Passionate space: the philosophy of affect in Gabriel Josipovici’s Hotel Andromeda

Since the 1990's the study of affect and emotion has been a major growth area in such disciplines as psychology, psychoanalysis, neurobiology, social studies and the humanities. On the basis of Baruch Spinoza's and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of affect, this article propounds an affect diagram whose aim is to illustrate the essentials of the elusive and transient workings of affect on both the intra-and interpersonal level and thus to refer to the dynamic correspondence between the mind and the body as well as passions and actions. This diagram is further used as a methodological tool for the interpretation of Gabriel Josipovici's latest fiction Hotel Andromeda (2014) into which it has been symbolically inscribed to signal the protagonist's major struggle. The same diagrammatic structure can be also discerned in Joseph Cornell's peculiar box construction -Hotel Andromeda from which the title of the novel derives.