Abstract:

The “affective turn” which has gained enormous attention in recent years, has turned its focus from emotion of everyday life into the philosophical inquiry, including the causal relations between affects and body, of which the “biomedia” body is but one example. According to Spinoza, affect is defined as the modifications of the body; While body cannot determine mind to think, neither can mind determine body to move and everything will go back to the law of nature. Similarly, Massumi’s definition of affect as the abilities to affect and be affected also focuses on bodily experiences. In AThousand Plateaus,Deleuze and Guattari took the example of Penthesilea,a German tragedy at the early of 19th century,to expound the affective features in Greek culture, regarding affects as a form of becoming, and holding that the success of the playlies in the intensifications of affects in the war machine. Lawrence Grossberg may be right: the “affective turn” could be a materialism, a naturalism, or even a mechanism, but it will eventually manifest a different postmodernism from the European mainstream tradition.

Key words: Deleuze, affective turn, Crawford, Hardt, Spinoza