Spinoza and the Affective Turn: A Return to the Philosophical Origins of Affect

Abstract

In their introduction to a recent special issue of Qualitative Inquiry, Taguchi and St. Pierre observed that Foucault’s notion of “fruitful disorientation” seemed to circulate throughout the included articles. Embracing this fruitfully disorienting impulse, the authors of this article provide a detailed reading of Baruch Spinoza’s ontological concept of affect as he articulated it in the Ethics. Through this return, the authors consider the implications of affect for qualitative and postqualitative inquiry and offer an example of how a return to the philosophical origins of a theory can produce new lines of thinking and inquiry.