This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The Affective Turn Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva Lovari, Eirini Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 05. Oct. 2021 The Affective Turn: Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva Eirini Lovari Eirini Lovari Phd Thesis submitted to the Department of French, King’s College London 2014 Supervisors: Hector Kollias and Patrick ffrench Abstract This thesis examines the role of affect in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze (including works co-authored with Félix Guattari) and Julia Kristeva. It explores the notion of affect and its place in the creation of art and the formation of subjectivity. Recent social and cultural research in affect theory locates the affective turn in the mid 1990s, developing affect as a type of excess that is contrasted with the cognitive and the discursive and lays considerable stress on the body and feeling. This thesis considers the affective turn in philosophy to have taken place in the late 1960s early 1970s. Affect in Lyotard, Deleuze and Kristeva moves beyond the notion of affect as excess and is established as that which engenders cognitive capabilities, linguistic structures as well as artistic and creative processes. This thesis stages an encounter between two different theoretical strands of affect theory: Deleuze’s philosophical assessment of Spinoza’s distinctive formulation of affect and Lyotard and Kristeva’s revisiting of the psychoanalytic notion of affect through Freud. I propose that we can draw from their writings a definition of affect that is common to all three. I will argue throughout this thesis that the definition of affect in these three writers is the non- signifying element of an image or representation that is autonomous from but also operates alongside signification (within or beneath it) creating the new, that is new art- work and new directions in thought. It is therefore the creative element of a process that incites language and conscious thought processing by moving them in different directions; it is the driving element in a productive process of change. Affect in this definition is therefore two-fold: it is an excess within language and a process. The thesis draws attention to the significance of the correlative relationship between affect and the visual realm where images become the site of affect and the place of its production. I propose that the notion of affect establishes a mode of communication outside the limits 2 of language that overruns linguistic meaning and illustrates that what surfaces to consciousness has already undergone an act of interpretation. This involves a break with the idea of the image as representation, while privileging the image over language as that which is capable of maintaining affective difference. I show that affect is what incites language and gives rise to subjective as well as discursive renewal. 3 Acknowledgements I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to all those who have contributed to my thesis and supported me in one way or another during this time. I would like to thank my supervisor Hector Kollias for his support, as well as taking the time to translate the French citations in the Lyotard chapter. I am grateful to Patrick ffrench for his help and in particular for his hands on approach, especially during the last stages of the writing up processes. I cannot thank Jo Malt enough for generously giving up her time to advise me, for her kind support and encouragement, as well as, for the many invaluable discussions. I am forever grateful for the trouble she has taken to read my work and guide me, especially in the last few months. I want to thank my good friend Tasos Lazarides who I can always count on for great advice and for taking the time to discuss my work with me. A special thank you to my parents for their love and support during this time. Finally I could not have done this without my partner and best friend Niko who has been supportive of me from the beginning. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………..4 Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………..….5 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………...6 Chapter 1: Affect in Theory…….…………………………………………..….…13 Chapter 2: Jean-François Lyotard and the Figural..…………….…………..….83 Chapter 3: Gilles Deleuze: Art, Affect and Creation……………………….…..150 Chapter 4: Julia Kristeva and Affect: From the Semiotic to Love………………..221 Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………..281 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………286 5 Introduction In light of the recent “affective turn’ in the humanities, this thesis investigates the notion of affect in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva, and explores its relation to artistic and creative processes. Their work on affect unfolds approximately around the same time at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Whereas contemporary social and cultural theory locates the affective turn in the mid-1990s, this thesis proposes that in philosophy, this turn takes place at a much earlier time.1 The revival of affect theory in the humanities has coincided with, and is largely due to, the emergent interest in Gilles Deleuze’s work in this area. His return to Spinoza’s distinct formulation of affect has prompted a great deal of discussion across various areas and disciplines of study. This thesis explores the notion of affect: what affect is and what affect does in the work of three writers, two of whom are better known and better associated with the “linguistic turn” and post-structuralism than they are with affect theory. The significance of Lyotard’s work on affect in particular, as well as the magnitude of his writings in this area, has yet to be acknowledged to its full extent.2 I view Lyotard and Kristeva’s return to the Freudian notion of affect side by side, with that of Deleuze’s Spinozist formulation, illustrating points of contact, exchange and confluence between them, as well as examining their differences. I suggest that the affective turn in recent French philosophy therefore, derives primarily from two different intellectual strands in the theoretical history of affect theory: the work of Baruch Spinoza and Sigmund Freud. Whereas Gilles Deleuze builds on 1 See Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth’s (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. 2 The Affect Theory Reader (2010) and The Affective Turn: Theorising the Social (2007) are a series of essays dedicated primarily to Gilles Deleuze’s work on affect. However, neither contains a single reference to Lyotard’s work on the subject. 6 Spinoza’s distinct category and conception of affect, Lyotard and Kristeva draw theirs from Freudian psychoanalysis. The affective turn in the humanities has been thought to come about as a reaction to the allegedly holistic theories of language developed in the ‘linguistic turn’ that turned the whole world into language without remainder.3 In The Affect Theory Reader (2010), Gregg and Seigworth claim that affect theory “attempts to turn away from the much-heralded ‘linguistic turn’ in the latter half of the twentieth century” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 7). In my own reading of these three writers, the affective turn surfaces not so much as a turn away from “the linguistic turn” but rather as a reaction to particular readings of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of language. All three writers revisit Saussurean linguistics and claim that his theory of language is in fact doubly constituted (see Chapter One). Their work on affect thereby remains very much engaged with the question of language, as much as what falls outside of its parameters and structure. I therefore read the ‘affective turn’ in Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure (1971), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) as developing from an ongoing discussion on the issues of language that simultaneously explore spheres of experience that fall outside the dominant (structuralist) paradigm of representation. Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that writers like Lyotard and Kristeva, associated as they are with the linguistic turn (or post-structuralism), might also be interested in what falls outside language. Their theories of affect illustrate that one often finds affect where one would not expect it. As such, there is a blurring of boundaries between the distinct intellectual movements that have been labelled as structuralism, post-structuralism, the linguistic turn and the affective turn. What has been understood as the ‘affective turn’ in recent 3 This is what Frederic Jameson calls the “prison-house of language”.