Knowledge production in the in the Global North, beginning with Plato and consolidated with Descartes has privileged rational thought (mind) over affective embodied knowledges (body). In line with feminist, poststructuralist theory beginning in the 1970’s and the affective turn in the late 90’s, new forms of incorporating aesthetic affective embodied experience into academic writing began. It was a two-fold political strategy of firstly drawing attention to the violence of historical exclusion of embodied, affective knowledges attributed to women and the colonised other,  and secondly re-inserting these missing knowledges and thus expanding the canon in an attempt to rectify the epistemic exclusion. Inspired by the vision of this new inclusivity and beginning with my Doctorate of Creative Arts (DCA) project combined theory/practice degree in the early stages of this turn to affect, I have attempted wherever possible to incorporate this aesthetic and affective way of theory making into my teaching. I do this by inviting students to engage in combined theory/practice public facing research and aesthetic forms of expression in their knowledge production and expressed in their seminar presentations and final assessments.

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Finally, for me personally, before realizing the significance of a Deleuze -/Spinozian analysis of the enabling subject forming significance of desire and joy – I have always approached my teaching, performance work and research with a stance (Haltung) of my outer self, stepping into the unknown, while my inner selves hold on to the various contours of  joy, desire and anticipation. Deleuze, inspired by Spinoza puts it thus: “Joy expresses the sensation of body experience with the enhancement of its power of affectivity and complexity. This is achieved when aspects of its own body are combined with those of another, to form a complex emergent unity that is more affectively potential and expresses each individual in terms of those aspects they share in common (Deleuze 1988: 49-51). Properly conceived joy is the basis for an ethical attitude of desire because it is necessarily mutual (Deleuze 1990: 281-2) (Bignall 2010: 17).