The role of passions in postfordist society and in the production of value.

1. DELEUZE AND
THE PASSIONS
Annual
National
Deleuze
Scholarship
Conference #3
Erasmus
University of Rotterdam,
16 May 2014

2. 

 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.


3. Conference Program
10h00 Panel 1 (chaired by Henk Oosterling)
Samantha Bankston – To Have Done with the Judgement of ‘Reason’: Deleuze’s
Aesthetic
Moritz Gansen – Everywhere There Are Sad Passions”: Gilles Deleuze and the Unhappy
Piotrek Świątkowski – Deleuze and the politics of the phantasm
13h00 Panel 2 (chaired by Andrej Radman)
Daniel Colucciello Barber – Noncommunication, Debt, and the Negativity of Affect
Iwona Mlozniak – Debt and sad affects in the “control” society
Louis-Georges Schwartz – Deleuze, Passion, Cinema and the Old Materialism
15h00 Panel 3 (chaired by Piotrek Swiatkovski)
Claudia Landolfi – Contempt and bliss in post-Fordist subjectivity
Benoît Dillet - Noology Critique: Stupidity and Shame in Deleuze's politics
David Liu – Death of Deleuze, Birth of Passion
16h45 Keynote lecture (chaired by Sjoerd van Tuinen)
Jason Read – The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze
and Guattari
Respondent: Claire Colebrook