03/05/2014
In preparation to Dr. Siegworth's Talk on Spinoza and Deleuze here is a short little blurb taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Article on Gilles Deleuze written by Smith and Protezi found here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/
Here is the part that tips the hat (fedora, bowler, top, etc.) towards Spinoza:
In sum, then, against the “major” post-Kantian tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Deleuze in effect posited his own “minor” post-Kantian trio of Maimon, Nietzsche, and Bergson. To these he added a trio of pre-Kantians, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume, but read through a post-Kantian lens. We have already touched on Deleuze's reading of Hume. Let us now turn to Spinoza, for whom Deleuze's admiration was seemingly limitless; for Deleuze, Spinoza was the “prince” or even the “Christ” of philosophers. There are many Spinozist inheritances in Deleuze, but one of the most important is certainly the notion of univocity in ontology. Univocity—as opposed to its great rivals, equivocity and analogy—is the key to developing a “philosophy of difference” (Deleuze's term for his project in Difference and Repetition), in which difference would no longer be subordinated to identity. The result is a Spinozism minus substance, a purely modal or differential universe. In univocity, as Deleuze reads Spinoza, the single sense of Being frees a charge of difference throughout all that is. In univocal ontology being is said in a single sense of all of which it is said, but it is said of difference itself. What is that difference? Difference is difference in degrees of “power”; in interpreting this term we must distinguish the two French words puissance and pouvoir. In social terms, puissance is immanent power, power to act rather than power to dominate another; we could say that puissance is praxis (in which equals clash or act together) rather than poiesis (in which others are matter to be formed by the command of a superior, a sense of transcendent power that matches what pouvoir indicates for Deleuze). In the most general terms Deleuze develops throughout his career, puissance is the ability to affect and to be affected, to form assemblages or consistencies, that is, to form emergent unities that nonetheless respect the heterogeneity of their components. (Here we see the empiricist theme of the “externality of relations”: in an assemblage or consistency, the “becoming” or relation of the terms attains its own independent ontological status. In Deleuze's favorite example, the wasp and orchid create a “becoming” or symbiotic emergent unit.)
Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a ?pure metaphysician.? In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition , he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science?a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity…
