Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant by Edward Willatt;Matt Lee;

Author:Edward Willatt;Matt Lee;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2009-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

3. Deleuze: Productive Force and the Unconscious

The Kantian hesitation is taken further in the work of Deleuze. We can see this particularly in his reading of Spinoza and his decision to regard knowledge of the second kind as the fulcrum point of the Ethics.17 Why this fulcrum point is selected is precisely because it seems to support the thesis that we only connect with productive forces on the cusp of consciousness, where understanding fades and the forces implicit in the surrounding darkness vibrate. Knowledge of the second kind can be defined by two principal characteristics. At the logical level it argues for the primacy of relations (rather than identities); at the phenomenological level, it marks the primacy of the affects over the sensations of perception. Let us look more closely at the two aspects of Spinoza’s notion of knowledge of the second kind and consider whether it can really be regarded as the fulcrum of his thinking.

Without a doubt one of the chief innovations of the Ethics is to propose a new account of the nature of a physical law. Spinoza argues that a law should not be regarded as an assimilation of particulars – the traditional notion of a universal – but marks something that is different in kind: a difference that will never be grasped if we insist on taking our bearings from the particular instances we experience in perception. A law is not gained through the assimilation of particulars because it concerns the relation between particulars. Consequently Spinoza maintains that a common notion (which is the phrase he uses for relation) cannot be comprehended in terms of what it relates: ‘what is common to all things … does not constitute the essence of any singular thing’ (Spinoza 1996: Part II, Prop. 37). But if relations are different in kind from the things we perceive, we must ask how we can gain awareness of them. It cannot be the case that we will learn the ways of the world by induction, for the latter will only ever scramble together the particular ideas given in perceptual consciousness: far from providing a clear idea of what all the particulars have in common we will produce a confusion of differences that have a unity in name only.18 Spinoza solves this problem by claiming that we do not perceive a relation, we feel it – we first learn of relations through the affects. We feel joy when our body forms an effective relation with another; sadness when our body engages with that which is contrary to it. A relation is not grasped in static consciousness (an image) but is felt in an emotion.

At a primitive level a relation is the intensity of joy,19 but this has a dynamic: we want more joy, we want to discover more relations. Joy picks up speed: a cascade of ever widening relations such that each whole, or each new relation, becomes, in turn, a part of wider whole.20 A continuum stretches from, this joy of this

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