Spinoza (and) the Spider: Theorizing Childhood as Capacities of Affection and Affect

Abstract

This chapter theorizes childhood as capacities of affection and affect by working through the immanent philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza and intersecting some of its conceptual threads with Walter Benjamin’s understanding of children and revolutionary action through play. As part of this move, Spinoza is approached as both a complex weaver and intricate traverser of a web of immanence, and particular attention is paid to his characterization of the embodied imagination and its relationship to different forms of knowing and understanding. Spinoza’s ontological system of immanence in general – and his understanding of the embodied imagination in particular – provides promising metaphysical threads upon which to step away from notions of childhood or children as age-dependent representations or stages within identificational schemes of linear development to, instead, approach and understand them as immanent bodily capacities. The import of this move and the universal implications it holds for notions of political agency of children is also discussed.