return of joyful encounters

How can we make our joyful encounters return? How can we constitute a new mode of living, a new world, out of these joyful encounters? An event may intervene in our life and give rise to a joyful encounter, but we cannot guarantee that joy will return since the cause of the encounter comes from outside, unknown to us. The fortuitous joyful encounter, however, is a gift-- it presents us with a certain opportunity. If we recognize what is common to that body and our own, if we discover the body that body agrees with our own and how our bodies together compose a new body, we can ourselves cause that joyful encounter to return. This is how Spinoza conceives our active constitution of a joyful mode of living. And love is the driving force in this constitution. The organization of joyful encounters is the increase in our power, our power to act and our power to exist-- that is a Spinozian notion of love. The eternal return of the joyful encounter is a constitution of being, not in the sense that it fixes an immobile identity (far from it), but rather in that it defines a movement, a becoming, a trajectory of encounters, always open and unforeseeable, continuously susceptible to the intervention of the new events.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 73 - 74