Affectivity, then,

does not belong to the order of the individual or of the human as such, but

emerges precisely as the change or variation that occurs when bodies—both

human and nonhuman—enter into new relations.

Biography 35.1

The Deleuzean concept of affect or affectivity is crucial to explain how

bioart not only encourages humans to form emotional attachments to nonhuman

life forms, but also engenders new constellations of what we could call

posthuman subjectivity. Deleuze, whose philosophy has become central to the

“affective turn” in cultural theory, does not use “affect” in the colloquial sense

of an individual psychological reaction to a state of affairs, but approaches it as

a form of intensity that produces an active transformation of a given situation. p.7-8

 

call zoegraphy: a postanthropocentric

mode of life writing that affi rms life as a force of inhuman

vitality that runs through humans, animals, and things, and connects them

transversally.4 Rather than addressing life from an already determined viewpoint

such as that of the human “subject” or the nonhuman “other,” zoegraphy

invites us to look at life as an experimental and open process of transformation,

a continuous production of new relationalities. It encourages a renewed

sense of the human not as the ground from which a narratable life proceeds,

but as a temporary production of the material fl ow of life itself. In this view, a

human being is nothing more and nothing less than a relatively stable moment

in a process of perpetual variation. Zoe refers to this “vitality of life as continuous

becoming” (Braidotti 41), from which the human subject only emerges

through a multiplicity of encounters with what it is not. p.9
 

A life” is not life in general, nor can it be reduced to the lived

biography of a human subject: it does not belong to individual beings, but

rather points to the moment in which the life of the individual fades away in

favor of “an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed

from . . . the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens” (28). In other

words, “a life” is the pre-individual or impersonal force of becoming: it is life

as an ongoing process of becoming. “A life,” therefore, does not coincide with

the linear progression of bios—the historical time bound to the life and death

of the human organism—but expresses “the cyclical, dynamic and molecular

time of becoming” (Braidotti 154): p. 15