Robert Piercey
That
Deleuze’s thought is heavily indebted to Spinoza is a claim that is both
obvious and obscure. On the one hand, Deleuze says quite plainly that he is “a
Spinozist,” and that Spinoza is for him “the ‘prince’ of philosophers” [1]. On
the other hand, it is hard to imagine that the thinker of difference and
pre-individual singularities could have anything in common with Spinoza,
thinker of the one absolutely infinite substance and monist par excellence. One might, under the circumstances, be tempted to
divide Deleuze’s books into two groups:those in which he speaks in his own name,such
as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense; and those which deal
with the history of philosophy, such as Expressionism
in Philosophy: Spinoza.
But to
make such a division would be a mistake. Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, far from
being peripheral to his own thought, is in fact central to it. Indeed, I want
to argue here that Deleuze’s ontology of difference cannot be adequately
understood outside the context of Expressionism
in Philosophy. I intend to show that Difference
and Repetition and The Logic of Sense
are in large part attempts to articulate an expressionistic ontology, and that
they must be read in light of what Deleuze says about expression in his work on
Spinoza. Accordingly, what follows is divided into three parts. The first gives
an overview of Deleuze’s ontology, and shows that it invokes a tripartite
distinction among Being, the virtual, and the actual. Part Two traces this
tripartite scheme back to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, and fleshes out
Deleuze’s claim that it is a necessary part of an expressionistic ontology. And
in Part Three, I explain how Deleuze both preserves and modifies the Spinozist
scheme in his own work. In doing so, I try to show that Difference and Repetition and The
Logic of Sense are attempts “to make substance turn around the modes -- in other words, to realize univocity
in the form of repetition” [2].
1. Deleuze as ontologist
It is
often said – indeed, it has become something of a cliché – that Deleuze’s texts
operate on many levels at once. In Constantin Boundas’s apt expression, they
create multiple “series,” series which “converge and become compossible” at the
same time as they “diverge and begin to resonate” [3]. Thus Deleuze’s texts
contain a highly original semantics, and a theory of subjectivity, and certain
views on the relation of philosophy to political practice. It is less commonly
recognized that they contain an ontology – where ‘ontology’ means, roughly,an account
of what there is.But Deleuze’s writings abound with ontological claims. Difference and Repetition describes its
task as the articulation of a “philosophy of ontological difference” (DR, xix). Similarly, The Logic of Sense insists that any
genuinely philosophical inquiry eventually “merges with ontology” [4].
Deleuze’s work of the late 1960s advances an ontology of difference – that is,
a metaphysics in which differentiation and determination are seen as the
principal characteristics of what there is.
At the
same time, Deleuze’s ontology is a kind of transcendental philosophy [5]. His
ontological claims emerge from something like transcendental analysis, in that
they describe “not the sensible, but the being of the sensible” (DR, 266). They are a “transcendental
empiricism” (DR, 56) – “empiricism”
because their subject matter is something “which can be perceived only from the
standpoint of a transcendental sensibility”
(DR, 144) [6], “transcendental”
because they describe not the material world itself, but the conditions of
there being such a world. Deleuze’s ontology seeks “to determine an impersonal
and pre-individual transcendental field, which does not resemble the
corresponding empirical field” (LS,
102), but which makes the empirical field possible.
The
notion of a “field,” then, is central to Deleuze’s ontology [7]. Deleuze not
only talks about a “pre-individual transcendental
field;” he distinguishes three fields
in his ontological writings. Now, to say that Deleuze distinguishes three
ontological fields is merely to say that he makes three different types of
ontological claim. It is also to say that claims referring to one field have a
different status than those referring to another – that claims about (say) the
material field are fundamentally different from ones about a transcendental
field. But it is not to say that the two sets of claims concern different
worlds. It is not to say that in addition to the empirical world, there is
another actual realm which transcends
it or from which it emanates.To distinguish fields as Deleuze does is just to
say that different kinds of ontological claim are formally distinct. A familiar
example of a formal distinction in ontology is Heidegger’s insistence that the Seinsfrage is fundamentally different
from questions about entities. To the extent that this is so, Being and
entities belong to different ontological fields. Another example – and one
Deleuze incorporates into his own work – is Duns Scotus’s theory of virtual
descriptions. Scotus maintains that some of a material entity’s properties are
virtual. They genuinely bvelong to the entity, but do not correspond to any of
its material features. “Unity” is an example of a virtual property. Every
entity is unified, so unity may be truly predicated of any object; but we cannot
sense an object’s unity as we can sense (say) its colour. Virtual properties
are indeed properties, but they cannot be isolated in the material world. They
are real but not actual. While they do not belong to the same ontological field
as material properties, neither do they pertain to an extra-material world.
Talk about the virtual is simply a different way of describing the one world.
Similarly, Deleuze’s talk about fields is a way of keeping apart formally
distinct types of ontological claim, without suggesting that they describe
different worlds. But what are the fields he has in mind?
