The Transformation of Relations in Spinoza’s Metaphysics
Simon B. Duffy
One finds in Spinoza’s Ethics what could be described as a double point of view of the degree of the power to act of a singular thing: sometimes it seems to be fixed to a precisely determined degree; sometimes it seems to admit a certain degree of variation. The question of how to resolve this apparent contradiction has been responsible for many varying interpretations among scholars in the field of Spinoza studies. For a more precise understanding of these different ways of variation, and to render them compatible with each other, it is necessary to commence with the question of the variation of the essences of singular things. Certain interpreters consider these essences to be situated between a “minimum” and a “maximum,” and that it is only above or below this range that the rupture of an individual’s identity is attained, resulting in a change of the individual’s structure and therefore of its nature. Any resolution of these questions will involve an understanding of the relation between the essence of an individual human being, the conatus of that human being, and its power to act. In Qualité et quantité dans la philosophie de Spinoza [Quality and Quantity in Spinoza’s Philosophy], Charles Ramond maintains that the essence of a singular thing is determined by a “precise rapport” of movement and rest, or by a quantum of the power to act of the conatus, and all variation is prohibited, since all augmentation and diminution of this power to act would create another individual. Despite this conclusion, that all augmentation and diminution of the power to act of the same individual is inconceivable, Ramond believes that it leaves man “absolutely incomprehensible, and moreover contrary to good sense.”1 Ramond is here confronted with the apparent contradiction raised by our first question, which he wants to resolve by redefining one side of the contradiction. He maintains the concept of a fixed power to act of a singular thing, while denying that there is room for the concept of a margin of variation “of” its power to act. Ramond proposes to do this by making a distinction between changes “of” the power to act and changes “in” the power to act. Ramond justifies this formulation by arguing that the “variations ‘in’ the power to act” occur within the theory of the passions, that is, the power to act itself remains unchanged by these variations within the theory of the passions. Despite the fact that Ramond provides a useful rubric to resolve the apparent contradiction, the main two interpreters that we will look at will be Pierre Macherey and Gilles Deleuze. We will examine the similarities and differences between their respective interpretations of the composition of a finite mode and how this contributes to the way each interpreter goes about resolving the apparent contradiction in the definition of a mode’s power to act.
In Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza: La troisième partie [Introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics: The Third Part], when he speaks of the conatus of a finite mode which constitutes its “actual essence,” Macherey writes that “the power [puissance] and the energy of the conatus of each thing invests itself by deploying itself according to the thresholds of intensity distributed between a minimum and a maximum, the first corresponding to a pole of extreme passivity, the second to a pole of extreme activity.”2 When he writes “between a minimum and a maximum,” he seems to agree with Ramond’s (mis)interpretation of Gueroult, that modal essence varies between two limits. If not, Macherey at least seems to agree with the interpretation of the essence which admits a certain margin of variation of its power to act. Even Deleuze seems to be open to criticism from Ramond for the same reason when he writes that, with Spinoza, “the relation that characterizes an existing mode as a whole is endowed with a kind of elasticity”3; and that the “essences [of existing modes] or degrees of power always correspond to a limit (a maximum or minimum).”4 But it remains to be seen exactly what each of these interpreters mean by a maximum and a minimum, and exactly how they implicate the modal essence, conatus, and power to act of singular things together with the concept of variation.
In Spinoza et le problème de l’expression [Spinoza and the Problem of Expression], Deleuze invites us not to “confuse” the essence of a mode et the “relation [rapport] in which it expresses itself”: “A modal essence expresses itself eternally in a relation,” writes Deleuze, “but we should not confuse the essence and the relation [rapport] in which it expresses itself.”5 Contrary to this interpretation of Deleuze, Ramond considers the two to be identical. However, for Deleuze, insofar as Spinoza defines modes as modifications of the attributes of substance, he refers only to modal essences, not to the existence of modes, which is determined solely by the effects of existing modes on each other. Therefore, within an attribute, each mode is composed of both a modal essence and, corresponding to this, an existing mode. Deleuze suggests that a modal essence can be divided into what he calls “intensive parts”; and an existing mode can be divided into what he calls “extensive parts.”6 Deleuze understands by “intensive parts” those “parts of power [puissance], that is, of intrinsic or intensive parts, true degrees.”7 Modal essences are therefore distinguished from one another as different “intensities” or “degrees of power.”
Deleuze declares that, with Spinoza, “modal essences are […] parts of an infinite series.”8 He argues that the essences of finite modes “do not form a hierarchical system in which the less powerful depend on the more powerful, but an actually infinite collection, a system of mutual implications, in which each essence conforms with all of the others, and in which all essences are involved in the production of each.”9 Therefore the degree of power or essence of modes within any attribute are mutually determined by one another. Corresponding to any determined degree of power is an existing mode. Each existing mode involves its attribute precisely in the form belonging to that attribute. Existing modes can be seen as extensive parts, which are external to one another, and which act on one another from the outside. An existing finite mode comes to exist by virtue of an external cause; its cause is another existing finite mode, whose own cause is another existing mode, and so on ad infinitum. The component parts of an existing mode are external to the mode’s essence but these extensive parts exist directly in relation to the modes intensive parts, that is, to its essence or degree of power. Therefore, insofar as a mode exists, an infinity of extensive parts pertain to it under the relation that corresponds to its essence. “To every degree of intensity, however small, there correspond an infinity of extensive parts […] even to a minimal essence there correspond an infinity of parts.”10 The primary elements of Spinoza’s scheme, according to Deleuze, are therefore a mode’s essence, which is a degree of power, and, corresponding to this a mode’s power of existence, which it possesses in relation to the extensive parts of which it is composed.
Deleuze argues that with Spinoza, the relations between the extensive parts which constitute the existence of a mode or body, and which correspond to that mode’s essence, are determined by purely mechanical laws. Such a mode comes to exist when an infinity of extensive parts enter into a “given” relation [rapport] which corresponds to a given modal essence, when its parts “actually belong to it … in a certain relation [rapport] of movement and rest.”11 Deleuze refers to this relation as “a characteristic relation [rapport].”12 This mode continues to exist as long as the ratio or proportion of relations and relative movement of the extensive parts is maintained. By arguing in this way, Deleuze suggests that the form of an existing body will not change if its component parts are at each moment renewed according to the “characteristic” relation of movement and rest. The whole remains the same insofar as it is composed of the same ratio or proportion of parts that articulate that particular modal essence. An existing body is thus open to continual alteration of motion and rest between its parts, but it will continue to exist as long as the same ratio or proportion of parts subsists in the whole.13 “Each mode endures,” writes Deleuze, “as long as its parts remain in the relation [rapport] that characterizes it.”14
According to these mechanical laws, Deleuze’s concept of a singular thing or composite body can be articulated in the following way. A composite body is what constitutes a whole present in its parts. Such a body is characterized by the relation that is formed between an infinity of extensive parts and the modal essence to which this relation corresponds. The essence or degree of power of an existing composite body articulates itself in a relation which subsumes an infinity of extensive parts. These parts are determined to enter into the characteristic relation, or to realize this relation, through the operation of an external determinism. The extensive parts that enter into a relation must have existed in other relations. These initial relations have to combine if the extensive parts subsumed are to enter into the new composite relation. If the extensive parts combine to form some other relation, they will form part of another whole. These extensive parts will then correspond to another modal essence, and therefore compose the existence of another mode or body.
For Deleuze, the modal identity of such a complex composite body, or the extent to which it corresponds to the same modal essence, is associated with the spatial and dynamic pattern of composition and the function in which the composite body consists, i.e., its identity is not solely bound to the relations between the simpler bodies of which it is composed as Ramond holds. The preservation of identity through time rests not only with the preservation of the pattern rather than with the particular collection of parts presently embodying it, but for any body, its “identity,” or its remaining “itself,” should be explained both by some constant proportion or ratio of parts, “and” on it remaining a part of a larger more composite whole. As Deleuze writes: “We should not confuse the essence and the relation [rapport] in which it expresses itself.”15 The modal identity of a body is thus seen in the sustained sequence of states of a unified plurality, with only the form of its union enduring while the parts come and go. This is the concept of the individual as a determinate level of “integration,” or individuation, which, as a whole, incorporates other individuals, and is itself incorporated as a part into, and therefore composing, more composite, although not necessarily more complex, individuals or bodies.16
By explaining the mechanical determination of a modes existence, Deleuze has argued, as we have seen, that a mode’s essence is a degree of power to which corresponds a certain capacity of the mode’s extensive parts to be affected by other extensive parts. This is illustrated in the relations between the extensive parts of a human Body and those of other existing modes or individuals. Deleuze notes that Spinoza differentiates the motion and rest of the extensive parts composing a human Body insofar as “some of the individuals of which the human Body is composed are fluid, some soft, and others, finally, are hard.”17 Those bodies “whose parts lie upon one another over a large surface” and whose position is therefore difficult to change, Spinoza calls “hard”; those bodies “whose parts lie upon one another over a small surface” and whose position can be changed with less difficulty, Spinoza calls “soft”; and those whose parts are in motion, Spinoza calls “fluid.”18 Spinoza goes on to describe what happens when these different parts of the human Body interact with an external body. He says that “when a fluid part of the human Body is determined by an external body so that it frequently thrusts against a soft part of the body, it changes its surface and, as it were, impresses on the soft part certain traces of the external body striking against the fluid part.”19 Such a determination by an external body is what Spinoza understands to be an “affection” of the human Body—the way in which the human Body is affected by other bodies. Deleuze argues that if an individual is able to undergo such affections without them changing the proportion or ratio of its parts—i.e., without its relations being destroyed or decomposed by them—then this capacity to be affected which belongs to that individual is an expression of its power of existing. Insofar as a body is an individual or human being whose structure is constituted by the composition of its relations, these relations are inseparable from that individual’s capacity to be affected. Deleuze argues that an affection in Spinozian terminology may be active or passive, depending on whether the affection was determined by the mode’s own degree of power, or whether it was acted upon from without by an external body. Therefore, the power of existing of a mode always corresponds to a power to be affected, and this power or capacity to be affected is always exercised, either in affections produced by external things or in affections explained by its own essence. Those affections produced by external things are called passive affections, and those explained by the mode’s own essence are called active affections. Deleuze argues that to the extent that an individual’s affections can be explained by passive affections, it is said to suffer, or undergo things, and its power of existence is expressed by a power of suffering. To the extent that an individual’s affections can be explained by active affections, it is said to act, and its power of existence is expressed by a power of acting.
Deleuze writes that the “capacity to be affected remains constant, whatever the proportion of active and passive affections.”20 However, Deleuze argues that within this fixed capacity of being affected the proportion of active and passive affections is open to variation. “For a given essence, for a given capacity to be affected, the power of suffering and that of acting should be open to variation in inverse proportion one to the other. Both together, in their varying proportions, constitute the capacity to be affected.”21 The production of active affections will have as a result the corresponding reduction of passive affections, and, reciprocally, the continuation of passive affections will inhibit proportionally the power to act. Thus for Deleuze, the power to act of an essence is open to variation.
Macherey bases his argument on the foundation that the conatus of a finite mode constitutes its “actual essence.” According to Macherey, neither the conatus nor the power to act of a finite mode is variable. Macherey considers the concept of a variation to be a problem of logic, which is resolved by what Macherey considers to be “an economic perspective on the system of affective life [la vie affective] as a whole.”22 Macherey argues that it is throughout affective life that the capacity [puissance] of the conatus deploys itself between the poles of extreme passivity and activity. Affective life is constituted in one part by the Spinozist theory of the passions. Macherey explains what he means by affect in the following way: “It is the idea of an affection of the body which corresponds to an augmentation or diminution of its power to act: or this variation is in relation [rapport] with the fact that the body is affected, sometimes by itself, sometimes by an external body.”23 That is to say, the body is affected sometimes by itself resulting in the idea of an augmentation of its power to act, sometimes by an external body resulting in the idea of a diminution of its power to act. In the general definition of the affects, Spinoza notes that “when I say a greater or lesser force of existing than before, I do not understand that the Mind compares its Body’s present constitution with a past constitution, but that the idea which constitutes the form of the affect affirms of the body something which really involves more or less of reality than before.”24 Macherey argues that this idea expresses only “a momentary state of our body […] in rupture with [its] preceding state”25 in the sense of an augmentation or diminution, which marks a development or a restriction, of its power to act. As Spinoza says, all affectivity is based on the foundation of “joy” and “sadness” which, according to Macherey, expresses the “transformations” [mutationes] associated with the fact that the soul is without end exposed to “passing sometimes to a greater sometimes to a lesser perfection.” These transformations, or “passages” [transitiones], are experienced as “passions,” at the heart of which the “soul,” Macherey writes, “is completely subject to the mechanisms of the imagination.”26 The fact of passing to a greater perfection leaves the soul “euphoric,”27 however, Macherey emphasizes that even though this “joy” that the soul experiences is perfectly real, the base on which it rests remains imaginary.
The idea of perfection of a mode of which Spinoza speaks is a measure of the power to act which is expressed actively by this mode at any precise moment. In agreement Ramond’s notion of a fixed essence and power to act, Macherey suggests that whatever the margin of variation that affects the expression of the capacity [puissance] of the soul, this capacity “remains in all cases, and by definition, the same,”28 and, the soul “maintains this conformity to its nature without which it would simply cease to be.”29 Therefore, to pass to a greater perfection is to express “actively” a greater proportion of what is a mode’s fixed power to act. Passing to a lesser perfection is neither to be deprived of a greater perfection, in the sense of a hole or lack, nor “a pause in the pursuit of the movement which effects the fundamental impetus of the conatus.”30 Sadness is the inverse of joy, but it is not the absence of joy. As Macherey writes, sadness is “a contraction of the power to think of the soul, which deprives it momentarily, but which would be unthinkable without the persistence of this power, of which it continues to give a paradoxical expression.”31 Sadness therefore is an integral part of the movement of the conatus. What Macherey wants to make understandable by reasoning in this way is that, whatever the orientation of the variation which affects the soul, joy or sadness, the soul continues in all cases to be animated by the pressure of the conatus, and the “transformations” that the soul does not cease to experience, in no way alter the constancy of the conatus, which is, writes Macherey, “constitutionally inalterable, and persists imperturbably across these series of transitory states.”32 In postulating that the soul can be confronted at any moment by the alternative between two orientations of the contrary sense, Macherey wants to make us understand that there is no room to think that the soul “would have more control of itself when it is occupied by those sentiments which elate it than when it is occupied by those sentiments which depress it.”33 The character of the “transformations” therefore leaves the affections “fundamentally ambiguous.”34 As none of these states of the soul have in itself a guarantee of stability, affective life is a “state of permanent instability.”35 This state, Macherey suggests, prevails in the “uninterrupted affective flux [le flux affectif ininterrompu], which balances continuously between the two extreme poles of a maximum and a minimum.”36 Macherey concludes that the states of activity and passivity of the soul are not absolute states, and as such radically exclusive one of the other: but they are measured one against the other at the interior of a gradual series of states, that Macherey describes as the “uninterrupted affective flux [le flux affectif ininterrompu],” which tends to realize all intermediate forms between the two extremes. The variations of the intensity of the active expression of the power to act are therefore in rapport with the place occupied respectively by the “uninterrupted affective flux.”
It is here that Macherey introduces the concept of negativity into his interpretation of the constitution of a singular thing. Since we can never escape the “uninterrupted affective flux,” Macherey argues that “there is in our nature … something incomplete and unfinished which is the mark of our impotence, that is, of the limited and finite character of our power [puissance], which is always exposed to being measured against other powers [puissances] which exceed and oppose us negatively.”37 Macherey considers that Spinoza develops the notion of power [puissance] “to understand the way in which the representation of unaccomplished virtualities, which would traverse this power [puissance] as a sort of internal negativity, are definitively excluded from one’s field.”38 The “unaccomplished virtualities” are the imaginary ideas which correspond to the “uninterrupted affective flux,” and function as a sort of internal negativity only insofar as they function to inhibit or limit the power to act of a singular thing. But actually, as we have seen, the affects of the “uninterrupted affective flux” flow from relations with external bodies, this negativity in fact therefore derives from outside of the mode. As Macherey writes: “Reality can only be connoted negatively on the plan of its extrinsic relations, not in that which concerns its intrinsic constitution.”39 To confuse this negativity as something fundamental to singular things, “as if it actually constituted their cause or origin,”40 one would be mistaken. The negativity of singular things does not fundamentally define them. Macherey writes that “it is in reference to this point of view that Hegel could say … that Spinoza ‘did not give justice to the negative.’”41 Spinoza’s negativity is something fundamentally extrinsic to the nature of things. Negation passes occasionally between things, as the affections of modes which are limited reciprocally, but it does pass actually in the things themselves. It cannot in any case be determined from the interior. From this point of view, the reference that Macherey made to an internal “negation” is immediately relativized. It manifests itself in the nature of things across passive affections, but it comes from the exterior. This negativity draws the “uninterrupted affective flux” of a mode to the minimum side of the affirmation of its power [puissance], while the power to act is only actively expressed when the “uninterrupted affective flux” brings its power back, on the contrary, toward the maximum.
Macherey analyses affectivity from the perspective of the imagination, in relation to the attribute of thought or the soul, while Deleuze’s explication remains directly within the perspective of the body, and its power to act. Macherey considers that the effect of individual affects, whether joy or sadness, remain fundamentally ambiguous, absorbed within the “uninterrupted affective flux,” which functions as a hindrance or limit to the expression of the fixed power to act.42 Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza complicates some aspects of Macherey’s reading. First of all, Deleuze wants to introduce another level of possible variation. Even though we have seen Deleuze argue that the capacity to be affected for a “given” mode is fixed, he argues, simultaneously, that it does not remain fixed at all times and from all viewpoints. “Spinoza suggests,” Deleuze maintains, “that the relation that characterizes an existing mode as a whole is endowed with a kind of elasticity.”43 In opposition to the interpretation of Ramond, Deleuze maintains that a mode changes its body or relation [rapport] in leaving behind childhood, or on entering old age, and also after the permanent effects of illness.44 Such changes as growth, aging, and illness may be understood as though the capacity to be affected and the corresponding relations enjoy “a margin, a limit within which they take form and are deformed.”45 What Deleuze means by this is that, even though quantitatively there has been a change in the intensive parts of a modal essence, that is if there is a change in its intensity or degree of power, qualitatively the modal essence of this individual remains the same, and therefore is the same individual, only with an altered degree of power.46
Deleuze argues that the power of suffering and the power of acting of an existing finite mode can only be considered as two distinct principles, inversely proportional to each other within a “given,” or fixed, capacity to be affected, insofar as “we consider affections abstractly, without concretely considering the essence of the affected mode.”47 Macherey’s “uninterrupted affective flux” remains abstract in the sense that Deleuze maintains here. Deleuze argues that this is a primary thesis of Spinoza, and that “this thesis, if physically true, is not metaphysically true.”48 Deleuze argues that, for Spinoza, the power of suffering expresses nothing positive or real. “In every passive affection there is something imaginary which inhibits it from being real,”49 that is, which inhibits it from being real for the finite existing mode itself. As have seen, Macherey is in agreement on this point with Deleuze. When Spinoza writes in E3gendefaff that “the idea which constitutes the form of the affect affirms of the body something which really involves more or less of reality than before,” Macherey argues that the affection that the soul experiences is perfectly real, but the bases upon which they rest are imaginary. However, as we will see, Deleuze develops this idea differently to Macherey.
Deleuze’s argument hinges on what he describes as “a coincidence in the development” of the respective philosophies of Leibniz and of Spinoza, in relation to the theory of the affections, that is, the concept of action and passion, a coincidence that Deleuze considers as “more remarkable” than an influence.50 The coincidence that Deleuze finds between their respective terminologies is the most crucial aspect of the argument, the Leibnizian pre-Newtonian concept of “force” appearing as “coincident” with the concept of “power to act” of Spinoza. Deleuze presents the findings of Leibniz as follows: “Only active force is strictly real, positive and affirmative. Passive force […] expresses nothing but […] the mere limitation of active force. There would be no such force without the active force that it limits.”51 This is then transposed onto Spinoza as: “Our force of suffering is simply […] the limitation of our force of acting itself. Our force of suffering asserts nothing, because it expresses nothing at all: it ‘involves’ only […] the limitation of our power of action.”52
The way in which “affections” in general, or the “uninterrupted affective flux,” hinder or “limit” the expression of a modes power to act is, according to Macherey, very different from the way passive affections “limit” the expression of active affections, according to Deleuze. For Macherey, the term “limit” functions to explain the impact of the affections in general on an existing mode, limiting the active expression of a finite modes power to act to the range of variation between a maximum and a minimum. Whereas for Deleuze, the term “limit” defines a margin or threshold beyond which a mode’s capacity to be affected ceases to be animated by active affections and therefore ceases altogether to be expressed, that is to say, beyond which an existing finite mode ceases to exist.
Ramond criticizes Deleuze for using the term “limit” in the singular (“a limit,” writes Deleuze, “a margin”) “since what is actually designated are two limits (‘a maximum and a minimum’),” Ramond argues, “or two margins, ‘between which’, Deleuze should have written, and not … ‘in which’ the bodies ‘take form and are deformed.’”53 This criticism underlies the difference between the two concepts of “limit” that are used by Macherey and Deleuze, respectively. Macherey considers there to be two limits, a maximum and a minimum. According to him, the active expression of a mode’s power to act is hindered by the “uninterrupted affective flux” to vary within these finite limits. Whereas Deleuze uses the term “limit” in the singular to define a point beyond which an existing mode finite ceases to exist.
How can Deleuze speak of a limit in the singular when he also speaks of a maximum and a minimum, as does Macherey?54 Deleuze argues that it is only in the “physical view” that the capacity to be affected remains fixed for a given essence, and can therefore be represented by a fixed range of variation between a maximum and a minimum. Macherey’s point of view of modal existence fits this description. But Deleuze introduces another point of view which he calls the “ethical view,” in which the capacity to be affected of a mode “is fixed only within general limits.”55 What Deleuze means by “within general limits” and why these are different to “the limit” he speaks of in the singular remains to be seen, however, before doing so, it is necessary to elaborate Deleuze’s “ethical view.”
One of the fundamental aspects of Deleuze’s distinction between the physical and ethical views is the division of passive affections into, on the one hand, joyful passive affections and, on the other, sad passive affections. In the ethical view, passive affections function solely as a limit to the existence of the mode. They no longer animate modal essence, as all passive affections do with Macherey, but actually limit its expression. What changes from the physical view is the definition of the capacity to be affected of a mode, which was previously understood to be the combination of the power to suffer and the power to act of a mode. In the ethical view, the power to suffer is no longer considered to express the capacity to be affected. Deleuze describes the effect of the passive affections on the capacity to be affected in the following manner: “While exercised by passive affections, it is reduced to a minimum; we then remain imperfect and impotent, cut off, in a way, from our essence or our degree of power, cut off from what we can do.”56 The passive affections which have contributed to a mode’s power of suffering in the physical view now only reduce or limit a mode’s power to act to its “lowest degree.”57 Insofar as active affections contribute to a mode’s power to act, they are the only affections which exercise this new ethical concept of its capacity to be affected. “The power of action is, on its own,” Deleuze argues, “the same as the capacity to be affected as a whole,” and this newly defined power to act, “by itself, expresses essence.”58 Therefore, in the ethical view, an existing mode’s essence is expressed by its power to act, and its power to act is the same as its capacity to be affected.
When Deleuze says that conatus is the affirmation of essence in a mode’s existence, he means that the essence of a mode is determined as conatus insofar as it exists. As we have seen, a mode exists for Deleuze insofar as it has a capacity to be affected, where the capacity to be affected is determined by the precise relations between the extensive parts of which it is composed, the proportion or ration of which, at any given time, is fixed. According to the ethical view, the conatus of a finite mode is the “effort to maintain the body’s ability to be affected in a great number of ways,”59 therefore conatus expresses a mode’s capacity to be affected. Deleuze also argues that power to act is the direct expression of the mode’s capacity to be affected, where a mode’s power to act is the measure of the relation between the intensive parts which constitute a mode’s essence, or degree of power, insofar as this is expressed as the mode’s existence. The conatus of a mode thus expresses its capacity to be affected as its power to act. From this Deleuze is able to conclude that “the variations of conatus as it is determined by this or that affection are the dynamic variations of our power of action.”60 The conatus of a mode therefore varies with the corresponding variations of its capacity to be affected and its power to act.
Deleuze’s concept of a finite mode’s capacity to be affected, as we have seen, always already involves a concept of variable power to act as the expression of a modes active power of existence. This arrangement is complicated further in the ethical view, when Deleuze directly equates the capacity to be affected with the mode’s power to act. Passive affections, for Deleuze, now function as a limit of the expression of active affections, and therefore of the existence of the finite mode itself. This limit functions within the range of the given finite modes fixed power of existence, or essence,61 and therefore within a maximum and a minimum. Therefore, for Deleuze, the three aspects of a mode, its capacity to be affected which is expressed by its conatus as its power to act, are all together correspondingly open to variation within this range, and their expression is limited by the passive affections that they are together subject to. However, Deleuze argues that a maximum and a minimum, or the range of variation, established by our power of existence function only as “general limits,” because finite modes are also open to a third type of change, what he calls “metaphysical” changes, which are changes of the so-called “fixed” essence itself, or power of existence. Deleuze argues that “while a mode exists, its very essence is open to variation, according to affections that belong to it at a given moment.”62 These metaphysical changes to a mode’s essence are the changes which Deleuze describes as “a kind of elasticity.”63 As we noted previously, Deleuze argues that essence is only fixed qualitatively and remains open to variation under certain conditions quantitatively, insofar as it is composed of “intensive parts.” Therefore, the reason that the maximum and minimum are described as “general limits” is that Deleuze uses the term “limit” in the singular, which indicates that a finite mode is not so much limited between a maximum and a minimum, than by the actual passive affections which directly limit its existence.
Macherey and Deleuze therefore come to different conclusions concerning the resolution of the apparent contradiction between the double point of view of the essence of finite modes. According to Macherey, this contradiction dissipate itself as soon as we take into account the fact that the two theses in question are not situated on the same plane. He considers the concept of the margin of variation of a mode’s power to act to be a problem of logic, which is resolved by taking an economic perspective on the system of affective life as a whole. Macherey argues that when Spinoza characterizes the elementary forms of affectivity in the unfolding of affective life, they happen to be imaginary ideas of the power to act. It is these imaginary ideas which determine a mode’s power to act to vary between two alternate poles of activity and passivity, a maximum and a minimum. Affective life is constituted by these ideas which are expressed as an “uninterrupted affective flux.” Macherey argues that affective life is in fact separated from a mode’s power to act itself. The ideas of augmentation and diminution of the power to act associated with this life remain at the level of the imagination, while the essence, conatus, and power to act of a mode are fixed once and for all.
Deleuze views the problem differently, he considers it to be determined by two different perspectives within the Ethics: a physical view and an ethical view. Deleuze agrees with Macherey and Ramond in regards to the perspective of the physical view. But the differences in their respective interpretations revolve around their different interpretations of the role of the passive affections. For Macherey, they remain an integral part of the mode’s existence, being expressed by the conatus of a mode although hindering its ability to express fully, or more perfectly, its fixed power to act. Deleuze’s ethical view serves to resolve the apparent contradiction in another way. One of the fundamental aspects of the distinction between the physical view and the ethical view is, for Deleuze, a change in perspective on the relation between passive affections and active affections. In the ethical view, only active affections function integrally as a part of modal existence, constituting its power to act. Passive affections function rather as a limit to the existence of a mode, to the expression of its power to act, and therefore to its conatus, which both vary with the modes capacity to be affected. By admitting the variability of a mode’s capacity to be affected, of its conatus and of its power to act, while maintaining the concept of its fixed modal essence, Deleuze’s ethical view resolves the apparent contradiction; in fact, according to the ethical view there is no apparent contradiction.
This paper draws on material published in Chapter 6 of Simon B. Duffy, The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)
1 Charles Ramond, Qualité et quantité dans la philosophie de Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 194. All translations of this text are ours.
2 Pierre Macherey, Introduction à l’Éthique de Spinoza, tome 3: La vie affective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 24. All translations of this text are ours.
3 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone, 1992), 222.
4 Ibid., 204.
5 Ibid., 191.
6 Ibid., 174.
7 Ibid., 173.
8 Ibid., 198.
9 Ibid., 184.
10 Ibid., 207.
11 Ibid., 208.
12 Ibid., 209.
13 E2p13le4–7.
14 Deleuze, Expressionism, 213.
15 Ibid., 209.
16 Matheron discusses how the human being is more complex though less composite than a political society: “There are [.… ] individuals that are very integrated yet not very complex. For example, a stone: nearly all that happens in it concerns its structure, but nearly nothing happens to it; its essence is therefore very poor [pauvre]. Inversely, there are individuals that are very complex yet not very integrated. For example, a political society: lots of things happen to it, it’s possibility of internal variation assure it of a great chance of survival; but the majority of these variations (private life, loves and personal hatreds, etc.: all things indifferent to the eyes of the law) do not in any way concern its structure; and this is why it’s essence is very much less perfect than that of man, even though it has a higher degree of composition. Then again, there are individuals that are both very integrated and very complex: man, in particular, whose essence, for this reason, is extremely rich.” Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 58 (my translation). In the Letters to Boyle [Eps. 6, 11, 13, and 16], Spinoza expresses his doubts concerning the mechanist explanation of phenomena, which supposes the hierarchy from simple to complex, or the idea of a hierarchy of complexity based upon a hierarchy of composition.
17 E2ppo2.
18 E2pa3”.
19 E2ppo5.
20 Deleuze, Expressionism, 222.
21 Ibid., 222.
22 Ibid., 224.
23 Ibid., 355.
24 E3gendefaff, translated from Macherey, Introduction, 357.
25 Ibid., 355.
26 Ibid., 121.
27 Ibid., 333.
28 Ibid., 125.
29 Ibid., 123.
30 Ibid., 124.
31 Ibid., 125.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 121.
34 Ibid., 125.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 121.
37 Ibid., 70.
38 Ibid., 36.
39 Ibid., 125n.
40 Ibid., 73.
41 Ibid., 73n. For Hegel, one finds negativity at the foundation of things themselves.
42 Macherey bases his conception of the functioning of the “uninterrupted affective flux” on E3p17, where Spinoza speaks of fluctuatio animi. He argues that Spinoza chose to expose the theme of affective ambivalence [fluctuatio animi], with the case where a sadness doubles itself as a joy. “Let’s return to the wording of E3p17: it starts by presenting an affect of sadness ordinarily attached to an object, and if we understand this well, it is in this case that the object is cause ‘in itself’ of the ‘affect’; it then shows how, by contamination, because the object in question appears to resemble another object which ordinarily gives joy, this joy is artificially transferred onto the first object, which is then the cause ‘by accident’ of this affect of which the second object would be itself the cause ‘in itself’. The first affect proceeds from a direct association while the second proceeds from an indirect association by transfer, by which the object on which the affect is fixed is considered analogically, as representing another, and not itself” (Macherey, Introduction, 163).
43 Deleuze, Expressionism, 222.
44 E4p39s: “Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly have said he was the same man. I have heard stories, for example, of a Spanish Poet [.… ] If this seems incredible, what shall we say of infants? A man of advanced years believes their nature to be so different from his own that he could not be persuaded that he was ever an infant, if he did not make this conjecture concerning himself from [NS: the example of] others.” See Deleuze, Expressionism, 222.
45 Deleuze, Expressionism, 223.
46 We are not in a position here to take a critical perspective of Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza. Such a perspective, as we have already seen, would require a thorough discussion of the distinction between quantity and quality as it appears in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, which is beyond the confines of this chapter. For the moment what we are interested in doing is setting out as clearly as possible the two different readings of Spinoza that are elaborated by Macherey and Deleuze. Unfortunately, to articulate the distinctions that Deleuze makes in relation to modal essence requires a temporary and somewhat unsatisfactory trespass onto the territory of the quantity/quality distinction.
47 Deleuze, Expressionism, 223.
48 Ibid., 224.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 223.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 224.
53 Ramond, Qualité, 226.
54 As we have already seen in the following: “Essences [of existing modes] or degrees of power always correspond to a limit (a maximum or minimum).” Deleuze, Expressionism, 204.
55 Deleuze, Expressionism, 225.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 224.
58 Ibid., 225.
59 Ibid., 230.
60 Ibid., 231.
61 That is to say quantitative essence, as intensity or degree of power.
62 Deleuze, Expressionism, 226.
63 Ibid., 222.