The Revolutionary Spinoza - Immanence, Ethology, and The Politic of Desire
The Revolutionary Spinoza - Immanence, Ethology, and The Politic of Desire
The Revolutionary Spinoza - Immanence, Ethology, and The Politic of Desire
Article
T
he philosopher, Deleuze describes in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
appropriates the ascetic virtues of chastity, humility, and poverty, and
lives it as the creative expression of his own singularity. 1 Spinoza
utilizes these virtues not to achieve moral ends or religious pathway towards
an afterworld, “but rather the ‘effects’ of philosophy itself … as there is
absolutely no other life for the philosopher.” 2 Meanwhile, in Expressionism in
Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze considers Spinoza as the ‘prince of all
philosophers.’ 3 This man deserves this noble description because he provides
“the best plane of immanence … the purest, the one that does not hand itself
over to the transcendent, the one that inspires the fewest illusions, bad
1 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and
disappointments of Cromwell’s revolution and the possible coup d’etat by the House of Orange.
In his words, “During these periods, ‘revolutionary’ ideology is permeated with theology and is
often, as with the Calvinist party, in the service of a politics of reaction.” Deleuze, Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy, 9.
6 Cf. Baruch Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise in Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. by R.
by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1983).
8 Cf. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics
10 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
14 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
16 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. by Anne Boyman (New York:
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), 93. Like Spinoza, Bergson’s immanent philosophy offers a
critique of State philosophy. See Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasure of
Philosophy,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), ix.
18 Cf. Ibid., 91
19 Deleuze defines the Eternal Return as “the being of that which becomes. It is the being
of becoming itself, the being which is affirmed in becoming.” Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy,
48. A similar description can be seen in Difference and Repetition: “The eternal return is not the
effect of the identical upon a world to become similar; it is not an external order imposed upon
chaos of the world; on the contrary, the eternal return is the internal identity of the world and of
chaos.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 299.
20 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 122. Being at the middle of Spinoza is analogous
Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. by Paul Patton (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 165.
24 Cf. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 128.
25 Cf. Ibid.
relation to this, Vincent Descombes in Modern French Philosophy describes the project of Deleuze
as a quest for a transcendental empiricism. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An
Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. by Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), 3. French poststructuralist thinkers, in the likes of Jacques Derrida, join
Deleuze in his search for a novel foundation divergent from the transcendental plane,
characterized by difference, constellations, and dislocations. Jacques Derrida, Writing and
Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 151.
28 See Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 3-21.
Agency,” in Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, ed. by Keith Ansell-Pearson (London
and New York: Routledge, 1997); Deleuze, Preface to Negri, Savage Anomaly.
30 Cf. Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, 214.
advancing its totalizing and narcissistic interests using the ploy of achieving
communal cohesion under the authority of the Leviathan. 31 In other words, he
only repudiates all transcendental configurations that overlay on the
initiative of the multiplicity of a transcendent synthesis. 32 Against the various
juridical mystification of the State, he formulates a kind of immanent horizon
characterized by active forces, relations, and possibilities. Spinoza describes
the state as a product of a purely natural process, in consonance with the
cultivation of natural right and personal life. In this vein, the state’s
genealogical configuration is nothing but a product of secularized procedures
and struggles, and not of metaphysical or divine-laden processes. For
example, ethical relation and difference between bodies in the State are
defined not in accordance to an overarching transcendental principle. Rather,
the relation and distinction between bodies “relates to the kind of affections
that determine our conatus.” 33 In the study of ethology, the behavior of bodies
in the plane of immanence is governed by the power of self-preservation.
However, the numerous bodies’ perseverance entails a necessary encounter
with other bodies. It can be argued, therefore, that the aptitude and
movement of bodies may vary depending on the quality and quantity of other
bodies they associate with. Likewise, this creative encounter posits the idea
that even the power of self-preservation is not immune from the affections
from the exterior.
This characterization inspired Spinoza to re-configure democracy
under the rubric of materialism and production—the politics of the
multitude. 34 This mature phase in the philosophy of Spinoza, from the A
Theologico-Political Treatise onwards, constitutes a radical materialism of
bodies and surfaces where praxis constitutes being as an incessant
reconstruction by human praxis. 35
31 For Deleuze, compact is one of the states of value judgments where individuals attempt
to unite with parallel bodies. Cf. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 257; Cf.
Armstrong, “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza: Compositions and Agency,” 144.
32 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 130.
thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” Spinoza, Ethics, 159.
34 Cf. Ibid., xviii.
attribute relates essence to substance and it is this immanent relation that the
intellect grasps. All the essences, distinct in the attributes, are as one in
substance, to which they are related by the attributes.” 40
Meanwhile, in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze
elucidates the concept “expression” as double-edged hermeneutical device
that capacitates us to interpret texts, relations, and events, not limited to the
frontiers of representation, identity, linearity, and teleology. In
understanding history, for instance, we must not merely interpret it as a
linear progression of events towards a grand purpose or simply as a
culmination of a single Unitarian concept. Neither should we reduce it into
perpetual becoming. Craig Lundy’s History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy
of Creativity offers a profound articulation of Deleuze’s expressionist reading
of history. He interprets Deleuze’s philosophy of history as irreducible to
either historicism or nomadic becoming. This novel kind of historical
philosophizing does not conform to either aforementioned dualism, but
operates in-between. History as historicism and nomadic becoming, Lundy
writes, “will emerge in the middle to compose a productive composite or
differential history/becoming.” 41 Expression or expressionism dismantles the
logical stratification and arboreal scheme of things towards a relational and
minortarian reading (or the in-between) of understanding things, on a
parallel level of expression. 42 At the macro-level, being a Spinozist entails
embracing bare life in its concealed, unconscious, and marginal appearances
in the history of philosophy: “There is a philosophy-becoming which has
nothing to do with the history of philosophy and which happens through
those the history of philosophy does not manage to classify.” 43 Indeed, a
Deleuzian notion of immanence develops as a kind of creative heterogenetic
ontology that extends Spinoza’s concept of expressionism by depicting how
substance produces its very own modes and characteristics via a twofold
process of differentiation. 44
Ethology, moreover, is a philosophical perspective that does not
presuppose a reality beyond the contours of life’s materialities and is
irreducible to the epistemological regimentations of Platonic, Cartesian, and
understands the notion of expression … lies perhaps at the heart of his thought and style, and is
one of the secrets of the Ethics: a two-sided book, with its continuous succession of propositions,
demonstrations, and corollaries on the one hand, and its violent, broken chain of scholia on the
other.” Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 337. See also Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy, 28-29.
43 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 2.
Spinoza’s adjuration to make the body as the new model signifies its
ability to surmount all our logical abstractions pertaining to it, including
thought’s capability to go beyond consciousness. Deleuze opines that, “there
are fewer things in the mind that exceed the consciousness than there are
things in the body that exceed our knowledge. So, it is by one and the same
movement that we shall manage to capture the power of the body beyond the
given conditions of our knowledge … and the power of the mind beyond the
given conditions of our consciousness.” 47 The various powers and
possibilities of the body can only be unleashed through perpetual syncretism
and struggles with other bodies. This inspires Spinoza to develop the concept
of agency.
The reason behind Spinoza’s formulation of agency is two-fold.
Historically, it seeks to revolutionize the decadent multitude of his time; and
philosophically, it aspires to antagonize the traditional or transcendental
notion of subjectivity that enormously shaped western philosophical
thinking. His philosophy of agency critically aims to salvage the body from
its marginalization in the history of western morality. Since the ancient times,
the body is subordinated to the logic of the mind or consciousness. Its
45 Cf. Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2010), 261.
46 Spinoza, Ethics, 155-156.
affections designate that which happens to the mode, the modifications of the mode, the effects
of other modes on it.” Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 48.
51 Ibid., 19.
back to the two fundamental questions of Spinoza’s Ethics according to Deleuze, namely, “What
must we do in order to be affected by a maximum of joyful passions?” and “What must we do
in order to produce in ourselves active affections?” The first problem heartens us to organize
relations and opportunities where bodies can be affected by a maximum quality and quantity of
joyful passions. But at the end of the day, we must realize that joyful passions are not enough
because the continuous production of joyful passions does not guarantee bodies’ full possession
of their respective powers of action. Rather than merely experiencing joyful passion, we must
search for the means in order to fashion within ourselves active affections—the main point of the
second problem. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 273-274.
53 In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze asserts, “But this is only our body in its own
relation, and our mind in its own relation, and the other bodies and other minds or ideas in their
respective relations, and the rules according to which all these relations compound with and
decompose one another; we know nothing of all this in the given order of our knowledge and
our consciousness.” Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 19.
54 The theory of common notions is an ethical activity that seeks to organize good
Philosophy, 55.
56 Cf. Ibid., 264; Cf. Gillian Howie, Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expression (New York:
Metaphysics and Metabolism,” in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. by Constantine
Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
61 Ibid., 27; Cf. Gatens, “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” 167.
65 Ibid.; Cf. Abigail Lowe, Intersections in Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri (M.A. Thesis,
when it no longer contains this ability for they are themselves active
affections: “The mode passes into existence when its relation actually
subsumes an infinity of extensive parts … determined to enter into
characteristic relation … through the operation of an external determinism.
The mode ceases to exist when its parts are determined from without to enter
into a different relation, which is not compatible with the former one.” 66 In
short, the individual is composed of unlimited extensive parts. But these parts
are not constitutive of individual essences in themselves because they are
organized only on the basis of extensive determinism. 67 Despite the twin
possibilities of a body to decompose or strengthen itself after a certain
encounter with another, the fact remains that in every relation, there exists an
eternal truth, where “Nature in its entirety is conceived as an Individual that
composes all relations and possesses all the sets of intensive parts with their
different degrees.” 68
At this point, I must underscore that despite Spinoza’s radicalization
of metaphysics, he does not espouse the privileging of the body over the mind
or consciousness. His repudiation of the primacy of the mind over the body
does not want to fall into a vicious circle of privileging the body over the mind
just to give slavish justice to the former. Deleuze escapes this philosophical
quicksand by introducing the concept of “parallelism.” He opines that
parallelism “does not consist merely in denying any real causality between
the mind and the body, it disallows any primacy of one over the other.” 69
Ethics bluntly invalidates the conventional belief that the body’s activities and
attributes are merely dependent on the workings of the mind. Deleuze argues
that “what is an action in the mind is necessarily an action in the body as well,
and what is passion in the body is necessarily a passion in the mind. There is
no primacy of one over the other.” 70 His notion of parallelism demonstrates
that the body exceeds the epistemic registers that we have of it, in the same
fashion that thought exceeds the consciousness that we have of it. This is the
reason why Deleuze suggests that the traditional notion of the philosophy of
consciousness must re-think its hubris and blindness in relation to the body.
Consciousness is caused by determinate affections—the consciousness of the
conatus on the striving of things and man to preserve its being is produced by
affection towards joy or sadness, “and since the affections,” Deleuze
explicates, “are not separable from a movement by which they cause us to go
to a greater or lesser (joy and sadness), depending on whether the thing
encountered enters into a composition with us, or on the contrary tends to
69 Ibid., 18.
70 Ibid.
75 Cf. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 91;
77 Ibid., xii.
78 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write, “For many French intellectuals, the
hyperactivism of post-May gave way to a mid-seventies slump, then a return to religion or
political conservatism in a foreshadowing of the Reagan eighties.” Deleuze & Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, xi.
82 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 209; Cf. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues,
124.
83 Cf. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 124.
IV. Conclusion
84 In The Logic of Sense, the nomads are deemed as the pure abstract line that comes ‘from
the east.’ Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. by Constantine Boundas, trans. by Mark Lester
with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 1990), 129; Craig Lundy, “Who are Our Nomads
Today?: Deleuze’s Political Ontology and the Revolutionary Problematic,” in Deleuze Studies, 7:2
(2013): 240.
85 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 216. Moreover, in the section, “Many
Politics” of Dialogues, Deleuze and Parnet appear to interchangeably use the molecular (supple)
and the abstract line or line of flight. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Dialogues, 130-4, 141-2.
86 Lundy, “Who are our Nomads Today?,” 243.
Department of Philosophy
Research Center for Culture, Arts, and Humanities
The Graduate School
University of Santo Tomas, Philippines
References