Abstract
Posthumanist ethics unsettle the obdurate dependencies of virtue upon transcendental values. In so doing, the promulgation of false problems tied to spurious modes of morality is challenged. But can bodies and societies keep up with the onto-ethical demands of posthumanism? Mired in the tumult of manifold crises—climatic, viral, others imperceptible—and yoked to authoritarian governments immured in mediocrity, why, in the absence of transcendental comforts, would anyone act in the amelioration of social, environmental and psychological ecologies? In this chapter I argue that one response to this ethical aporia is an interpolation of Spinoza’s insistence on passionate reason. The approach is twofold. Firstly, it advances Spinoza’s basic proposition that freedom in thought lies in a passionate mode of reason. Secondly, the chapter assays the notion of ‘speculative passions’. The upshot is that speculative modes of thought are unimaginable without an insistence on passion.
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Notes
- 1.
Inter-alia, the nascent Spinozism running through Eliot’s literature and the pernicious, gendered occlusion of what is possibly the first English translation of the Ethics. Had it been accepted by the publisher, there is a reasonable chance that Eliot’s translation would have been the first version of Ethics in English, period. Carlisle (2020b, 598) comments, “Eliot was more intimately acquainted with Spinoza’s Ethics than anyone else in England in the mid-nineteenth century”.
- 2.
“Philosophy cannot neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross” (Whitehead, 1978, 338).
- 3.
“The multiple manifestations of desire are collectively signified by the term conatus” (Zovko, 2014: 140).
- 4.
In contrast to what Jason Read (2016: 105) describes as the “absolutely and rigourously consistent” use of the term affect by Spinoza himself.
- 5.
The taxonomic graft of assaying the various passions (and their relations) is undertaken by Spinoza (1677) himself in Part III of the Ethics.
- 6.
To identify two somewhat parochial examples: (1) Pret-a-Manger (UK-based sandwich shop franchise): passion is officially designated a ‘core behaviour’ of all its employees; and (2) SEAT, S.A. (Spanish automobile manufacturer): “we are passionate perfectionists, emotional technologists”, see: https://seat-avto.ru/assets/files/windscreen_tte.pdf.
- 7.
The apotheosis of this anti-intellectualism was expressed during a speech delivered in December 2020 by (at the time of drafting) the UK’s Secretary of State for International Trade (and now, at the time of editing, unfathomably, a candidate to be the UK’s next Prime Minister), Liz Truss, in which Michel Foucault was erroneously traduced as a ‘post-modernist’ and held accountable for the ‘failed ideas of the left’. The speech, originally published on an official government website, was subsequently redacted from the public record.
- 8.
Tensions that are consonant with others in respect of a contemporary vitalist pushback against ‘negativity’ (see, for example, Roberts & Dewsbury, 2021).
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Gerlach, J. (2022). Passionate Speculations | Speculative Passions. In: Williams, N., Keating, T. (eds) Speculative Geographies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_5
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