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Being Affected: Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion

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International Journal of Group Tensions, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2001

BEING AFFECTED: SPINOZA AND

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTION

STEVEN D. BROWN
Loughborough University
PAUL STENNER
University College London

ABSTRACT: This paper describes the relevance of Spinoza’s Ethics for con-
temporary thought on the psychology of emotion. Spinoza’s account of the pas-
sions completely inverts the Cartesian primacy given to mind. For Spinoza
the critical task is to formulate an ethics of knowing, which begins with an
understanding that body and mind are two attributes of the same substance.
Increasing the capacity of the body to both be affected and affect others is the
means by which the knowing subject progresses. The article sketches out the
key concepts involved in this system and shows how they sensitize us to a
post-cognitive understanding of emotion in Proust’s Swann’s Way.
KEY WORDS: Emotion; Spinoza; Proust; jealousy.

OTHERNESS WITHIN

The technique of unsettling familiar ways of thinking by contrast

with the radical otherness of exotic ways of thinking is by now a fa-
miliar strategy in the repertoire of social constructionism. This is no-
where more apparent than in the field of “the social construction of
emotion” where the taken-for-granted emotions of modern Westerners
are revealed as constructions by way of juxtaposition with the liget of
the Ilongot, the metagu of the Ifaluk, the jealousy-free hospitality
ceremonies of the Inuit, and so on. Without denying its undoubted

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Dr. Steven D. Brown,

Department of Human Sciences, Loughborough University, Leicestershire LE11 3TU,
United Kingdom.

81
0047-0732/01/0300-0081$19.50/0 䉷 2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
82 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

merits and fascinations, one cost of this strategy is a too rapid set-
tling of the question of how modern Westerners do indeed construct
emotion. The aim of this article is partly to unsettle what we think we
know about these “modern” constructions.
We will attempt this task of “unsettling from within” by returning
to a figure often cast as a father of the Enlightenment: Spinoza. In
Spinoza’s Ethics of 1677, we already find an explicit and sustained
critique of that thinker usually held responsible for laying the phi-
losophical foundations for modernity: Descartes. The usual story,
crudely put, is that Spinoza, despite his enlightenment ambitions (his
valorization of reason), had one foot firmly in Medieval mysticism (his
unwieldy pantheism), and so helped to open a door to modernity
which he himself could not enter. Descartes, by contrast and despite
Spinoza’s critiques, did enter modernity. This story, of course, works
only in as far as we continue to consider ourselves “modern” in the
broadly Cartesian sense: only in so far, that is, as we continue to
divide up the world according to the nexus of problematics enshrined
in Cartesian dualism. As soon as this dualism is rendered question-
able (as it now undoubtedly is), Spinoza and the tradition he gave rise
to resume center stage and our relationship to our past is dramati-
cally altered. We discover, to adapt Latour (1993), that we never were
modern. This, in our view, has radical implications for the psychology
of emotion.

SPINOZA’S CRITIQUE OF DESCARTES

In the Ethics, Spinoza sought to explicitly challenge the Cartesian

model of the body-as-machine animated by the will of an immaterial
mind or soul. Recourse to such “mystic” explanations was for Spinoza
a sign of inadequate understanding of the actual workings of the hu-
man body:

Whence it follows that when men say that this or that action arises
from the mind which has power over the body, they know not what they
say, or confess with specious words that they are ignorant of the cause
of said action, and have no wonderment at it. (E. III. prop. 2, note)1

The problem of mind-body interaction, as formulated by Descartes,

involves the strict separation of the two elements of being, a move
that makes Descartes essentially modern. This reflects Descartes’
commitment to the idea of two radically different substances: exten-
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 83

sion (the physical field of objects positioned in a geometric space) and

thought (that property which distinguishes conscious beings from ob-
jects). Thought, as displayed by the human subject qua “thinking
thing,” is precisely that which is not object (not an extended sub-
stance). Likewise, extension is that which thought is essentially de-
tached from, but can come to know “clearly and distinctly,” and thus
render controllable, through mathematics.
Although the implication is perhaps not immediate for the contem-
porary reader, this distinction involves political and ethical questions
of power and governance. For Descartes, the subject is active, the ob-
ject is passive, hence our minds are (or should be) active, whilst our
bodies are passive. Personal being is thenceforth identified with an
active thinking mind, which must exercise its control over a passive
body that it happens to own (but which by no means defines it). Now
the same relation of domination and ownership applies to emotions
or, more accurately, passions in Descartes’ philosophy. Passions of the
soul are depicted as entirely passive (they are passive perceptions of
the active desires of the will), and thus the mind should strive to gain
absolute dominion over them. The mind is authorized to exercise this
absolute control over the body and emotions because, being active, it
depends upon nothing but itself, whereas the body’s “activity” (strictly
we should say “movement”) depends either, as with the passions,
upon the mind, or upon some physical proximate cause (an encounter
with another passive body).
Once body and soul are cleaved apart in this fashion, however, the
question arises as to precisely how it is that the mind may become
connected to the body such that control may be exercised. Spinoza
attacks Descartes for his inability to adequately conceive of what es-
tablishes a bridge between and holds together the two supposedly
separate substances:

Truly I should like him [Descartes] to explain this union through its
proximate cause. But he conceived the mind so distinct from the body
that he could not assign a particular cause for this union, nor for the
mind itself, but he had perforce to recur to the cause of the whole uni-
verse, that is, to God. (E. V. preface)

Descartes, then, is criticized by Spinoza because he is only able to

reformulate the subject through the transcendental power of God.
Furthermore, the same relationship of control and ownership that ob-
tains between the two substances of thought and extension obtains
for Descartes between God and World. Just as the mind governs the
84 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

body from a position of radical externality, so a transcendent God has

in eminence this power of governance to oversee the world of nature
that He created. Spinoza, by contrast, dispenses with the chain of
eminent relations to posit an immanentist conception of a single sub-
stance that composes the universe, known as either God or Nature (E.
IV. preface). The neo-Cartesian separation between extension and
thought that Spinoza subsequently performs is then conceived as oc-
curring between different aspects or attributes of the singular sub-
stance. Individual minds and bodies (as “finite modes” proper to the
attributes of thought and extension respectively) are ultimately de-
rived from a fundamental unity of composition:

The mind and body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now
under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension.
Whence it comes about that the order of the concatenation of things is
one, or, nature is conceived now under this, now under that attribute,
and consequently that the order of actions and passions of our body is
simultaneous in nature with the order of actions and passions of our
mind. (E. III. prop. 2, note)

Here the Cartesian hierarchy of relations is systematically dis-

mantled and replaced with a system where “the order and concatena-
tion of things is one.” Personal being is thereby revealed as both mind
and body, seen “now under this” attribute and then “now under that
attribute.” Spinoza then goes on to assert that the “object of the idea
constituting the human mind is the body, and furthermore the actu-
ally existing body” (E. II. prop. XIII, proof). This position has two
major effects. First, it means that although thought, considered as an
attribute, is infinite, mind is by virtue of its constitution around the
“object of the body” located in duration, that is as approximating to a
particular lived time and space. Second, Spinoza may further demon-
strate that:

The human mind has no knowledge of the human body, nor does it
know it to exist, save through ideas of modifications by which the body
is affected. (E. II. prop. XIX)

This crucial proposition couples movements in ideas to modifica-

tions in the body (by way of “ideas of modifications”), or to put it more
plainly, knowing proceeds in parallel fashion to the body’s physical
engagements. As we will show, this is the basis upon which Spinoza
constructs an intimate relationship between affects and knowing.
What is more, within the parallelism adopted by the Ethics, activity
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 85

and passivity cease to be uniquely identified with particular attri-

butes, contra the Cartesian formulation. They become properties of
(or proper to) both attributes as expressions of God or Nature. The
equal standing of each attribute in turn as expressions means in addi-
tion that they are no longer successively weaker parties in a relation-
ship of control or ownership with a transcendent God.
These moves may be characterized in several ways. They serve, ini-
tially, to remove the need to imagine some kind of “holding power” or
a mechanical point of connection between body and mind, there being
no fundamental difference in the substantial composition of the at-
tributes. There is simply an ordering of things expressed in two regis-
ters. Beyond this, Spinoza may be read as performing an emancipa-
tory act of awarding the body its full and proper standing in the
definition of personal being that is not unlike that recently witnessed
in critical psychological theory (e.g., Brown, 1997; Harré, 1991; Rad-
ley, 1991; Stam, 1997). But it is important to recognize that the “lev-
eling” of the attributes is ultimately warranted as the exercise of rea-
son. What offends reason, for Spinoza, is the hitherto ignorance of the
actual nature of the body displayed in conceiving of it as a simple
vehicle for the mind. Such a conception fails to question what powers
and capacities may be immanent to the body qua body:

For no one has thus far determined the power of the body, that is, no
one has yet been taught by experience what the body can do merely by
the laws of nature, in so far as nature is considered merely as corporeal
and what it cannot do, save when determined by the mind. For no one
has acquired such accurate knowledge of the construction of the human
body, as to be able to explain all its functions; nor need I omit to men-
tion the many things observed in brutes, which far surpass human
sagacity, and the many things which sleep-walkers do, which they
would not dare to do when awake: this is sufficient to show that the
body itself, merely from the laws of its own nature alone, can do many
things, at which the mind marvels. (E. III. prop. 2, note)

In raising the possibility that extended substance may have capaci-

ties which “far surpass human sagacity,” Spinoza challenges Des-
cartes’ separation between a purely mechanical causality which per-
tains to bodies (the kind of clockwork action that came to dominate
the way that modern science conceived of causes) and a mysterious
causality of free will by which the mind operates the body-machine
and through which a Creator “breathes life” into what is created.
Such a separation is a partial truth based on an anthropocentric lack
86 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

of understanding of the true non-mechanical and nonspiritual causal-

ity of the “necessary connections” in Nature.
What Spinoza takes aim at here is the central Cartesian notion
that acts of will depend on nothing but will itself (the proof of mind-
as-active). Neither determination for action nor “decisions of the
mind” are, for Spinoza, equivalent to effects produced by the will of
the “thinking thing.” They are instead related to a wider series of
determinations (of which “appetites” and “dispositions” are the most
proximal) that have their place in the ongoing encounters between
bodies and between ideas in which the human individual is perpetu-
ally engaged. Now inasmuch as the power of thought or action is
taken to define the individual, these powers emerge from a process of
sustained engagement with the world. Here Spinoza is entirely con-
sistent with the notion of a single substance: God or Nature is itself in
a permanent process of self-constitution, being Natura Naturans (in-
volved in infinite active self-creation) rather than Natura Naturata
(finished product). Becoming active involves the individual grasping
his/her complex relationship to unfolding Natura Naturans and recog-
nizing what, by virtue of one’s composition from a single substance, is
shared in encounters with other finite individuals.
Most modern day psychologists will consider it strange indeed to
discuss, as in the section above, such disparate matters as emotions,
ethics, politics, governance, God, and nature all together on the same
platform. Nevertheless, for both Descartes and Spinoza, these mat-
ters were intimately related. The question of ethics—of a philosophi-
cal system for guiding the maximization of activity and freedom—was
crucial to both. We modern psychologists tend to have a better grasp
of Descartes’ (and his successors’) system—where active minds, as-
sembled in social contracts, govern and control passive bodies (our
own, those of others, of animals, of nature, of the earth) simply be-
cause we are its inheritors. The apparent conviction within psychol-
ogy, demonstrated by endless debates between physiological psycholo-
gists and cognitivists, naturalists and constructionists, that emotions
must be either biological systems (aspects of extension) or cognitive,
linguistic, and social processes (aspects of thought) bears testimony to
the grip Cartesianism exerts. If it seems strange now that emotions
are related to ethics and politics, physics, and the meaning of exis-
tence, then this indicates not that they are unrelated but that the
nature of their relationship has already been settled and decided
upon. That is, for ethical reasons, Cartesianism interiorizes or indi-
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 87

vidualizes the emotions, which thereby become merely symptomatic

of more or less tolerated “leakages” in the rational disciplining of our
individual lives.
Understood in terms of Spinozism, this Cartesian departure (the
parting between thought and extension that begins a modern ethical
relationship or power relationship) is a limited way of increasing our
activity because it is based upon inadequate understanding. For Spi-
noza, a condition of becoming active (his ethic) is gaining adequate
knowledge of our situation. Cartesianism, in setting us against na-
ture, sets us against ourselves and hence inevitably decreases the
scope of our power and activity. But because Spinoza’s understanding
is less familiar than Descartes’, it will now be necessary to spend
some time showing how he conceives activity, passivity, ethics, and
emotion.

THE SUBJECT OF SPINOZISM

Although many of his most illuminating illustrations draw upon

human examples it is important to remember that, for Spinoza, the
human being is but one of an infinity of existing modes or complica-
tions of the single substance. If this single substance with its infinite
modes and attributes taken in its entirety is called Nature or God,
then God is the only entity that has the “absolute” freedom and inde-
pendence that Descartes attributes to thought, as God alone is cause
sui or cause-of-itself (being infinite, there is logically nothing outside
God upon which God might depend). All other things have God as
their formal cause because they are in, or of, God. However, since any
given mode is necessarily finite (and hence dependent), it is also nec-
essarily affected and variously determined, that is subject to mod-
ification by its encounters with other finite modes. A given mode can
never be absolutely free in the sense of causa-sui; it is always subject
to external determination.
Spinoza, then, makes a distinction between the formal cause (God/
Nature) and the proximal cause of a modification (an encounter with
another finite thing). The proximate cause of a finite thing is always
another finite thing rather than an omnipotent intervention or a mys-
terious act of will. There is no room for transcendental explanations
in Spinozism, whether these are called the “will of God” or, in the
present context, any of the grand explanandum of the social sci-
88 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

ences—“class,” “culture,” “history,” or “biology.” Spinoza evokes God

as formal cause not as an end in itself, but rather in order to establish
the immanence of a single substance and thence to proceed rapidly to
more proximate causes (Deleuze, 1992). Each finite thing or mode is
then understood as an unfolding of substance in a certain determi-
nate manner. This manner is circumscribed by what Spinoza calls a
thing’s essence:

From the given essence of a thing certain things necessarily follow, nor
can things do anything else than that which follows necessarily from
their determinate nature. Wherefore the power or endeavour of any-
thing by which it does, or endeavours to do, anything, either alone or
with others, that is, the power or endeavour by which it endeavours to
persist in its own being, is nothing else than the given or actual essence
of that given thing. (E. III. prop. 7, proof)

An essence is therefore both the efforts to maintain form and the

potential that a thing has so to do. Spinoza thus defines essence as
power in a double sense and terms this conatus: the endeavor to per-
sist in being. In keeping with his system, conatus can be seen under
both attributes:

This endeavour, when it has reference to the mind alone, is called will
(voluntas); but when it refers simultaneously to the mind and body, it is
called appetite (appetitus), which therefore is nothing else than the es-
sence of man, from the nature of which all things which help in his
preservation necessarily follow; and therefore man is determined for
acting in this way. Now between appetite and desire (cupiditas) there is
no difference but this, that desire usually has reference to men in so far
as they are conscious of their appetite; and therefore it may be defined
as appetite with consciousness thereof. (E. III. prop. 9, note)

Of note here is the manner in which Spinoza tightly associates will

with conatus. Will is no longer the judge presiding over sensory data
in the court of the Cartesian cogito (only God or Nature as causa-sui
possesses free will). With Spinoza there is a sense in which ideas are
in themselves forms of judgment (Gilbert, 1991). If an idea is part of
mind then it is already affirmed to some degree. Now, leaving aside
for now the question of truth and falsity, Spinoza places this affirma-
tion in the context of mind and body as manifolds. Human physical
being consists of a “complex body” made up by the alliance of many
simple bodies. In parallel fashion, mind, as idea of the body, consists
of the ideas of all these simple bodies, as well the modifications that
may befall them. Thus what is “affirmed” in an idea is some actual
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 89

modification, which has its effect upon the power of the individual to
persist in being. Will is therefore conatus viewed with “reference to
the mind alone.”
Modifications occur in encounters between the individual and other
finite things (themselves manifold). As such, the precise kind of mod-
ification experienced depends upon the exact nature of relations that
are possible between two individuals qua complex bodies. Spinoza de-
scribes the outcome of encounters in terms of emotion or affect:

By EMOTION (affectus) I understand the modifications of the body by

which the power of action of the body is increased or diminished, aided
or restrained, and at the same time the idea of these modifications. (E.
III. def. 3)

Affect, as an emergent property of the encounter, takes the form of

either an increase or diminishment of the finite individual’s power to
act.2 This is described in the basic distinction between affects of “joy”
or “euphoria” (laelitiae) that increase power or those of “sorrow” or
“dysphoria” (tristitiae) that decrease power. What takes place as an
affect (an emotion) is an ordering of the relations between bodies and
between ideas that shows forth as a decision or a determination for
action:

For each one manages everything according to his emotion, and thus
those who are assailed by conflicting emotions know not what they
want: those who are assailed by none are easily driven to one or the
other. Now all these things clearly show that the decision of the mind,
and the appetite and the determination of the body, are simultaneous in
nature, or rather one and the same thing, which when considered under
the attribute of thought and explained through the same we call a deci-
sion (decretum), and when considered under the attribute of extension
and deduced from the laws of motion and rest we call a determination
(determinatio). (E. III. prop. 2, note)

Although affect seems here to be the prior term (“for each one man-
ages according to his [sic] emotion”), Spinoza avoids what we moderns
would understand as the opposition of emotion and cognition, by in-
sisting that affects are emergent orderings of the relational field
made up in the encounter between manifold finite beings. His project
is thus perhaps closer to those contemporary explorations of the pro-
duction of order from disorder in physical and social worlds (Cooper,
1990; Hetherington & Munro, 1997; Latour, 1993; Prigogine & Sten-
gers, 1984; Serres, 1982). Following this line, we will proceed in the
following section to explicate Spinoza’s system of affects as processes
90 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

of ordering, and describe how this transforms psychological under-

standing of specifically human emotions.

WHAT IS AN ENCOUNTER?

By describing affect as all modifications of finite things, which re-

sult in increases or decreases of the potential to act, Spinoza dislodges
“the emotions” from the realm of responses and situations and ties
them firmly to action and encounters. Affects occur between finite
things on the basis of their mutual relations, in the context of an
infinitely productive Nature. Because Spinoza adheres to a strict de-
terminism, this placing of emotions in the broadest possible context
carries with it the obligation to consider the intersection of multiple
chains of causation. Encounters and the modifications in which they
result are complex events, complex productions of order. Here Spi-
noza’s “geometric method” serves as a tool to “diagram” each encoun-
ter, demonstrating precisely which relations are at issue and the or-
derings of the bodies and ideas they call forth.
The first step in analyzing encounters is to maintain the parallel-
ism of body and mind. This involves, for Spinoza, a separate explica-
tion of how affects order relations between bodies and between ideas.
Proximate causes are sought within each attribute. The body cannot
act as the cause of changing order within ideas, nor do ideas directly
bring about modifications in bodies. Since “the order and connection
of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (E. II.
prop. 7), what is sought is the dual expression of the encounter as it
presents under each attribute.
Spinoza then proceeds by examining the registering of an image or
an impression of some-thing by the body (that is ordering under ex-
tension). Images are understood here as literal intrusions by external
causes upon the body of the individual:

[T]he images of things . . . are the very modifications or modes by which

the human body is affected by external causes and disposed for doing
this or that. (E. III. prop. 32, note)

Images result in modifications whereby the body becomes disposed

for action in a particular way. For this to occur it is not even neces-
sary for the Other who brings about the image to be present. Images
of absent persons may, for example, be at the root of affects of love or
hate. Indeed, it is sufficient to merely perceive some evil occurring to
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 91

the image of the absent loved one to then experience sorrow or de-
spair.3
What is also important in this process is the link made by Spinoza
between being affected (through the image) and the capacity to affect
(as the result of modifications). It is this dual aspect of affection that
links ordering to power. Affects of dysphoria determine the person in
such a way that they diminish their abilities. This occurs in encoun-
ters between bodies that do not agree in some way, such as when one
body adversely affects, dominates or even, in extreme cases, destroys
another by decomposing the relations through which it is constituted.
Opposed to this are affects of euphoria which are marked by an in-
crease in power when “agreeable” bodies unite into a new form of
composition that extends the abilities to act of one or both. What mat-
ters, then, is how bodies (as manifolds) come together in the encoun-
ter to compose either harmonious or disharmonious relations:
The power of any particular thing, and consequently the power of man,
by which he exists and works, is determined only by another particular
thing whose nature must be understood through the same attribute,
through which human nature is conceived. Therefore our power of act-
ing, in whatever way it may be conceived, can be determined, and con-
sequently aided or hindered, by the power of some other particular
thing which has something in common with us. (E. IV. Prop. 29, proof)
The phrase “something in common with us” or “common notions”
plays a pivotal role in Spinoza’s ethical system. Suffice it to say here
that there is a great deal in nature that is “disagreeable” to the hu-
man, and thus the source of dysphoria or worse. Such things are obvi-
ously to be avoided, and it is one of the central propositions in Spi-
noza’s political theory that the role of the state is to provide the
conditions under which disagreeable encounters and accompanying
affects of dysphoria may be minimized.4
Spinoza then moves to consider the idea of images, or the finite
aspects of thought. Seen in terms of this other attribute, the encoun-
ter shows forth as series of modifications arising from the relations
between ideas, some of which currently constitute the mind (as idea
of the body, divisible into ideas of the simple bodies constituting the
manifold complex body), others of which are the ideas of external
bodies (themselves manifold). For Spinoza, the passage to greater or
diminished abilities in euphoria or dysphoria is paralleled by a move-
ment toward “adequacy” or “inadequacy” with regard to ideas. An “in-
adequate” series of ideas (the effect of a disagreeable encounter) is
one that does not contain the cause of the effect. In other words, it is a
92 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

failure to have the “idea of the external body” as “clearly and dis-
tinctly” part of mind. Whether adequate or not, the resultant ordering
of ideas acts as the ideational form of the affect:

[T]his idea, which constitutes the form (forma) of the emotion, must
indicate or express the constitution of the body, or some part of it, which
constitution the body or that part possesses by reason of the fact that its
power of acting, or existing is increased or diminished, aided or hin-
dered. (E. III. Gen. Def.)

It is important to consider exactly what this “form” means. Spi-

noza’s parallelism means that, in effect, bodies cannot be the cause of
ideas, nor can the ideational be reduced to, made to correspond with,
or be explained by the physical. The demand to explicate ideas solely
in terms of their standing as a finite mode of the attribute of thought
lends no purchase to a correspondence theory of truth (Wilson, 1996).
Equally there is no support for the view of ideas within affects as the
simple mental registration of physical events. Yet ideas qua ideas of
images clearly have some representational dimension, albeit one that
is appears strange to psychologists grounded in implicit Cartesian-
ism. As Deleuze summarizes Spinoza’s position:

We may note that while the idea is representative, its representative-

ness (objective being) does not explain anything about its nature: on the
contrary, the latter follows from the internal properties of the idea. . . .
When Spinoza says “adequate,” he has in mind something very different
from the Cartesian “clear and distinct,” although he continues to use
these words. The form of the idea is not sought in a psychological con-
sciousness but in a logical power that surpasses consciousness; the ma-
terial of the idea is not sought in representative content but in an ex-
pressive content, an epistemological material through which the idea
refers to other ideas and to the idea of God. (Deleuze, 1988, pp. 74–75)

On Deleuze’s interpretation, ideas receive their form from a rela-

tion to a wider ordering, in other words a “system” or “series” within
which individual ideas gain recognizable standing as components or
elements. Here Spinoza is read as offering a kind of semiotics. This
system or series must logically surpass any individual “psychological
consciousness,” much as language or discourse goes beyond the per-
sonal being of any particular speaker. This interpretation is rein-
forced by considering that what is at stake in the “material” of an
idea is the expression of a cause (the idea of the external body), which
is in turn related to God or Nature as the formal cause of any effect.
Hence what is explicated is a whole chain or series of ideas all of
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 93

which refer to and have their sole standing in terms of one another.
And the process of this explication expresses a certain power of un-
derstanding, which emerges when the individual, as a manifold, is
able to grasp an adequate ordering of ideas:

By IDEA (idea) I understand a conception of the mind which the mind

forms by reason of its being a thinking thing . . . I say conception rather
than perception, for the name perception seems to indicate that the
mind is passive in relation to its object, while conception seems to ex-
press an action of the mind. (E. II. Def. 3)

Now with regard to affects, it is the series of ideas that circulate

around the idea of the image of the external cause itself, which com-
prise what we commonly call “emotions” (e.g., love, hate, hope, jeal-
ousy). As long as the individual fails to explicate the idea of the cause,
that is, fails to place this idea “clearly and distinctly” within the se-
ries of ideas currently constituting mind, he/she may be said to be
passive with regard to the encounter. Passivity expresses inadequate
thought and a diminishment in the power to act. By contrast, an abil-
ity to grasp the external cause is an expression of the individual “be-
coming active,” since what was external to the individual is now, in a
sense, part of their constitution (as the idea is adequately placed
within mind). How does this occur?
It is at this point that Spinoza’s beginning with the body becomes
explicable. In passive encounters, modifications are wrought by some
external mode. However, as Spinoza notes, it is rare that the individ-
ual does not contribute something to the encounter, and inasmuch as
he does make some contribution then he himself is a part of the cause
of subsequent effects (modifications). Now it is by considering how
bodies combine in the cause that the individual is able to grasp what
is common to both, and on what they disagree. Ideas of commonality
and difference, or “common notions,” are the result. Common notions
are always adequate orderings of ideas and present themselves to
mind as such. They emerge “fortuitously” during agreeable or eu-
phoric encounters, which is to say that rudimentary common notions
accompany joyful affects. From which it follows that by maximizing
encounters marked by euphoria the individual begins to develop the
means to exercise adequate ideas.
To summarize briefly, affects are for Spinoza modifications of
bodies and ideas, indexed to agreeable and disagreeable encounters,
which result in determinations to action and the expression of a cer-
tain power of understanding. Grasping how affects emerge from en-
94 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

counters, and more importantly, organizing one’s conduct so as to

maximize joy and minimize sorrow is the basis for an ethical perfor-
mance of becoming active. It is around this ethical account that Spi-
noza is able to analyze each of the particular affects. In order to clar-
ify this further, we will now turn to a brief discussion of how Spinoza
treats some specific emotions.

LOVE, HATE, SYMPATHY, ANTIPATHY, JEALOUSY, DESPAIR,

FEAR, HOPE, CONFIDENCE, DISAPPOINTMENT . . .

At the core of Spinoza’s “definitions of the emotions” (E. III. def.)

are the three primary affects of desire, pleasure (joy or euphoria), and
pain (sorrow or dysphoria). Desire, as “appetite with consciousness
thereof” is the endeavor to persist in being (conatus) seen under the
attribute of thought. It is through desire, as the essence of the indi-
vidual that the terms “good” and “bad” are in any ways applicable to
affects:

The knowledge of good and bad is the emotion of pleasure or pain in so

far as we are conscious of it: and therefore every one necessarily seeks
what he thinks to be good, and turns from what he thinks to be bad. But
this appetite is nothing else than the very essence or nature of man.
Therefore every one, from the laws of his nature alone, necessarily
seeks or turns away from, etc. (E. III. prop. XIX, proof)

Desire leads the mind to endeavor to conceive (to place within it-
self) those things that improve the individual’s power of understand-
ing. Things that reduce this power lead the mind to conceive ways of
excluding or avoiding those things (E. III. props. XI–XIII). Hence we
love whatever we think increases our power and perfection (i.e., what-
ever gives rise to euphoria), and hate those things that decrease it. To
hate is to endeavor to remove or exclude the hated thing, and to love
is to endeavor to have and to keep the loved thing.
All encounters, even those where only the image is actually pres-
ent, lead to modifications and determinations for action. The euphoria
resulting from an encounter with a loved thing, for example, config-
ures the body as a lover disposed to love. All things may now be en-
countered according to this sympathetic disposition (as through the
“rose tinted spectacles” of the love that loves to love), and things
which may previously have been encountered as neutral—or even
dysphoric—may accidentally or incidentally become causes of further
pleasure:
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 95

From the fact alone that we have regarded something with the emotion
of pleasure or pain, though it were not the efficient cause of the emotion
we can love or hate that thing. (E. II. def. XV, corollary)

The inverse is true in cases of antipathy, were the thing becomes

regarded as hateful. Of course sympathy is not the only possible effect
of a modification involving euphoria. If through satiation or famil-
iarity the loved thing ceases to produce euphoria, then it may be said
that, effectively, the thing is no longer loved. For example:

[W]hen we imagine something which is wont to delight us with its fla-

vour, we desire to enjoy it, that is, to eat it. But as soon as we enjoy it
the stomach is filled and the body is disposed differently. But if while
the body is in this condition the image of this food . . . be stimulated,
and consequently the endeavour or desire of eating it be stimulated, the
new condition of the body will be opposed to this desire or endeavour,
and consequently the presence of the food which we sought will now be
odious to us. (E. III. prop. LIX, note)

The wider import of this note is to indicate that it is not the proper-
ties of what is encountered that are decisive in emotions, nor the
qualities of the affected individual. What is at issue is the composi-
tion of an affective relationship. So euphoria and dysphoria are not
the ground of any given emotion any more than musical harmony is
the ground of the simultaneous tones which give rise to it. The names
of the many emotions we experience are merely the names given to
differently assembled euphoric or dysphoric relations, akin to chords.
Hence Spinoza does not build a hierarchical structure upon them as if
they were foundations, but points instead to the lack of any essential
connection between affected body, encountered body, and quality of
affection:

The human body is affected by external bodies in many ways. Therefore

two men can be affected in different ways at the same time, and there-
fore they can be affected in various ways by one and the same object.
Again, the human body can be affected now in this way and now in that,
and consequently it can be affected by one and the same object at differ-
ent times in different ways. (E. III. prop. LI, proof)

If the same person is affected simultaneously in different ways by

the same external body, then they are subject to vacillation. This is
the result of an unstable relation that admits simultaneously of mod-
ifications according to euphoria and dysphoria. The vacillation be-
tween the two forms of ordering gives rise to the ambiguity or doubt
of dissonance. Hence in jealousy a loved thing whose faithfulness is
96 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

questioned may acquire hateable qualities. Another way of putting

this is to say that, in vacillation, two opposing images of the external
body vie with one another for certification (the image of the lovely
object that brings me joy and that of the hateful deceiver).5
Vacillations may also result from the fact that:

A man is affected with the same emotion of pleasure or pain from the
image of a thing past or future as from the image of a thing present. (E.
III. prop. XVIII)

To anticipate an encounter that will affect us in some way is to be

already affected by the image of a thing that is not yet present. If we
are certain of this future encounter, then we may despair or help-
lessly resign ourselves; despair being the name of the sorrow felt
when uncertainty about a future painful encounter is removed. But if
some doubt remains, then our affection will be fear if the encounter is
anticipated as disagreeable, or hope if we fasten on to an image of
some more agreeable encounter actually occurring. Fear is here the
name given to inconstant dysphoria, and hope inconstant euphoria,
both of which arise “from the image of a thing future or past of whose
event we are in doubt” (E. III. prop. XVII, note II). If we subsequently
become certain that the future event will not bring dysphoria, and
perhaps will even result in euphoria, then we experience this latter
scenario as confidence. If that certainty proves misplaced, then disap-
pointment is the name of the affect that follows. In all these examples
what occurs are substitutions as one image takes the place of another.
Once a certain affective relationship has been composed by the en-
counter between individuals, this may be conceived as establishing an
extended individual or alliance. If a loved object is harmed or a hated
object benefited, this will then be experienced as pain by the lover/
hater. In contrast, they will feel euphoria if a loved object is itself
affected with joy or a hated object harmed. This process extends the
possibilities for alliance such that we are inclined to love whatever
loves what we love and hates what we hate (this type of euphoria is
called approval), and, contrariwise, we are inclined to hate whatever
hates what we love and loves what we hate (indignation). In the
course of describing the emotions, the components of Spinoza’s ethical
system begin to fully operate. Now whilst it is certainly possible to
take issue with the precise content of some of his characterizations
(particularly around such complex affects as “shame” or “consterna-
tion”), there is much to recommend the method by which they are
drawn. It is, first and foremost a way of exploring affects as ways of
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 97

being. This much is clear from the association of conatus with desire.
What is at stake in an affect is nothing less than how the person
should “go on” or proceed forth on the basis of their emotion. Spinoza
is moreover presenting a processual account of affects as the unfold-
ing of personal powers to act and understand within a complex web of
forces made up by a world of finite beings and things affecting one
another.
Although Spinoza makes repeated reference to “individuals,” it is
clear from his conception of bodies and minds as manifolds that the
prior ontological category is the “alliance” or “relationship.” Affects
occur in an encounter between manifold beings, where everything de-
pends upon what form of composition they are able to enter into.
Thus the method begins from a point that exceeds individualism (as
we moderns would understand it), concerning itself instead with the
“necessary connections” by which relations are constituted. Spinoza
challenges us to begin not by recourse to biology or culture, or indeed
any of the great dualist formulations, but with the particularity proper
to an encounter, such as “common notions,” “proximate causes,” or
“resultant modifications.” Indeed it is a substantial part of this chal-
lenge to be able to understand or explicate affects as ultimately part
of a single analytic frame or “plane of composition,” known as God or
Nature.6 Once again, this directs us toward the study of how ordering
occurs, irrespective of and circumventing the analytic divisions be-
tween “humans,” “things,” and “nature” with which we are familiar.

. . . AND JEALOUSY: SWANN IN LOVE

There is a further aspect of the Spinozist legacy that is worthy of

reiteration. The parallelism of thought and extension, under which
finite ideas circulate in chains or series, and bodies connect and enter
into alliances, means that the analysis of emotions has to continually
proceed according to two distinct registers. Now this acts, on the one
hand, as a barrier to simple reductionism. But it also sets up a pecu-
liar tension between what might be characterized as “materiality”
and “the work of thought.” Spinoza requires that the order of things
and the order of thought be both “the same” (when considered as sub-
stance) and yet “different” (when viewed under the attributes).
This tension is remarkably modern in character. It reappears in the
great Western modernist acts of literature (Joyce, Proust, Borges) and
art (Artaud, Kandinsky, Magritte), and indeed in many works which
98 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

explore the affective dimension of the relation between Being and be-
ings (Heidegger being the clearest reference point here). More pre-
cisely we would hazard that the tension between the work of thought
and materiality operates as it were “beneath the surface” of most at-
tempts to produce a comprehensive psychological theory of emotions
(e.g., Lazarus, 1991; Neu, 1977), and indeed emerges into full view
within those critical attempts at rethinking the accomplishments of
emotionality (e.g., Harré, 1991; Sarbin, 1986). In other words, Spi-
noza’s problem actually remains as our problem: we have never
ceased confronting this irreducible difference.
In order to gain some purchase on how the tension becomes embod-
ied in accounts of emotionality, we will describe an extended example
taken from Proust’s Swann’s Way. Proust’s work is arguably the great
modernist Occidental exploration of affect. We would argue that
whatever is “in” Proust is in some way part of the conditions of knowl-
edge in which we, as modern European psychologists, grasp and con-
front questions of emotionality. What is more, Proust is in many ways
remarkably Spinozist in his conception of such issues as the role of
habit in organizing our emotional experiences; the central place of
images; and, most notably, the emphasis on the revelation of common
notions, as in the following:

There was in me a personage who knew more or less how to look, but it
was an intermittent personage, coming to life only in the presence of
some general essence common to a number of things, these essences
being its nourishment and its joy. Then the personage looked and lis-
tened, but at a certain depth only, without my powers of superficial
observation being enhanced. Just as a geometer, stripping things of
their sensible qualities, sees only linear substratum beneath them so
the stories people told escaped me, for what interested me was not what
they were trying to say but the manner in which they said it and the
way in which this manner revealed the character of their foibles.
(Proust [1927], 1981, pp. 737–738)

Here there is also a linkage made between essence and “joy,” a cen-
tral proposition of the Ethics. But perhaps the point on which Proust
and Spinoza are closest is in their treatment of jealousy. Both hold
jealousy to be among the most complex of affects, involving a contin-
ual shuffling of images and ideas as it passes through various phases.
It is also quintessentially a passion, that is, an affect that cuts us off
most decisively from our power to act.
Proust’s most elegant account of jealousy occurs in the third chap-
ter of Swann’s Way. Here what is described is the course of a develop-
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 99

ing affair between Charlus Swann, a member of the influential Guen-

nantes set, and Odette de Crecy, involved with the less well regarded
salon or “little clan” of the Verdurins. As the narrative progresses, the
affair gradually unfolds through a number of encounters, bringing
with it a whole series of affections or, to read in Spinozist terms,
“modifications,” that order the relations between Swann, Odette, and
a third figure, the Comte de Forcheville. Each affection determines
action in such a way that a further encounter is predicated upon the
relations composed by the latter.
The first mention of jealousy occurs after a bungled episode in
which Swann returns unexpectedly to Odette’s house in the evening,
to find that she is apparently entertaining another visitor. Although
Swann is unable to confirm this, he experiences a jealous affection,
which seizes upon the relations previously ordered by love such that
they are now reconfigured as dysphoria. The images (or more prop-
erly, the idea of these images) of Odette and their love become for
Swan tools which he uses to inflame rather than understand the jeal-
ousy that seems to now almost define him:

But then at once his jealousy, as though it were the shadow of his love,
presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new
smile with which she had greeted him that very evening—and which
now, perversely, mocked Swann and shone with love for another—of
that droop of the head, now sinking onto other lips, of all the marks of
affection (now given to another) that she had shown him. And all the
voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, so to
speak, but so many sketches, rough plans like those which a decorator
submits to one, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes,
aflame or faint with passion, which she might adopt for others. With the
result that he came to regret every pleasure that he had tasted in her
company, every new caress of which he had been so imprudent as to
point out to her the delights, every fresh charm that he found in her, for
he knew that, a moment later, they would go to enrich the collection of
instruments in his secret torture-chamber. (Proust, 1981, p. 301)

At this point it is worth recalling Spinoza’s characterization of jeal-

ousy as tending to follow from the affection of love. Jealousy grasps
and modifies established relations causing a new set of images and
ideas to circulate around the existing bodies and ideas of these bodies:

This hatred towards an object loved together with envy is called jeal-
ousy (zelotypia), which therefore is nothing else than a wavering of the
mind caused by simultaneous love and hate, accompanied by the idea of
a rival who is envied. Further, this hate towards the object loved will be
greater according to the pleasure with which the jealous man was wont
100 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

to be affected from the love which the thing loved returned to him. (E.
III. prop. 34, note)

What is decisive here is the movement of images and the accom-

panying “wavering” of ideas as both love and hate toward the object
and the “rival object” with which it is now (presumably) allied is ex-
pressed. This movement is also a passage from a greater to a lesser
capacity to act, as affects of joy or pleasure dissolve into affects of
sorrow or pain.
To understand this movement in Proust it is necessary to analyze
each attribute in turn. Beginning with bodies and images (extension),
the most notable figure is Odette herself. But, as image, there is, for
Swann at least, a rapid fragmentation into a whole series of Odettes:
the woman at the theatre, the double of Jethro’s Daughter, the “love”
of Madam Verdurin, the image of “unknown” Odette who is so often
absent from Swann’s company. Indeed Swann comes to experience
himself as also distributed into a series of images. There is the “young
Swann” of society circles, the “jealous monster” who pursues Odette,
the “misanthrope” who desires total possession, the “other self” pres-
ent at the start of the affair, and finally the “wretched figure” who
resigns himself to losing Odette’s love. Again reading with Spinoza,
what occurs is a proliferation of images as the various relations that
compose each of these manifold individuals takes on increasing im-
portance. If it is possible to speak of the “same” Odette and Swann,
then it is because what remains constant between them is the defin-
ing force of the jealous affect.
There are also other objects (themselves manifolds) that are sim-
ilarly weaved into the relations configured by jealousy. The chrysan-
themums that Swann preserves from the early part of the affair, for
example, become so unbearable that he starts making “a detour to
avoid [them] whenever he went in or out of the room” (1981, p. 350).
The flowers, along with an old note from Odette, which were once
constituent parts of the material relations between Swann and Odette,
now stand as markers of the entirely different alliance that persists.
In effect, the flowers become a kind of “mediator” or “switching point”
between the orders established by the opposed affects of love and jeal-
ousy, through which the various images pass. There is, for example,
the “former” Swann who received the letter and flowers and the
“other” Odette who sent them, latterly revealed to be the “same” Odette
who was actually Forcheville’s mistress at the time, which pains the
“wretched” Swann who has preserved both objects. As bodies and im-
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 101

ages, these mediators are crucial to the kinds of modifications that

each affect expresses.
Equally important are the places in which the affect is played out.
Although it remains somewhat implicit in Spinoza, a consideration of
the actual places in which encounters are enacted plays a causal role
in subsequent modifications. The jealousy here is played out around
the Verdurin salon, Odette’s house, and the Society settings that
Swann frequents. The “little nucleus” which meets at the Verdurin’s
is the milieu in which Swann and Odette are drawn together, and in
which Forcheville becomes interposed. The salon effectively governs
the timing of their encounters, around which Swann experiences the
first anxiety leading directly to the affair commencing. When Swann
is eventually excluded from the Verdurin’s this brings about the emer-
gence of the image of an “other” Odette and an “other” time to which
Swann has no access. This also holds for Odette’s house, which seems
to have been always open to Swann at the start of the relationship,
but becomes later on drawn into the ever more complex pattern of
timings:

[I]f she was now frequently away from Paris, even when she was there
he scarcely saw her, and she who, when she was in love with him, used
to say “I’m always free” and “What do I care what other people think?”
now, whenever he wanted to see her, appealed to the proprieties or
pleaded some engagement. (Proust, 1981, p. 339)

Even the places where Swann is most distant to Odette become

drawn into the affection. They are either the haunts of the “young
Swann,” who predates the affair, or merely open up the possibility of
anxiety at a prolonged absence from Odette. Such is the complex pat-
tern of movements and timings between the two that spaces become
contested in a play of disavowals and restrictions. It is across these
spaces that the central alliance of Odette, Swann, and Forcheville is
constituted. Indeed, it most often appears that what we conceive of
and discourse as sexual jealousy depends on there being three per-
sons or a “triad” involved in the encounter (cf. Stenner, 1993). At
times the triad is played out in a direct encounter, as in the episode
over the carriage (1981, p. 310) or the orangeade (p. 325), or else it
may be the movements between images, as contained in letters (p.
308), absences (p. 387), or even dreams (p. 411). It is to be recalled
that Spinoza makes no fundamental division with regard to affects
between either the “actual” presence of a body or its image.
Turning now briefly to ideas, we see corresponding movements and
102 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

substitutions in the kinds of ideas that are evoked by the jealous af-
fect. Swann conceives of simple descriptions, moral evaluations, de-
sires, regrets, justifications, and apologies, all of which rapidly circu-
late around the ideas of the images of Odette:

The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed of the
death, the infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of
which had Odette for their object. (Proust, 1981, p. 404)

Ideas are placed around that of Odette varying from a conception of

her as “charming” and “full of tenderness” (1981, p. 330), to a disap-
pointment with one who is “sinking into a mire from which it will be
impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her” (p.
341). Swann alternates between blessing her name (p. 327) and long-
ing for her accidental death (p. 386). Her beauty originally associated
by Swann with a Sistine figure, then changes and passes through
phases (p. 336). This movement in the ordering of ideas is inseparable
from the structuring of relations across time:

His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second,
and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself firmly to that particular mo-
ment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another
again. (1981, p. 309)

As the affect of jealousy unfolds, it re-invents a form of duration for

Swann (one might say it comes to define the way he persists in be-
ing). Particular moments come to seem interminable and simply un-
bearable, whilst others simply lie fallow. In considering his future,
Swann alternates between being unable to think of himself as any-
thing but Odette’s lover and imaging that he is entering into a termi-
nal phase of an illness, or else of falling into regret at the passing of
the “other” Swann who began the affair.
The division into attributes allows for an analysis which fixes upon
both aspects of the tension, what we have called the “work of thought”
and “materiality,” but which might also be termed that between
“physical being” and “narrative being,” or more simply between dis-
course and materiality. Yet there are certain events within Proust’s
account of Swann’s jealousy which both reaffirm and make problem-
atic the division. Vinteuil’s little musical phrase, for example, which
acts as a material mediator (“the national anthem of their love,” 1981,
p. 238), a key idea (“Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual
ideas, of another world,” p. 379), the image of an encountered body
(“Human as it was from this point of view, it yet belonged to an order
Spinoza and the Psychology of Emotion, Brown/Stenner 103

of supernatural beings, p. 381) and a kind of place (“driving across a

region unexplored,” p. 382). In short, it is the very difficulty in placing
the musical phrase firmly as either “thought” or “materiality” which
indicates the fundamental identity of these attributes as dual expres-
sions of the same substance, albeit one which becomes infinitely com-
plicated as it is folded into myriad orders and modifications. It is this
complication which an affect properly expresses:

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single,

continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of different jeal-
ousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted
multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of
unity. (Proust, 1981, p. 404)

OPERA POSTHUMA

In this article, we have tried to explore how what we think we know

about emotions, as members of a modern western culture. Our ac-
count is traversed by a deep fissure between two aspects of being. We
have given several names to these aspects, but will for reasons of
brevity settle upon “discourse” and “materiality.” The role of Spinoza
in all this is as one who articulated this division, contra Descartes, in
the clearest possible fashion at the very dawn of European modernity.
In returning to Spinoza, we hope to be making a passage, which not
only revisits a yet still powerful way of questioning affects within a
specifically European context, but also modifies and reconfigures
what we take to be the historical legacy of modernist Occidental so-
cial science. Not least of the benefits is that we are now able to see
that a strong current of anti-Cartesianism has always existed. It is
simply unnecessary to repeat the arguments against dualism.
In terms of a project of rethinking the psychology of emotion, Spi-
noza not only brings the body back to center stage, but also chal-
lenges us to reconsider exactly what is meant by our conceptions of
“bodies” and “objects.” If much nascent discursive psychology has con-
cerned itself with questioning the psychological subject, then Spinoza
allows us to question the object, to reveal it as manifold, as defined by
alliances and relationships. What is more, none of this is achieved at
the cost of dispensing with ideation or the work of thought, for it too
is brought to the center, to be considered in turn as always divided,
subject to modification in unstable compositions and orders. In other
words, it is subject to a form of politics which is in turn negotiated by
104 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP TENSIONS

a practice of ethics, a “becoming active” which proceeds by way of the

emotions. This then is Spinoza’s legacy and our way of “going on” as
European psychologists: to analyze “clearly and distinctly” ordering
and its modifications as expressive of a singular complexity in which
all things are gathered and governed.

NOTES

1. In citing passages from the Ethics, we will refer to part (E), proposition (prop.),
definition (def.), note or proof. Hence the note to the second proposition in part two
is E. II. prop. 2, note.
2. Spinoza’s description of power in terms of a relationally circumscribed “power-to
act,” rather than a sovereign or foundational “power-over” the body or, indeed,
others is recapitulated by much postructuralist social science (see Curt, 1994; Law,
1991; Rose, 1989). For explicit attempts to address Spinoza’s conception of power in
political theory, see Chomsky and Foucault (1974), Curley (1996), Gatens (1996),
Negri (1991).
3. In this respect Spinoza prefigures many of the attempts in psychology and psychia-
try to elucidate the image as the material cause of trauma (e.g., Antze & Lambek,
1996).
4. The state functions here as an “individual” or collective assemblage composed of the
bodies of the citizenry. It assumes the role of minimizing disagreeable modifications
of “itself” as supra-individual (Curley, 1996).
5. It is certification that is at issue since ideas are by their very nature already af-
firmed in mind (Gilbert, 1991).
6. This aspect has been developed in ecological readings of Spinoza, notably Naess
(1977).

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