Inquiry

This question was first posed by 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza to consider how thought and action are intertwined through the body’s power to act, to be acted upon, to affect others and to be affected. More recently, Gilles Deleuze readopted Spinoza’s question to assert that we still don’t know what a body can do: not only its physiology, but its capacity for inquiry, relationality, and creativity. In again re-posing this question, we expand its focus beyond the singular: a body encompasses bodies as collective entities, and non-human bodies. In spite of the many ways modernity imposes bodily alienation—through the mechanization of work, or hyper-individualization, for example—the body remains a confounding and elusive organism. Our bodies have wants and needs that make them irreducible to bounded and linear thought. Creative inquiry provides a means to riff and reframe Spinoza’s simple yet expansive question, spiraling it out into related ones: What counts as a body? Where do bodies’ desires and capacities lead? How do we understand non-human bodies? What can’t a body do?