<p>Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before </p><p>Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize </p><p>bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of </p><p>activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition </p><p>of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith, </p><p>devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across </p><p>confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal, </p><p>emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans </p><p>and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency </p><p>and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John </p><p>Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis </p><p>of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate </p><p>developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's </p><p>configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives </p><p>towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza </p><p>and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and </p><p>determinism.</p> / Dissertation
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DUKE/oai:dukespace.lib.duke.edu:10161/1356 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Leo, Russell Joseph |
| Contributors | Khanna, Ranjana, Shannon, Laurie |
| Source Sets | Duke University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | 23734998 bytes, application/pdf |
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