You know that point in a philosophical process with a given philosopher and a given text where you’re starting to see (or feel (these vague connections that you’re not very confident about articulating? I had such an experience tonight with my study point in Deleuze’s book on Spinoza. In the 4 pages I got through, I filled my notebook with all kinds of points. And as Deleuze encourages me to do, I’m going to have to do a little (maybe a lot of (chancing and write at the edge of what I know (think: Difference and Repetition (and go randomly through the quotes –that is to see what happens and hope I manage to make some kind of sense:
“Adam does not understand the rule of the relation of his body with the fruit, so he interprets God’s word as a prohibition.”
And this refers to an earlier point:
“But because Adam is ignorant of causes, he thinks that God morally forbids him whereas God only reveals the natural consequence of ingesting the fruit. Spinoza is categorical on this point: all the phenomena that we group under the heading of Evil, illness, and death, are of this type: bad encounters, poisoning, intoxication, relational decomposition.”
Now I would note the connection with the joyful and sad effects described in Deleuze’s lecture on Spinoza (gold.ac.uk/media/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf) which is basically about power relationships. A joyful effect is one in which the individual is empowered while the sad effect is one in which the individual is disempowered. Easy enough to understand for anyone who has went through a shit phase. Such sad effects have even led to suicide.
But the more subtle point at hand is the distinction being made between Morality, which is social (even socially mandated (in nature and Ethics which is a study of the relationship between sad and joyful effects. In other words (and as I understand it, Spinoza’s book on Ethics makes the revolutionary step of moving beyond the socially mandated (morality (and into the study of how power relationships should best be arranged to maximize joyful effects (ethics: a kind of prelude to utilitarianism and even pragmatism if you think about it.
But even more interesting to me is how this anticipates Deleuze’s work with Guatarri and the notion of social or machinic production. Once again:
“Adam does not understand the rule of the relation of his body with the fruit, so he interprets God’s word as a prohibition.”
As has been often said of Deleuze’s earlier studies: one never knows where the philosopher he is studying ends and he begins. And here we see the larval beginnings of what he and Guatarri described in the Anti Oedipus: this sense of ourselves as nodal points in a vast system of exchange: the plane of immanence. This eventually led to the manifesto of conceptual play for the sake of the creation of concepts laid out in What is Philosophy. In this sense, he eventually comes to a prescription for the failure of Adam.
And don’t even get me started on the univocity of Being –at least not tonight.