Author Q&A: On Gilles Deleuze, philosophical tools, and "Political Affect"

John Protevi, a professor of French studies at Louisiana State University, is author of Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, which is the 7th installment in the University of Minnesota Press's Posthumanities series. In this book, Protevi applies his concept of political affect to show how unconscious emotional valuing shaped three events: the Columbine High School slayings, Hurricane Katrina, and the Terry Schiavo case. Here is a preview from a recent Q&A with the author. You can read the full text of his Q&A here.

Q: How did you decide on case studies as a method of doing philosophy?

A: I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments ... with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express. Here is where my reliance on the thought of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze comes in. Deleuze did not think in terms of essences that would slot things into categories, but thought that events are the points of intersection of “multiplicities.” That’s a technical term for Deleuze which, roughly speaking, means a field in which several processes meet to produce events, much as a crystal or a lightning bolt or a hurricane forms out of a field of multiple processes. In dealing with analogous multiplicities in our social fields we see that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and that (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions ... The more we explore the Schiavo case, the Columbine case, the Katrina case, the more we realize that concrete situations are “crystallizations” of a problematic field, and that a change here or there, if it occurs at a critical point, might make all the difference in the world.

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