All posts filed under: affect

Malabou

Friday, April 8, 2016
by Joseph Weissman
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affect / capitalism / creativity / machine

Catherine Malabou has created a meticulous and profound new concept of the brain. Malabou analyses the functions which neuroscience has discovered, conducting a contemporary synthesis of neuroplasticity, crystallizing a new concept which acts as a curious new abstract machine with many parts. She names this concept plasticity after the plastic multiplicity of the brain; and one component of this concept expresses the brain’s power to learn and to heal, and even to reconfigure itself. Another component is transdifferentiation, or the power of […]

Affectivity, or What is an Event?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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affect / becoming / body / celerity / cosmos / double / event / freud / God / gravity / Interpretation / liberation / machine / model / outside / resonance

Events are volcanic. The event opens upon an outside, a beyond, a resonant and enigmatic depth. Events move the world, releasing free and untamed vibrations within and without us. They place being into relation with exteriority. But how does evental resonance work? When the new breaks free it is almost like it suddenly becomes “permitted” to us to learn to see all over again. Perhaps it would be better to say: we are allowed to […]

A Short List of Gilbert Simondon’s Vocabulary

Wednesday, November 28, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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affectivity / allagmatic / becoming / Disparation / emotivity / ensemble / form / hylemorphism / individualization / individuation / information / metastability / milieu / model / modularity / ontogenesis / potential / preindividual / signal / signification / Simondon / subject / system / Transduction / transindividual

1. Affectivity -This term designates a relation between an individualized being and the pre-individual milieu; it is thus heterogeneous to individualized reality. This is why Simondon claims that affectivity, more than perception, indicates a spirituality that is greater than the individualized being (the Sublime) because perception is merely the functions of the structures interior to this being (L’Individuation psychique et collective, p. 108–hereafter cited as IPC). Simondon writes that affectivity is the ground of emotion, […]