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Précis
Eco-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces
Marjolein Oele
Radboud University, NL
Oele, Marjolein. 2025. “Précis: Eco-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interface.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 2: 1-5. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.winter.1.
Abstract: In this Précis I provide a brief overview of my monograph E-Co-Affectivity, which combines biology, phenomenology, Ancient Greek thought, new materialisms, environmental philosophy, and affect studies. I briefly outline central concepts such as affectivity, interface, community, and the middle voice.
Keywords: affectivity, suffering, biology, science, phenomenology, new materialism, temporality, pathos, Dagognet, interface, plants, birds, placenta, skin, soil, ontogenesis
Suffering. Compassion. Reflection. If any terms capture my life’s orientation and its fundamental motivation, these three get at its core. It was devotion to understanding suffering as illness that drove me to my first career, that of medicine. And it was reflection on the meaning of suffering and compassion that led me to my investigations of affectivity. As I use the term “affectivity,” I use it with the Ancient Greek term “pathos” in mind. This term, in Greek, has a wide spectrum of meaning, including suffering, feeling, passion, illness and qualitative change. Reaching, in meaning, from incidental change and emotion to illness and excruciating suffering, the term pathos for the Greeks covers an amazing array, true to the dynamics of life’s emergences and transformations.
While my earlier work more narrowly focused on the meaning of pathos within the philosophical discipline (Oele, 2012a, 2012b), my monograph E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Mat- erial Interfaces (Oele 2020) seeks to overcome narrow disciplinary boundaries and aims to steer the topic of affectivity away from notions of human emotion or anthropocentrism. By turning to affect- ivity, we acquire a fuller and deeper insight into the underpinnings of how living beings are always in motion, that is, how they come to be, grow, interact, react, suffer, and die. This focus is much needed to complement, if not strategically undermine, modern philosophy’s focus on static and insular activity, autonomy, and disembodied freedom. With the term “e-co-affectivity,” I seek to emphasize that affect-
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ivity neither occurs in a vacuum nor pertains to singular, discrete entities: it implies a certain place or milieu (hence “eco” as in the Greek “oikos”) and connection to others (hence “co”). The hyphenation I use speaks to the fact that the influence of place and community cannot be tightly distinguished from the happenings of affectivity I investigate here: : e-co-affectivity is one phenomenon.
In this book, I integrate readings of natural scientific studies with philosophical reflections on the emergence of embodied life. Inspired by new materialism, ancient and continental thought, and scientific studies, I explore various concrete interfaces where affectivity co-emerges: nutrition in plants, sensation in bird-feathers, the place-making organ of the placenta, the sentient-sapient interface of human skin, and, finally, the co-constitutive interface of soil. Within that terrain of concrete interfaces, I make an innovative attempt to perform philosophy as it engages the concrete material interfaces and to follow the logic that emerges. For instance, in the case of trauma to bird feathers, I follow recent ornithological research on fault bars in feathers to grasp how avian bodies may reallocate their traumatized feathers, thus showing the responsive capacities prevalent in bird bodies.
Admittedly, I play with various terms and figures to indicate what I mean by e-co-affective life as it comes about in connection to others and its environment, such as boundary, limit, etc.[1] The preferred term that I work with is interface, given its strategic emphasis on the productive in-between that allows place, time, and being to become. Rather than starting with the subject, extending outward from the inner, the focus is placed on the in-between: the interface.
The most fruitful definition of interface I have found is in the work of François Dagognet:
The interface—as noted from the start—const- itutes/proves to be a region of choice. It separates and at the same time mixes the two universes as they meet “within,” as they generally bleed onto it (interface). As such the interface in itself becomes fruitful convergence. (Dagognet 1982, 49)
What I find particularly productive here is the notion of the convergence that in itself allows for the emergence of both internal and external factors.
In my focus on the interface, I seek to analyze the concrete materiality of the interface, and, in so doing, to provide a situated affective ontology. The benefits of such a situated focus on affective ontologies are many. For one, instead of a generic discourse on affectivity, such an affective ontology can be more flexible and faithful to the uniqueness of each concrete form of affectivity. Secondly, such a situated discourse can concretely show how and where form, abstraction, and choice emerge out of affective materiality (e.g., on the level of the individual, the species, the community, etc.). Thirdly, this focus brings to the fore aspects of local ontogenesis and spatiotemporal synthesis that crucially inform the work of affective interfaces. Fourthly, in thinking through different categories of affective change (incidental, qualitative, substantial, and aesthetic change), and how they interact and contaminate each other on the local level, this book demonstrates both the need for using such categorical inventions and the need to “break them down.”
In thinking through e-co-affectivity, the concept of “community” is crucially important. I use this term in a broad sense, namely as “life in community with human and non-human others” (Oele, 2020, 14). Plato’s and Aristotle's concept- ualization of city-state and community form a helpful theoretical background to understanding the ontological necessity of a community for the e-co-affective formation of individuality; simul- taneously I contest their ideas for their prioritization of a human community and for ranking community higher than individuals.
In my argument, I also reserve a special role for the concept of the middle voice. The middle voice, originally a linguistic category, is particularly suited to grasp e-co-affective ontogenesis given the fact that it goes beyond the dichotomy of a so-called “active” subject and a ”passive” object, and focuses instead on processes in which beings participate. The middle voice accordingly emphasizes the fact that a subject does not simply act or is simply a passive recipient to a process, but indicates that a living being is “participating in a process that
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encompasses the subject” (Oele, 2020, 24). I mostly unfold the dynamics of the middle voice in the first chapter, devoted to plant life, but the middle voice is present throughout the entire book, moving through animal life, the life of the placenta, human skin, and, finally, soil.
Finally, a few words on the book’s structure. The book begins by focusing on plants, moves on to discuss touch in bird feathers, considers next the ontogenetic boundary that is the human placenta, and uncovers the meaning of the skin as a sapient and sentient interface crucial to human affectivity. This structure does neither reflect an ontological nor ethical hierarchy; rather, I seek for the different analyses of affectivity to acquire complexity in their own terms, while potentially also cross- pollinating the other accounts as well. The book ends by examining the interface of soil, and specifically its messy, ungrounding, porous, rela- tional character. By turning to soil for the final chapter, I foreclose any avenues that could lead the reader to presume that human sapient affectivity should be prioritized. Instead, this chapter focuses on a material interface that, in its inter-relationality, can offer some prescriptive guidelines for an e-co-affective ethical regime to come, specifically within the context of anthropogenic climate change. Here I ask for attention to the reduction of and threat to the soil’s symbiotic communities, and ask the reader to envision the soil as a place to produce and engineer a new epoch beyond the Anthro- pocene. The soil’s ontogenetic powers and its complex inner workings provide the locale to engage with emergent potentialities and to create more porous and enduring ways to form new communities.
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Notes
[1] Ed Casey has done remarkable work with the concept of “edge” in many of his books, showing for instance in his book The World on Edge that “edges are constitutive not only of what we perceive, but also of what we think and of the places and events in which we are situated” (Casey 2017, xiii).
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References
Casey, Edward S. 2017. The World on Edge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Oele, Marjolein. 2012a. “Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Concept of Pathos.” Epoché 16 (2): 389-406.
_____. 2012b. “Passive Dispositions: on the Relationship between Pathos and Hexis in Aristotle,” Ancient Philosophy 32 (2): 351-68.
_____. 2020. E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
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Marjolein Oele © 2025
Author email: marjolein[dot]oele[at]ru[dot]nl
