Deleuzian Exercises and the Inversion of Stoicism
Janae Sholtz
In Logic of Sense Deleuze explicitly aligns his thinking on sense and event with the Stoics, elaborating upon the Stoic distinction between causal bodies and incorporeal effects to accommodate his ontology of the virtual and the actual, praising the Stoics as the only ethical position worth pursuing. Commentary on the Deleuze/Stoic connection generally centers around passages concerning the significance of Stoic incorporeals, as they relate to what Deleuze calls the metaphysics of surfaces as an explanation of sense-making.1 Less has been written about Deleuze’s claim concerning Stoic ethics,2 linked as it is to the characterization of ethics as “becoming worthy of the event”(1990: 149). Thus, it is worth pursuing the question of just how much of Stoic ethics, generally considered an ethics of perfection of rational disposition, obtains in Deleuze’s appropriation. Deleuze finds a counterpart in the Stoics to his desire to liberate ethics from views of morality based on transcendent truths and universal principles,3 preferring rather an ethological/ontological view of ethics—ethics as a practice of living in conformity with life, immanence, or cosmic order.4 Yet, I argue that Deleuze’s ethics offers a transformed understanding of Stoic oikeiōsis 5 and necessitates a re-formulation of spiritual exercises and practices proper to ethics.
Of course, there is some question as to whether Deleuze actually incorporates a faithful or classical interpretation of the Stoics.6 Deleuze explicitly understands Stoicism as providing a logic of surfaces and an ethics of the event (Deleuze 1990: 5–6, 143)—yet no similar language of surfaces appears in Stoic thought, and the notion of event plays a much smaller role.7 Likewise, in his discussion of incorporeal effects, Deleuze emphasizes lekta at the expense of other incorporeals (void, place, time), perhaps, as Sellars has criticized, extrapolating features of some incorporeals to lekta in a way that might suit his purpose but does not necessarily follow from the texts.8 One of the main impediments, to my mind, in fitting Stoic ethics to a Deleuzian framework is the seeming incompati bility between visions of the subject and its relation to the cosmos, particularly in relation to the idea of a rationally ordered cosmos and the goal of the perfection of reason as the telos of ethics. As such, a further goal of this chapter is to reconcile aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy that seem in tension with, or divergent from, certain Stoic principles, and by doing so, contemplate the way that Deleuze’s philosophy, while intimately bound to Stoicism, reflects its inversion in relation to the passions (amplification and intensification) and spiritual exercises (experimentation).
As highlighted, Deleuze claims that the only true ethics is the ethics of the event, which he understands as becoming worthy of what happens to us. This ethical prerogative bears resemblance to a fundamental Stoic mantra: don’t seek to have events happen as you wish but wish them to happen as they do happen. Of course, this mantra is intimately tied to the Stoic sense of fate9 that events are the effects of a network of necessarily connected causes. Thus, our human prerogative should be to make peace, so to speak, with the causal order and, moreover, try to understand and become aware of our place in it. In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze invokes the concept of fate: “There is no other ethic than the amor fati of philosophy” (1994: 159), and he repeats the famous formula of Logic of Sense: “to become worthy of the event” (1994: 160).10 The questions that arise from these statements are: How do we become worthy of what happens? What do we mean by “what happens to us?” and what is the sense of willing involved here?
In Stoicism, this principle (to will events as they happen) is derived from Zeno’s fundamental ethical insight and moral end—to live in agreement with Nature. Combined with Stoic physics, this leads to a very specific understanding of how to live. The Stoics held the view that the cosmos is fully material, causally determined, and rationally (divinely) ordered. Cosmologically, the Stoics believed that the universe is a unified, finite whole composed of two principles, one active (reason/God) and one passive (matter), both of which are corporeal. The active principle is “life-giving, rational, creative, and directive” (Inwood 2003: 129) and causes all the attributes of bodies: their qualifications, dispositions, and relative dispositions. The Stoic argument for thoroughgoing materialism extends from Zeno, who posited that in order for something to exist, it must be part of causal relations, and, as Zeno says, “it was quite impossible for anything to be acted on by something entirely without body” (LS 45A). This conjunction of rational principle and materiality is the basis for not only Stoic determinism but also their insistence on the rational order of the universe, which, moreover, guarantees that fate itself is providential (the ultimate cause is God). In other words, given that the laws of nature are synonymous with the cosmic reason of God, the goodness (and purposefulness) of the universe is guaranteed. Living in agreement with nature means that we cultivate our rational natures to be in line with this rational order as much as possible. This is possible because of what the Stoics refer to as oikeiōsis, which indicates a process of appropriation, whereby Nature appropriates the organism to its telos, and the organism, as part of nature, self-appropriates itself to its telos. Acting rationally is to do those things that accord with one’s nature and facilitate the health of the organism, and, as we shall see, explicitly means a movement beyond both passions and affectations, a life internally regulated as closely as possible to the rational nature of the universe.
Thus, to become worthy of what happens to us, from a Stoic standpoint, is bound up with ascending to the most rational part of our natures and accepting/understanding the dictates of fate. The Stoics derive multiple guiding principles from this and recommend a series of practical and spiritual activities, several of which involve proper objects and direction of desire—namely to will only that which is within our power.
Willing is understood as rational impulse, the result of assenting through careful application of judgment and reason to impressions. As Marcus Aurelius writes, “The rational nature goes well when it assents to nothing false or unclear among its impressions . . . when it generates desires and inclinations for only those things that are in our power, and when it welcomes everything apportioned to it by common nature” (MA 8.7). The things that are in our control are essentially our mental states, our opinions, desires, aversions, and emotions, while the things not in our control are essentially those things external to us, which are subject to the immutable laws of nature. Assent should be given only to those impressions that are kataleptic (clear and distinct and in conformity with the natural order of causes); this forms the basis of an ethical practice.
Generally, it is agreed that this emphasis on assent comprises the realm of freedom in Stoic ethics. Thus, what is within our power is the very fact of assent and control over our reactions and inner dispositions. Since one must modulate beliefs about the good and bad that inform one’s impulses and actions to accord with Nature, and the only things that can be considered good or bad are moral virtues or excellences of character, which correspond to the virtuous expression of a rational nature in line with the divinely ordered cosmos, anything that disrupts the inner tranquillity brought about by our resonance with the greater rational whole should be discarded or controlled. This is why the Stoics view pathē (passions) negatively, as misjudgments about things that we should consider with indifference. For instance, the expression of anger toward someone who has lied to us or stolen something is an improper reaction to these states of affairs, as these things are out of our control. These are bad judgments and therefore unnecessary passions.11 Moreover, regulating our desires and controlling our emotions is a kind of freedom, in that it makes us more capable to appreciate the whole and not be carried away from the truth by false impulses.
This practice requires a kind of mental, or spiritual, discipline—as Hadot says, “to apply the rules of discernment to inner representations . . . so that nothing that is not objective may infiltrate” (Hadot 1998: 35–6), and the Stoics develop spiritual exercises in order to do just this. These spiritual exercises consist of reflecting or meditating on one’s daily experiences—to identify falsely imposed value judgments—keeping in mind fundamental principles through daily repetition and imaginatively invoking a view of the cosmos and relation to it that extends beyond our everyday, self-interested, and banal experience (31). Deleuze’s constant reflection on philosophy’s illusions, value judgments, and his creative repetition of images and concepts to evoke the plane of immanence are counterparts, writ large, to these spiritual exercises, and his constant vigilance and examination of the foundations for our concepts and thought reveals a deep affinity with the Stoics’s style and practice of philosophy. As with the Stoics, these exercises are aimed not merely at the theoretical but toward realizing a transformation of one’s vision of the world, which is meant to be lived and practised (21). The twist, as we shall see, is that what Deleuze understands as impediments are, inversely, the very constructs upon which the Stoics rely.
For Deleuze, spiritual exercises would also be linked to experimentation, which must be devised to intensify experience rather than be met with indifference. His spiritual exercises are meant to bring us into contact with a cosmos of immanent forces and intensities:
Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical . . . it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These orders belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41)
Because of his immanent metaphysics, these will be techniques of disorientation, discontinuity, displacement, and disruption, not as conduits to revelation of a spiritual realm but as revelation of immanent cosmic force.12
As the second emphasis in Stoic ethics, “willing only that which is within one’s power” also suggests that we must carefully assess and understand the causal chain of events, recognizing that events occurring in relation to external bodies are not up to us but, in order to make good judgments, understanding as much of the causal network as possible. The Stoics held that the perfect sage would have a grasp of the ordering principles of nature and how everything connects together, thus making her beliefs firm and unshakeable in their accordance with nature.
The content of this knowledge . . . is the awareness of the rationality, teleology, and providentiality of cosmic divine rationality as it manifests itself in the constitution and functioning of terrestrial living beings, and, further, the understanding of how human rational action can be in accordance with, mirror, and promote this cosmic rationality. (Betegh 2003: 299)
In this sense, emphasizing what is or is not up to us is a way of conforming one’s life to the natural, material order; the sage must devote herself to greater understanding of the cosmos as a whole, relinquishing a view concentrated on one’s small sphere of personal interest. It is this imperative that leads Epictetus and Aurelius, for instance, to posit the need to develop what Sellars has called a cosmic perspective.
The impasse is that human judgment is normally based on a necessarily limited perspective, whereas the aim of a cosmic perspective requires moving beyond the sphere of self—to “observe the cosmos free from such human judgments” (Sellars 1999: 18). Even more importantly, this clarity seems essential to actually being able to live in agreement with Nature, moving beyond individual concerns toward a geo-historical perspective in which we see ourselves as part of the totality, subject to all of the processes of Nature (Sellars 2006: 164). Sellars’s position is that the Stoics were aware of this impasse and devised certain Stoic exercises, such as meditating on the impermanence of all things (1999: 12), in order to facilitate this dissolution of the boundary between Self and Nature and that this is an essential element of Stoic ethics existing in tandem with the logical concerns for right reason and judgment.
Deleuze endorses a similar division between judgments/sense (logic) and attention to the cosmic perspective (physics), and Sellars even designates Logic of Sense as related to the first pole and A Thousand Plateaus as concerned with the second, making the case for a holistic approach to his ethics. My contention is that these poles, though derived from Stoicism, are also the place of Deleuze’s inversion of Stoicism. In order to fully appreciate how, we must extend Sellars claim of the need to look at Deleuze’s corpus as a whole, including not only these two references but other elements of Deleuze’s own writings and also by engaging the significance of other figures within Deleuze’s alternative lineage of immanent ontology. I will begin by parsing through several points of dislocation between Deleuze and the Stoics’s ethical accounts, specifically when understood in relation to the processes of actualization and counteractualization originating from his earlier work.
1 Actualization, Counteractualization, and the Intensive Field
Though willing the event has often been associated with the purely logical or virtual (metaphysical surface),13 I am interested in examining the event from Deleuze’s stance toward its bodily incorporation, as integral to the ethics of being worthy of the event. Deleuze says that the Stoic sage is one who “understands the pure event . . . [and] also wills the embodiment and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in a state of affairs and in his or her own body and flesh” (Deleuze 1990: 146), raising the question of whether (and how) willing the event concerns both the logical and the physical pole of the Stoic division.
Deleuze paraphrases Émile Bréhier’s La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme (1962: 13), in saying that the Stoics were the first to “radically distinguish” two planes of being (1990: 5): bodies and states of affairs (which exist) and incorporeals (which subsist), and it is true that Logic of Sense is primarily focused on explicating the sense of the logical pole of this division. The incorporeals that Deleuze focuses upon are lekta, as logical or dialectical attributes. He describes these as subsisting or inhering in states of affairs that result from bodies, expressed as verbs, and existing at the limit or surface of being. They designate a way of being and are intimately connected to bodies—growing, becoming smaller, being cut. For Deleuze, this Stoic distribution implies “an entirely new cleavage of the causal relation” (1990: 6). On the plane of being/bodies, they refer causes to causes, while at the surface, bodies are the causes of incorporeal surface effects, which, again following Bréhier, can be multiplied infinitely: “a multiplicity of incorporeal beings without connection or end” (Bréhier 1962: 13). Effects can be referred to effects, and proliferate, as it were, at the “surface of being” (Bréhier 1962: 13). This new distribution upheaves philosophical categorization and reverses Platonic metaphysics that privileges the reality of the Idea. For the Stoics, states of affairs, quantities, and qualities are beings (bodies) and are contrasted to the extra-being of sense, which, as incorporeal, is a nonexisting entity—and which Deleuze links to the virtual. Thus, we are set to understand the event topologically as an infinite series of effects, frolicking at the surface of being, always referring back to a material foundation, though as non-resembling expressions (proliferations) of it.
Deleuze also attributes the relationship between the two levels to the Stoics: “Stoics’ strength lay in making a line of separation pass—no longer between the sensible and the intelligible, or between the soul and the body, but where no one had seen it before—between physical depth and metaphysical surface” (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 63), which begs the question of what kind of relationality this is. There are two interpretations of Deleuze’s position here: (1) that order of causation is unidirectional, from material causes to effects and (2) that this passage between goes beyond a one-way cause/effect relationship. This debate hinges upon the elusive power of what Deleuze calls the quasi-cause, which he attributes to incorporeal effects, as an alternative type of causality that is somehow outside of the system of actual (physical) causal relations. The latter view, which will be mine, suggests Deleuze’s emphasis on quasi-causality as an important factor in the differences between Stoicism and Deleuze.
Deleuze gets the notion of quasi-causality from Bréhier’s reading of Stoic logic, wherein Bréhier distinguishes “real” corporeal being from “the plane of facts” at the surface of being (1962: 13). In relation to this surface, Bréhier refers to reason’s “spontaneity” as an “active cause” (16) which constructs significations,14 and, though this is most certainly the impetus for Deleuze’s notion of the “quasi-cause,” I believe it also marks a divergence, in that Deleuze attributes this “spontaneity” to a more primary disparity, the heterogeneity between series, which affects reason rather than extending from it—in essence, a nonsense within sense. It is this disparity that explains the proliferation of “a multiplicity of incorporeal beings without connection or end” (1962: 13) and which Deleuze links to the idea of the quasi-cause.
Deleuze describes the quasi-cause as a mark of difference between heterogeneous series, the unequal and/or the aleatory, and, though there are a few commentators who agree that Deleuze’s interpretation of quasi-cause is compatible with the Stoics, many have suggested that his utilization of this term is idiosyncratic15 and that he attributes more power to this feature than most Stoic scholars are willing to concede. While it is generally agreed that the quasi-cause indicates some kind of causal relationship that involves the virtual (sense or event) and the actual, intensive plenum (the realm of bodies),16 th ere is much debate over whether Deleuze’s interpretation accurately portrays incorporeals as having a “kind of autonomy with respect to Stoic bodies/beings” (Bennett 2015b: 3) (i.e., can they generate other effects), and, further, whether effects, as quasi-causes, affect how we interact with the world. As Bennett explains, the mainstream interpretation of incorporeals is that they have a subordinate relation to bodies, an asymmetrical dependence (2015b: 4), yet he goes on to argue that some commentators read this relationship as reciprocal (see Boeri 2001; Bobzien 1998). Deleuze’s formulation of quasi-causality operates similarly to suggest that incorporeals are not merely “sterile byproducts of causal relations” but, instead, exercise their own power (Bennett 2015b: 5). Bennett associates this power with the logic of events, maintaining that at the level of the event (still incorporeal), there is a proliferative capability that goes beyond or happens irrespective of corporeal bodies “among event-effects themselves” (2015b: 7). Roffe reiterates this reading, endorsing Bennett’s view that quasi-causality pertains only to the level of virtual events: “Events belong together, each making sense of each other, providing a point of view from which the other is able to be expressed” (2017: 284). This new causality resituates other events (285) but has nothing to do with the dynamic interactions of the Actual. I believe we should push this notion of the passage between physical depth and metaphysical surface farther.
To some extent, Roffe provides the connective tissue between my reading and Bennett’s.17 He reads the quasi-causal developmentally, claiming that, while in Logic of Sense, under the influence of the Stoics, Deleuze introduces the quasi-cause to make sense of the nature of compatibility and incompatibility between events—a strictly horizontal account of interactions between metaphysical surface events. In Anti-Oedipus the quasi-cause becomes vertical, expressing modality according to which intensive social inscriptions come to bear on social processes of connection. In other words, the quasi-cause is a problem in being rather than effect (Roffe 2017: 289), that is not merely residing within the incorporeal. Roffe also wants to push the limitations placed on quasi-causality; he just locates this later in Deleuze’s thinking with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, where he claims the quasi-cause is related to a kind of vertical causality which operates between the intensive plenum and the metaphysical surface. What Roffe locates in Anti-Oedipus, I want to insist, is already there in Logic of Sense, partly because I read the process of dramatization, developed in Difference and Repetition, as re-emerging in the discussion of counteractualization in Logic of Sense, rather than returning via Anti-Oedipus (see Sholtz 2016).
In the following passage Deleuze utilizes the theory of the event to propose another affinity with Stoic philosophy—that of fate. Yet, it is here that one may begin to see the possible impact of a reformulated emphasis on quasi-causality:
The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us . . . to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth. (1990: 149–50, my emphasis)
Though the language seems related to an idea of fate and acceptance in a Stoic manner, it is also within this passage that we can also see Deleuze diverging from Stoicism. We can easily assimilate the willing of (or even assenting to) the event to Stoic ethics, but what does it mean to release the event? Here is where I believe the full impact of the quasi-causality of effects comes back into play. One thing often lost in treatments of Deleuze’s event is the ineluctable double-sidedness that the surface implies: “A doubling which . . . permits sense, at the surface, to be distributed to both sides” (1990: 125).
Deleuze reintroduces the question of bodies and passions in light of Stoic physics as an ethics of bodies, acknowledging that the event cannot be grasped or willed without it being referred to the corporeal cause from which it results, as well as the unity of causes (1990: 124). He calls this divination a tracing of lines and points that appear on surfaces (143). Effects act as signs of relations, forces, and intensities occurring between and within bodies. Deleuze says that it is by following the border that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal, releasing the incorporeal double and multiplying the method of expression. In A Thousand Plateaus, this process of tracing takes an even more materialist bent and becomes associated with the cosmic artisan, as one who is sensitive to cosmic flows and intensities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 223–9, 345). Dramatization is this act of retracing or miming of the event, and it follows that this method not only wills the event as it is but allows for more of its release.18 Thus, the activity, though tracing the incorporeal sign, is a matter of opening up more potentialities for bodily encounters to be actualized.
This could be interpreted as purely metaphysical activity: “to extract sense and create identifiable states” (Lundy 2012: 45), yet Deleuze also writes that the more that events traverse the entire, depthless extension, the more they affect bodies which they cut and bruise (1990: 10), implying not only that “they provide the infinitive sense or organizational structure by which individuation occurs” (Lundy 2012: 45), but that they have some role in the actualization of bodies. In other words, incorporeal events do play a role in the selection involved in actualization of particular bodies out of the dynamic processes of the intensive plenum (in terms of which of these will be expressed): “As long as the surface holds, not only will sense be unfolded, but it will also partake of the quasi-cause attached to it. It, in turn, brings about individuation and all that ensues in a process of determination of bodies” (1990: 126). The depth has the power to organize surfaces, but Deleuze insists that it is the surface—the locus of the quasi-cause—which is like a theater for the reshuffling of singularities, condensations, and fusions (1990: 125). “The event re-patterns a system” (Protevi 2006) in much the same way that abstract machines operate in the framing of assemblages and relations later in A Thousand Plateaus.
The idea of quasi-cause is idiosyncratic to Deleuze in that it requires an appeal to these processes of actualization and counteractualization. Incorporeal surface effects are quasi-causes in the sense that through their proliferation, combination, or relations, they bring more unactualized potentialities, understood as the intensities and forces, to the surface. Thus, they do not actually cause in the Stoic sense, but they do quasi-cause the emergence or expression of that which already exists in an intensive state—as individuations and determinations—only now as re-patterned actualizations.
What I am suggesting is that, aside from the logical compatibility of effects/events which assures “the full autonomy of the effect” (1990: 95), in order to fully understand this elusive “power” of quasi-causality, one has to take into consideration the factors of actualization and counteractualization connected as they are to the logic of the individuation (generation of bodies out of the dynamic processes of the intensive plenum); and, in terms of “becoming worthy of the event,” it is counteractualization that really holds crucial import. In fact, Boundas goes as far as saying “it is this process that reveals the true meaning of ‘becoming worthy of the event’—the spinal cord of Deleuze’s ethics” (2006: 17). The fact is that the event is always virtual and involved in processes of actualization and counteractualization. As Boundas remarks, “Deleuze situates freedom in the space of contradiction between the sterility and impassiveness of the virtual event and the event’s resourcefulness in engendering actual states of affairs (Deleuze 1990: 4–11)” (2009: 223). It allows us to recognize the infinite play that is possible at the surface and between the surface and the depth. Becoming worthy of what happens to us is to exceed that which has been actualized, idea or state of affair, in order to recognize that what happens to us is a constant interplay with the virtual reservoir, that which is excessive to the event in any instant—a constant demand not to hypostasize existence.
Thus, excess is a central feature of the event—an excess that is only contingently actualized and which opens up a realm of chance and indeterminacy not present in Stoic ontology.19 The event is a “paradoxical element, intervening as nonsense or as an aleatory point, and operating as a quasi-cause” (1990: 95). Yes, it is the case that this event is incorporeal, but it also intervenes on the intensive plenum of pre-individuated forces which form the immanent field out of which bodies arise. More will be said about how this field differs from the materialist, cosmological picture of the Stoics in the next section, but for now, we can relate this to the difference between being and becoming—bodies do not preexist their relations, and bodies do not exhaust the excessivity of immanence, thus there is a connection back to effects wherein they provide illumination of different potential relations and a framework for making those connections.
Willing the event is willing the release of more of the event; this is what is at stake in so many of Deleuze’s invocations to make oneself a bodywithoutorgans (BwO), to dismantle the Self,20 and to become worthy of the Event. Deleuze has said that we need more resistance to the present—let us interpret that in light of what we have just said to mean that resistance to the present means resisting interpreting the real only in terms of the actualized. Then we have a new way of conceiving what it means to be worthy of what happens to us, or as Colebrook says, “The true sense of freedom (is) an embrace of the virtual that is not limited to the possibilities that are contained within our present point of view” (2002: 171). Willing is a kind of prosochē, a “continuous vigilance and presence of mind” (Hadot 1995: 84) but one directed toward the infinite excessiveness of the event—to extract (counteractualize) more and more of the event in order that it may be incorporated into states of affairs.
Summarily, what is at stake in our guiding is the following: (1) to become worthy of the event equals traversing the event; (2) willing implies a kind of selection, not just assent; the actor/sage occupies the instant, represents and comprehends this instant, and in so doing selects (limits) the event in such a way that makes the instant all the more intense (147); (3) releasing the event means accessing more of the virtual event. What remains is to explore the final element of the quote: (4) to become the offspring of one’s own events, to be reborn. This is related to the Deleuzian imperative to overcoming the transcendental illusion of the Self, indicating a process of dismantling the boundaries of the Self, and is the (inverted) conceptual coun terpart to the Stoic goal of eliminating the boundaries between the self and the cosmos. Before attending to this final element of becoming worthy of the event, it is important to have a sense of how the Stoics and Deleuze conceive both the human and what is beyond the human—their accounts of the cosmos. Looking more closely at the ways self and cosmos are differentially conceived gives us a clearer path toward a Deleuzian ethics.
2 Stoic and Deleuzian Conceptions of Self—Inverting Oikeiōsis
In order to further examine the inversion between Stoicism and Deleuze, we must look more closely at their different conceptions of the self. Though it is rather uncontroversial to claim that the Stoics identify reason as the key characteristic of the human soul (LS 63D), let’s look at the consideration of the Stoic self which is provided by Hadot in The Inner Citadel and the relation of the higher self to a cosmic perspective therein. The self becomes aware of itself as an island of freedom in the midst of a great sea of necessity when the phenomena of nature are stripped of all adjectives so that it appears in its nudity and savage beauty, which would be the perspective of universal Nature and the flow of eternal metamorphoses (1998: 112).
Accomplishing this cosmic perspective requires a delimitation of the self, or rather the elimination of certain nonessential elements of the higher self. Hadot calls this delimitation of the Self the fundamental activity of Stoicism (1998: 120); it reflects a complete transformation of self-consciousness. The guiding principle is that anything that is subject to external causality must be delimited. Then there are circles of exteriority which must not enter into consideration of the true self and its realm of freedom, each of which corresponds to Stoic doctrine concerning those which should be considered as indifferents, including the body as subject to physical laws and the domain of involuntary emotions, which arise from the body and are conceived as a first shock to the soul that cannot be avoided with the help of reason (117). By delimiting the self from these, the self becomes aware that it stands outside of this flux but, in so doing, now wants and acts only according to reason, purifying the higher self that is aligned to the Rational world soul (LS: 396). The higher self is purified of pathos, aligned with reason, and revels in the intellect—its good sense.
As we have seen, the Stoic view of oikeiōsis assumes the good nature of thought in terms of its a priori nature as well as its telos—its natural orientation toward truth and reason. Deleuze, on the other hand, understands the rational, self-contained self to be a transcendental illusion, and the image of thought that it relies upon as in need of critique. According to him, good sense indicates a particular distribution of faculties that relies on assumptions of unification, identification, and recognition. Deleuze views the assumption of good sense as pragmatic, rather than expressing a metaphysical reality. Good will and good sense merely overlay the human desire for stability and order onto reality. When good sense sees differences, it wills that the differences eventually equalize or annul themselves (see Lawlor 2012: 106–12). Good sense thus “affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction” (Deleuze 1990: 1). It wills the taming of our interaction with radical differences and the becoming/s of immanent existence. To truly be worthy of the event, rather than willing the erasure of differences, willing the event would perhaps multiply them, affirming the irreducible heterogeneity of what Deleuze calls “paradoxical agency” (Deleuze 1990: 40: see Lawlor 2012: 111).
Deleuze’s image of thought is not one of harmonious agreement between faculties but of each faculty being taken to its limit, by and through external provocation. The judgments that must be overcome are the very endorsement of this good and common sense of a rational, higher self, as these “crush thought under an image which is that of the Same and the Similar in representation, but profoundly betrays what it means to think” (Deleuze 1994: 167)—an image which obscures the true nature of thought as an encounter with difference rather than of representation. Therefore, dismantling the self is not just a matter of moving beyond our personal perspective, interests, or desires to recognize our place in a larger whole, but a matter of overcoming a certain image of thought that assumes common sense and the good nature of sense (desire for truth): “There would seem to be an absolute incompatibility between a notion of making the self an inner citadel . . . and dismantling the self” (Skrebowski 2005: 11). The former subscribes to a natural resemblance between the Self and Nature, while the latter unlinks thought from the bonds of a transcendent principle and allows thought to think its own genetic conditions out of an impersonal and inhuman transcendental field.
Yet I want to claim that Deleuze actually takes the Stoic imperative to become one with, or correspond to, the cosmic to its ultimate, logical conclusion. Rather than accepting the Stoic vision of a rational organizing principle in the cosmos, Deleuze proffers a view of nature as self-differing, generative, and indeterminate.21 Understood through this lens, the seeming incompatibility between Deleuze’s dismantling of the self and the edict to live according to nature resolves itself, as thought must think its self-differing genesis and renewal as aligned with this wholly impersonal, nonrational, and indeterminate cosmic flux rather than stand outside of it—an inversion of Stoicism, but a form of oikeiōsis nonetheless.
The inversion reflected in Deleuze’s dismantling of the Self requires the reversal of the Stoic priority of self-control and the concomitant disciplining o f the passions or desire—supporting Deleuze’s accentuation of the practices of experimentation and the proliferating of desires/(active) passions: “Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of the encounter with that which forces thought to raise up the absolute necessity of an act or thought or passion to think” (Deleuze 1994: 176). What this implies is that, rather than the delimitation described by Hadot, dismantling the Self is a method of exploring and surpassing limits of our being, which would be inherently externally oriented and which operates through exposure rather than closure.
Acquiring knowledge of the powers of the body in order to discover in a parallel fashion, powers of the mind that escape consciousness . . . to discover more in the body than we know and hence more in the mind than we are conscious of. (Deleuze 1988: 90)
Deleuze presents this becoming, and thus dissolution, of the Self as a matter of passages and fluctuations of intensity, which is to say, an affective engagement with the world. Obviously, this is always a processual and partial dismantling—Deleuze and Guattari caution of moving too fast and of various kinds of radical or full eviscerations (like alcoholism or suicide) which would be counter to life itself. The goal would be allowing these fluctuations and disturbances to flow over and through us, effectively letting them in, in order to transform and thus incessantly dismantle hypostasized formations and identities we tend to associate with of ourselves. Remembering Deleuze’s imperative to release the event, affect is the enacting of a cut or tear in the surface, an encounter that forcefully re-opens the pulsating, primary order from whence sense and surface arises. Deleuzian spiritual exercises would involve the consideration of affect and desire as virtues rather than things to be avoided or delayed. Understanding or becoming sensitive to affective engagements, rather than attempting to limit or eradicate them, is important for improving or enhancing our knowledge of the world and our place in it. On this issue, Deleuze is more in line with Nietzsche than the Stoics, as Nietzsche understood that it was by participating in the superabundance of life, intensifying our vulnerability to chance and risk, that we grow and learn (the Great Health). As Ure explains, one of Nietzsche’s main critiques of Stoicism is that their insistence on indifference especially in relation to our passions “cuts us off from the learning process that the passions facilitate” (2016: 298).
Spinoza, who Deleuze identifies as his predecessor, also reserves a more positive role for the passions and body and has a similar view of the edifying potential of encounters, which is explained in terms of the increase or decrease in one’s power to act and think (to affect and be affected). And this is a crucial difference: the emphasis placed on affect and the attunement to the body, rather than indifference toward it, which indicates the relation between an affecting body and an affected body, and, by extrapolation, centers upon the importance rather than indifference toward the body as both the site of passage of intensity and the locus of these transformations. Rather than ethics being characterized by a movement beyond passions and affectations, it “is a movement oriented by encounters . . . not based on autonomy and self-containment, the quelling of external impingements, but through engagements that enhance or deplete one’s powers of bodies and thought to act and be acted upon” (Grosz 2017: 56). Positively, this means that affections and passions are utilized, rather than eschewed, as part of a practical ethology whose goal is to “denounce all that separates us from life” (Deleuze 1988: 26), that is separates us from our power (conatus).
Now, in what seems to be a correlate to Stoicism, Spinoza delineates actions, as a power of acting (originating from the individual), from passions, as a power of being acted upon (originating from an external source). For Spinoza, passive passions are those linked to inadequate ideas (separation from real causes), while active or joyful passions (those in which external bodies are in agreement with mine) are those corresponding to adequate ideas, which, very similarly to the Stoics, means that there is a clear understanding of real causes, which, in turn, leads to the increase of our capacity to act, active joy. Thus, their acquisition entails bringing the passions in line with a rational order. While passions, in general, separate us from our power of acting, they can also increase our power to be affected (Deleuze 1988: 27), and, when we have encounters which enter into agreement with our own body, they produce joyful passions that lead us “to the point of transmutation . . . that will make us worthy of action, of active joys” (28) which pertain to rational acquisition or more perfect understanding. In other words, a prima facie reading of Spinoza would suggest that passions are a necessary and an ineliminable part of what “makes us worthy” of action and life but are to be surpassed in view of a more rational acquisition of the concept. Deleuze’s uptake of Spinoza (see 1988) actually complexifies this particular understanding of the role of affect.
On the prior view, increase of power and the corresponding active joy pertain to moving beyond sad passions (and some might say even joyful passions), which differs from Deleuze’s appropriation on several counts. First, although Deleuze advocates the promotion of joyful passions and, ultimately, active joy, as Ruddick points out and I agree, Deleuze extends Spinoza’s argument for exploring the passions to all affects. Thus Deleuze is not merely focused on the move from passive to active (or the discovery of common notions that this implies), but instead “more complex determinations of a range of emotional [and affective] registers” (Ruddick 2010: 35) and their creative potential.22 In other words, there is a shift in viewing affect as edifying our thought to actually creating new modes of thought and as exploration of the immanence of affective life as such. Though perhaps less apparent when reading Deleuze solely on Spinoza, this becomes clear when combined with his insistence on the creative potential of aesthetic encounters, whose power lies in their ability to disrupt and confound us. Relatedly, Deleuze would not be satisfied by an account of eupatheiai (good passions), as related to Stoic virtue or Spinozist correlation to adequate ideas, that merely associates them with becoming mo re rationally ordered or conceptually clear: “The aim is not to make something known to us but to understand our power of knowing” (Deleuze 1988: 83). At several points in his discussion of Spinoza, Deleuze points to a kind of knowledge beyond Reason (intuitive intellect) (58) or toward a mode of thinking beyond the Idea (that of conatus and affect) (59). “Kinds of knowledge are modes of existence, because knowing embraces the types of consciousness and the types of affects that correspond to it” (82). Second, this interpretation also neglects the pervasive way that Deleuze advocates affirmation of the encounters as a provocation in and of itself (as a power of shame to catapult us beyond ourselves/our I and what we “think” we know/are, that is, our stupidity23 ).
Rather than [solely] a telos toward rational, adequate ideas—what Ruddick insinuates is the recuperation of a “Stoic moment in Spinoza’s passions” (2010: 36)—the Deleuzian ethos is guided by the desire to increase affective capacities and create new capacities. It is thanks to these passions that we move to more understanding and knowledge, but Deleuze is quick to point out that this knowledge is in service of life, of understanding our singular existence as an ongoing and infinite process (being worthy of the event as it is infinite and never ending).
In this respect, Deleuze takes the more Nietzschean view that passions and affects should be cultivated in order to learn more about the unknown—essentially embracing risk and contingency in the acknowledgment that our purview should be to explore more of what we can become, to discover and create, rather than assume a coherence between an already known rational nature and ourselves: “The genesis of thought is not a model of the same, but a co-creation of something unforeseen” (Ruddick 2010: 36). There is value in every encounter in that they force us to think beyond recognition, ungrounding thought. Deleuze recognizes the importance of passive affects and bodily encounters in moving us beyond ourselves: “It is a matter of acquiring knowledge of the body in order to discover in parallel fashion, powers of the mind that escape consciousness” (Deleuze 1988: 90). The immediate visceral experience of an encounter (passive affect) actually creates changes on and through bodies, potentially engendering different perceptual fields and modes of thought. Encountering new affects, shocking affects, spurs thought to create new concepts, and thus to introduce new ways of being into the social sphere. Moreover, the rise and fall, these fluctuations, of affect are the very process by which the individual becomes worthy of the event or immanently related to the cosmos. This process of exploration is a counteractualization which leads to greater understanding of the cosmic and greater empowerment of ourselves. This represents a further reorientation of the Spinozist ethos toward Deleuze’s full throttle embrace of experimentation.
Deleuze’s emphasis on affections, desires, and passions also constitutes a reorientation of living in agreement, a new oikeiōsis. As I have mentioned, the Stoics associated oikeiōsis with self-preservation and perfection of the normative self, deriving the notion from observing how organisms are fitted to their environment, and linking this to humanity’s greatest capacity—to reason. For Deleuze, preservation is rather expressed as increase in the capacity to be affected and to affect: “Each tries equally to preserve himself, and has as much right as he has power, given the affections that actually exercise his capacity to be affected” (Deleuze 1990: 258). Here, Deleuze is endorsing the basic premise of living in agreement, but this phrase has now become compatible with what Deleuze thinks should guide us: affects which both enhance the power (potential) of the body and lead us to know what these potentials are, spurring us to new thoughts and new bodily configurations. What differentiates the wise from the foolish is the type of affectations of which they are capable.
3 From Spiritual Exercises to Experimentation
In order to experience the Event, Deleuze advocates the dismantling of the Self—a dismantling which differs dramatically from the dissolving of boundaries between Self and Nature implied by the Stoics. Counteractualizing or releasing the event, if it is to be an engagement with the virtuality of the Idea/Event, needs the dissolution of the subject—the I must counteractualize itself. In other words, the dismantling of the self has to precede the dissolution of boundary between Self and the cosmos, which Deleuze might say still remains in the realm of the actual. This is an idiosyncratic idea of rebirth that it is predicated on a kind of death, the perpetual and incessant experience of the dissolution of subjectivity into the event. This is position that we find both in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, where Deleuze calls for the dissolution of self as a kind of performance which would allow the individual to re-engage the intensive plenum. Working through or contemplating the double-ness of death, as an incongruent interface between the empirical event and transcendental instance, is a kind of Deleuzian spiritual exercise, which initiates what he calls a “radical reversal . . . [that] loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power” (Deleuze 1994: 148). It is the very practice of contemplating the incommensurability of the two faces of death that constitutes a method of cracking the self, wherein the illusory boundaries of the Self’s identity and resemblance fall away in light of the affirmation of the intensive plenum and pure connectivity. Hence death is affirmed as generative becoming beyond the Self. This is another instance of the importance of what Spinoza might call the confusion of the passive—these affections that have not been fully incorporated into the active and thus confound our sense of assurance. It is also an instance where Deleuze most clearly moves beyond the sole ethical aim of increasing power, in service of what seems to be the higher order of becoming worthy of the event itself. Submitting ourselves to the crack is a necessary component because living in agreement is placing oneself into the flow of the cosmic, not obtaining a final resting place—for thought or for ourselves.
This is a spiritual exercise, the outcome of which is to transform the individual perspective into a perspective of the absolutely and infinitely singular, not the universal. As well, this is merely a step necessary to engage in a more “appropriate” relation with immanence. The dismantling of the subject loosens the psychic boundaries in order tha t one begin the work of making oneself a bodywithoutorgans by engaging more acutely with the fluctuations of intensity of the plane of immanence. Willing that one become an event is thus the deeper sense of becoming worthy of the event, which brings us to the issue of experimentation.
Willing the event is to engage in a way of life directed by the intent to take the event to its limit, to always experience more of the event. But if the event is infinite, the limit would be limitless. Deleuze wants us “to explore all distances” (Deleuze 1990: 210), transforming ourselves through the process, rather than succumb to any particular actualization of the event and resign ourselves to our “fate” in a limited fashion. As Bowden says, given the ongoing nature of the sense-event, Deleuze translates the Stoic desire to live according to nature to mean living in accordance with the event, which never finishes coming about (Bowden 2011: 45). This is a process of affirming as much of the event as we can stand to experience and perpetual transgression as the way of life—the Nietzschean element of affirmation melds with Stoic acceptance of fate.
Deleuze’s emphasis on experimentation (spiritual and bodily) is integral to his ontology of the event:
The sage waits for the event, understands the pure event in its eternal truth, independently of its spatio-temporal actualizations, as something eternally yet-to-come and always already passed. But, at the same time, the sage also wills the embodiment and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in states of affairs and in his or her own body and flesh. (Deleuze 1990: 146).
This quote suggests that, for Deleuze, experimentation is a matter of imbricating ourselves in immanence (material existence). This correlates to Deleuze’s penchant for Spinoza’s claim that no one has yet determined what the body can do. As we have seen, we primarily come to know the body indirectly, through being affected. Moreover, passive (external) affectations are what allow us to go beyond what we already “know.”
Attempts to capture the flows of desire and infinite powers of the event can be disastrous: Artaud’s madness or Fitzgerald’s alcoholism. This prompts Deleuze to question whether we should limit ourselves to the counteractualization of an event that would not include actual physical destruction:
To will the event, how could we not also will its full actualization in a corporeal mixture . . .? If the order of the surface is itself cracked, how could it not itself break up, how is it to be prevented from precipitating destruction . . . how can we prevent deep life from becoming a demolition job? (Deleuze 1990: 183)
But then Deleuze flips the question: Are we merely to speak of these risks taken to the body and to the extremities of psychic awareness while remaining on the shore? These individuals who succeeded in communicating something of the event only did so through great risk and bodily vulnerability. Remaining at the shore, as a spectator, is not an option. The fine line between tracing the incorporeal crack at the surface and letting this crack deepen exists in tandem with the inscription on bodies: “The eternal truth of the event is grasped only if the event is also inscribed in the flesh” (Deleuze 1990: 188). The metaphor of the crack is illustrative in that it invokes the metaphysical surface of thought and instructs us to move beyond this purely ideational plane. Thought must be quickened through the return of exteriority and the depth of the body. The crack, by which we can understand the dismantling of the Self, makes possible the release of the underlying forces and affects that compose the depth (body and materiality) from which the surface is generated. Deleuze likens the greatest health to an open wound—living on the surface of a sheer exposure to the outside and suffering the intensification of this moment.
The construction of the bodywithoutorgans corresponds to this open wound—letting chaos in to remake our bodies and our thoughts. Making a BwO is described as a process of freeing of intensities, which is initiated through the fracture of self and reason (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 158). One can see how Deleuze’s revision of the image of thought as a genetic provocation of the faculties inverts the priority of rational judgment by positing a more fundamental level of experience that must be accounted for (i.e., affect), issuing in his imperative to think that which is unthought. It is the level of affect, which is found in those intensities that pass between bodies and the variations and resonances between them. But Deleuze is clear; making a BwO is “not a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 149–50), sustained through pursuit of intense embodied experiences. In this way, affect is synonymous with the force of encounter, and experimentations calibrate our awareness to movements of becoming.
Deleuze’s is a method of repetition and imagination that disciplines us against certain transcendental illusions. It is a method of miming that reminds us of the externality of thought. It is a method informed by the nature of the event, which allows us to place ourselves within its ebbs and flows in order that we become worthy of that event. It is a method of counteractualization, which releases the event. Finally, it is a method of experimentation, which places our bodies at risk in order to experience and transgress the apparent limits thereof.
For the Stoics, all beings participate in rational being, while for Deleuze, all beings are part of the immanent field of forces and intensity. Whereas Stoic immanence is governed by rational order, Deleuzian immanence is characterized by contingent becoming. What is appropriate is that there is nothing proper—immanence is living a singular life, attentive to the particularity of the assemblage of forces that one finds oneself in at any particular moment. We are most appropriate when we are swept into the immanent flow of life. Eradication of the fiction of the subject/self—to become impersonal—is to be more in line with the fluidity of immanence. Living in accordance would be to live in a constant state of intensification, experimentation, and becoming.
Notes
1 Williams (2008) elucidates the relation between the language and the event, philosophy as event, and how the metaphysics of the surface relates to the Deleuzian impersonal transcendental field, singularities, and genesis; Widder (2011) focuses on the importance of incorporeals; Bowden (2011) emphasizes the influence of the Stoics distinction between incorporeal meaning/effects and corporeal bodies in Deleuze’s characterization of sense as the “fourth dimension” of language, as well as devoting attention to the importance of Stoic ethics; Johnson (2017) provides an excellent account of the significance of incorporeals for Deleuze’s account of sense.
2 Notable exceptions: Sellars (2006) says that by examining his oeuvre as a whole one can discern a deeper affinity with Stoicism. Reynolds (2007) approaches Deleuze’s ethics of the event as a matter of recognizing the irreconcilable rupture between the transcendental and the empirical that reflects the heterogeneity between certain aspects of time (147–8); Lawlor (2012) writes about the significance of being worthy of the event. Bennet (2015a, b) writes on the significance Stoic Fate and quasi-causality for Deleuzian ethics.
3 The priority of immanence over transcendence is a fundamental feature of Deleuze’s thought, as seen in his 1966 article “Renverser le platonisme,” in his insistence on the plane of immanence in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and in his last book, Immanence: A Life. Many commentators have linked this priority to his ethics. See, for instance, Lorraine (2011) and Smith (2007).
4 As Johnson notes, Deleuze finds preferable figures whose philosophies evince an entailment of ethics from ontology (2017: 285, ft. 21). Ansell-Pearson describes Deleuze as committed to affirmative naturalism, linking “together physics and ethics as a way of providing an emancipatory and affirmative philosophy of life” (2014: 121).
5 The Stoics appeal to oikeiōsis (DL 7.85-6; Seneca Letters 121.6-15), postulating the naturalness of certain capacities and the recognition of what belongs to oneself. Klein explains that the Stoic oikeiōsis, as an original impulse to that which is appropriate the entity, is often explained in terms of self-preservative instincts of animals, but that since human beings’ particular natural capacity is to reason, what is appropriate to us is to seek beyond mere instinct toward understanding the cosmos (2016: 148).
6 Deleuze’s interpretation relies heavily on Bréhier 1962 [orig. 1908] and Goldschmidt 1953 (Widder 2011: 103).
7 The Stoics do speak of “events” (gignomena) as incorporeals (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Fat. 181.13-182.20), but do not make them central features of their philosophy.
8 See Sellars (2006); Long and Sedley also separate lekta from other incorporeals (LS 51H).
9 In De Fato, Cicero identifies fate with antecedent causes: no motion is without a cause, all happens by preceding causes, everything happens by fate (20–21). Further, Alexander of Aphrodisias argues for the necessary connectedness of all causes, otherwise “the universe would be torn apart” (Fat. 192).
10 Deleuze is partial to Nietzsche’s conception of amor fati, which is to say the affirmation of the aleatory encounter rather than mere acceptance.
11 Sedley (2003) identifies Chrysippus’s use of moral failings and passions as synonymous (21). Gill (2003) attributes to Seneca the view that emotions need to be extirpated not just moderated (49).
12 For more on Deleuze’s experimentation and spiritual exercises, see my article, “Bataille and Deleuze’s Peculiar Askesis: Techniques of Transgression, Meditation, and Dramatisation” (Sholtz 2020).
13 For commentators who associate the event with the virtual tout court, willing the event must be related solely to thought. See Sellars 2006: 160; also Bennett 2015b).
14 Kurt Lampe remarks on this thoroughly in Chapter 6 of this volume, seeing it as an essential opening for Kristeva’s reading of the Stoics.
15 Massumi (1992) calls it a neologism; Angelova (2006) calls it a “strange term of Deleuze’s own coinage” (121); James (2008) dubs it “one of the rare heavy and clumsy concepts in Deleuze’s work” (130).
16 The relation of the intensive with bodies may seem strange as the philosophic tradition associates material substance with extension, but in Difference and Repetition Deleuze uses the intensive when referring to bare materiality “while spatio-temporal dynamisms suggest a materialist ‘plane of immanence,’ a pre-individual continuum of matter—energy flows, these remain undifferentiated until incarnating a particular set of differential relations as the solution to a particular problematic Idea” (Sholtz 2016: 53). Part of this comes from the problem of mapping these terms across texts (as the Virtual is related to the pre-individuated/pre-actualized in Difference and Repetition, yet aligned with the metaphysical surface in Logic of Sense), but I want to maintain the idea of the intensive plenum, as the plane of immanence, out of which bodies become fully actualized. In Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze is interested specifically in the process of formation (different/ciation), everything that is undetermined would be associated with virtuality, whereas he seems to split the Actual and Virtual in Logic of Sense more clearly between corporeal (physical plane) and incorporeal (metaphysical plane). I would advocate that this proves rather than confounds my point, as the plane of immanence suggests that the inseparability of the actual and virtual, corporeal and incorporeal—they must be thought as ineluctably intertwined and in relation.
17 Even Bennett suggests that “incorporeal transformations shift what things in the world the proposition supposedly refers” (2015b: 16), which, in turn, would shift concrete social contexts.
18 In Difference and Repetition, dramatization is part of an ontological process of different/ciation, where spatiotemporal dynamisms are dramatized (actualized); in Logic of Sense, dramatization is linked to counteractualization, reflecting a doubling of dramatization; making the event one’s own has to do with ideal selections (tracings) from the event. See Sholtz 2016.
19 There may be ways that even this might be reconciled with Stoicism. Chrysippus’s discussion of hidden causes could account for those things which are unexplainable via directly observable causal chains (see Galen, De placitis 348, 16–8). Alexander of Aphrodisias’s reference to “swarm of causes” (smênos aitiôn) (Fat. 192,18) has also been invoked to counter simplistic notions of linear causality in Stoic determinism (see Meyer 2009: 73).
20 The dismantling of the Self is not total annihilation of the individual, but indicates that there are preconceptions about the self-contained, metaphysically defined Self (the self as transcendental illusion) that limit our ability to make new connections and relations or understand the constant interplay between ourselves and the world. I have reserved capitalization of Self for this sense (with respect to Deleuze).
21 The difference between Stoic and Deleuzian ontology represents another instance of inversion, one which, unfortunately, cannot be adequately developed within the scope of this chapter. Summarily, Deleuze would reject a cosmos governed by divine order, opting rather for an impersonal plane of forces and intensities which includes chaos, chance, and disorder (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 140). My sense is that this divergence has to be explained in terms of advances in physics itself—a project that I am currently undertaking within an interdisciplinary research group (supported by the SSHRC) on Deleuze and cosmology, consisting of philosophers, Alain Beaulieu and myself, and physicists, Gennady Chitov and Ubi Wichoski (see https://www3.laurentian.ca/deleuzecosmo/).
22 This becomes more apparent in Deleuze’s later essay on Spinoza (1997), where he attributes, even to Spinoza, a more complex relation to affect and passions—one that exceeds the goal of developing common notions and revels in the expression, struggles, and liberations of affective life itself (146).
23 Deleuze characterizes stupidity as the unrealized assumption of a transcendental ground, especially in terms of the ego (1994: 152).
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