Conatus
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Where it appears in the corpus (2)
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#01
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.32
Part I. > Introduction > Affects and Autoaffection: Definitions
Theoretical move: The passage establishes a conceptual genealogy of *affect* (Spinoza/Deleuze) and *autoaffection* (Kant/Heidegger) in order to pose the question of whether affects can exist without a pre-given subject, staging a confrontation between philosophical autoaffection and neurobiological heteroaffection/non-affection as rival models of subjectivity and emotion.
It is easy to discover that the motif of autoaffection is closely linked with Spinoza's definition of affects as modifications of the power of existing, or conatus.
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#02
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.78
5. > Damasio as a Reader of Spinoza
Theoretical move: By reading Damasio's neuroscientific interpretation of Spinoza, the passage argues that the conatus—as biological self-preservation enacted through emotions, feelings, and neural mapping—constitutes a form of auto-heteroaffection in which subjectivity is grounded in impersonal, nonconscious processes, thereby challenging any first-person account of selfhood and opening toward a third-person perspective on neural subjectivity.
For Spinoza, organisms naturally endeavor, of necessity, to persevere in their own being; that necessary endeavor constitutes their actual essence.