Expressionism In Philosophy : Spinoza Translated by Martin Joughin Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza Gilles Deleuze ZONE BOOKS · NEW YORK 1992 © 1990 Urzone Inc. ZONE BOOKS 1226 Prospect Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11218 First Paperback Edition Fourth Printing, 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and ro8 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the Publisher. Originally published in France as Spinoza et la probleme de I'expression. © 1968 Les Editions de Minuit Printed in the United States of America Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Deleuze, Gilles. [Spinoza et le probleme de l' expression. English] Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza / Gilles Deleuze; translated by Martin Joughin. p. em. Translation of: Spinoza et le probleme de l' expression. Bibliography: p. Index ISBN 0-942299-51-5 (pbk.) r. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677 -Contributions in concept of expression. 2. Expression. r. Title. B3999.E9D4513 1990 ' 199 -492-dc19 88-2o6o7 CIP Contents Translator's Preface 5 Introduction: The Role and Importance of Expression 13 PART ONE THE TRIADS OF SUBS TANCE Chapter I Numerical and Real Distinction 27 II Attribute as Expression 41 III Attributes and Divine Names 53 IV TheAbsolute 69 v Power 83 PART Tw o PARALLELISM AND IMMANENCE VI Expression in Parallelism 99 VII The Two Powers and theIdea of God 113 VIII Expression and Idea 129 IX Inadequacy 145 X Spinoza A9ainst Descartes 155 XI Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression 169 PART THREE THE THEORY OF FINITE MODES XII Modal Essence: Th e Passage from Infinite to Finite 191 XIII Modal Existence 201 XIV Wh at Can a Body Do? 217 XV Th e Three Orders and the Problem of Evil 235 XV I Th e Ethical Jtlsionof the World 255 XV II Common Notions 273 XV III To ward the ThirdKind of Knowledge 289 IXX Beatitude 303 Conclusion: Th e Th eory of Expression in Leibniz and Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy 321 Appendix 337 Notes 351 Translator's Notes 403 Index 429 Index of Te xtual References 437 Tr ans l at o r ' s P r e fa c e "We discover new ways of folding ...but we are always folding, unfolding, refolding": so ends Le Pli, Deleuze's latest book, on Leibniz, his first major historical study of a philosopher since the present book was published twenty years before. Here the main text doses: "It is hard, in the end, to say which is more impor­ tant: the differences between Leibniz and Spinoza in their evalua­ tion of expression; or their common reliance on this concept in founding a Postcartesian philosophy." Spinoza and Leibniz: two different expressions of "expressionism in philosophy," an expres­ sionism characterized in this book as a system of implicatio and explicatio, enfolding and unfolding, implication and explication, implying and explaining, involving and evolving, enveloping and developing. Two systems of universal fo lding: Spinoza's unfolded from the bare "simplicity" of an Infinity into which all things are ultimately fo lded up, as into a universal map that fo lds back into a single point; while Leibniz starts from the infinite points in that map, each of which enfolds within its infinitely "com­ plex" identity all its relations with all other such points, the unfolding of all these infinite relations being the evolution of a Leibnizian Universe. We are always involved in things and their implications and 5 EXPRESSIONISM IN PHILOSOPHY: SPINOZA developments, always ourselves developing in our bodily "enve­ lope," always explaining and implying. In Spinoza's Latin the distinctions between these various ways of being enfolded in a universal "complication" or complexity of things are home by the different contexts, mental, physical, and so on, in which implicare, explicare, and their derivatives are used. An English translator must often identifYthe implicit or explicit context of a particular use of one of these words and choose between, say, "imply," "impli­ cate," "enfold" - or "explain," "explicate," "unfold" - while Deleuze can retain in the French impliquer and expliquer several of the multiple senses of the Latin. The English language has developed differently from the French language. It has integrated Latin and Germanic roots, where French has unfolded directly from Latin. And this double system of English roots has allowed a splitting of senses in the language of "folding" itself, so that a Germanic vocabulary of "folds" must often be used in external, physical, contexts, and one can only talk of a universal "folding" of thoughts and things metaphorically. But what then becomes, in English translation, of Deleuze's attempt to organize Spinoza's Universe of internal Thought and external Extension in terms of an "unfolding" of which the distinction of "inner" and "outer" sides of things (ideas and bodies) is precisely the initial fold? The problem does not end with folding itself, but becomes more complex as the discussion extends to a general dynamics of Spin­ oza's system. Thus while the Latin comprehendere and the French comprendre cover both the "mental" sense of understanding (con­ taining or comprehending in thought) and the "physical" sense of comprising, including (containing, "properly speaking"), an English translator must either stretch his language beyond break­ ing point in an attempt to find some term (say, "comprehend") 6 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE to cover both "sides" ofthe Latin or French word (everywhere substituting it, then, for "understand," "include," "comprise"), or simply ask the reader to try to constantly bear in mind that both sorts of containment are always to be understood as cor­ responding to a single "term" of the exposition, a term whose single grammar or expressive logic must be understood as organ­ izing the relations of the two English "sides" of the term through­ out the book. Then consider the Latin couple involvere and evolvere: an order of continuous "turning" inward and outward, involution and evo­ lution, rather than the elementary order of folds. The French envelopper covers both abstract and physical senses of "involving" and "enveloping" or (once more) "enfolding." (Just to compli­ cate matters further, the "envelope" which is the human body, later identified by Deleuze as the primary "fold" of internal sub­ jective space in external visible space, is linked in French to that order of folding by the fact that pli and enveloppe are two names for the "envelope" in which we enfold things we send through the postal system.) Is this aU a case ofa seductive metaphor being finallyneutral­ ized in English, once the implicit divergences of the "mental" and "physical" grammars of folding in Latin and French are at last made explicit? The metaphorical use of the language of"folding" would then amount (in a familiar analysis) to a partial transposi­ tion or translation of the logic of some term ("fold," say) from its true or proper linguistic context (all the sentences in which it can properly occur, with all their implications and explications) into some only partly or superficially similar "analogous" context. English might then be said to have developed in accordance with the Scholastic project of systematically distinguishing between the multiple senses of "equivocal" words, in order to construct a complete logic of true (as opposed to specious) implications 7 EXPRESSIONISM IN PHILOSOPHY: SPINOZA and explications - with the "technical" or formal use of words like "mode" (for example) properly distinguished from the impre­ cise informal use of the Latin modus or French mode, informally rendered in English as "manner," "way." Deleuze's reconstruction of Spinoza's system as a logic of expres­ sion is diametrically opposed to such a conception of "equivoca­ tion." Curley does not list (the "equivocal," "informal") exprimere as a "systematic". term in his glossary, and most commentators, as Deleuze notes in his Introduction, have also passed over this term in their reconstructions of the "logic" of the system. Deleuze's use of a disregarded term as the principal axis of his reconstruc­ tion of a philosophical or literary system had already character­ ized his earlier studies of Nietzsche and Proust (and has analogies with, say, Barthes' contemporary reading of Racine "in terms of" solar imagery, which so scandalized the Old Criticism). Indeed the language of "folding," and an insistence upon the "meta­ phorical" multiplicity of sense as prior to any projected unitary logical syntax, had already been applied in the 1964 reading of Proust. And in the Logic of Sense that followed the present study of Spinoza we find Deleuze inverting the traditional figures of metaphorical use as a partial transposition or translation of a given logic or grammar from its true context to some partly similar con­ text, and of metaphor or analogy "breaking down" at some point where the logic of the two contexts diverges. Words are there considered as "multiplicities" of sense, with no stable "home" context, no primary identity: as transferrable among multiple con­ texts to produce various patterns of relations between things as their essentially incomplete grammars or logics unfold in inter­ action with those of other words. Already in Difference and Repe­ tition, published jointly with the present book, it was precisely 8 TRANS LATOR'S PREFACE the "breakdown" of the traditional logic of identity that organ­ ized fundamental "divergences" or radical differences as the prime dimensionality or structure of unfolding experience. Deleuze's thought evolved from his first book (on Hmbe, 1953) down to the present work in a series of historical studies (on Nietzsche, Kant, Proust, Bergson and Sacher-Masoch).