Spinoza 1980 81 Edit Summaries 2023 2
Spinoza 1980 81 Edit Summaries 2023 2
Spinoza 1980 81 Edit Summaries 2023 2
“Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought” is a 15-lecture seminar given from November 1980 to
March 1981. There is some uncertainty regarding the seminar’s initial date since the extant
recordings start only with the December 2, 1980, session. In this seminar, Deleuze revisits his
examination of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy, having previously published one books on
Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (Spinoza et le problème de l'expression, 1968),
and as he presents the seminar, he is in the process of revising his 1970 guide to Spinoza as
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Spinoza – Philosophie pratique, 1970, 2nd ed. 1981). Given that
the majority of these lectures correspond to the latter title’s publication, these sessions were
clearly informed by this new editorial preparation. On The Deleuze Seminars site, we provide as
the opening session Deleuze’s discussion of the theme of "continuous variation" and Spinoza
from February 2, 1978.
of one’s singular essence and God’s singular essence and the singular essence of things. And in
this third kind of knowledge, all bodies agree with each other in a world of pure intensities, a
mystical point of beatitude or active affect, or auto-affect.
Session 1, November 25, 1980
With no transcripts or recordings preceding this session, its brevity suggests that even this one is
not complete. Deleuze begins by discussing the extent to which seventeenth-century philosophy
seems compromised with God and argues that philosophy seized on the theme of God to free
concepts from prior constraints and that Spinoza was the philosopher who went too far and too
fast, for whom God serves as a philosophical concept. In contrast to Leibniz’s vision of divine
understanding dominated by the calculation of chess, Deleuze notes the danger arose for Spinoza
in treating God as immanent (versus emanative) cause, i.e., no longer distinguishing cause and
effect. Deleuze follows Spinoza’s Ethics and how he frees the immanent cause of all
subordination to the causal process, establishing a veritable plane of immanence for the great
causal sequence. Given that this fixed plane implied a certain mode of life, Spinoza was damned
and isolated and forced to endure an illiterate comprehension of his works. Deleuze concludes by
describing the geometric methods in the Ethics, its interconnections of definitions, axioms,
theorems and corollaries in continuous connections to concepts.
possessing only the faculty of reason, a natural light. Then tracing this through Descartes’s
cogito, Deleuze considers the theme of the idiot at its climax in Russia with Dostoyevsky. After
returning to the Greeks’ view, for whom evil is necessarily nothing, Deleuze considers Spinoza
who also says “evil is nothing”, the wicked man as someone in error, and Deleuze refers to
Spinoza’s treatment of the question of evil in letters with William de Bleynbergh, thereby
presenting a different viewpoint than the path of “Good is the One above Being”. Spinoza’s view
is that while there’s neither good nor evil, there is some good and some bad, hence the link
between ethics and ontology, ethics as speed taking us quickly to ontology, i.e., to life within
Being, implying an ethical difference between the distinction with good-evil. For Spinoza, from
the ethical point of view, the wicked is not one who judges badly (as is the case for morality) but
is one who is false, not in judgement, but as the inadequacy of the idea of the thing, i.e., of the
thing’s manner of being in itself, as authentic. Deleuze maintains that this perspective is opposite
the judgment system, more akin to a world of “tests” (épreuves) as in assaying a coin, enduring
the acid as authentic gold. So, Deleuze’s task is to examine the authentic-inauthentic distinction
in contrast to the distinction of good-evil.
whereas if joy does so, then one’s power increases, a theory that Spinoza develops on several
levels.
terms for relations, each relation extends to infinity, while the terms are relative to a particular
level of relation. With constitutive relations in ceaseless communication and ceaseless
decomposition and then recomposition, (implying the body as a mode of extension, connected to
a soul as a mode of thought), Deleuze sees this parallelism of soul and body, suggesting
movement and rest within a body’s extension correspond also to “perceptions” within the soul.
After pointing to phenomena of resonance in Spinoza’s thought (e.g., with Leibniz’s theory of
tiny perceptions), Deleuze shifts towards modes or manners of being as a matter of sensibility,
occurring through molecular relations, about which Deleuze explores practical questions of what
would health and illness be for a manner of being via a typology of cases (three in all). Finally,
Deleuze returns to the Spinoza-Blyenbergh correspondence on the topic of good and evil, and
Blyenbergh’s two strong objections that Deleuze discusses in detail, with Spinoza’s responses.
However, to clarify Spinoza’s replies, Deleuze proposes an additional concrete reorganization
via three examples of evil in Spinoza’s era -- theft, crime, and adultery – that Spinoza offers in
his letters to Blyenbergh. As for Blyenbergh’s objection regarding the pure chaos for the calculus
of relations, Spinoza will not yield on how good acts compose relations while bad acts
decompose them, a distinction to which Deleuze will return.
Again addressing Spinoza’s answers to Blyenbergh’s two main objections, Deleuze reviews the
criteria of the distinction of vice and virtue, indicating that the image of a thing associated with
an action is an affection (Latin, affectio), i.e., the determination of my power of action
(puissance) under a particular action and that, in any event, one is as perfect as one can be as a
function of the affections of one’s power of action. Deleuze points out that faced with
Blyenbergh’s response – that essence can only be measured through its duration, e.g., one
becoming better or worse --, Spinoza stops the correspondence, with his response located in the
Ethics, about which Spinoza must remain careful not to expose key aspects. Deleuze proposes to
reconstitute Spinoza’s answer, first regarding duration of which Spinoza is indeed aware and
through which he distinguishes between affection (affectus) and affect (affectio). Deleuze likens
Spinoza’s concept of duration to Bergson’s use of duration, every affection enveloping the
passage through which we reach it, infinitely, and Deleuze calls this the decomposition of three
dimensions of the essence which, first, belongs to itself under the form of eternity; then, second,
affection belongs to essence under the form of instantaneity; and third, affect belongs to the
essence under the form of duration. As for the passage (the basis for Spinoza’s theory of affect),
it consists of being an increase or decrease of a power of action, sadness derived from things
whose relations do not agree with mine, while joy increases power in agreement with my
relations. Suggesting that these perspectives raise problems for Spinoza regarding manners of
living, Deleuze turns to concrete matters that distinguish morality – what one must do – and
ethics, and he examines successive aspects of the dimensions of “belonging of essence”,
resulting in our being a kind of vibration within this amplitude, the extremes of which are the
minimum (death) and maximum (joy, or “beatitude”). To a question from Georges Comtesse
whether one can consider beatitude as beyond joy and sadness, without affect, Deleuze says that
Spinoza calls these affects “passions” and then develops Spinoza’s distinctions between passive
and active affects and his belief that at the level of beatitude, one composes relations with the
world and with God as well as oneself, with no difference between outside and inside. After
responding to a student’s question, Deleuze returns to ethics, noting Spinoza’s belief that each
being is at the mercy of encounters, of the risk of decompositions, as the state of nature, for
which the Ethics offers a practical outline. Hence, this first aspect of reason for Spinoza –
selecting, experimenting with relations that compose with one’s relations, avoiding those that do
not – is an apprenticeship in finding signs alerting one to relations as well as to what one is
capable of doing, without previous knowledge. The signs that one must find constitute an
ambiguous language, one of equivocity, with the goal of increasing one’s power of acting, to
experience passive joys, and to reach a more certain stage of greater reason and freedom, a stage
that Deleuze proposes to consider in the next session.
Although Deleuze continues the discussion about the signs that arise in existence, he shifts
midway through this session to material related to painting. Deleuze insists that for Spinoza,
everything from birth separates us from innate ideas such that the conquest of what is innate is
what mobilizes all lives. Deleuze also considers a modern problem that arises in Spinoza, a
general semiology that Deleuze associates with Saussure as well as C.S. Peirce and about which
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Spinoza offers three characteristics, each of which contains both an extreme dimension (a
relation with God) and a daily dimension that Deleuze outlines. He associates this to what
Spinoza calls the first kind of knowledge, i.e., life according to signs. Considering Spinoza a
philosopher of light not concerning himself with shadow, Deleuze shifts toward contemporary
painters who discover light (hence, toward material for the following seminar on painting),
linking Spinoza to this enterprise of “thinking within light” through painting. After examining
philosophical aspects corresponding to traits in 17th- and 18th-century painting, Deleuze points to
the importance of the development of infinitesimal analysis and infinitesimal calculus in this era,
and also emphasizes that the 18th-century problem of perspective must be linked to the 17th-
century development of pure optical space. Deleuze then returns to the starting point regarding
Spinoza’s desire to pull us from the world of equivocal signs toward a world of light, a world
ultimately of univocal expressions, asking what the kinds of signs are. To break with them, one
needs to see their genres, and Spinoza proposes three kinds of signs corresponding to the three
preceding characteristics, that Deleuze outlines: the imprint of an external body on my body,
imprint-signs, or an “indicative” sign; “imperative” signs which one reaches through the illusion
of purposes (finalités), which distribute commands and forms of obedience; third, in a world
where words are constantly and necessarily interpreted, are “interpretive” signs, to which
Deleuze proposes to return in the next session.
springboards to reach the latter, and with this point in mind, Deleuze summarizes Spinoza’s
distinction of three kinds of knowledge: first, the aggregate of affections and affects-passions
resulting from it, i.e., the world of signs; second, the aggregate of univocal common notions and
the active affects resulting from them; third, a knowledge or intuition of essences which, like the
second kind, constitutes the world of univocity. Deleuze concludes with Spinoza’s definition of a
general idea of man, by the composed relations likely to suit all men, i.e., a composition of
relations of all men that would be the ideal society, and Deleuze indicates that the status of these
three dimensions will be the problem for the next session.
Deleuze summarizes the previous session, his analysis of the different dimensions of
individuality through the presence of the infinite in seventeenth-century philosophy, a way of
providing concrete aspects of an infinitist conception of the individual. In Spinoza, the individual
is relation, or a whole plane of composition, compositio; the individual is also power of action,
potentia; and third, the individual is an intrinsic mode, and through these aspects, the individual
is not substance, but rather a relation. Deleuze argues that it is only in the seventeenth century
that the relation is thought independent of its terms, precisely through the development of
infinitesimal calculus, and Deleuze points out the equilibrium point reached in the seventeenth
century between the infinite and the finite was through a new theory of relations. His first
question is how the individual is a relation, i.e., the limit at the level of the finite individual.
While proposing some thought experiments regarding the three terms (infinity, relation, limit),
the students’ lack of interest leads him, first, to discuss the logic of relations within the history of
philosophy (e.g. Bertrand Russell), then to shift to the theme of the individual as power of action
and the effort or tendency toward a limit, i.e., puissance. Regarding the term “limit”, Deleuze
returns to Greek era, and after a brief terminological debate with Georges Comtesse, Deleuze
provides an example of the conception of limit from the Stoics, concluding that the Stoics’ term
tonos, or contracted effort defining the thing, is necessary to the thing itself. After providing a
second example from Neo-Platonism, namely Plotinus’s The Enneads (specifically IV, book 5),
to which he compares the end of Plato’s book six of The Republic to The Ennead IV, Deleuze
turns to a third example, Byzantine art, and then summarizes his outline of limits: a contour-limit
that is a tension-limit; then, a space-limit and a spatialization-limit; then a light-color limit, as
well as a terminus limit. Deleuze concludes that the dynamic limit is spatializing while the
contour-limit supposes a measured space. With these successive developments in mind, Deleuze
returns to specific points in Spinoza and then concludes by pointing out that the first group of
notions discussed, relation and infinity, is linked to the second group, power of action-limits,
since limit is the limit of the relation, with a constant intersection of both sets of notions. Finally,
through both groups, the individual is designated as an intrinsic mode, a notion that Deleuze
attributes to Duns Scotus, and he proposes to pursue this at the next session.
different powers, i.e., they can be at a higher power than other ones, hence the definition of the
second layer of the individual as the differential relation that defines the power (puissance).
Hence, at a third level, the relations of movement and rest only express a singular essence, and to
assess what the singular essence is, Deleuze argues that for Spinoza, “existence” requires a very
rigorous determination that Deleuze contrasts to Leibniz’s. To develop Spinoza’s position, he
comments on a text from Spinoza’s early work, the Short Treatise, notably that bodies exist
within extension, and naming the body’s shape a “mode of attribute”, Spinoza maintains that
essences are singular (not to be confused with the existent). Deleuze suggests that besides
shapes, another mode of distinction is the degree, or gradus, also called “intensive quantity”, to
which Deleuze adds the terminological distinctions of “quality” and “magnitude” or extensive
quantity composed of parts, to which Deleuze brings in Duns Scotus on “intrinsic modes”.
Addressing the distinction between intensive and extensive quantity, Deleuze argues that
extensive quantity can only be thought of within space according to a kind of duration, while
intensive quantity has non-additive magnitudes, a multiplicity within the moment, a synthesis of
the instant. Deleuze also suggests that they consider the question of eternity, but he asks students
for questions regarding Spinoza’s conception of individuality. To a first question regarding
biogenetism and types of preformation in the 17th century, Deleuze explains (and seems to
announce already aspect of “the fold”) the mechanism of development or “explication”
(enveloped parts being unfolded), something enveloped in the seed, then shifts to discuss the
later theory of epigenesis (development via new formations), from undifferentiated to
differentiations. As for preformationism, one finds the theme of the actual infinite and the
infinitely minute applied to living matter, hence corresponding the symbolic system of the era.
Moreover, maintaining that Spinoza should be viewed within the context of this symbolic
system, Deleuze parses specific terms (part; totality; unity) before returning to Spinoza’s sense of
singular essences and the degree of power, finally providing two senses of the word “part”
(extensive and intensive). In dialogue with Georges Comtesse, Deleuze justifies deliberately
limiting his analysis to Spinoza, objecting to Comtesse’s critique, and in closing, he proposes to
continue with Spinoza’s claims regarding the experience of eternity and also Spinoza’s
ontological view.
terms, an actuality of the essence as an intensive part, a degree of power of action. With this
suggestion of a double eternity, Deleuze locates the experience of feeling eternal in authors like
D.H. Lawerence and Edward Boys, and Deleuze provides two concrete cases, one regarding an
individual who remains solely in the first knowledge, and a second one who gains insight within
the second knowledge. After summarizing the dimensions of the individual, Deleuze suggests
that for Spinoza, the first individual at death loses the extensive parts whereas in the second case,
having reached adequate ideas and active affects, the individual’s loss at death is a relatively
small part. Then linking this to the question of the eternal, of the soul’s immortality, Deleuze
reviews a text in which this is addressed, notably Plato’s Phaedo, while for Spinoza, he opposed
eternity to immortality but not as a matter of before and after (as in previous cases). Rather, he
considers that one experience being eternal at the same time as being mortal, i.e., the eternal as
the intensive parts, the degree of power, differing from the “in time” extensive parts, hence an
immortality of coexistence but not of succession. During the rest of the session (the final hour),
students pose questions regarding various points, with Deleuze providing successive
explanations regarding Spinoza’s view of death, e.g., Richard Pinhas’s description of artistic
creation as a kind of unfolding and realizing; Comtesse’s objections to death coming from the
outside; another student’s question about what is missing should one reach the third kind of
knowledge, to which Deleuze points out that the second kind of knowledge grants one
understanding about relations that compose and decompose, but not about the singular nature or
essence of each individual, i.e., about the question of passing to the third level. To Pinhas’s
query whether one can be a Spinozist who remains happily in the second kind of knowledge,
Deleuze replies that since, for Spinoza, God cannot be treated as a simple common notion, God
necessarily is the idea of a being both infinite and singular, but also that one could opt for a
truncated Spinozism, believing there are only relations but not essences. After debating aspects
of what Deleuze calls Pinhas’s “mutant Spinozism” regarding the artist’s relation to common
notion vis-à-vis essences, Deleuze suggests an outline for two kinds of Spinozism, a “restricted
Spinozism” (second kind of knowledge) and “integral Spinozism” (all the way to the third kind
of knowledge). To another student’s query about Spinoza’s distinction of morality in terms of
life as progress or as actualization of extensive parts, Deleuze responds that morality is
necessarily a judgment system, and that for Spinoza, people who only want to spread sadness are
judging themselves, such that Spinoza rejects morality, whereas he talks about a kind of physico-
chemical test, a self-experimentation, like a gold piece testing itself, according to the affects it
has. Deleuze recalls Spinoza’s great trinity of judgment to be the tyrant, the priest (or the “man
of anguish”) and the slave, and then notes that at the next session, he will provide a “conclusion
of conclusions” regarding judgment as well as ontology.
[NB: An edited version of this session was prepared for the Gallimard release of the audio CD,
“Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza : immortalité et éternité” (2003) and, as such, can be considered an
exemplary session, at least from the post-seminar perspectives of the CD editors, Claire Parnet
and Richard Pinhas.]
to essence no less than adequate ideas, yet with a difference. Deleuze reviews the occurrence of
inadequate ideas from which a passion-affect emerges, concluding that as long as one exists, a
relation of movement and rest is realized by the extensive parts that belong to an individual
according to this relation. Deleuze concludes that since affection is the idea of an effect, then
one’s extensive parts necessarily encounter each other constantly and are defined by the relation
of movement and rest, with an affection being the reception of the effect, or “I perceive”. To this
kinetic formulation, Deleuze adds the dynamic version, one being defined through a power of
being affected, and there is no moment in which one’s power of being affected is not fulfilled.
Deleuze considers “every affection is affection of essence” insofar as the essence has an infinity
of extensive parts belonging to it according to such a relation. Then, as one rises to the next
levels, one has adequate perceptions and active affects, and these also are affections of essence,
but with the difference that they come from the inside, i.e., essence as it expresses itself in a
relation. For 80 minutes within the session, student questions alternate with Deleuze’s responses,
notably on the inside-outside distinctions, and then continuing with his development on the
relation of ethics and ontology, Deleuze asserts that Spinoza is the only philosopher to have
realized philosophy as ontology. He briefly digresses to considers writers and artists linked to a
cult of the sun or light as these connect to Spinoza, and then returning to the question of
ontology, notably to nine propositions in book I of the Ethics, Deleuze asks what is really new in
Spinoza. His response introduces a Greek term, hen panta, as a cry of philosophy, the “One All”,
which resounds an essence across all philosophy, specifically “panantheism” (One-All-God)
with Deleuze situating Spinoza at the confluence of the purest pantheism with philosophy and
arguing that what is new in Spinoza is the statement that the same attributes in the same form are
stated regarding God and regarding things. Deleuze explains what Spinoza means is that we
humans know only two infinite forms, thought and extension, the soul as a manner of thinking,
the body as a mode of extension. From this, Spinoza develops a doctrine according to which
these same forms of infinity attributed to God also belong to finite things, in distinct ways, i.e.,
forms stated “in relation” and yet stated of unequal terms, hence a community of forms, hen
panta, “the One All Things”. After linking this to different traditions, Deleuze concludes that to
liberate this Being from its neutrality, Spinoza affirms that this Being is the real, Nature, the
same Being that is stated regarding all be-ings (étants) of God and creatures, an equality of
Being for unequal essences. With this, says Deleuze, ontology begins and also ends.
Spinoza, Session 15, March 31, 1981 / Painting and the Question of Concepts, Session 1
Having hoped to finish the Spinoza sessions two weeks earlier, Deleuze ends it by addressing
students’ questions (for nearly an hour) and then later introducing the seminar on "Painting and
the Question of Concepts." The questions posed concern: how the third kind of knowledge
relates to the relation of artistic states of creativity, i.e., the knowledge of the self as knowledge
of power of action, and vice versa. Deleuze reviews Spinoza’s three-step path in the Ethics, from
apparent condemnation to the first level of inadequate ideas toward successive levels on a path:
first, related to the passions (sad and joyful) and increasing the power of action with joyful
passions; encountering bodies that agree with one’s own, leading one to form common notions;
following the second step, the formation of a third body having composed relations, hence active
affects resulting from common notions; then, with this build-up of active affects overlaid with
new ideas and new states, emergence of auto-affections. To other questions, Deleuze suggests
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that there is an element of play or improvisation in the composition of relations, and he suggests
that “timing”, or kaïros from Greek, the correct moment, has a function in this procedure. As the
17th century was a century of gamblers, everyone including Spinoza, says Deleuze, was
interested in games and chance, corresponding to the birth of calculating probabilities, but
however strong the certainty of the third kind of knowledge might be, the possibility of collapse
or catastrophe still exists. The theme of catastrophe provides the link to the Seminar on Painting.
(See the Painting session 1 summary for the session’s second half).
Session 15, Spinoza/Session 1, Painting and the Question of Concepts, March 31, 1981
Foremost in Deleuze’s initial presentation is the importance of the “concept”, for
example, color as “concept”, thereby foreshadowing the concept’s importance in developing the
broader theme of “what is philosophy?”. He immediately raises the importance of the catastrophe
in painting and its affect in the act of painting itself, the painting of imbalance, the relation of
catastrophe and the birth of color. Referring to different painters and theorists (Claudel, Goethe,
Klee, Turner, Ruskin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Francis Bacon), he links the question of catastrophe
to the previous discussion of affects such that color emerges from chaos. In particular, he
emphasizes Joachim Gasquet’s book on Cézanne and the emergence of chaos-catastrophe as pre-
pictorial, seen in Cézanne’s letters. Deleuze responds to a student’s remark by briefly connecting
these perspectives in terms of Kant’s theory of the sublime.
Continuing with Cézanne, Deleuze emphasizes the first moment of “chaos-abyss”
following which color would emerge, but he also reflects on possible failure of this emergence,
and he reflects at great length on the color scale emerging, or greyness in non-emergence.
However, Deleuze is cautious here, discussing kinds of grey in Kandinsky, and then Deleuze
announces a detour, to reflect on painting’s relation to time and painting operating a synthesis of
time. Here he comes to his second text, from Paul Klee on the grey point, but also on chaos and
the emergence of color. This emergence constitutes the beginning of the world, also present in
music, but feeling blocked, Deleuze shifts to another painter, Francis Bacon’s interviews,
painters’ struggles with clichés, and then pursues a reading from Bacon to create a bridge to the
next session. This reading yields several notions, especially that of the diagram as germinal
chaos, similar for Cézanne and Klee, the tension towards a pre-pictorial condition. Here, Deleuze
can point to starting points for each painter (Turner’s 1830 diagram; Van Gogh’s diagram;
Klee’s black-and-white grey point as matrix for all colors), and he considers when Bacon found
his diagram, indicating this notion -- this history of the catastrophe and of the seed in the act of
painting, that is, the notion of the diagram – as the first step of the seminar’s analysis.