Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity

Rhizomes no. 11

Rosi Braidotti

Michael O’Rourke

2005

This paper argues that affect and desire as an ontological passions play a central role in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical intervention. The political economy of this kind of affectivity, however, is linked to a neo-vitalist brand of anti-essentialist bodily materialism. This approach is openly critical of the linguistic paradigm of mediation which has been dominant in postmodern thought and especially in the North American reception of French post-structuralism. Nomadic affectivity is outward-bound and based on complex relations with a multiplicity of others, including non-human others. The kind of ethics that sustains this project is Spinozist in its materialist foundations and productive in its political economy. As such, it could not be further removed from the dialectics of Lack, Law and Signifier which have dominated Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridian deconstruction and the queer theories that rely on these schemes of thought.