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Commentary
Affectivity, Continuity, and Separation
Miguel José Paley
Fordham University, NY, USA
Paley, Miguel José. 2025. “Affectivity, Continuity, and Separation.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 2: 23-29. https://doi.org/10.33497/2025.winter.4.
Abstract: This commentary explores the issues of separation and continuity in Marjolein Oele’s E-Co-Affectivity. I begin by providing a summary of what makes the book unique and its important achievements before moving on to a critical discussion of Oele’s concept of temporality. There, I claim that an overemphasis on the continuity between an organic being and the material interfaces that constitute it might be responsible for essential confusions in the understanding of time. My commentary begins by using Bergson’s philosophy to distinguish two common views on time and then argues that in several instances, Oele’s descriptions of temporality are in fact describing space rather than time. As Bergson shows us, affect and emotion must be understood as qualities of experience rather than quantitative forms of presence. I then conclude by arguing that E-Co-Affectivity might benefit from further thinking about separation and auto-affectivity as essential features in the process of affectivity.
Keywords: affectivity, Bergson, separation, duration, temporality, space
Over the past few decades, the notion of affectivity has garnered increasing attention from all corners of academic life. Today, theoretical engagement with affectivity and its conceptual possibilities can be seen in fields as varied as philosophy, neuroscience, feminism, psychoanalysis, film studies, and many more. The apparent centrality and conceptual possibilities inherent in the notion of affectivity have even spawned the standalone field known as affect theory. Within these varied fields, however, certain basic assumptions regarding the nature of affectivity can usually be found. Affect-ivity, for the most part, is understood as a physical and psychological event that marks an experiencing subject or community. In many cases, affectivity is further determined as a social phenomenon, one whose occurrence importantly marks subjects’ social and political lives.
Marjolein Oele’s (2020) new work, E-Co-Affectivity, is an important contribution to the field if only because of its entirely original approach. E-Co-Affectivity doesn’t simply eschew focus on people like Spinoza and Deleuze (Spinoza 2020, Deleuze and Guattari 2008), it in fact takes the unusually radical step of considering affectivity through an analysis of material surfaces and what it
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calls their mediating, ontogenetic possibilities. (Far from being irrelevant, however, consideration of the work of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari would strengthen the project.) With this approach, Oele’s investigation charts an entirely new way to think about affectivity. Affectivity is determined, without an excessive focus on its psychological interpretations and without a reliance on what Oele identifies as the two dominant lineages of affective interpretation: the phenomenological and the Spinozist/Deleuzean. Instead, Oele’s book turns to the work of Aristotle and a variety of other less commonly used sources for these issues.
Oele’s book is further distinct in terms of her desired goals. The study of affectivity as it is found in various material interfaces leads to the development of what she calls provisional ontologies rather than a comprehensive theory of affectivity as such (Oele 2020, 11). In this sense, her work is somewhat reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s series of works on the elemental imagination (refer to, for instance, Bachelard 1999). Here I am also thinking methodologically rather than thematically. Oele's approach and use of 'provisional ontologies,' the way the book weaves in and out of various surfaces and themes, reminded me of Bachelard's approach to the elemental imagination. Neither posits a traditional comprehensive theory of affect or imagination but rather approaches the theme from many angles, and exemplifies it through a series of different but related investigations. With each chapter, the reader is presented with a new material interface, and the various ways in which these constitute the emergence of a variety of organisms. E-Co-Affectivity presents the reader with a series of novel analyses which illustrate the multifaceted workings of affectivity throughout the natural world. In investigating the various modalities and possibilities of affectivity at life’s material interfaces, Oele’s work thus leads to some tremendous achievements. Among these are novel understandings of the radical continuity among living beings and the natural world as well as deeply significant notions of co-constitution and the above-mentioned process of ontogenesis. In the end, all of these elements come together to illustrate deeply hopeful notions of community and trust.
While this general methodological approach has tremendous rewards, it also risks certain drawbacks. Namely, in minimizing the essential role of separation in both subjectivity and the process leading up to it, Oele often seems to fall back on what Henri Bergson (2001), another essential thinker of affectivity, would call a spatial understanding of time. As I will argue below, however, this seems to be more a contingency of historical interpretation than an essential flaw in Oele’s approach. The insights necessary for a non-spatial understanding of temporality remain available to Oele without compromising her analysis through problematic introductions of transcendental or solipsistic subjects.
In what follows, I will begin by recounting the general approach taken by Oele’s work and its achievements before moving on to a discussion of the issues of separation and temporality. I will then explore the possible dangers of minimizing the notion of a separate subject by showing some potentially problematic issues with how temporality is understood throughout E-Co-Affectivity.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF CONTINUITY
As mentioned above, E-Co-Affectivity is unique in its approach and its choice of textual sources. For Oele, the focus on material surfaces seeks to highlight the creative, ontogenetic possibilities of affect. Throughout her analyses, affectivity is seen to be an essential and localized process through which time, place, and being are first created. Further, because of the focus on different material surfaces rather than psychological states, Oele lays claim to a better appreciation of the uniqueness of every event of constitution: “[The] interfaces I investigate, seek to offer a localized, material place to engage affectivity, and simultaneously show how every interface is not simply an existing place or surface, but a place of ontogenesis: always emerging, creative, porous, and fluid” (Oele 2020, 2).
Oele justifies this focus on material surfaces by appealing to the Aristotelian meaning of affect as pathos (suffering, emotion), which is much broader than that “narrow, psychological interpretation of affect as passion, mood, feeling, and emotion” (Oele 2020, 7). This Aristotelian focus is also what
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ultimately sets E-Co-Affectivity apart from affect theorists like Massumi, Clough, and Ahmed (2010), theorists whose work is more in line with the approach to affect of Deleuze and Spinoza.
In the end, all these insights build to the idea of community understood as co-affective-emergence, a community which is fundamentally prior to and constitutive of the individual subject. Put another way, Oele shows that subjectivity itself can only come as a result of processes of categorial contamination which are seen throughout the natural world. These relationships and contaminations are found at all levels of life, from the soil in which we bury our dead to more complicated organisms like plants, animals, human beings, and eventually communities as commonly understood.
In the realm of plant life, continuity and contamination find expression through the linguistic category of the middle voice. So understood, plants are granted a dimension of affective depth that nowise relies on any robust notion of “a centralized, nuclear subject” or “agent” (Oele 2020, 22–23). What the middle-voice describes, rather, is a kind of open-ended process that is neither autonomous nor wholly dependent, a process which, although affective and passionate, “escapes ramification in terms of the division between agent-patient, inner-outer, or subject object” (Oele 2020, 37).
Boundaries are similarly blurred in animal affectivity with the use of Aristotle’s notion of aesthesis (from the Greek ‘aisthetikos’ meaning ‘related to sense experience’). Here, identity and separation seem subordinated to an untouchable medium which first makes touch possible. Unlike in plant life, separation thus does arise with animal affectivity, but the status of this separation is somewhat unclear. Such is the strength of the theme of continuity. For Oele, the untouchable and enigmatic medium of touch means the animal “cannot be identified with its boundaries, escapes narrow confinement . . . to the active-passive division, and is indebted to alterity” (Oele 2020, 61). Similarly, “avian touch involves a restructuring of aesthesis through community, where the aesthesis of one individual is made possible and informed by the aesthesis of yet another individual” (Oele 2020, 76). Within this “metaphysics of affective fluidity,” community and co-constitution once again hold ontological priority over difference and identity. Thus, while the animal is nevertheless described as “remaining also radically and absolutely separated,” this separation seems to result from a prior from of contact “in the immanent meeting ground of affectivity, a mediated space in which animal identity is born out of difference” (Oele 2020, 77).
In the realm of human life, we once again find a blurring of boundaries between self and other, this time through the material mediums of the placenta and the skin. As Oele shows, the placenta must be understood as an active, autonomous third agent in the process of pregnancy. The changes and transformations it brings about in both the mother’s biology as well as in the fetus allow us to see yet another form of co-affective emergence and ontogenesis. It is through the placenta that new lives, temporalities, individualities, and a new community is created. Affectivity is again a common no-place from which individuality is first born.
Throughout the book, what the study of affectivity and material surfaces makes evident is the stunning priority that connection, continuity, and co-community have over the notion of individuality and separation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the chapter on human skin. There, Oele maintains that the incredible variety of microorganisms that live and transform the skin challenge the very idea of individuality. Quoting both scientists and philosophers, Oele concludes that our existence is fundamentally coextensive before it is individual (Oele 2020, 128–29).
In the end, these material explorations on co-affective emergence build up to a meditation on the necessity for a new ethics and a sense of community that can, through an acknowledgment of our fundamental unity with the earth and one another, challenge the problematic ways of life that have led to forms of alienation, discrimination, and impending environmental disaster.
SEPARATION AND TEMPORALITY
This emphasis on continuity and material interfaces is motivated in part by the wish to overcome the shortcomings of modern philosophy, in particular
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its emphasis on “static and insular activity, autonomy, and disembodied freedom” (Oele 2020, 6). It is likewise an attempt to move beyond the remnants of these thoughts as they appear in phenomenology: especially its anthropocentrism and solipsism (Oele 2020, 6, 125). Now, while the text does manage to avoid these problems, I fear an overemphasis on continuity over difference, of materiality over psychology, and of co-affection over auto-affection risks running into issues of its own. We see this especially in the text’s understanding of temporality.
To illustrate the issue here, we can briefly turn to Bergson’s (2001) philosophy of time. As Bergson pointed out, we may speak of temporality in two senses, what he called “homogenous time” (or the time of clocks) and what he called “duration.” Clock time describes that common understanding of temporality as a sequence of moments. In this sense, time would be like a line moving forward, and each moment in time would be a point or segment of that line. Moments are thus discreet, homogenous, and sequential. Mathematical abstraction often speaks of moments as such: t1, t2, t3, etc. Now, while this is indeed a useful and sometimes necessary way to understand time, Bergson argues that clock time doesn’t accurately describe lived experience. For psychological life, the moments of temporality are neither homogenous nor discreet.
To show this, Bergson often uses the simple example of what it is like to listen to a musical melody. Think of a common melody you might know. Now, Bergson asks, change the duration and pitch of one of the notes in the melody. What you will quickly notice is that it is not the single, changed note which is experienced differently. It is rather the quality of the melody as a whole that has changed. This is because the moments of duration are never discreet but melt into one another. Duration, as the very essence of psychological experience, can only be thought of as what Bergson calls a “heterogenous multiplicity” (121). Time is not a series of instants that follow one another, it is a fundamentally continuous process whose “moments” are always variable, never equal to one another, and never truly separated from the process itself.
Bergson thus notes an important difference between time as it is experienced and time as it is measured. In breaking up time into discrete, homogeneous segments, clock time is shown to not be measuring time at all, but rather space. For it is space—and only space—that can be broken down into homogenous segments and become quantified. Thus, while clock time deals with quantities (1 hour, 10 minutes, 3 days, etc.), duration relates qualities. Ultimately, this is what affect is for Bergson. Affect is a qualitative experience that reflects the subject’s feeling of itself in duration.
Subjectivity is thus fundamentally different in kind from space in at least this way. This remains true even if we consider material reality itself to be in duration, as Bergson himself did. Psychological experience is, in essence, a unique, felt quality that is importantly distinct from its body, environment, and community. As Bergson (121) argues: Time is not space. Time is a quality, not a presence or a quantity.
For Bergson, these distinctions are enormously consequential, for they lie at the root of many of the fundamental problems of philosophy. The question of determinism and human freedom, the relationship between mind and body, the nature of evolution, and even the very possibility of metaphysical knowledge hinge upon a proper understanding of time. When temporality is spatialized, confusion and distortion are not far behind.
TEMPORALITY IN E-CO-AFFECTIVITY
Is temporality problematically spatialized in E-Co-Affectivity? Oele, of course, doesn’t intend it to be, but without a robust development of separation and subjectivity, descriptions of temporality do tend to describe simultaneities and space more than they do duration. We can see this in particular in Oele’s discussion of human skin. In chapter 4, Oele claims that,
Skin also affords us new insights regarding the deeper temporal structure that underpins human lives. The skin lives our age, future, trauma, vulnerability, and finitude, but not merely mimetically so [my emphasis]. On the skin, events are not simply stamped and
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inscribed as they occur, but they are put together, synthesized, according to a deeper temporal order than that of mere chronology. (Oele 2020, 109)
What is this non-mimetic temporality of the skin? Oele describes it as a synthesis, a putting together, or contraction of history, which abbreviates that history, and is thus affected by it. This occurs as a “pre-reflexive . . . passive synthesis” which, according to Oele’s reading of Deleuze, is “temporal . . . in that it constitutes a ‘living present of the body’” (121). Oele extends this Deleuzian thought of the body as “integral” to the skin because “our skin is also passively synthesized and incorporates all these different temporal directions” (121).
Are the two uses of the word “synthesize” above equivalent? And do they both apply to duration? As Oele mentions in a footnote, the relevant Deleuzian “synthesis” here is the synthesis of memory, which answers the question, “How can the past be contemporaneous with the present and also ground the present?” Deleuze, who was a keen reader of Bergson and engaged with his thought throughout his life, surely has Bergson’s (1991) Matter and Memory in mind here, for it was in that book that Bergson first formulated the question of how the past exists in the present and in the body. Deleuze, that is, is thinking of duration in some sense.
Oele argues that these temporal syntheses exist in the skin’s processes of healing and scar-making, and argues that the skin “composes and contracts past experience in these deposits of memories . . . [which] ground our present life and provide it with coherence and meaning” (Oele 2020, 122). In this way, the skin is the setting for “a complex temporal interplay between the time of our species (our evolutionary time), the time of our biological and parental ancestors (epi-genetic time), as well as our own time” (122-123).
But are there not important differences in how the words memory and synthesis are used here? Usually, temporal syntheses describe a fundamental aspect of the qualitative experience of temporality, be that understood as Deleuze’s integration, Bergsonian duration, Heideggerian ecstasies, or even the Kantian form of inner-sense, whereas the epidermal processes of scaring and the influence of (epi)genetic markers can only be “temporal” or “synthesizing” in a metaphorical sense. This is evident from Oele’s own use of quotes in the phrase “deposit of memories” (122), which is attributed to “Serres’s poetic language” (121).
Going back to Bergson’s thoughts on time and space, it becomes difficult to see how one might speak of scarring or epigenetics as anything other than spatial phenomena: simultaneities rather than qualities. There is of course no question that the skin changes in time, but simple endurance can’t accommodate Oele’s claim that the skin “lives our age, future . . . not merely mimetically” (109). Scarring and epigenetic traits describe physical processes, not qualities. One does, no doubt, experience one’s scarring and the processes of one’s skin, but these experiences, as experiences, are qualities of the subject in duration rather than the skin itself. It’s hard to see here, even in the poetic language used to express the “syntheses” of the skin, anything other than simple chronology, presence, and spatial phenomena.
The spatialization of time is most evident in Oele’s discussion of Botox and Heideggerian temporality. For Heidegger, recognition of our finitude is an essential moment in the achievement of authenticity. This occurs when Dasein confronts its future resolutely and breaks free from its mindless absorption in the idle present. Similar to the Deleuzian moment described above, Oele transposes this Heideggerian structure of authentic temporality to the skin in order to argue against the use of Botox and other anti-wrinkle techniques.
The thought here is that just as Dasein must embrace its finitude and future to reach authenticity, so using Botox or anti-wrinkle techniques risks bringing “our skin-time to a stand-still and freeze [sic] us up quite literally [my emphasis], cutting us off from our past and future and identifying us with a generic, “eternal” present to which we are oppressively tied” (125).
This passage might be interpreted in two ways, but in either case, it is again difficult to see how Botox and skin could possibly describe anything other than spatial phenomena. On the one hand, we may think that Oele means to describe a tem-
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porality of the skin itself. In this case however, the application of the Heideggerian schema would not work, for it is important to remember that Dasein can be resolute and authentic only because Dasein is, in its being, concerned for its being. Such self-reflexivity, with its characteristic anxieties and projections, could only be applied to skin metaphorically, whereas Oele means to speak “literally.” On the other hand, we might take the argument to mean that the use of Botox “freezes” time for us, i.e., makes us, as Dasein, inauthentic in the Heideggerian sense. This seems to be more in line with what the text is saying. In that case, however, the argument would also not fit, as it would reduce Heideggerian temporality to a metaphysics of presence, which is precisely what Being and Time is trying to avoid. In Bergson’s language, this move would again substitute space for time.
Now, while I believe these issues pose important difficulties for E-Co-Affectivity, it seems to me that they are neither fundamental nor unavoidable. By way of conclusion, I’d like to quickly argue that a greater emphasis on separation need not compromise the insights of continuity entirely and that Oele’s project need not risk anthropomorphism through a greater consideration of separation and auto-affectivity.
MUST SEPARATION BE SOLIPSISTIC?
Oele’s stated goal in this book is to “investigate how time and place and beings emerge” (Oele 2020). As I tried to show, however, time often lapses into space in these descriptions. Ironically, Oele’s efforts to avoid anthropocentrism led to possible anthropomorphisms, such as in speaking of “the memory” of the skin or “the sacrifice” of plants. While valid, then, I believe concerns over anthropomorphism and solipsism need not require the exclusion of certain phenomenological insights; insights that might importantly come to bear on the nature and experience of temporality. Oele, of course, is aware of this when saying that her goal is to sharpen and adjust the tools of phenomenology rather than abandon them. The issue then might be more about which tools are used and sharpened, and which are abandoned.
Oele’s hesitation with the Heideggerian schema and its problematic emphasis on separation seem to me entirely justified. But I would argue these issues are more indicative of Heidegger’s own idiosyncrasies than phenomenological necessities. In fact, Heidegger’s strongest critics are perhaps phenomenologists themselves. In the thought of French phenomenologists like Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and even in Henry (Levinas 2013; Merleau-Ponty 1967, 1968; Henry, 2008, 1973), we find an important emphasis on affectivity as instituting both separation and temporality. Their emphasis on separation, however, never institutes a sovereign, fully autonomous subject of the Cartesian kind. One possible reason for this might be the preponderance of Bergsonian philosophy in France during the 20th century. Second generation French phenomenology is thus uniquely sensitive to issues of temporality, separation, and affectivity in ways which might suit the program of E-Co-affectivity. Oele is also aware of this and herself mentions Levinas as providing tools to break through modern philosophy’s shortcomings. On this note, I wonder what Oele might say about approaches similar to that of Levinas’, which develop views on affectivity as the institution of separation. Can we think of separation and embodiment together, without spatializing temporality? Can co-affectivity be reconciled with auto-affection and the institution of separation? Does separation necessarily endanger a strong sense of ethical community?
Ultimately, I suspect these concerns about temporality and separation pose no serious threats to the general and important project of E-Co-Affectivity. If anything, my goal here is to point out how their elucidation might flesh out potential misunderstandings and to further develop this project in productive directions. With E-Co-Affectivity, Oele has opened exciting new paths for thinking about affect and its ethical and political importance. These new directions of thought, I believe, might benefit from further consideration on the essential role of separation for the experience of temporality.
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References
Ahmed, Sara. 2010. “Happy Objects” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29-51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1942) 1999 . Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Edith R. Farrell. Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
Bergson, Henri. (1896) 1991. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York, NY: Zone Books.
_____. (1889) 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.
Clough, Patricia 2010. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 206-228. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2008. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London, UK: Continuum.
Henry, Michel. 1973. The Essence of Manifestation. The Hague, NL: Nijhoff.
_____. 2008. Material Phenomenology. 1st ed. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 2013. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Massumi, Brian,. 2010. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 52-70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1967. The Structure of Behavior. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
_____. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Oele, Marjolein. 2020. E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces. SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1994. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Translated by E. M. Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Miguel José Paley © 2025
Author email: mpaley1[at]fordham[dot]edu
