The body geographic: Affect, imagination and the relationality of be(com)ing, or movements through Spinozan earth-writings

An exploration of what geography does can help uncover its role as a disciplinary mode of encounter in tension with the dominant ontological foundations of Western philosophic and scientific thought. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze points to the existence of two lines of Western philosophical tradition: the dominant one exemplified by the philosophies of Plato, Descartes and Kant, the other a challenge to and break from the interiority and artificial dualisms of this "rationalist" tradition and expressed through the works of such philosophers as Lucretius, Hume, Nietzsche and Spinoza (as well as Deleuze himself). It is my position that the latter line, most forcefully the work of 17th century thinker Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza, finds a certain vital resonance with geography through a shared epistemological break from and ontological challenge to conventional Western thinking. Nigel Thrift recently argued that "Spinoza was a kind of geographer." I take this statement one step further to argue that geography does a kind of Spinozan science. I support this claim by first exploring how geography's content is entangled in enduring intellectual and impractical separations of mind and body that hinder or disallow it adequate expression. I then discuss and illustrate through different topical movements how Spinoza's work presents geographers with a conceptual logic internal to and expressive of the content of the discipline.