The actions of affect in Deleuze : others using language and the language that we make ...

Gilles Deleuze inextricably ties up the ways in which power works through and in language with affect.The problem that confronts us is therefore:What is affect, and how does it relate to language and power? Deleuze suggests that we get different answers to these questions depending upon whom we ask, and as such resists outlining a clear definition of affect anywhere in his oeuvre. In this paper, I have constructed the two ways in which affect is approached in the writing of Deleuze in terms of a model (please refer to Figure 1) to aid comprehension of the idea, though this does not represent a unified theory of affect.The point of the Deleuzian scholarly synthesis and reinvention of these thinkers through his studies (Hardt, 1993) is not to become confused by the ways in which affect has been deployed to support different philosophical outlooks, but to realise that affect is a philosophical tool that helps to build perspectives. For example, Spinoza used affect in his system of ethics to connect desire with reason; language therefore takes on a powerful ethical and joyful cadence as it communicates deeply felt emotions. Nietzsche used affect as a basis for sensation in his understanding of the will to power and the eternal return. Language, as such, assumes power as it is combined with the ways in which the repetitions of time and the energies of the will may drive one's life. Bergson, on the other hand, made affect part of his conception of durée and the élan vital, so that language may be imbued with the many subtle nuances of the continuities in time, memory and creativity, and these may constitute power. One should not therefore try to teach the truth of affect, nor rationalise it into a coherent or unified 'affect theory' but instead use it to develop theory that will help to sustain and modify one's views with empirical evidence and the fluctuations that may be contained in this evidence.