(Appadurai 2006). Indeed, I hold to a tragic view of human life insofar as I believe
that history is one long stumble into the unknown, and it cannot be tied down
and ordered in the way that too many social theorists imply with their too neat
theories. Most particularly, it would be foolish to deny some of the more unsavoury
facts of existence. Nature is both astonishingly prolific, able to produce infinite
variation and exquisite adaptation, and abundantly and unremittingly cruel. Nature
does not take sides. The cost of what Nietzsche called ‘more life’ is depredation
on a scale we can hardly comprehend: who could sum the number of violent deaths
that casually occur around the world every second or claim to understand this
sublime destructiveness?
Human being does not stand outside nature. It is full of all kinds of impulses
which are outside its comprehension and are the other (I will not say negative)
side of this equation, impulses that can be likened to Freud’s death instinct in their
capacity to undo connections and destroy life. In the last section of the book,
I start to address some of these issues, and, most particularly, the issues of anger,
rage and humiliation, by concentrating on the issue of affect, for what it seems
important to underline is that a clarion call for ‘more life’ is disingenuous, even
misleading, without some understanding of the surpluses of anger, rage and
humiliation that have been unleashed as a result of the ‘predatory narcissisms’
(Appadurai 2006) that characterize too much of the modern world.
The last four chapters in the book which form its final section point to the need
to think about affect as a key element of a politics that will supplement the ordin-
ary. What is certain is that understanding affect requires some sense of the role of
biology, howsoever understood. The first chapter, ‘From born to made’, is an
attempt to come to terms with that legacy of thought and practice by taking up
some of the themes from the first part of the book and pulling them into the third.
It is particularly concerned with forging new links between biology and technology
by delivering a set of shocks to the meaning of accepted categories like ‘nature’
and ‘technology’, especially by relying on the Whiteheadian dictum that ‘nature
is a theatre for the interrelation of activities’ (Whitehead 19 7 8: 1 4 0). To achieve
these dual aims, the chapter double clicks on the icon ‘intelligence’. ‘Intelligence’
prioritizes the active shaping of environments. It thereby allows space for the
spaces of the world to themselves become a part of intelligibility and intellect as
elements of distributed cognition anddistributed pre-cognition. The chapter
argues that such a conception of sentience can provide a series of new perspectives,
as well as a pressing ethical challenge. I then move to a consideration of the political
stakes that the deployment of affect entails against the background of the active
engineering of pre-cognition. In the chapter ‘Spatialities of feeling’ I outline what
a politics of affect might look like and especially the more explicit politics of hope
that is currently struggling to be born out of an analysis of the affective swirl that
characterizes modern societies. However, I take seriously the criticism of this kind
of work, that it has tended to neglect the many forms of violence and repression
that infest the worlds and knock it around. Thus I try to counterbalance the politics
of hope that I espouse with some sober reflections on the affective substrate in
which it is embedded and from which it cannot be simply divided. Thus the chapter
Life, but not as we know it 25