Wharton’s Aesthetics and the Ethics of Affect

Abstract

The miracle of distance asserts itself in many modes, spatial, conceptual, temporal. It is the miracle that mathematicians feel when they have created and discovered a formula for the sheer aesthetic delight of its form and harmony and then realize, to their great surprise, that their formula may be used to predict price fluctuations or send a probe slingshotting around Jupiter. And it is the same miracle that transfixes the theorist who explores a concept, a theory, for the pure enjoyment of its elegance and complexity, and who discovers—again with a great shock of delight—that the concept is the key to unraveling the hard knot of a problem lying at the center of a story, a problem that begins with a close reading of a story, an opening to the rules and conditions of that particular fictional world. The concept comes from a great distance to a profound intimacy with a story’s singularity.

Characters can only exist, and the author can only create them, because they do not perceive but have passed into the landscape and are themselves part of the compound of sensations … Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man.

—Deleuze, What is Philosophy? 169