from an inadequate to an adequate perception of things. This type of knowledge is gained “from the fact that we have common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things.”5 What Spinoza has in mind here is the formation of adequate ideas of the common properties of things and the movement by way of deductive inference to the formation of adequate ideas of other common properties. Unlike in the case of knowledge of the first kind, this order of ideas is rational but remains unaware of the immanent necessity of this rationality.
The third kind of knowledge (scientia intuitiva) “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the [formal] essence of things.”6 This type of knowledge gives insight into the essence of some singular thing together with an understanding of how that essence follows of necessity from the essence of God. Furthermore, the characterization of this kind of knowledge as intuitive indicates that the connection between the individual essence and the essence of God is grasped in a single act of apprehension and is not arrived at by any kind of deductive process.
According to Deleuze, all three kinds of ideas or knowledge entail a determined relationship between passivity and activity, affects and concepts. All three are, in their own way, affections of the substance, that is, of the essence of reality. We have to understand that some affects are caused by external objects, and others by internal solicitations. “When … I am raised,” Deleuze writes, “to ideas of the third kind, these ideas and the active affects that follow from them belong to essence and are affections of essence, this time insofar as essence is in itself [en soi], is in itself [en elle-même], in itself and for itself, is in itself and for itself a degree of power [puissance].” It is when we reach the ideas of the third kind that we come across the motif of autoaffection: “Ideas of the third kind are affections of essence, but it has to be said that, following a word that will only appear quite a bit later in philosophy, with the Germans for example, these are autoaffections. Ultimately, throughout … the ideas of the third kind, it’s essence that is affected by itself. Spinoza employs the term active affect and there is no great difference between autoaffection and active affect.… The power of being affected of an essence can be as well realized by external affections as by internal affections.”7
The Deleuzian notion of autoaffection does not refer to what Derrida calls the subject’s self-touching. First of all, even in the third kind of knowledge, affects never interiorize an external solicitation. Autoaffection is not the reflection of an internal or immanent movement. When essence affects itself, be it through passions or through its own capacity of referring to itself, this self-encounter always occurs as a spacing. In other words, the reflexivity of essence over and on itself is never immediate, but creates a material and spatial surface. Each kind of idea creates, by introjection and projection at the same time, a space of encounter between thought and its object. This encounter between thought and being may be immanent, as in the case of the third kind of knowledge, but it gives way to a surface creation nonetheless. Deleuze calls this surface—exterior or interior—a “plane of immanence.” It also appears in Deleuze’s texts as a “map”: “The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible of constant modifications.”8 In that sense, autoaffection does not arouse any feeling, but is comparable to an artistic creation, as if the ideal solicitation were painting or imaging itself.
Descartes
The emergence of such a “plane” or “map” is also, according to Deleuze, present in Descartes’s Passions of the Soul. Contrary to Derrida, who affirms that there is no internal spacing of the soul or the psyche in Descartes, Deleuze shows that the Cartesian theory of affects implies such a spacing, a spacing that prevents autoaffection from being a simple self-touching of the subject, a closure of subjectivity upon itself.
In his reading of The Passions of the Soul, Deleuze concentrates on the end of part 2. These paragraphs are devoted to the external signs of the passions. As Descartes explains, “The external signs of these passions: … I have yet to deal with the many external signs which usually accompany the passions—signs which are much better observed when several are mingled together, as they normally are, than when they are separated. The most important such signs are the expressions of the eye and the face, changes in colour, trembling, listlessness, fainting, laughter, tears, groans and sighs.”9 As we can see, these external signs appear mostly on the face. That is why, according to Deleuze, the face becomes the Cartesian plane of immanence par excellence, as if the soul’s internal spacing is projected itself on it.
That is why Deleuze shows, in Cinema I, that Descartes, in a way, would have invented the “close-up.”10 The face and its passionate expression are the very site of autoaffection understood as the creation of a determined surface of interaction or an encounter between the affecting and the affected instances. Autoaffection must then be interpreted as a kind of spatial phenomenon. Even if this spatiality of autoaffection does not occur in the same way as in Spinoza, its mechanism is, from a structural point of view, the same.
Deleuze gives an interpretation of the two fundamental kinds of movements caused by the action of animal spirits. The first causes action in the muscles and limbs. Deleuze calls it the “movement-action.” The second causes specifically the passions of the soul and has effects on the face. This kind of movement, invisible in its source, becomes visible at the surface of the body. This becoming-visible of the passionate movements is called by Descartes himself the inscription of signs on the face. The face thus becomes a surface of inscription or a writing tablet.
These movements of inscription are called by Deleuze “expressive movements” or “movements of expression.” Deleuze explains that the first and main meaning of a face in general is social. When the face becomes expressive because of passions, it transcends its social role and stops playing its identificato
ry part. Affects interrupt or suspend the normal behavior and meaning of the face. When the face expresses an affect, it becomes a surface or a plane that coincides with the affect itself. It loses its autonomous existence to become a “pure” affect. Deleuze writes: “The face must get rid of its individual and social aspects in order to emerge as what it is in reality: the ‘affect-face.’ … If the face is in reality the ‘affect-face,’ it is clear that it has nothing to do with the individuation or social function of a person.”11
The affect face is a reflexive surface of inscription. The face, as it coincides with the affect, becomes a pure quality or pure intensity. It then reveals its ontological dimension. It is as if being itself came to the surface through the face. That is why the face is said to express the essence of the face; the “visage” becomes “visageity” (visagéité). About the movements of expression, Deleuze affirms: “The moving body has lost its movement of extension, and movement has become movement of expression. It is this combination of a reflecting, immobile unity and of intensive expressive movements which constitutes the affect. But is this not the same as a face itself? The face is this organ-carrying plate of nerves which has sacrificed most of its global mobility and which gathers or expresses in a free way all kinds of tiny local movements which the rest of the body usually keeps hidden. Each time we discover these two poles in something—reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements—we can say that this thing has been treated as a face [visage]: it has been ‘envisaged’ or rather ‘faceified’ [visagéifiée], and in turn it stares at us [dévisage], it looks at us.”12 This is the emergence of the “icon.”
In this becoming “pure affect” of the face, wonder plays a major role. Deleuze places stress upon this role in The Passions of the Soul: “Descartes will develop a theory of passions starting with—how can I say that—a degree zero. This degree zero coincides with the fundamental passion. The most originary passion is like this degree zero. Degree zero of what? The degree zero of the expressive movements.… Descartes calls this originary passion ‘Wonder.’”13
Wonder is the least expressive of all passions, but it is at the same time the very site of conversion of physical needs into ontological signs. That is why, as is clear in English, wonder is intermediary between passion and thought. Admiration (wonder) “marks a minimum of movement for a maximum of unity, reflecting and reflected on the face.… There are two sorts of questions which we can put to a face, depending on the circumstances: what are you thinking about? Or, what is bothering you, what is the matter, what do you sense or feel? Sometimes the face thinks about something, is fixed on to an object, and this is the sense of admiration or astonishment that the English word wonder has preserved. In so far as it thinks about something, the face has value above all through its surrounding outline, its reflecting unity which raises all the parts to itself.”14 The wondering face does not express something intellectual; it reflects the affect of thinking as such.
In both cases, the wondering face becomes a “close-up”: “There is no close-up of the face. The close-up is the face.”15 The close-up suspends individuation or social roles. Descartes’s theory of passions thinks of the splitting-off of the individual subject from itself and its transformation into an impersonal surface. Affects are impersonal. From Griffith to Eisenstein, cinema will explore this becoming-neutral, becoming-intensive, and becoming-spatial of the face: “a nudity … much greater than that of the body, an inhumanity much greater than that of animals. The kiss already testifies to the integral unity of the face, and inspires in it the micro-movements that the rest of the body hides. But, more importantly, the close-up turns the face into a phantom.”16
Descartes would have thus described, in The Passions of the Soul, the framing and cutting in the composition of the close-up, the assemblage of the face with itself in passion, and particularly in wonder, which suspends the face from its own flesh and materiality. In this sense, passions are the movie of the soul.
A Nonmetaphysical Philosophy
Again, there seem to be two possible readings of Descartes. The first one is the deconstructive one, which shows that the Cartesian thought of affects belongs to the traditional metaphysical thought of subjectivity, conceived as a process of autoaffection and self-touching. The second consists in leading or pushing Descartes out of this trend, to show that Descartes belongs to another tradition, which Deleuze calls “Philosophy,” and which is quite different from “metaphysics.” In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze articulates this nonmetaphysical concept of philosophy. According to this concept, philosophy is thought of as a way of inscribing events on a certain kind of surface. This surface is precisely what Deleuze calls the plane of immanence. Every philosopher has his own conception of this plane. We saw that, in Descartes, the face is the plane of immanence of the cogito.
The events that are inscribed on the plane of immanence are what Deleuze calls “Concepts.” These are not just ideas; they are forms, figures, shapes, and even characters—“conceptual personae,” as is very clear with Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Cartesian subject is in itself such a concept. Contra what we usually think, there is no constituted subject in the first place and neither is there the affected subject that would have come afterward. On the contrary, the affects produce subjectivity as such as a “personage,” a figure.
“Concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of events,” writes Deleuze in What Is Philosophy?17 The encounter of concepts and events determines the emergence of conceptual personae, which are incarnations of the philosopher: “I am no longer myself but thought’s aptitude for finding itself and spreading across a plane that passes through me at several places. The philosopher is the idiosyncrasy of his conceptual personae.”18 The subjectivity escapes its traditional definition.
We now face two concepts of affects and autoaffection: a traditional one, according to which the subject is affected by an object and by itself first of all; and a different one, according to which affects come before subjectivity as such, as events, points of impact of these events on a surface, like colors on a canvas. If we follow this second line of interpretation, affects and autoaffections are heteroaffections to the extent that they separate the human subject, the “I,” from itself. The I becomes an “icon,” that is, nobody in particular, a nonsubstantial instance, just like in a close-up, where the actor disappears as an individual to become “the” face.
6.
DAMASIO AS A READER OF SPINOZA
Following up the topics of the plane of immanence, the surface, and the map, we can now turn to Damasio’s reading of Spinoza, developed in Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.1 The general purpose of the book is to show that Spinoza, as the “first neurobiologist,” insists upon the importance of emotions and feelings in the very process of reasoning. Spinoza’s nondualistic conception of the relationship between mind and body implies a definition of the conatus in which the ontological and the biological are intertwined. According to Damasio, Spinoza anticipates the brain’s importance as the meeting point between being and life. This meeting point is materialized through the operation of neural “mapping.” Here also, there is a projection or a production of surfaces and planes. I will focus here upon the specific way in which Damasio elaborates the problems of the preservation of life, the relationship between the surface and the event, and the conception of a neural subjectivity.
Toward a Biological Conatus: Emotions and Feelings
In his book, Damasio shows that the ensemble formed by emotions and feelings constitutes the mechanism regulating life and promoting survival. Feelings, which correspond for Damasio to classical philosophical passions (joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, love, hatred), are more elaborate forms of affects than the basic emotions that are involved in homeostasis. Feelings are also important for survival. “The simple process of feeling begins to give the organism incentive to heed the results of emoting.”2
Emotions determine homeostasis to be the process of
the self’s attachment to itself. They constitute the elementary form of autoaffection. Damasio defines emotions as simple “internal simulations” with no specific content. Feelings, for their part, transform emotions into what Damasio calls a “concern.” Emotions produce self-attachment; feelings produce the concern for self-attachment. In this sense, feelings form the mechanism of attachment for the attachment, the redoubling of autoaffection.
Feeling in general, and wonder in particular, lays the foundation for care, the care of ourselves, the care for ourselves. The systematic unity of emotions and feelings takes place in the brain and remains unconscious for the most part. Damasio undertakes his reading of Spinoza to explore this systematic unity and its importance in the conatus, the regulation of life, and the life of ideas at the same time.
Damasio declares; “Now that I have sketched my main purpose, it is time to explain why a book dedicated to new ideas on the nature and significance of human feelings should invoke Spinoza in the title. Since I am not a philosopher and this book is not about Spinoza’s philosophy, it is sensible to ask; why Spinoza? The short explanation is that Spinoza is thoroughly relevant to any discussion of human emotion and feeling. Spinoza saw drives, motivations, emotions and feelings—an ensemble Spinoza called affects—as a central aspect of humanity. Joy and sorrow were two prominent concepts in his attempt to comprehend human beings and suggest ways in which their lives could be lived better.”3
This insistence upon the role of affect in the development of our ideas implies, of course, the biological regulation of life. This is what Spinoza critiques in Cartesian dualism. For Spinoza, mind and body, or thought and extension, are, as we know, parallel attributes of the same substance—hence the idea that the mind is the idea of the body. Damasio concludes that “Spinoza might have intuited the principles behind the natural mechanisms responsible for the parallel manifestations of mind and body.… I am convinced that mental processes are grounded in the brain’s mappings of the body, collections of neural patterns that portray responses to events that cause emotions and feelings.”4
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