The Affective Reproduction of Capital

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, Spinoza asked the question of why people fight for their servitude as if it was salvation. Spinoza's question fundamentally reoriented the question of ideology away from ideas toward affects and desires. There have been two returns to Spinoza in the last fifty years that examine the way capitalism restructures desires and joys as much as beliefs and ideas: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and, forty years later, Frédéric Lordon. The gap between these two returns to Spinoza structures this chapter's examination of Spinoza's potential for theorizing the economics of affect and desire. Spinoza makes it possible to understand how work and consumption restructure our desires and joys. In this age of neoliberalism, the demands for an alternative economy and subjectivity of affects are even more imperative. At the same time, the failure of countercultural revolution reveals the limits of subjective transformations without transformation of structures.