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n one of the most cited propositions of his Ethics, published in 1677, Baruch Spinoza writes that "Each thing, as far as it lies in its power, strives to persevere in its being." Insofar as the effort for self-preservation makes things remain what they are, such effort is essential in the things themselves. When this effort refers to both the soul and the body, Spinoza calls it desire. Following this reasoning, the Dutch philosopher deduces that we judge "good" that which we desire, and not the other way around. Thus, we could say that life is good because we desire it. For Suely Rolnik, a Brazilian psychoanalyst, essayist, and curator, these ideas have been very significant in proposing her project of micropolitical resistance. They were also significant for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with whom she maintained a fruitful intellectual relationship starting from her exile in Paris between 1970 and 1979.
"What it is always about is liberating life wherever it is captive, or trying to do so in an uncertain combat"In What is philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari described the task of thinking thus: "What it is always about is liberating life wherever it is captive, or trying to do so in an uncertain combat." Rolnik used this quote as the starting point for her lecture, as it perfectly fits the theoretical and practical development of her activism. To locate the place where life is "suffocated," one must ask how the subject relates to the world. Rolnik observes two simultaneous yet opposing forms of experience in the subject: "perceptive experience" and "extra-personal experience." The first is "structural" because it is guided by a cultural "distribution" to evaluate the present situation; the second apprehends affects – understood as "forces" that affect our body, sowing seeds of emotional states within it – and forces the subject to appreciate the present as a singularity that requires a new response. These two opposing "logics" create a tension from which arises the more or less intense experience of the "destabilization of the repertoire." And this discomfort can be responded to actively or reactively.
Rolnik defines the activity of thought "from an ethical-aesthetic point of view." Ethical, because it implies the will to fulfill our essential desire (to preserve ourselves), and therefore the search for what is good. Aesthetic, because finding an answer to the discomfort of the present means creating.As an example of active micropolitics, Rolnik brought up the case of the Guarani people, where she considers there is a widespread awareness of the time that separates affect from its emergence in the subject. This lapse, of patient waiting, allows for precisely locating the cause of life's suffocation. To "care for" the process that affect follows – "to sustain oneself in the state of destabilization" – is necessary to be able to state the cause of discomfort and to imagine new possibilities for action on the present and to "transvalue" them, thus establishing a new balance, distinct than what has been originally problematized. This defines, according to Rolnik, the activity of thought "from an ethical-aesthetic point of view." Ethical, because it implies the will to fulfill our essential desire (to preserve our being), and therefore the search for what is good. Aesthetic, because finding an answer to the discomfort of the present means create.
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Rolnik sees in the unconscious the place where desire is produced, so that ignoring it is equivalent to "not being able to live up to what life demands" (the effort to preserve it). The unconscious is the "factory of worlds" that can offer active responses to the reality that affects the subject. It happens that, according to Rolnik, advanced capitalism finds in the despoliation of desire its genuine form of capital accumulation. The "colonial-capitalist regime" has just dissociated the modern subject from the "body-knowledge," from its capacity to attend to extra-personal experience. This does not mean that the contact of affects disappears, nor the discomfort caused by their tension with perceptive experience. In fact, this is greater, inasmuch as the subject cannot recognize its cause. Therefore, the response to discomfort can only be reactive: the subject tries to maintain that cultural distribution that has entered into crisis and that represents and constitutes him as such. The creative potential is annulled; only the shell remains: "creativity," capable of giving rise to "novel scenarios for new consumption situations."
Life, Rolnik repeated several times, must be defended all one's life.Art is that "human activity aimed at the creation of a body from listening to affects." This is how Rolnik defined it. Indeed, art can to formalize the emotions that have germinated in the experience; art could to be perhaps the most direct critical gesture against modern subjectivity, reduced to the subject in itself. However, the conference was not limited to diagnosing the micropolitical ills of our society. Suely Rolnik proposed ten "notes for decolonizing the unconscious." The last one, as an epilogue to this invitation to reconsider the most essential effort, read as follows: "Exercise thought in its full function: inseparably ethical, aesthetic, political, critical, and clinical. That is, re-imagine the world in every gesture, in every word, in every way of existing, and in every relationship with the other (human and non-human)." Life, Rolnik repeated several times, must be defended all life long.
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