Affective reading

In the preface of ‘Spinoza’ by Gilles Deleuze, Robert Hurley writes:

“I am aware that I have said next to nothing about Spinoza. The fact is that Spinoza is difficult. And this book on Spinoza is difficult. But the situation is helped by the author's word to the wise: one doesn't have to follow every proposition, make every connection — the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway. What if one accepted the invitation — come as you are —and read with a different attitude, which might be more like the way one attends to poetry? Then difficulty would not prevent the flashes of understanding that we anticipate in the poets we love, difficult though they may be. The truly extraordinary thing about Deleuze is precisely the quality of love that his philosophy expresses; it is active in everything he has written. I like very much a phrase in Arne Ness' article, referred to above. Speaking of Spinoza's amor intellectualis Dei, he says that it "implies acts of understanding performed with the maximum perspective possible". As I see it, just such a performance awaits the reader here.”

My encounter with Hurley’s text happened at a time where my mind was newly electrified with the thought of everything there is to read, to learn, to understand — I was trying to ram through both foundational and secondary texts from European philosophers and french theorists’ interpretations of their works. Lacking a formal education in classics or philosophy beyond a few semesters of semiology and Chinese thought (which was the obsession of my art school philosophy teacher), I was often frustrated at the slow process of building a base of concepts solid enough to grasp the authors’ words in one reading.

I had given up on reading fiction altogether. Reading for ‘pleasure’ didn’t seem ‘productive’ enough, it was as if only the mind gymnastics of difficult texts, chosen in order of their historical impact, were worthy and able to occupy the remains of my disappearing attention span that years ago could take on hours and hours of fantasy fiction in a single sitting.

“One doesn’t have to follow every proposition, make every connection — the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway.”

It was Hurley that gave me permission, in a way, to let go of the dichotomy of leisure vs productivity, and to lean into a way of reading that, instead of stopping at every unknown concept or difficult turn of words, made me happily skip over pages, make seemingly unrelated connections, and abandon a book when it no longer seemed to give me pleasurable insight, to perhaps open it again at another time.

Intuitive or affective reading may not be goal-oriented in the way that institutional education requires, or productive, if we see productivity as a quantitative measure of favourable outcomes. But what if productivity, in the context of reading, meant that when there’s pleasure and creativity involved, we might end up thinking in new ways (as opposed to learning to think ‘the same’)? What if a better way to read is through acts of understanding, performed with the maximum perspective possible?