Expressionism in Philosophy

"Deleuze has a penetrating grasp of Spinoza's thought. His study is a major contribution."

Auteur

Gilles Deleuze Translated by Martin Joughin

Texte du rabat

Expressionism in Philosophy is both a pivotal reading of Spinoza's work and also a crucial text within the development of Deleuze's own thought.

Résumé

In this remarkable work, Gilles Deleuze, the renowned French philosopher, reflects on one of the thinkers of the past who most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy. For Deleuze, Spinoza, along with Nietzsche and Lucretius, conceived of philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification. He locates in Spinoza a set of affects, a kinetic determination, an impulse and makes Spinoza into an encounter, a passion.

Expressionism in Philosophy was the culmination of a series of monographic studies by Deleuze (on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Proust, Kant, and Sacher-Masoch) and prepared the transition from these abstract treatments of historical schemes of experience to the nomadology of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Félix Guattari). Thus, Expressionism in Philosophy is both a pivotal reading of Spinoza's work and a crucial text within the development of Deleuze's thought.

Contenu
Part 1 The triads of substance: numerical and real distinction; attribute as expression; attributes and divine names; the absolute; power. Part 2 Parallelism and immanence: expression in parallelism; the two powers and the idea of God; expression and idea; inadequacy; Spinoza against Descartes; immanence and the historical components of expression. Part 3 The theory of finite modes: modal essence - the passage from infinite to finite; modal existance; what can a body do?; the three orders and the problem of evil; the ethical vision of the world; common notions; toward the third kind of knowledge; Beatitude. Conclusion: the theory of experession in Leibniz and Spinoza - expressionaism in philosophy.