Deleuze and New Materialism:
Naturalism, Norms, and Ethics
Keith Ansell-Pearson
Abstract. This essay examines Deleuze’s relation to new materialism through an
engagement with new materialist claims about the human and nonhuman relation and
about agency. It first considers the work of Elisabeth Grosz and then moves on to a
consideration of Deleuze’s own conception of a new materialism/new naturalism (Deleuze
elaborates a ‘new materialism’ in his work on Spinoza of the 1960s). I seek to show that
Deleuze is an ethically motivated naturalist concerned with an ethical pedagogy of the
human, which he derives from his reading of Spinoza. I seek to illuminate some of the
principal features of this ethically guided materialism/naturalism and show that even in his
later work with Felix Guattari, which situates all life, human and nonhuman, on a plane of
immanence, there remains a recognition that the human animal is ethically distinguished
as the inventive species par excellence. My main claim, then, is that Deleuze’s project
cannot be aligned with a new materialism that supposes a flat ontology and that does away
with an ethical distinction between the human and the nonhuman. Although Deleuze
bequeaths a complex legacy to post-modern thought in his thinking about the human, it
should not be supposed that he has no affinities with aspects of a humanist position and
pedagogy.
Introduction
There are two key questions we might ask of the new intellectual work around materialism:
just what is new about the so-called new materialism? And, second, what role should
Deleuze play in these debates about the new materialism? In what follows I seek to show
why Deleuze is important for the new materialism but that he also bequeaths a complex
legacy to contemporary thought about the human. In key work of the 1950s and 1950s
Deleuze’s texts support a rich philosophical naturalism that is also a kind of humanism
(the concern is with the promotion of human emancipation and the freedom of Reason);
in his collaborative work with Guattari in the 1970s his work takes on a more antihumanist inflection and orientation (here the human is placed on a plane of immanence
that strips it of its ontological privilege).1 Although it is stated by some of its proponents
that new materialism is a term coined by Rosi Braidotti and Manuel de Landa (Dolphijn
and Tuin 2011: 383), this, as we shall see, overlooks the fact that in the 1960s Deleuze was
using this term in connection with his reading of Spinoza.2 It is my view that it is Deleuze’s
Spinozism that accounts for his complicated reception, allowing, as it does, for both
humanist and anti-humanist, and even post-humanist, appropriations. Deleuze’s
Spinozism allows for different possibilities for thinking, then, and my worry is that we are
being invited to opt for an anti-humanist and post-humanist position at the cost of
neglecting what I regard as some important insights that Deleuze developed in his reading
of Spinoza in the 1960s, notably into the ethical task of human emancipation. Although
one might claim a ‘strategic’ value for the term, rather than a ‘descriptive’ one, as Dolphijn
and Tuin indicate, key issues are at stake in the appropriation of Deleuze for the ends of a
new materialism (Dolphijn and Tuin 2012).3
Whilst it may well be the case, as Coole and
Frost contend, that ‘thinking anew about the fundamental structure of matter has farreaching normative and existential implications’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 5), in Deleuze’s
1
This is no doubt an oversimplification. However, I would maintain that at the heart of the book
on Spinoza of 1968 is an ethical pedagogy and that its ‘humanist’ orientation is widely neglected
amongst commentators on Deleuze. For an anti-humanist reading of Deleuze’s 1960s ‘Spinoza’ see
Peden 2014, chapter six.
Typically Deluze is construed not as a new materialist but as a ‘new vitalist’. In ignorance of the
fact that Deleuze actually deployed the term ‘new materialism’ in his work on Spinoza in the 1960s,
Coole and Frost bizarrely assert that, ‘Gilles Deleuze, whose work has been influential in much of
the new ontology, did not count himself a materialist despite his radical empiricism and some
evocative descriptions of materialization’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 9).
3
It is perhaps interesting to note that Coole and Frost, in their introduction to their edited
collection New Materialisms speak of the interventions of the new materialists as ‘renewed
materialisms’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 6). In a recent contribution Claire Colebrook has argued
that materialism ‘is always a turning back, is always part of a materialist turn, and is therefore always
a “new” materialism’ (Colebrook forthcoming).
2
case the focus is very much on the normative and existential implications of human
becomings, even when this involves the human becoming, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms,
animal, molecular, and imperceptible (Deleuze and Guattari 1988).
A note on the use of ‘-isms’. With regards to humanism, as Beatrice Han-Pile
notes, humanism is a concept that is as widely used as it is indeterminate. It is often, at
least in the English-speaking world, associated with a view of the world that is secular and
optimistic and that contends the privilege of human beings over non-organic (or organic
but nonhuman) entities, ‘defending the rights of human beings to happiness and to the
development of their individual potential’ (Han-Pile 2010, 118). On the continent,
especially in France and Germany, for thinkers such as Foucault, it was a dirty word and on
account of its implied anthropocentrism. As far as I know Deleuze never employs the word
humanism or the term anti-humanism. As I will endeavour to show there are features of
Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza in the 1960s that clearly align his position with elements of
humanism and there are other aspects, especially the way he continued to develop his
Spinozism, that align his position with anti-humanism. But even here, I want to show,
Deleuze does not produce an ontology that refuses to recognize the differences between the
human and other forms or modes of life.
I shall shortly show how Deleuze conceives materialism and naturalism. For now
let me note that by ‘naturalism’ I am referring to key Spinozist-inspired moves made in
modern thought, such as construing the human being as fully part of nature in which it
enjoys no special metaphysical value or privileged place in the natural order. In addition,
no cosmic exceptionalism is allowed: everything in the world, be it human, animal, or
mineral plays by the same rules. Materialism is a general view about what actually exists:
everything is material or physical. It originates with the early Greek thinkers, such as
Democritus, and materialism is physicalism. Understood as a general theory about what
exists it is an ontological view.
I have two opening sections on Elisabeth Grosz’s attempt at a ‘new materialism’
and ‘renaturalization’. In the rest of the essay I then look at Deleuze’s Spinozism of the
1960s and the highly innovative thinking that he developed with Guattari in 1980 with the
publication of A Thousand Plateaus. I conclude with some critical points of reflection.
A New Materialism?
What is taken to constitute the ‘new materialism’ is typically said to question the privilege
given to the human being in the human/nonhuman binary, along with the emphasis on
mind and subjectivity and the construal of matter as passive and inert, so at the core of this
latest turn in theory is a preoccupation with the agential properties of matter itself. Even
within inorganic matter there are emergent, generative powers or agentic capacities to be
discerned, and this is seen to entail the break down of the distinction between organic and
inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at the ontological level. Furthermore, materiality is
taken to be something more than mere matter. As Coole and Frost put it, there is ‘an
excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative,
productive, unpredictable’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 9). This means for them that amidst ‘a
multitude of interlocking systems and forces’ we can ‘consider anew the location and
nature of capacities for agency’ (ibid.). As Coole and Frost further put it, the perception
now amongst many working in the humanities and the social sciences is that ‘the
radicalism of the dominant discourses which have flourished under the cultural turn is
now more or less exhausted’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 6). This is encapsulated in the ‘feeling’
that ‘the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate to thinking
about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context
of biopolitics and global political economy’ (ibid.). There is thus needed, they further
contend, ‘a theoretical rapprochement with material realism’ (ibid.). The key insight and
claim centres on the question of agency:
Conceiving matter as possessing its own modes of self-transformation, selforganization, and directedness, and thus no longer as simply passive or inert,
disturbs the conventional sense that agents are exclusively human who possess the
cognitive abilities, intentionality, and freedom to make autonomous decisions and
the corollary presumption that humans have the right or ability to master nature.
Instead, the human species is being relocated within a natural environment whose
material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities…Matter is no longer
imagined here as a massive, opaque plenitude but is recognized instead as
indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways. (Coole and
Frost 2010: 10)
The aim here is to be strictly non-anthropocentric: there is no privileging of human bodies
or even of human capacities for agency. The contention is as follows: ‘As a consequence,
the human species, and the qualities of self-reflection, self-awareness, and rationality
traditionally used to distinguish it from the rest of nature, many now seem little more than
contingent and provisional forms or processes within a broader evolutionary or cosmic
productivity’ (ibid. 20).
In its Deleuzian mode the new materialism has an intellectual and a political
agenda. It seeks to contest the primacy accorded to the human in our theoretical
discourses and then utilize this for the ends of a post-humanist position. In the process it
raises questions about the status and development of Deleuze’s thought, and forces one to
ask: what is the relation between Deleuze’s own work and his collaborative work with
Guattari? For it is the latter work that the new materialists most draw upon in order to
advance this materialism. Elisabeth Grosz is more confident than I am when she asserts
that, and I quote:
These nonhuman forces – from the smallest sub-atomic forces to the operation of
solar systems, forces comprising the human and its overcoming, forces that cannot
be comprehended by the human…but that connect the human to all that is both
human and nonhuman – are Deleuze’s primary preoccupation throughout his work
(Grosz 2015: 19).
Such a claim clearly reveals that the Deleuzian-inspired new materialism aligns itself
with the position of post-humanism. For Grosz to think the human in relation to the nonhuman entails upheavals and challenges various forms of human, and even post-human,
disciplinarity (ibid.: 22-3). She contends in a recent interview that for Deleuze Spinoza is
the prince of the philosophers on account of his far-reaching naturalization of the human:
the human occupies a miniscule place on the impersonal ‘plane of immanence’ (this
notion is handled later in the essay). Thus, ‘When we understand the human, not as the
telos or end of nature but as a small part of it, many philosophical claims about human
privilege fall away’ (ibid.: 22). The only problem with this position is that it can make little
sense of key work Deleuze carried out in the 1950s and 1960s and that centres on
questions of human subjectivity, agency, and ethical pedagogy. It also fails to acknowledge
the complexity and complex evolution of his reading of Spinoza, the chief source for a
reading of Deleuze as a naturalist and materialist.
The work of Grosz has been identified with new materialism, though she in fact
embraces it only with qualification and some hesitation. She sees her work in two ways.
First, it attempts to go beyond the post-war discourses of structuralism and poststructuralism. For her these discourses have served to foreclose the problem of existence of
an independent material reality, one beyond human consciousness and control, and in
favour of emphasizing the constructed character of the real. Second, she wants ‘following
Darwin’ a concept of matter that does not remove it from its opposing term, be it mind,
life, Idea, form, or Spirit. She confesses that she is not sure that this project can be still be
said to be one of materialism, and then she adds:
Perhaps it involves a new kind of materialism; or perhaps materialism is no longer
an adequate term and we need to generate a new term. What I am seeking is a new
concept of matter that also involves something incorporeal, a spark of virtuality that
enables life to emerge (Grosz 20011a: 18).
Deleuze is central to this project with his emphasis on pre-individual virtuality and reliance
on a genealogy of the concept of matter that is said by Grosz to run from Darwin, through
Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson on to Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer
(ibid. 21). In essence, she wants a new materialism that thinks matter in terms of events
and processes rather than in terms of things and objects. Already we begin to see the ‘old’
character of much of what is taken to be a new materialism: the concern with an ontology
of the real is arguably as old, in its early modern incarnation, as Spinoza and the desire for
a philosophy of events and processes strikes up a rapport and an affinity with the modern
likes of Bergson and Whitehead.
In the work of both Grosz and Rosi Braidotti then, two of the main proponents of
a new materialism that is inspired by the work of Deleuze, there is expressed a desire for a
return to the real and to realism: ‘I would like to return to the question of the real, the
question of ontology, the question that the privileging of subjectivity and representation
has tended to foreclose’ (ibid. 17). And, Braidotti echoes this when she argues that we
need to locate ‘Life itself’ as a nonhuman agent at the centre of scientific and political
debate: ‘After so much emphasis on the linguistic and the cultural, an ontology of presence
replaces textual or other deconstruction’ (Braidotti 2012: 171). She then invokes
‘neorealist practices of bodily materialism’ and refers to ‘radical neo-materialism or
posthuman feminism’. Furthermore, Grosz reads Deleuze as a producing not a materialism
but a ‘philosophy of the real’ and that is to be conceived as a ‘theory that addresses the real
without distinguishing its material from its ideal components, a kind of supersaturated
materialism, a materialism that incorporates that which is commonly opposed to it – the
ideal, the conceptual, the mind, or consciousness’ (Grosz 2011b: 43).
These are welcome moves in the light of the emphatic priority accorded in recent
decades to subjectivity and representation and in which it is assumed that it is not possible
to think beyond the human. However, it’s far from clear to me that the primary move
suggested by the new materialism, away from the representational subject to the
ontologically real, captures what is most distinctive about Deleuze’s philosophical practice,
chiefly, its ethical motivation. Deleuze is an ethically motivated naturalist who attaches
himself to naturalism because he sees it as a project of demystification and human
emancipation. The task is to liberate human beings from the realm of myth: the myth of
religion, the myth of a false physics, and the myths of a false philosophy. Although it can
be conceded that the new materialism would welcome such a conception – philosophy as
demystification – we cannot overlook the extent to which this requires an ethical pedagogy
of the human being and of the kind undertaken by Spinoza in his ‘ethics’ (an education in
the three main kinds of knowledge, for example). In addition, we can note that Grosz’s
conception of a new materialism, in which matter is to be supplemented by a notion of
virtuality, is fully anticipated by Deleuze and at work in his appreciation of key early
modern materialists or naturalists such as Spinoza. Deleuze’s new materialism has its
location in sources that we would expect it to have on an informed appreciation of the
history of philosophy, namely, in Epicureanism and Spinozism. However, Deleuze does
not himself conceive the new materialism as operating in terms of a supplementary
dimension of ideality or virtuality. On the contrary, he sees virtual or ideal actions and
passions as fully immanent features of matter itself. Perhaps this is what Grosz actually
means, and if she does then her characterization of the new materialism is incisive and in
tune with Deleuze’s own conception of it.
What cannot be upheld, though, is the idea that Deleuze flattens ontology in such
a way that he is seen to have little concern, if any, with issues of normativity and as they
pertain to what is distinctive about the existence of the human animal. This is my main
anxiety over the Deleuzian-inspired new materialism: it fails to engage with key aspects of
Deleuze’s work in the 1950s and 1960s and that centre on issues of normativity, including
as they pertain to the distinctive ethical character of the human animal. How can we claim
that the human animal is ethically distinguished? A clue to Deleuze’s own position on this
issue is provided in his early short essay on ‘Instincts and Institutions’, in which he holds
to the view that in the case of both instinct and institution we are dealing with ‘procedures
of satisfaction’ but with a key difference in the case of the human subject: an organism
responds instinctively to external stimuli, ‘extracting from the external world the elements
which will satisfy its tendencies and needs’. More, ‘these elements comprise worlds that are
specific to different animals’. In the case of the human animal, however, ‘the subject
institutes an original world between its tendencies and the external milieu, developing an
artificial means of satisfaction’ (Deleuze 2004: 19). In this piece Deleuze even goes so far as
to maintain that, ‘humans have no instincts, they build institutions. The Human is an
animal decimating its species’ (ibid. 21). In short, the human is an inventive species,
building institutions and creating norms and as a way of satisfying its needs and desires. As
a ‘species’, then, we are ethically and politically distinguished since the means of satisfying
our life is not given or simply of the order of instinct. Deleuze always maintained that the
ethical and the social are profoundly positive. As he puts it in the early essay ‘…if it is true
that tendencies are satisfied by the institution, the institution is not explained by
tendencies. The same sexual needs will never explain the multiple possible forms of
marriage’ (ibid. 20). In his first published book on Hume of 1953 Deleuze opposes social
contract theories because they present us with a false and abstract image of society, in
which society is defined only in a negative way: society is construed as set of limitations on
egoisms and interests rather than as a positive system of invented endeavours: “the state of
nature is always already more than a simple state of nature” (Deleuze 1991: 39). As
Deleuze seeks to show the problem of society is not one of limitation but of integration. In
short, the human animal is, first and foremost, an inventive species, so that although
justice is an artifice and not nature, for us artifice is part of our nature. Justice is that
which extends and expands our passions. Deleuze writes: ‘The social is profoundly creative,
inventive, and positive” (ibid. 46). And: ‘the subject is normative…’ (ibid. 86)
The Politics of Renaturalization
I now want to focus on Grosz’s project of renaturalization in which she makes inventive
use of Deleuze’s readings of Nietzsche and Spinoza. In seeking to show our fundamental
continuity with nonhuman agencies the result, I want to suggest, is a neglect of core
Deleuzian insights into the normative character of the human creature. This is what I
focus on in my second section on Deleuze.
Bergson defined the task of philosophy as one of ‘thinking beyond the human
condition’, where this condition refers not to an existential predicament but an
evolutionary one, naming the dominance of our spatialized habits and established patterns
of representation (see Bergson 1965: 193). Grosz has her own unique way of thinking
beyond the human. She is perhaps distinctive amongst the feminist cultural theorists of
her generation in writing so positively of nature, as well as life and biology, and developing
what one commentator has insightfully called a ‘politics of renaturalization’. According to
Hasana Sharp, on Grosz’s interpretation nature, ‘designates uncontainable dynamism,
irrepressible mutation, and constant self-differentiation. She elaborates and calls for new
models of nature that insist on our continuity with nonhuman agencies…’ (Sharp 2011:
169). Of course, Grosz is attentive to the pitfalls identified by decades of denaturalizing
critique, and it is well known that feminists, race theorists, and critical theorists have
advanced strong suspicions of appeals to nature, which often function as discourses of
normalization. However, Grosz’s appeals to nature are clearly designed to disrupt such
normalization. Like other theorists, amongst which I would include myself, she appeals to
the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to do this, making productive if contentious use
of their notion of a becoming-imperceptible (Ansell-Pearson 1999).4 So, whilst there is an
acknowledgement of the need to denaturalize those discourses that eternalize social roles,
attributing in the process a transhistorical human nature, ‘we also need to see our projects
in terms of natural forces that exceed human powers’ (Sharp 2011: 174). As a feminist
Grosz is stridently anti-humanist: ‘Because, for Grosz, any humanization and
anthropomorphism falls into a phallocentric economy of the same, she rejects the
possibility of stretching the category of the human to include its excluded others’ (Sharp
2011: 168). As Sharp puts it, Grosz confronts her readers with a theoretical choice
between a humanist philosophy of the subject and an inhuman theory of impersonal,
natural forces (Grosz 2002: 470). Her source for this philosophy of the impersonal is
Nietzsche, though Sharp thinks it can also be located in Spinoza.
4
This work pioneered the biophilosophical appreciation of Deleuze and influenced much of the
new materialism, especially as Deleuze has inspired this materialism.
Perhaps Grosz is at her most contentious with the idea of a politics of
imperceptibility, which she develops and advances contra the perceived humanist claims of
a politics of recognition. She writes of a ‘regime of recognition’, which she equates with
an identity politics (Grosz 2002: 463). Here identity is conceived not as something
inherent, as given or internally developed, ‘but as bestowed by an other, and only an other,
and thus can also be taken away by an other’ (ibid.: 465). Grosz adds to this: ‘Identity
comes only as result of the dual motion of the internalization, or introjection of otherness,
and the projection onto the other of some fundamental similarity or identification with the
subject’ (ibid.).
What are Grosz’s main claims and arguments about the restricting confines of an
identity politics? She associates the politics of recognition with the Hegelian ‘law of desire’
in which the subject can only become a subject as such through being recognized by
another subject (ibid.: 465). Her main anxiety is that a vision of justice predicated upon
the validation of social subjects by other subjects is to succumb to a servile politics. Instead
we should think about politics in terms of agonistic forces and impersonal becomings. As
noted, Grosz has recourse to Nietzsche to develop such a politics. She refers, for example,
to Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962) as a significant event in the articulation of
such a politics since it provided a ‘Nietzschean rewriting of the Hegelian dialectic as the
servile rationalization of the slave and the herd, rather than as the movement of an
enlightening “spirit” to its own self-fruition’ (ibid.: 466). This means that instead of
emphasizing the need for an identity the task is to seek out forces and continuous selfmodification, including what Grosz problematically calls ‘an untimely leap into futurity’
(ibid.). I say problematic since Nietzsche himself argues against all and any such ‘leaps’ into
the future (see the denouement to the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, for
example, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘only a buffoon thinks the human can be jumped
over’). The key move is the following one: instead of offering a model of liberation
through identity based on the subject’s internal constitution, which is to provide a model
of psychical interiority ‘inhabited by the spectre of the other’, we think in terms of subjects
as bodies and forces with the capacity to act and be acted upon (ibid.). Here she follows
Deleuze in presenting a Spinozist-inspired Nietzscheanism, combining a notion of force
with one of affectivity (affective bodies) (see Deleuze 1983: chapter two).
Grosz wants to go a long way with this elusive notion of force. She wants us to stop
conceptualizing the subject as an agent of causal effects, or as a victim of another’s agency,
and instead see things in a ‘Nietzschean’ manner in which politics, subjectivity and the
social are to be viewed ‘as the consequences of the play of the multiplicity of active and
reactive forces that have no agency, or are all that agency and identity consist in’ (ibid.:
467). This requires an understanding of force in terms of ‘its full sub-human and superhuman resonances: as the inhuman which both makes the human possible and which at the
same time positions the human within a world where forces works in spite of and around
the human, within and as the human’ (ibid.). For Grosz, the struggle to produce a
different future is not a struggle by subjects in which the desire is to be recognized and
valued, ‘but a struggle to mobilize and transform the position of women, the alignment of
forces that constitute that “identity” and “position”, that stratification that stabilizes itself
as a place and an identity. Politics can be seen as the struggle of imperceptible forces, forces
in us and around, forces in continual conflict’ (ibid.). In this task we expose the fiction of
ourselves as masterful subjects, that is, as masters of the very forces that constitute us as
subjects.
The question can now be posed: need we accept the terms of the ‘theoretical
choice’ Grosz presents us with between a humanist philosophy of the subject and an antihumanist philosophy of forces? Does Deleuze not offer an ethical pedagogy of the subject
in his work on Spinoza that has affinities with a humanist orientation? To this topic I now
turn.
Deleuze and Naturalism
Let me now turn to Deleuze. In this section I wish simply to note some salient features of
his thinking as it pertains to naturalism and materialism.
In his work Deleuze offers a new naturalism and that at one point he calls a ‘new
materialism’ (Deleuze 1992: 321). It is ironic perhaps that with the rise of the new
materialisms in recent years, in which Deleuze’s writings and concepts have come to play
such a seminal role, this fact is rarely, if ever, acknowledged or drawn upon. Deleuze’s
commitment to, and conceptions of, naturalism/materialism are to be found in two main
sources: his essay on Lucretius from the 1960s and his book on Spinoza, also from the
1960s. Although well known today as an appendix to The Logic of Sense from 1969
Deleuze’s essay ‘Lucretius and the Simulacrum’ was first published in 1961 in Les études
Philosophiques as ‘Lucrèce et le naturalisme’. Deleuze speaks of Spinoza’s ‘realization of
naturalist program’ that has both mechanist and dynamic aspects (Deleuze 1992: 229). In
fact, he locates a ‘new naturalism’ in both Leibniz and Spinoza and articulates a clear
preference for the latter. For Deleuze, Spinoza belongs to a tradition of practical
philosophy that involves naturalism. This naturalism consists in the critique of
superstition since it is this that cuts us off from our power of action and diminishes it, and
induces in us sadness: naturalism exists, says Deleuze, to defeat this sadness (ibid. 270).
Spinoza is a materialist in the importance he places on the body and on bodies. One
might also wish to appeal to Spinoza’s atheism, though here Deleuze has a specific
understanding of his atheism: it consists in the insight that the moral pseudo-law is simply
the measure of our misunderstanding of natural laws (ibid. 253). For Deleuze the question
of Spinoza’s atheism is without interest if it depends on arbitrary definitions of theism and
atheism, and we can only pose the question in relation to what is commonly referred to as
‘God’ from the religious viewpoint. The new materialism is, for Deleuze, first and
foremost, a philosophy of immanence (ibid. 322). In this materialism, centred on
immanence (or more traditionally, pantheism), there is the attempt to recognize the
positivity of nature and penetrate its depths and to grant the human being the thinking
capacities necessary to penetrate these depths. Nature is not construed as passive or insert,
and instead Deleuze speaks of an ‘expressive’ nature, a nature of causal explication, and
argues that there is an immanence of expression in what expresses itself (including
substance, attributes, and modes).5 He acknowledges that in this thinking of immanence
the concept ‘insinuates itself among the transcendent concepts of emanative or creationist
‘Substance first expresses itself in its attributes, each attribute expressing an essence. But then
attributes express themselves in turn: they express themselves in their subordinate modes, each
such mode expressing a modification of the attribute’ (Deleuze 1992: 14).
5
theology’ (ibid. 232). The transformation effected, however, is radical since there is no
transcendence of the One beyond or above Being or the transcendence of a Being above its
creation. Being is univocal in all its expressions, so that the One is said with a single
meaning of all that differs.
Following Ferdinand Alquié (1906-85), Deleuze construes the new naturalism as a
reaction to Cartesianism. Descartes’s venture of a mathematical and mechanical science
devalues nature by depriving ‘it of any virtuality or potentiality, any immanent power, any
inherent being’ (ibid. 227). In Cartesian metaphysics Being is sought outside nature and in
a subject that thinks it and a God that creates it. The importance of the anti-Cartesian
reaction is that it seeks to re-establish the claims of a nature that is granted specific forces
and powers. Deleuze carefully elaborates:
But a matter, also, of retaining the chief discovery of Cartesian mechanism:
every power is actual, in act; the power of Nature are no longer virtualities
referred to occult entities, to souls or minds through which they are
realized. Leibniz formulates the program perfectly: to counter Descartes by
restoring to Nature the force of action and passion, but this without falling
back into a pagan vision of the world, an idolatry of Nature. Spinoza’s
program is very similar… (ibid. 228)
Deleuze is clear that in both Leibniz and Spinoza the attempt is made to restore a
philosophy of nature. In both the idea of ‘expression’ is central; indeed, Deleuze goes so
far as to claim that their anti-Cartesianism is grounded in this idea. In Spinoza nature
comprises and contains everything and is at the same time explicated and implicated in
each thing: ‘Attributes involve and explicate substance, which in turn comprises all
attributes. Modes involve and explicate the attributes on which they depend, while the
attribute in turn contains the essence of all its modes’ (ibid. 17).
In this expressive ontology ‘substance is self-expressing in the attributes: it is both
what is denoted by them and what manifests itself in them. The essence of substance, on
the other hand, is the sense of substance’s self-expression’ (Wasser 2007: 53). However,
Deleuze is keen to defend Spinoza’s system from the kind of concern about it articulated by
Leibniz, namely, that it renders us impotent as creatures: ‘the theory of modes was only a
means of taking from creatures all their activity, dynamism, individuality, all their
authentic reality. Modes were only phantasms, phantoms, fantastic projections of a single
Substance’ (Deleuze 1992: 226). For Deleuze everything in Spinoza contradicts such an
interpretation. Rather than utilizing the idea of the mode so as to take power away from
creatures, it is, Deleuze contends, the only way of showing how things participate in God’s
power, ‘how they are parts of divine power, but singular parts, intensive quantities,
irreducible degrees’ (ibid.: 227). If man is a part of the power or essence of God (or
Nature) this is the case only insofar as the essence of God explicates itself through the
essence of the human being. For Deleuze, Leibniz and Spinoza are in fact united in
sharing the project of a new naturalism. The difference is that Spinoza’s philosophy of
nature is the more dynamical and non-finalist of the two.
The new naturalism Deleuze espouses has its anchor, then, in readings of Leibniz
and Spinoza. It’s from an anchor in this naturalism that Deleuze develops an ethics, a
conception of normative activity, and an ethology that brings the human and the animal
into rapport whilst respecting the differences between the human and other forms of life:
our task as human animals is a uniquely normative one and we shall see in due course just
what this entails and why Deleuze is committed to such a view. In spite of his
commitment, then, to univocity and immanence Deleuze does not produce an ontology in
which there are no longer distinctions to be made between forms of life and modes of
being or power, so in his work there is a clear recognition that the human animal is the
normative animal par excellence. Deleuze, therefore, cannot be allied with new materialisms
that collapse normative distinctions and that seek to deprive the human of its normative
privilege however we construe this.
Deleuze on Spinoza and a New Naturalism
There are two key aspects to Deleuze’s thinking I now wish to explore: first, the nature of
his naturalism, and second, how he evinces in accordance with this naturalism a thinking
of norms and ethics. The aim is to show that Deleuze has a set of distinctive insights into
the normative character of the human animal. Although, as we shall see, his work with
Guattari opens up new ontological possibilities for thought and life, bringing human and
nonhuman life into rapport on a plane of immanence, even here there is an
acknowledgement that the human animal is ethically distinguished.
Deleuze sometimes writes of Spinoza’s ‘new materialism’ and mostly of his ‘new
naturalism’. As I have indicated, the former centres on the thinking of immanence and a
focus on the body, and the latter focuses on an expressive nature. In Spinoza nature is
characterised as a positive and productive power. It is from within infinite nature that all
finite things exist as a plurality of modes: nature is not the creation of a transcendent God
and the thinking subject is not placed outside the order of nature. Two points are worth
stressing. First, that Deleuze fully acknowledges that the dynamic characteristics of our
being – our conatus in Spinoza’s language – are fully linked with mechanical ones. For
example, a body’s conatus requires the effort to preserve the state to which it has been
determined by nature. At the same time: ‘A composite body’s conatus is also the effort to
maintain the body’s ability to be affected in a great number of ways’ (Deleuze 1992: 230).
We are thus determined in our capacity to be affected and so long as we remain exercised
by passive affections then our conatus is determined by passions, in which our desires are
born from passions. However, even on the level of a passive affection, which testifies to
our impotence and cuts us off from that of which we are capable, we find, however
minimal, some degree of a power of action (ibid. 231). This leads us to acknowledging a
second point: the ethical task is an on-going labour. As substance God is necessarily the
cause of all his affections, and as these affections can be explained by his nature they can be
called ‘actions’. The case is completely different with finite modes, such as ourselves. Such
modes do not exist by virtue of their own nature; rather, their existence is composed of
extensive parts that are determined and affected from outside. This is why we can say that
the affections of modes are passions: the changes that the modes undergo are not explained
by their natures alone. Childhood is the obvious example in the human case, an abject
state common to all of us and in which we depend heavily on external causes. Now the
ethical question and task comes to the fore, which can be put as follows: can a finite mode
attain to a state of active affections and, if so, how? Here we need to a rather modest
conception of what is possible: whilst we exist as finite modes we find it impossible to
eliminate completely the level of passions, so the best we can bring about is that such
passions occupy only a small part of ourselves (ibid. 219).
A profound difference between Spinoza and Leibniz can be noted: ‘Spinoza’s
dynamism…deliberately excludes all finality’ (ibid. 233). For Spinoza teleology is not at
work in nature: “Nature is a complex process without any predetermined end…There is
no ultimate foundation outside of nature, but immanent powers, relations, and bodily
compositions constitutive of nature itself” (Hayden 1998: 110). Deleuze holds Leibniz’s
finalism to be an inverted mechanism in which, although there is an expressive nature, this
nature is given by God and the pre-established harmony. Things are very different in
Spinoza. In him we find a pure immanent causality that is to be thought in terms of the
endowment of things with their own force of power and that belongs to them as modes.
On this conception of nature finality is excluded, and this is the true significance of the
notion of conatus: ‘Spinoza’s theory of conatus has no other function than to present
dynamism for what it is by stripping it of any finalist significance’ (Deleuze 1992: 233).
This means that there is no given moral harmony, no metaphysics of essences, and no
mechanics of phenomena: ‘Expression in Nature is never a final symbolization, but always,
and everywhere, a causal explication’ (Deleuze 1992: 232). It is not that there is no
mechanism or determinism in Spinoza for Deleuze; rather, he is pointing out that,
although everything is physical, there is also a level on which a physics of force and
dynamism allows for essence to assert itself in existence and espouse the variations of the
power of action. The ‘physical’ is to be understood in three ways: (a) in terms of a physics
of intensive quantity corresponding to modal essences; (b) in terms of a physics of extensive
quantity, which is a mechanism by which modes come into existence; (c) in terms of a
physics of force representing or signifying a ‘dynamism’ through which essences assert
themselves in existence and espouse the variations of their power of acting.
For Deleuze, Spinoza is most definitely engaged in a philosophy of nature. But for
Deleuze it is also the case that Spinoza belongs to a great tradition of practical philosophy
and whose chief task is that of demystification (pertaining to myths and superstitions). The
two projects are inseparably linked since it is through an understanding of what nature is –
asking questions about it works and coming to know that we are fully implicated in it –
that we can acquire and cultivate a ‘superior human nature’, moving from a human
condition of passivity and reactivity to a superior one of activity. Amongst other things,
superstition is what cuts us off from our power of action and diminishes it, including fear
and the hope linked to fear, as well as the anxiety that leads us to phantoms. I quote from
Deleuze:
Like Lucretrius, Spinoza knows that there are no joyful myths or superstitions. Like
Lucretius he sets the image of a positive Nature against the uncertainty of the gods:
what is opposed to Nature is not Culture, nor the state of Reason, or even the civil
State, but only the superstition that threatens all human endeavour. And, like
Lucretius again, Spinoza assigns to philosophy the task of denouncing all that is
sad, that lives on sadness, and all those who depends on sadness as the basis of
their power…The devaluation of sad passions, and the denunciation of those who
cultivate, and depend on, them form the practical object of philosophy… (1992:
270)
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than this since, as Deleuze acknowledges, some sad
passions have a social function and can be socially useful (hope, humility, remorse, etc.).
Still, for Deleuze, naturalism – from Lucretius to Spinoza and Nietzsche – is directed
towards and moved by a philosophy of affirmation: ‘Spinoza’s naturalism is defined by
speculative affirmation in his theory of substance, and by practical joy in his conception of
modes’ (ibid. 272). Deleuze cites Spinoza’s well-known piece of wisdom that the free
human being thinks of nothing less than death and that true wisdom is a meditation on
life and not death.
How does Deleuze develop a normative ethics from this new naturalism? He writes
of Spinoza developing a theory of natural right from the insights of Hobbes and that is
opposed to the classical theory of natural law. The antique tradition of natural law
(Cicero) advances the following theses: (a) our being can be defined by its perfection
within an order of ends (we are naturally reasonable and sociable); (b) the state of nature
does not precede society but rather we live in conformity with nature in a good civil
society; (c) in this state what is primary and unconditional are duties: our natural powers
are only potential and require an act of reason to realize them in relation to the ends they
need to serve.
Spinoza transforms this in a specific manner, the details of which we do not need
to trace here, grounding everything in natural right or power. The key development that
needs to take place in our thinking for Deleuze is this: it needs to be a matter of capacities
and powers, in which ‘law’ is construed as identical to ‘right’ and this means that natural
laws are to be conceived as norms of power rather than rules of duty: ‘This is the very
meaning of the word law: the law of nature is never a rule of duty, but the norm of a
power, the unity of right, power and its exercise’ (258). On this model duties, of whatever
kind, are always secondary relative to the exercise of our power and the preservation of our
right. Moreover:
Thus the moral law that purports to prohibit and command, involves a kind of
mystification: the less we understand the laws of nature, that is, the norms of life,
the more we interpret them as orders and prohibitions – to the point that the
philosopher must hesitate before using the word ‘law’, so does it retain a moral
aftertaste... (ibid. 268).
These norms are ones of life in the sense that they relate to the strength and the power of
action of individuals. We are normative types or animals out of a specific motivation: we
do not wish to be only the subject of chance encounters but rather to seek a rational
organisation of our natural powers and to enhance the cultivation and enjoyment of these
powers. Moreover, as one commentator on Spinoza argues, although he is a deep
naturalist and accepts rocks have minds, he has no difficulty ‘accepting that these minds
are not capable of the things required of agents, such as deliberation or responding to
reasons’ (Kisner 2011: 59). So, although the human is a mode like other modes it is also
the most complex mode since it is in possession of the greatest number of affects and ideas.
The difference between natural law and civil law is minimal on Spinoza’s
naturalistic and monistic account. Human laws, i.e. civil laws, pertain to human interests
in a specific manner, whilst the laws of nature do not. Still, human laws are ‘expressions’ of
natural law in the sense that in their invention human beings are following their natural
impulse (the natural law) to preserve themselves. As one commentator has expressed it:
Nature herself does not deliver civil law in its detail, but she certainly provides the
impetus for it, and the human being who conceives statutes is just as much a
natural being heeding the call of self-preservation as is the caveman who hunts for
food (De Brabander 2012: 90).
In nature we do not see a moral difference – of good and evil – but we can posit in relation
to it a legitimate ‘ethical’ difference, such as the difference between the wise man and the
foolish person. The content of Reason is strength or freedom. Deleuze notes that this
difference does not relate to conatus since fools and ignorant human beings seek to
persevere in their being as much as reasonable and strong human beings. How, then, do
we think this ethical difference and locate it? For Deleuze this centres on the kind of
affections that guide our conatus, and this involves developing adequate ideas and active
affections: ‘Reason, strength, and freedom…are inseparable from a formative process, a
development, a culture. Nobody is born free, nobody is born reasonable. And nobody can
undergo for us the slow learning of what agrees with our nature, the slow effort of
discovering our joys....’ (Deleuze 1992: 262) For Deleuze, reason is involved in all the stages
of our becoming-ethical and normative subjects, enabling us to move from the badness of
chance encounters to common notions and adequate ideas, and so helping us make the
effort to organise our encounters, including agreements and disagreements, in a more
thoughtful and rational manner (ibid.: 280). For Deleuze, then, reason – even in its socalled ‘commandments’ – does not demand anything from us that is contrary to nature
and so a reasonable being can be said to ‘reproduce and express the effort of Nature as a
whole’ (ibid. 265). Deleuze refuses to see reason simply as an artificial endeavour (say one
of ‘convention’); rather, it is necessary to appreciate that reason proceeds not by artifice but
by a natural combination of relations, and here the emphasis is not on a prudential
calculation of self-interest and interests so as to bring about social union, but rather ‘a kind
of direct recognition (reconnaissance) of man by man’ (ibid. 264).
What exactly does Deleuze mean by appealing to this ‘recognition’? It works quite
differently to the notion of recognition Grosz is keen to criticize. In an effort to diminish
the role of sad passions in our lives we strive to rationally organise our encounters. True
utility is to be defined as seeking to organize what is useful to us in terms of striving to
encounter bodies that agree in nature with us. It is impossible for us to avoid all ‘bad’
encounters, such as disease and death. Nevertheless, it is possible for us to strive to unite
with what agrees with our nature and that give the expectation of a maximum of joyful
affections. Deleuze now argues: ‘…if it be asked what is most useful to us, this will be seen
to be man. For man in principle agrees in nature with man; man is absolutely or truly
useful to man’ (261). This means that the effort to organize rational encounters translates
itself into an effort to form an association of human beings in relations that can be
combined. To practise reason in this context is to do nothing contrary to Nature since the
demand made is only that everyone should love themselves and seek what is useful to
themselves, striving to preserve their being by increasing their power of action. Deleuze
insists, then, that: ‘There is thus no artificiality or conventionality in reason’s
endeavour…The state of reason is one with the formation of a higher kind of body and a
higher kind of soul…’ (264). Man recognizes man and we, as finite modes, recognize,
through common notions, a positive order of Nature: ‘constitutive or characteristic
relations by which bodies agree with, and are opposed to, one another. Laws of Nature no
longer appear as commands and prohibitions, but for what they are…norms of
composition, rules for the realization of powers’ (291). Recognition in this context means,
then, a kind of gratitude. As Spinoza himself writes: ‘Only free human beings are very thankful
to one another’ (Ethics IV: P 71).
What is a norm? Deleuze calls it, following Hume, ‘a general rule’. Whatever these
norms are – rights of possession, rules of interaction – they exist to provide human activity
and endeavour with stability and community: “The function of the rule is to determine a
stable and common point of view, firm and calm, independent of our present situation’
(Deleuze 1991: 41). For Deleuze the human animal is an inventive species owing to its
cultural formation and for Deleuze this is our role within nature. Although we can
‘naturalize’ humanity we need to see ethics and politics as our nature. Deleuze refuses to see
the realm of human invention, such as custom, artifice, and convention, as ontologically
opposed to nature, though clearly there is plenty of room for a critique of culture and its
inventions.
Late Deleuze
I now want to turn finally to Deleuze’s collaborative work with Guattari and Deleuze’s later
Spinozism. I am suggesting that in spite on the emphasis on ontological univocity, Deleuze
continues to recognise that the human animal is ethically and normatively distinguished.
Deleuze and Guattari favour a model of evolution in which emphasis is placed on
transversal communication takes place across phylogenetic lineages and in contrast to
genealogical tree models and where evolution is mapped in terms of relations of filiation
and descent. A rhizome, for example, is said to be ‘anti-genealogy’ that operates not
through filiation or descent, but rather via ‘variation, expansion, conquest, capture,
offshoots’. They see this as an inventive domain of evolution since it involves novel
alliances or creative becomings. They write: ‘if evolution includes any veritable becomings,
it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and
kingdoms, with no possible filiation’.
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari posit nature as a plane of consistency
that is ‘like an immense abstract machine’, which they call the ‘machinic phylum’. It is said
to be ‘abstract’ yet ‘real and individual’: ‘its pieces are various assemblages and individuals,
each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or
less interconnected relations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 254). This is, in fact, to posit a
novel monism in which the plane of nature enjoys a unity that ‘applies equally to the
inanimate and animate, the artificial and the natural’ (ibid.). It is now worth citing
Deleuze and Guattari at length on the character of this plane since it is their fundamental
insight:
Its unity has nothing to do with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an
end or a project in the mind of God. Instead, it is a plane upon which everything is
laid out, and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all
functions; its dimension increase, however, with those of the multiplicities of
individualities it cuts across. It is a fixed plane, upon which things are distinguished
from one another only by speed and slowness. A plane of univocality opposed to
analogy. The One is said with a single meaning of all the multiple. Being expresses
in a single meaning all that differs. What we are talking about is not the unity of
substance but the infinity of the modifications that are part of one another on this
unique plane of life (ibid.).
There is much here to unpack and that merits clarification. I cannot do this here. I want
instead to focus on this point: Deleuze is interested in how we define a body and its
powers of being and acting. For him a body can be almost anything and can be defined in
two ways: first, it is composed of an infinite number of particles in in which it is
characterised by relations of motion and rest, speeds and slownesses; second, a body is an
‘affective’ one in that it affects other bodies and is in turn affected by them. Deleuze thinks
the Spinozist characterisation of a body is far-reaching since it means that what truly
defines a body is neither form nor functions, but the relations of movement and affect. It is
the second proposition just outlined that interests Deleuze the most and leads him to
discuss biology and ethology, especially the work of von Uexkull. He writes:
You will not define an animal, or a human being, not by its form, its organs, and its
functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it by the number of affects it
is capable of (Deleuze 1988: 124).
So, he suggests, long after Spinoza we find biologists and naturalists, such as von Uexkull,
describing animal worlds in terms of affects and their capacities.
Now, Deleuze acknowledges that there is a difference between the human world
and animal worlds but holds that this novel ethology can be made use of in the case of the
human. We do not know what affects we are capable of in advance, and this suggests that
there is an ‘empirical education’ in life, involving ‘a long affair of experimentation, a
lasting prudence’ and a wisdom that implies constructing a plane of immanence. In terms
of our becoming-ethical we can say that we do not know what a body can do: it is a mode
of practical living and experimenting, as well as, of course, furthering the active life, the life
of affirmative activity, for example, cultivating the active affects of generosity and
joyfulness, as opposed to the passive and sad affects of hatred, fear, and cruelty. Deleuze
even thinks ethology has a political implication and application since it becomes ‘no longer
a matter of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities’ (1988: 126). In
terms of human community we might say the task is to form a higher individual, and all
the classical questions of modern political thinking then come enter onto the horizon,
such as: ‘How can a being take another being into its world, but while preserving or
respecting the other’s own relations and world?’ We can also explore the different types of
sociabilities that may be available to us as human animals, such as the difference between
the community of human beings and that of rational beings.
The picture of life Deleuze develops in his later writings with Guattari, and in
‘Spinoza and Us’, can readily lead us astray, thinking mistakenly that he has completely
collapsed distinctions between nonhuman and human, nature and culture, nature and
artifice. Of course, this is the great naturalist vision: to dethrone the primacy of the
human and naturalise it. As Grosz puts it, the aim is to wrest life from ‘the privilege of the
human’ and places it in the living and nonliving worlds (Grosz 2011b: 39). For Deleuze,
too, things are in relation with one another through this breakdown of form and function
and thinking beyond genealogical or filial models of evolution. However, this does not
mean that the ethical becoming of the human is not something specific or singled out for
special treatment.
Conclusion
My main critical point in conclusion can be articulated as follows: the commitment to
univocity does not mean that all living systems and entities enjoy the same ethical and
cultural reality. In his work in the 1950s and 1960s, on Hume and Spinoza, for example,
Deleuze clearly recognizes that the human animal is the normative animal par excellence,
being what Hume called ‘the inventive species’. Today, of course, we would be keen to
describe it as also the destructive species.
It is clear though that Deleuze does not provide enough information in his later
writings about the different communities and sociabilities that might exist or reflect on our
treatment of nature or ecological issues. However, I think Deleuze provides us with new
concepts that can contribute to critical work on these topics, and this has been done in the
literature. For example, let’s reflect on the possible ecological significance of nature
conceived as an immanent plane of life in which living things are not fixed by an invariable
order. If nature is distributive of a life of affects and affective relations, then there is a basis
for affirming the continuity between each thing in the world, and basis for appreciating the
multiplicity and diversity of nature, so endorsing the concept of biodiversity and giving us a
model of ecological complexity (Hayden 1998: 118). Here we might appeal to the
multiplicity of ecological milieu, the diversity of their interactive elements and the dynamic
relations between mileux, in which each thing constantly connects to an immanent
exteriority in order to flourish. We cannot posit on this plane as an indifferent and closed
system. Of course, we might also suppose this means the end of the human/nonhuman
distinction and on ontological level this makes sense, though I think it important we do
not collapse it on other levels: culture, history, and ethics, and politics.
We have seen the extent to which Deleuze provides a new naturalism through his
re-working of Spinozism (his Epicureanism is equally important but has not been dealt
with here),6 and we have also seen the extent to which this commitment to naturalism on
his part is ethically motivated. My main contention has been that although Deleuze
produces an innovative ontology, or onto-ethology, he cannot be identified with the
intellectual move that would deprive the human animal of its ethico-normative
distinctiveness. True, Deleuze does not ground knowledge in a human subject or restrict
knowledge to representation, and this is what makes him so challenging as a so-called postmodern thinker: he is committed to metaphysics. However, we need to be attentive to the
different components that make up Deleuze’s identity as a philosopher and work through
them carefully, noting the tensions that his intellectual commitments give rise to,
sometimes productively, at other times less so (one thinks, for example, of the
extraordinary tension that exists between a commitment to Nietzscheanism and a
commitment to Bergsonism). It is my hope that this essay will at least serve to get readers to
re-think the appropriation of Deleuze by new materialism and to seriously consider ethical
questions and normative issues.7 It is clear that Deleuze’s legacy to contemporary thought
6
For insight here see my essay, 2014.
Only recently has attention been devoted to raising questions about Deleuze as a normative
thinker. As one commentator has noted, the moral and value-theoretical aspects of Deleuze’s
philosophy have tended to be ignored or overshadowed by the ontological, historical, and political
aspects (Jun 2011, p. 89). Along with other so-called ‘post-modern’ thinkers such as Derrida and
Foucault, Deleuze has been accused of moral relativism, scepticism, and even nihilism. In an essay
entitled ‘Thinking and Normativity in Deleuze’s Philosophy’, which opens a collection of essays
devoted to this topic, Anders Kristensen construes Deleuze as a normative thinker in the sense that
he is never concerned merely with objective factual statements on the subjects he addresses: ‘the
metaphysics of Deleuze aims at changing and not describing…the world in which we live’
(Kristensen 2013, p. 11). ‘Metaphysical science’, as Deleuze’s project is described, is said to be
normative in the sense that what we need and ought to think is to be invented: ‘It is this invention
7
is a highly complex one. In terms of the ‘new materialism’ it is important to appreciate
that Deleuze was advocating such a materialism in the 1960s and based on classical
sources. At the same time, it is important to recognize the value of the post-human turn
and the attempt to naturalize the human and politics as we encounter it in the work of
Elisabeth Grosz: it contains important insights that can help cultivate novel ecological ways
of thinking, and there can be little doubt that the eco-political crisis now facing the planet
needs the resources of the Deleuzian-inspired materialism if it is to be adequately thought
through and engaged with. However, what cannot be so readily relinquished are the
humanist elements of Deleuze’s Spinozism and its commitment to the tasks of
demystification and human emancipation.
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