From Joy to Gap: The Accessing of the Infinite by the Finite

Simon O’Sullivan

1.1 Introduction

In this first chapter I want to lay the philosophical groundwork for the further explorations, encounters and composite diagrams of the following four chapters. In particular I want to map out three different models of the production of subjectivity or, which amounts to the same thing, of the finite–infinite relation. In fact, I want to link these three together under one diagram that itself will recur throughout the remainder of this book. I begin with Spinoza’s Ethics (cited in references as E) and with the account of the different kinds of knowledge a subject might embody, before looking more briefly at Nietzsche’s ideas of affirmation and the eternal return as they occur specifically in The Gay Science (cited in references as GS). In both of these works it is especially the idea of joy as a kind of technology and passage – as well as a destination – that I am interested in. The longer third section of the chapter looks in some detail at Henri Bergson’s celebrated cone of memory – the diagram mentioned above – from Matter and Memory (cited in references as MM). Here, I am interested in a certain gap that, again, allows a passage from one intensive state to another, and especially, in Bergson’s terms, to beyond the realm of matter with its particular linear temporality. In general this chapter presents less an overview than an introductory sampling of the thought of these three philosophers, with an eye to extracting certain details and demonstrating certain resonances between them.

1.2 Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge (and the passage between)

What does Spinoza mean when he invites us to take the body as a model? It is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge we have of it, and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness we have of it. There are no fewer things in the mind that exceed our consciousness than there are things in the body that exceed our knowledge. (Deleuze 1988a, p. 18)

1.2.1 Introductory remarks: the Ethics

In an autobiographical passage from the Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding, Spinoza succinctly states his motivation and intention in writing the Ethics:

After experience taught me that all things which occur frequently in ordinary life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the things on account of which I was afraid, and which I feared, had nothing good or bad in them except in so far as the mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to inquire if there was some good which was genuine and capable of communicating itself, and by which the mind would be affected even if all the others were rejected; in sum, if there is something such that, when it has been discovered and acquired, I might enjoy for eternity continuous supreme happiness. (Quoted in Parkinson 1989, p. ix)

In the terms of the thematic of my own book this intention might be figured as the desire of a finite body to access the infinite, or what Spinoza will call the eternal. The relation of the finite to the infinite, which is so often portrayed as a non-relation (especially in religion), is, in fact, outlined by Spinoza in his Ethics as a decidedly livable relation. Indeed, in contradistinction to Kant, this finite–infinite dyad is less a split between a phenomenal world apparent to a subject and a noumenal one beyond, than rather, two poles on a continuum. In relation to this, Spinoza also famously lays out a thesis of parallelism between thought and extension, both being attributes of the same infinite substance. In this sense a subject, or ‘modal essence’, can develop an idea of their own composition as it were – a knowledge that results, ultimately, in a further intuitive knowledge of the infinite substance of which they are a part.

Spinoza’s Ethics is then exploratory and analytic, but it is also fundamentally programmatic. It operates as a manual for life and specifically for the production of a life that is not merely beholden to the world, but that ultimately authors its own existence [1]. In fact, the Ethics involves two distinct transformative moments in this continuing assumption of the subject of their own causality (although, as we shall see, the definition of a body, or mode, does not necessarily go through a definition of the subject per se). What then are these two moments – or specific technologies – of transformation? In order to answer this question this first part of my first chapter provides a brief account of Spinoza’s Ethics via a diagramming of the topology of the three kinds of knowledge found therein [2]. In particular I will be interested in the points of passage between the first and the second, and then the second and third.