John Protevi Political affect. Connecting the social and the somatic. University of Minnesota press. 2009. . .

. The harsh debate between the advocates of social detereminism, on one side, and genetic determinism, on the other, sets the basis of the claim that philosophy today is totally distanced from the achevments of natural sciences. In this book, an attempt being made to overcome the limitations which arise from the oposite claims of these two key theories. By connecting Deleuze's onthology with the results of the latest research in biology, Protevi makes a syntesis of the seemigly oposite arguments with which the social and genetic determinists operate. It can be said that in Political affect, Protevi shows that these two theories of human nature can be quite complemetary, which at first can seem a bit strange. The author John Protevi is a profesor of French studies at Lousiana State University. His early interests in Heidegger and Derrida, are suplemented with the specialisation of Deleuze, cognitive sciences and biology. The main issues in his lectures are the theories of Foucault, Bergson and Badiou. Political effect represents an addition of his book Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic in which Protevi uses the notion of selfmenagement of material systems, known in complexity theory, along with the critique of hilomorphism that Deleuze and Guatari develop in relation to this idea as a reading pattern for certain episodes of the history of Western philosophy. As Protevi himself claims, this book explores the connection of the social and the somatic, or how our bodies, minds and social settings are intricately and intimatly conected. In creating the hypotesis, Protevi uses arguments from phylosophy, science, and politics, and he calls his perspective political physiology. With this term, Protevi not only indicates the mix of intelectual resources, but also the bypassing of subjectivity in favour of a direct linkage of the social and the somatic. Following his line of thought, Protevi creates three basic concepts which he names bodies politic, political cognition and political affect. With the concept of bodies politic he captures the emboidied, embedded and extended character of subjectivity, or how the production, bypassing, and surpassing of subjectivity is found in the interactions of social and

somatic systmes. In this analysis, he makes thee compositional scales of bodies politic personal, group, and civic and three temporal sceles short-term, mid-term, and longterm. Borrowing this concept from Deleuze's ontology, in the first chapter of the book, Protevi explains how on all these conpositional and temporal scales we see the events as a product of differental relations that structure a dynamic bio-social-political-econimic field. On the personal scale of political physiology, we can see the formation of the somatic bodies politic, the paternes and triggers of the bodily action and reaction. On the group compisitional scale, we can see the short-term events of the concrete social perception and action that eventually form bodies politic. On the highest scale of the political physiology, we can see the formation of the bodies politic in classical sense, or what Protevi calls civil bodies politic - the patterns ans triggers of institutional action. In the first chapter titled A Concept of Bodies Politic, Protevi shows that we must rethink the dominant image of the rational-cognitive subject, using the concepts from diferent fields, such as developmental system theory, the ontology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, autonomous systems theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, synamic systems modelin or what is commonly refered as complexity theory, the new development in biological though, new research on human emotion and cognitive sciences. The progress on all of these fields together, allowes us to put subjectivity into a network of natural and social prosesses and practices. In some of the findings of the school of the human mind, we can see the basis for a more careful discourse of human nature based on emotional patterns such as rage, fear, and protoempathic indetification. Protevi also thinks that with this discourse, we question the way on which we are embeded in the social practices which reveal the thresholds and triggers of the creation of basic emotions. In the second part of the book tittled Bodies Politic as Organisims, Protevi looks at Aristitle's and Kant's claims from the point of the idea of organism of Deleuze and Guattarri as a bodies politic locked in imposed stereotyped patterns of polliticaly shaped and trigered affective cognition created from cetralized and hierachical social systems. In the mainstream of Western phylosophy, the unuty and the teleologcaly ordered finality subjected finity of nature in a whole and organism as a microcosm of the unified whole have often been patterned on divine perfection and are brought by God's

plan. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the organism is defined as a hierarichly ordered body, a body whose organs are constrained to work for the benefit of the organism as an intergative and emergent whole that acts as politically in the proper way that is determinned by its role in a hierarhical social system. In this way, the organism doesn't represent a strict biological term, but a term of political physiology that indicates the patterning of a somatic biological system by a hierachical social system. Protevi also examines Deleuze's and Gattari's treatment of the rigidly patterned organism and its oposite what they call body without organs. He provides a guide for the treminology of Deleuze and Gattari, in order to clarify how the political genesis of the capitalist subjectivity in their work Anti-Oedipus is placed in the naturalist philosophy in their other important and influential work A Thousand Plateaus. Protevi claims that it was exacly Deleuze and Gattari that led him formulate the main concepts of this book. In the third part of the book, Protevi takes a look of three case studies of contemporary instances of a politicaly formed and triggered affective cognition as concrete intersections of the social, physiological and psychcological. Those three cases are Terri Schiavo, the Columbine High School massacre and the natural disaster caused by the hurricane Katrina. Protevi develops a different emotional focus for every case love in the Schiavo case, rage in the case of Columbine. To create continuity throughout the analysis, Protevi concentrates on empathy as an important instance of the affective cognition. The empathy as an important emotional connection between all of the corporal beings is biological wide spread between the primates, as well as between humans. Even though it's wide spread, Protevi thinks that empathy need and appropriate development, it needs genetic background and social environment. That's why empathy is not present in everybody with the same intensity. If the protoempathic identification is present, it is triggered the easiest by the ones that are found in the in-group which is concerned with the case, and its transfer to the others is weak and it can be overcome by the social factors which manipulate with the thresholds of rage and anger such as political indoctrination and military training. The protoempathic identification is an aspect of the political physiology. It is biological, but it's submitted to political manipulation. In the conclusion of the book, Protevi claims that political physiology may be usefull in political theory in understanding the notion of sovereignty. The capibility of

the forces of order to kill in a planned systematic manner is the key of sovereignty conceived as the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within the borders of a certain teritory. He says that we have to take in consideration the techniques with which we can overcome the protoempathic identification and its inhibition of violence. To understand terrorism as political violence, we must have a clear understiding if the intersection between the political rhetoric, affective neuroscience and the act of killing. In other words, Protevi claims that we need a way of thinking of humans as collective and emotional, but as well as individual and emotional beings. The need for political psysiology to study the political affect is evident, because the negative affects of panic and rage, as well as the weaker forms of fear, anger, anxiety and sadness, represent emotions which are the easiest for political manipulation. Protevi says that all of the affects are not negative, but we have to rethink the focus of political physiology over the rational subject not just in panic and rage, but also in love and empathy, or what Aristotle calls philia. Even though Protevi himself admits that this is a book that is that is syntetic, and in some instances speculative, because it uses arguments from various scientific fields, still it represents interesting theoretical research that uses strong arguments in the discovery of the intersections of the somatic from one side, and the social field, from the other, in which every human being lives.