Spinoza quatenus Deleuze: The Problem of Expression in Language

Abstract

Spinoza’s theory of language seems to risk the paradox that no expression of true ideas is possible in linguistic terms. One particular term in the Ethics has stood out as addressing its potential contradictions: quatenus, ‘insofar as’ or ‘to the extent that,’ occurring hundreds of times in the text but still an element of mystery. This article offers an interpretation of this notion inspired by Deleuze’s reading and especially the theme in his seminars, that Spinoza’s project is a ‘general semiology.’ This suggests another way to affirm the coherence of the Ethics, by making a virtuous circle of its ontological and practical registers. Key to this is the notion of ‘sense’ in its genetic role and the overlooked distinction between infinite attributes and the two powers. The senses of words, propositions or demonstrations in the Ethics are not independent of a ‘noncausal correspondence’ between powers of thinking and acting from which they arise, and which quatenus consistently marks.

1.

At one moment in his seminars on Spinoza, Deleuze observes parenthetically that ‘philosophy constantly employs a word for which it’s been reproached, but […] philosophy needs it: it’s the locution “insofar as” [en tant que]. I believe that if it were necessary to define philosophy by a word, one could say that philosophy is the art of the “insofar as.” In fact, […] this is thought being born. […] Because “insofar as” is the art of the concept. […] Is it by chance that Spinoza constantly employs the Latin equivalent of “insofar as”?’ Quatenus is the textual mark, dispersed throughout the Ethics, of ‘distinctions in the concept that are not perceptible in things themselves’ (24/03/81).1 As often happens in Deleuze’s teaching, the line of thought is suggestive but clearly a spontaneous and undeveloped reflection arising in the course of another discussion. This moment at which locution and concept come together presents a flash of insight and is gone, and if anything still underplays the singular insistence of an articulation that cuts across virtually every page of the Ethics. Formulas like ‘being qua being’ may always have been needed, but no other philosopher so directly tied the very sense of what they had to say to their iteration. Spinoza made this ‘art of the insofar as’ his own to such an extent that it truly constitutes a signature style of thought or an expressive trait of his ideas.

One question is what Spinoza thought he was doing in using words, and this word in particular, as he did, which is what most readers have been interested in. But there is also the question of what this locution itself is doing, what operation it presents, if it does make available a type of distinction that characterises concepts as such. Although Deleuze does not go further, this article takes quatenus as the point of contact between several elements of his reading and a series of debates in the scholarship around the term’s specific role, as well as an enduring critical problem regarding Spinoza’s use of language in general. The problem is not just how adequate ideas might be expressed in words, but the nature of a selective mechanism operating at the level of sense in the formation of ideas. What is the birth of thought to which Deleuze refers, how do we come to fashion adequate ideas, what are the genetic factors? What are distinctions in the concept that are not perceptible in things? In a word, they are events, which relate the senses of the ideas that we have to the capacities of the bodies that we are. This relation is not a simple fact of parallelism, but a mysterious, paradoxical resonance. It is what Deleuze calls a noncausal, or quasi-causal, correspondence.

2.

Spinoza’s critical views on language are well known. In Metaphysical Thoughts, he blames the practice of naming for the fact that ‘we imagine as if they were beings all those modes which the mind uses for negating’ [2] (I/234.26-7), i.e., we treat the negative or non-being as if it were real. ‘I do not wonder that philosophers preoccupied with words, or grammar, should fall into such errors. For they judge the things from the words, not the words from the things’ [2] (I/235.6-9). Our ideas are confused because they follow linguistic norms. On the other hand, Spinoza writes, ‘my purpose is to explain the nature of things, not the meaning of words. I intend to indicate these things by words whose meaning is not entirely opposed to the meaning with which I wish to use them’ (E3DA20e),2 which seems to broach an undecidable gap between statements and a purport different in kind. Spinoza was at least acutely aware of the problematic, undetermined character of sense, but also its indispensable role in determining the ideas we come to have. One tradition has accused him of an arbitrary, specious, evasive use of terms that conflicts with their ordinary senses, but he has also been seen as intentionally concealing his real thought in a code to be deciphered by like minds. Most damagingly, Spinoza’s critique of natural language in the Ethics may be severe enough to threaten the coherence of his project. Words are abstractions and cannot express the singular, the worst being ‘universals’ like horse and ‘transcendentals’ like being. Such terms have hazy meanings in themselves, due to the way they are formed; moreover, their connotations vary depending on the life and times of a speaker. Yet Spinoza’s metaphysics is defined in such terms, and without excluding the biographical reference—‘By God I understand a being [ens] absolutely infinite …’ (E1d6).3 This provoked an article by David Savan arguing that Spinoza was aware of the tensions and even ‘did not intend the Ethics to be a simple exposition of truth’; indeed, ‘So sharply does Spinoza separate words from adequate ideas that it is difficult to make out for language any useful philosophical function’ [5] (pp. 63–64).

The majority of scholarship has discounted this subjective ingredient and focused on giving Spinoza’s system overall consistency and an objective and timeless character befitting the image of classical rationalism. One word in Spinoza’s text has long seemed to claim a special role in mitigating its potential contradictions, particularly the attribution to a single substance of incompatible modal predicates: quatenus, ‘insofar as’ or ‘to the extent that,’ occurring over 400 times in the Ethics. According to a book from 1888, ‘Every reader of Spinoza knows what an important rôle is assigned to this quatenus,’ by which Spinoza ‘contrives to escape from difficulties and inconsistencies otherwise insuperable.’4 Its endless variations clearly represent a key element and organising structure in Spinoza’s thought that folds and refolds the surface of the text, but can it help and if so how? What exactly is this element and the structure it brings to bear? Does it name a ‘part’ of Spinoza’s system, or does it have another role entirely? Inspired by one of the other lines of thought in Deleuze’s seminars, that ‘a univocal language is not a language in which there is a meaning fixed once and for all’ (27/01/81)—that something quite to the contrary is the case—the interpretation offered here suggests another way to grasp the coherence of the Ethics, by making a virtuous circle of its ontological and practical registers. This is an ‘ethological’ circle5 bearing a motive force of torsion between what a body can do and what the mind can conceive, but also a selective action between the greater and the lesser power in each case. Quatenus points out the coincidence (co-occurrence) of the two sides for an individual—the senses of words, propositions or demonstrations in the Ethics, like the qualities of modes of life in which they are embedded and the typical notions associated with them, are not independent of the differences in capacity from which they arise and which they express.

3.

Spinoza introduces the topic of language into the Ethics in a tangential way, by remarking that ‘from the thought of the word pomum a Roman will immediately pass to the thought of the fruit’ (E2p18s). As Moreau points out in a long chapter that is one of the few detailed discussions of Spinoza’s theory of language, this linguistic case should be distinguished from other examples of association that Spinoza offers.

If we understand similitudo in the very strict sense of an identity of forms, or an identity of causes, it is true that all of the links between images lack similitudo. [… I]f we understand similitudo in a less precise sense as the relation between two images that belong to the same register, or that possess points of commonality, then we can see that the two examples are not situated at the same level: there are common points between the horse and its plough […]—an identity of functions, the integration into a common category made up of various facts that are often tied together. These facts possess internal determinations that make it legitimate to associate them with the same universe. But there is nothing of this type between the articulated sound and the physical thing that is seen or felt. This is not a question of degree: in one case, the relation is purely arbitrary […]; in the other, by contrast, the absence of similarity does not imply a total heterogeneity.

[4] (p. 334).

An ‘identity of functions’ means not just any animal can perform the tasks of the plough horse—it must have certain capacities and not others. Yet there is nothing about the word pomum that uniquely fits it to name this fruit. Articulated sounds and physical things belong to distinct varieties of the organisation of images. There must occur a series of sensory impressions of apples and a series of the sound-images pomum, but these are independent, heterogeneous, without common points. They do not, even minimally, share the ‘internal determinations’ that allow constitutive relations to be understood. As Spinoza writes,

[T]he mind has, not an adequate, but only a confused [NS: and mutilated] knowledge, of itself, of its own body, and of external bodies, so long as it perceives things from the common order of nature, i.e., so long as it is determined externally, from fortuitous encounters with things, to regard this or that, and not so long as it is determined internally, from the fact that it regards a number of things at once, to understand their agreements, differences, and oppositions. For so often as it is disposed internally, […] then it regards things clearly and distinctly.

(E2p29s).6

In the case of the horse and its plough, Moreau is pointing out, certain internal agreements are discernible. There are ‘common points’ or ‘points of commonality’ between the two in the otherwise ‘common order’ of extension. The latter can be seen, interchangeably, as a global composition or decomposition of relations of motion and rest, since at the limit everything that exists is part of a common nature. From the point of view of the whole, as Deleuze puts it, ‘nature is the aggregate of decompositions as much as of recompositions. And I could never distinguish pure compositions and decompositions. They exist entirely within each other. So, nature is pure chaos’ (06/01/81). From the point of view of its parts, on the other hand, determinate points of commonality emerge within this chaotic mixture. There are specific agreements between their relations of motion and rest that ‘fit’ the horse to the plough, for instance, composing a higher-order assemblage. This allows it to be rationally understood to some extent, as well as simply imagined. The problem of language, on the other hand, seems to be that the conjunction of words and things is entirely determined externally.

Spinoza at first appears to treat the Roman passing from pomum to the thought of an apple and the soldier from the thought of a horse to one of war as equivalent, but this is not quite so:

The peasant who associates the image of a horseshoe […] with that of a plough links two different images that he himself recognises as being different and […] evoke two different things. […] The Roman […] links together two images that for him are not different and that correspond to a single idea. Certainly, it is possible to think of the word separately, […] to investigate the form of the letters […]. At that point, […] the word would no longer be playing its role as a word. When it does play this role, it corresponds to no other idea besides the idea of the thing that the visual image represents to us. A modification of our body (the word) is associated by habit with another modification of our body (the image of the thing), which it evokes and refers to. Language thus has the particularity of not only tying together an idea and an image: it ties together an idea with two images.

[4] (p. 332).

The peculiarity of language is that two images externally conjoined, the perceived sound-image pomum and the visual image of an apple, have for the conscious mind the objective reality of a single idea—what the visual image ‘represents to us.’ Language relates two images, a signifier and a referent, to one idea. Moreau takes this to mean that the word is ‘like the image of an image’—it is a matter of a ‘double image,’ which ‘suffices to distinguish it [language] from other effects of the imagination’; moreover, ‘This also suffices to radically distinguish Spinoza’s theses from those of all other theoreticians of language. For the latter, words represent things […] or the ideas of things […]. For Spinoza, words represent the affections of the body. It is only by the intermediary of these affections that they can have any relation to things or ideas’ [4] (p. 333).

4.

These references to representation do have some ambivalence. On one hand, word and visual image both correspond to ‘the idea of the thing’ that the visual image represents. On the other, a word is said to ‘evoke and refer to’ a visual image, and thus to represent an affection of the body. Here, the idea of the thing is absent, having merged into the visual image that is also now what is evoked. But this could suggest that ‘words represent affections of the body’ in the sense of connoting them. Hearing pomum, however, the Roman is not put in mind of bodily motions, but simply of something red, edible, etc. Certain affections do occur, as extended correlates of ideas that we have because they are associated with words (as well as sense impressions). Yet this fact of parallelism between attributes makes those affections neither the signification nor referent of the terms, or rather of the ideas to which the affections correspond in playing the role of words. The mode of extension corresponding to the idea is not what the idea represents. An idea has a formal essence (essentia formalis) that corresponds to the composition of modes of extension; but it also has an object, to which extent it is the objective essence (essentia objectiva) of that thing, in Spinoza’s scholastic terminology. This distinction is why ideas do not simply enter into an external order and connection of affections, a partitive sequence of impressions, but have the power to represent things by expressing a ‘comprehensive’ nature to some extent. Take my idea of the book on the table over there: one way to characterise it is to say that the book is an existing mode whose objective (but clearly not formal) essence just is the object of my idea, even if that idea is confused to the extent that there is much it cannot express about the book’s composition.7 Every idea expresses an objective power to understand that is subject to an immanent standard of acuity or reflexive ‘scope,’ because this is the condition for its serving a representative purpose. This is very different from the capacities of modes (of every attribute) to affect and be affected by other modes.

To fully establish this a long discussion would be needed that does not belong here, but because the argument is grounded in it a basic description has to be inserted. On distinguishing the corresponding mode of extension from what the idea represents, Radner’s ‘Spinoza’s Theory of Ideas’ [9] can be taken as the classic statement. Like most interpreters, Radner does distinguish what the idea represents from its object, however, and takes the latter’s identity with the idea to be an instance of attribute-parallelism, on the basis that it is ‘the same thing’ that exists formally and objectively. Here, another reading is possible that makes significantly better intuitive sense of Spinoza’s theory of mind and representation—namely, that the ‘identity’ in question means simply that everything existing is an object of thought, but does not necessarily map the idea/object relation onto that between attributes. As Richard Aquila has noted, ‘the identity of thinking and extended substance at most requires the conclusion that each mode of extension is identical with some mode of intellectual activity; it does not require any particular conclusion concerning the object of the intellectual activity’; further, it would be compatible with this condition to hold ‘that while each part of reality must be apprehending some part of reality, what it must be apprehending is not simply itself but the whole of reality outside it’ [10] (p. 274). Aquila takes this as an argument against the contrary position he ascribes to Spinoza, but with certain modifications, it may aptly describe the power unique to ideas and thus the solution Spinoza should have in mind.

As Deleuze is one of the few to argue, the key point is that there are really two distinct parallelisms, and hence two powers: ‘One and the same thing is formal in the attribute on which it depends within the power of existing and acting, and objective in the idea of God on which it depends within the power of thinking. A mode of an attribute and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing expressed in two ways, under two powers’ [11] (p. 117). The same thing under two powers: the formal/objective distinction is between powers, not attributes. Thus what we are conscious of directly is an object of thought; but the ideas that we think imply an objective power that belongs to ideas alone and accounts for the genesis of this representative function. Deleuze will refer to the ‘objective condition which the absolute power of thinking possesses’ [7] (p. 98). In sum, an idea corresponds to the relations of composition of the formal essence of modes of extension insofar as it partakes in a power to act, but it also has the power to comprehend things in the world.

5.

With the above in view, we can see that the ‘thought of the fruit’ called to mind for the Roman is not just a visual image, but a representative content implying typical conditions of reference—the abstract notion of an apple. This idea that we are caused to have by a word has some objective reality, and what it explicitly intends opens onto an order of implication that is accessible in this case as an arrangement of the general and the particular. The idea to which the two images are linked by language implies a comprehension, limited to a set of associations not all of which can be conscious at once. This means that what distinguishes language is not simply a double image, but rather the fact that an association between at least two series of images reciprocally determines a set of structured conceptual implications in the mind: first and foremost the general notion ‘apple,’ with its specific characteristics, implying the more general ‘fruit,’ the act ‘to eat,’ etc., as (potential) objects of thought. Each word or image encountered, as a bodily affection, corresponds to an idea evoking these conceptual orders.

Yet forming such concepts is a function that the idea performs only because it has the objective capacity to do so, i.e., ‘because it is a thinking thing’ (E2d3). ‘I say concept rather than perception,’ Spinoza explains, ‘because the word perception seems to indicate that the mind is acted on by the object. But concept seems to express an action of the mind’ (E2d3e). Being caused to undergo an order and connection of affections of the body would not be enough to form even general notions were it not for the fact that ideas also express an objective reality. Even if it does not sufficiently manifest it, the meaning of a term therefore points to a power to think and understand that is not identical with the power to act. It is important to note that this says nothing yet about whether or not the concept is an adequate idea, which follows only in E2d4: ‘By adequate idea I understand an idea which, insofar as it is considered in itself, without relation to an object, has all the properties, or intrinsic denominations of a true idea’; ‘I say intrinsic to exclude what is extrinsic, i.e., the agreement of the idea with its object’ (E2d4e). Thus adequate ideas have no relation to a world of represented objects; they are purely expressive and not referential or denotative, nor indeed general. Intrinsic denominations are distinctions that do not depend on the existence of terms to which they refer. They are not perceptible in objects, due to the way the mind is acted on, but impose divisions on things of their own accord. They appear at the far end of the spectrum of thinking, where ideas inherit a power to conceive what the essential distinctions in the world, the significant events dividing it, actually are.

Spinoza points to the difference between the order and connection of affections of the body and the order of comprehension in Letter 40:

[I]f someone were to ask through what cause a certain determinate body is set in motion, we could answer that it is determined to such motion by another body, and this again by another, and so on to infinity. We could reply in this way, I say, because the question is only about motion […]. But if I see a book containing excellent thoughts and beautifully written in the hands of a common man and I ask him whence he has such a book, and he replies that he has copied it from another book belonging to another common man who could also write beautifully, and so on to infinity, he does not satisfy me. For I am asking him not only about the form and arrangement of the letters, with which alone his answer is concerned, but also about the thoughts and meaning expressed in their arrangement, and this he does not answer by his progression to infinity.

[12] (pp. 865–866).

Spinoza’s respondent has provided a causal history—a series of motions that led to the existence of the book. By extension, perhaps, this could provide an account of how certain orders of images come to be gradually associated over time, for instance pomum with images of apples, and thus why conceptual implications are what they are in a given place and time. Yet it leaves something out. What has not been explained is the objective reality of the ideas expressed in the book—their sense. To the extent that this power to understand is part of the reason for the book’s being written, the existence of the book has not been satisfactorily explained. We need an ‘action of the mind,’ in addition to the mind’s being acted on by objects. The arrangement of letters, which it is of course possible to investigate as material things, as Moreau pointed out, cannot just refer to more and more traces (‘copies’), for then they are not playing their role as words. Spinoza is not concerned here with the power of causal agencies to act on each other bit by bit, but the power to understand something by a word in context, or by a series of words. This implies concepts that refer to one another and depend on the nature of ideas as different in kind from that of bodies.

The conclusion is that ideas are of such a nature as to comprehend something implied in an arrangement of elements and the relations between them, which inheres in the whole arrangement. They involve, not an indefinite progression to infinity, but an actual infinite enveloped in every point along the way. As Shirley comments, ‘The argument refers to the explanation of the representational content of a cognition or idea, which Spinoza—following Descartes—calls its “objective reality.” The objective reality of a representation cannot be explained by an infinite series of causes, although just such a series does explain its formal reality’ [12] (p. 865, n. 144). As this also suggests, however, the conceptual implications of a word by themselves, although they involve the power to think, do not adequately express this power.8 Such implications are a necessary condition for understanding what is signified, for being able to read or converse; yet insofar as they are still the condition for true representation, they are in turn conditioned by an infinite series of external causes. When it comes to adequation, Spinoza has in mind the operation of something unconditioned. At the limit, this would be a fully expressive idea, or the distinct sense of an expression. But the objective power at its origin is also what allows us not only to grasp the meaning of a word, even as it remains tied to a dimension of denotation, but to think anything at all, even something contradictory or impossible.

6.

How would the conceptual implications of particular words arise? All words have a complex embedding in natural language—not just a place in the occurrence of a series of images, but in relation to other parts of speech. The reason the Roman moves from pomum to ‘apple’ is that the association is not fortuitous, but impressed on each member of a community as an element of a much more extensive material assemblage in which these relations are organised. In this minimal sense at least, the author is no more responsible than the reader for what a book makes available to the understanding—they too must rely on a presupposed structure of conceptual implications to constrain the actions of the mind to a sequential order in a specific historical context. As Moreau puts it, if peasant and soldier associate different ideas with traces in the sand,

it is because they do not have the same biography. The body in which memory is inscribed is thus an individual body. We can certainly […] describe collective imaginaries, but in principle these are always on the verge of fragmenting […]. By contrast, the Roman who hears the word pomum hears something that was constituted before him—something that others had pronounced and heard in an identical form. If his body is often affected by the same sound at the same time as by another thing, it is because the association of one with the other is already constituted as a collective fact before he has even gained access to it.

[4] (p. 334).

Natural language involves the participation of an individual’s perception-memory circuit in preconstituted sets of associations. These collective facts fix or at least delimit orders of conceptual implication for words, but leave the imagination free to fluctuate otherwise. A possible conjecture at this point might seem to be that this constitutes, in fact, a transindividual virtue of sorts.

In the evolution of a language, we can imagine that a constellation of preconceptions is gradually encoded in the body of a multitude, in constantly recreated traces that extend to a deep past and continuously vary, albeit very slowly. Its inscription in each of the bodies that participate in a given social order is a local instantiation. For an individual, the sense of words will be subject to a degree of secondary variation, but more importantly to limits of variation that cannot be identified with immediate material causes. If words thus embody a transindividual order of composition, the question is whether they also open the individual mind to greater capacities flowing from such an ‘agreement’ of many bodies, as Spinoza’s broader philosophy might seem to suggest. Spinoza’s corpus does contain a number of potential references to a ‘preunderstanding’ of things as an element in the procedures of reasoning. In Letter 36 he recalls how, ‘in order to deduce from a single assumption everything necessary for the proof, in the sixth note I endeavoured to prove the existence of God from the given hypothesis; and then, taking nothing more as known except the bare meaning of words, I reached the conclusion which was sought’ [12] (pp. 857–858). According to Letter 9, a proof cannot avoid presupposing at a certain level what ‘everybody else means’ [12] (p. 782) by terms; as the same letter shows, these commonalities must also enter into indefinitely extended protocols in which their consistency is not only tested but partly formed, making proofs the eyes of the mind by which it comes to see new things. In this way the implications of a common order of nature are brought to light and made explicit, at least as presuppositions that we cannot avoid relying on at first. These are not so much literally discovered as they are formulated in the process that unfolds them and gives them concrete expression. The hope then seems to be that, if what we commonly understand has an implicit connection to other minds, it may for this reason tend to express certain internal determinations (real agreements and differences).

Since the question, for Spinoza, is always one of degrees of power, language can perhaps in principle be conceived as an instrument or technology of reason in a way the following passage seems to suggest:

Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature it demands that everyone seek his own advantage [… and] strive to preserve his own being as far as he can. [… But] we can never bring it about that we require nothing outside ourselves to preserve our being […]. Moreover, […] our intellect would of course be more imperfect if the mind were alone and did not understand anything except itself. There are, therefore, many things outside us which are useful to us […]. For if […] two individuals of entirely the same nature are joined to one another they compose an individual twice as powerful […]. To man, then, there is nothing more useful than […] than that all should so agree in all things that the minds and bodies of all would compose, as it were, one mind and one body.

(E4p18s).

The conclusion would appear to be that the evolution of language is one of the foremost ways in which the human mind has never been alone, in its everyday dealings with external things. This would assume that the ‘accord with nature’ involves the convergence of what is true or rational and what is useful in Spinoza’s sense, for which individual consciousness of adequate ideas is not strictly necessary in order to enjoy the benefits of social order. However, this line of thought has very clear and simple problems at the same time. The limit to this usefulness is not just that I can still understand words idiosyncratically, as Spinoza points out, but that the sense of what I mean to say is always liable to enter another association that conflicts. It is enough to note that there is an evident contest over how words should be understood and may be legitimately used. What we commonly understand is haunted by individual uncertainty, by orders of implication no individual can ever master, but also by a social problem that degrees of common use cannot settle outside an action in the present. For similar reasons, making a point that seems directed against Heidegger, Laerke writes: ‘For Spinoza, there was no truth hidden in language. No adequate understanding of natural things will ever be obtained by studying the origins of our collective language use. No non-arbitrary common origin of language can be sought out in the distant recoils of our collective memory and habits’ [13] (p. 535).

7.

This doubt as to the significance of collective memory is consolidated by the fact that ‘universals’ and ‘transcendentals,’ paradigmatic of linguistic abstraction, are based in the historical inheritance under discussion. The problem is that ‘the human body, being limited, is capable of forming distinctly only a certain number of images at the same time […]. If that number is exceeded, the images will begin to be confused’ (E2p40s1). In the worst case, ‘when the images in the body are completely confused, the mind also will imagine all the bodies confusedly, without any distinction, and comprehend them as if under one attribute […] of Being, Thing, etc. [… T]hese terms signify ideas that are confused in the highest degree’ (E2p40s1). Here Spinoza gives a precise sense to abstraction: multiple images are fused together—abstraction is con-fusion. The form of the general goes from a plurality of empirical cases to distinct classes defined by shared properties or at the limit by a single, indefinite class: the mind ‘can imagine neither slight differences of the singular […] nor their determinate number, and imagines distinctly only what they all agree in, insofar as they affect the body’ (E2p40s). This generality is then applied indiscriminately and obscures things under words. This is contrasted with the power of distinction to be sought: ‘[T]he more generally existence is conceived, the more confusedly it is conceived and the more readily it can be ascribed to any one thing. Conversely, the more singularly existence is conceived, the more clearly it is then understood, and the less likely we are to ascribe it (when we are not attending to the order of Nature) to anything other than the thing itself’ (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, ¶55) [2] (p. 25). This recalls Bergson’s ideal—to ‘cut for the object a concept appropriate to the object alone, a concept one can barely say is still a concept, since it applies only to that one thing’ [14] (p. 147).

Yet this could suggest that the goal is to apprehend the separate identity and unfused unity of images. The singularity of rational understanding should rather be contrasted with the entire order of generality, which goes from an image to any number of them. If the singular is ‘anti-general,’ it is not because it decomposes composites into their parts, but because it embodies an incommensurable direction. Not judging things from words but words from things means going from the ratio of singular individuals, or the organisation of what is singular in them, to its embodiment in collections of images or partitive individuals. It cannot mean going from the collection of parts to their actual constituents, if only because every part of a collection is itself divided, infinitely, into ‘parts [that] cannot be equated with or explicated by any number’ [12] (p. 787). In broad terms, what is singular is not the existence of the individual, but the degree to which it actively participates from moment to moment in the power of God and the inexhaustible relations of motion and rest under which its infinite parts are composed, determined in the interaction.9 If this describes the ‘essence’ of a thing, its eternal aspect nevertheless means neither permanence nor self-identity. A magnitude that is not extensive, Deleuze points out, is a potential to be determined by affections that has the structure of a threshold between maxima and minima, which are nested thresholds in turn. An intensive degree is thus inseparable from a ‘synthesis of the instant’ (10/03/81) that reconciles the eternity of essence with continuous variation, its tendency to increase or decrease. Essence, in short—a thing singularly conceived—becomes curiously instantaneous, rather than sempiternal, and differential, rather than self-identical, and is thinkable only by reason and intuition. The plurality of empirical cases, on the other hand—a ‘determinate number’ of singular individuals, if images could be kept strictly separate—remain at the level of inadequate ideas. The natural question is thus what kind of process abstraction involves, beyond the inadequacy of knowledge through images, which already involves the categories of unity, number or measure. Spinoza never describes in concrete terms what pushes the body’s capacity to distinctly form multiple images to its limit, and apparently beyond it. The body is capable of forming distinctly only a certain number of images at the same time, but if that number is exceeded the images themselves become confused. How is it exceeded, when the body can only form a certain number?

A common view is that, as Margaret Wilson puts it, ‘someone who has seen hundreds of horses is unable to retain in imagination all the “unimportant differences”’ [15] (p. 113)—i.e., so many images begin to accumulate that, over time, differences are lost. This may describe a real feature of our lives but makes little sense as an explanation of linguistic terms. No one actually needs to see hundreds of horses for the name to function as a confused universal. The implication of transcendentals like ‘being’ does not depend on the number of things that any particular individual has seen, any more than the meaning of pomum depends on the co-occurrence of sound- and visual-images in the life of a given Roman. In both cases, the same collective fact is to blame. The limited capacity of the individual body to keep hold of images contrasts with the vastly greater number that have been recorded by the transindividual body in which structures of language have evolved, and in which the individual participates as a spatiotemporally limited part.

The overall point is that signs do not come one by one but in ‘regimes,’ to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, which are collective assemblages of bodies. It is in this sense that ‘so many images (e.g., of men) are formed at one time in the human body that they surpass the power of imagining’ (E2p40s1). More images go into the transindividual production of language and its terms than we as individuals can gather clearly into the present. As a result, words lie over things like an inherited filter and silent condition of subjectivation, blurring the singularity of things themselves with connotations echoing deep into the connections of inaccessible images. This does not change the fact that conceptual implications imposed from a collective standpoint are subject to individual differences that make their meaning vary up to a limit with biography. Indeed, it is because general terms are confused ‘that these notions are not formed by all in the same way, but vary from one to another, in accordance with what the body has more often been affected by, and what the mind imagines or recollects more easily, e.g., those who have more often regarded men’s stature with wonder will understand by the word man an animal of erect stature’; yet others ‘will form another common image of men—for example, that man is an animal capable of laughter, or a featherless biped, or a rational animal’ (E2p40s1).

8.

What makes this a particularly thorny problem is that transcendentals and universals appear in crucial definitions of the Ethics. David Savan raised the obvious problem:

The imaginative, general, and confused character of words is, in Spinoza’s view, not contingent or accidental. It is not the result of ignorance and cannot be eliminated by knowledge. […] A true idea can neither arise from experience of words and images nor can it be verified through such experience […]. Whereas ideas and their ideata are singular and unique, words are inherently general […]. How then can language represent, express, or formulate the clear and distinct ideas of the true philosophy? After separating the two so radically Spinoza appears to show no interest in explaining how they may be brought together. If he was aware of this situation, then he cannot have intended that the Ethics should be a simple and straightforward exposition of his philosophy.

[5] (pp. 62–63).

What makes Savan’s article more than a blunt assault on the coherence of Spinoza’s position, however, is that he thinks Spinoza was indeed aware of the situation and even ‘did not intend the Ethics to be a simple exposition of truth’; Spinoza allows the contradictions to stand ‘because his theory of language led him to believe that no simple, direct, precise, and consistent verbal account of the true philosophy was possible’ [5] (p. 68). The Ethics is strictly therapeutic, designed to free us from illusions; though incapable of expressing adequate ideas, language can show as if by counterpoint that the only access to them is unmediated.

Spinoza ends with a warning: ‘If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still, it can be found. And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard’ (E5p42s). In the Theological-Political Treatise, Savan reminds us, Spinoza had written that ‘what is perceived with a pure mind, without words and images, is understood’ [3] (III/64.36-7). The ending of the Ethics could be taken to foreshadow that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ [16] (proposition 6.54). In the same way we must perhaps end by discarding the demonstrations of the Ethics, once we have used them to ‘see,’ by contrast with the insufficiency of language, the directly intuitable truth of things that we cannot speak about. On this view, the Ethics may help us find a way to things excellent and rare, but to such things we will never be able to give voice. Above all, we must not think Spinoza is trying to communicate them directly, that definitions of ‘substance’ and other terms should be taken literally, or that the Ethics is itself the expression of any adequate ideas.10

9.

This problem never arises directly in Deleuze’s published work on Spinoza, but a theme of the seminars is that Spinoza’s project involves a ‘general semiology’ that is partly diagnostic, classificatory or symptomatological, partly ethical or practical: Spinoza ‘wants to draw us from this world of signs which is fundamentally variable, an associated world, an equivocal world, in order to bring us, in fact, to a […] world of light’ (27/01/81). This would be a world of univocal expression, in which variation must have a form of invariance for all the ongoing recompositions in nature: ‘There is an equivocity of the sign, that is, the sign signifies in several senses. In contrast, expression is uniquely and completely univocal. [… T]here is only one single sense of the expression: it’s the sense according to which relations are composed. […] There would be as if two languages, a false language that is the language of signs, a true language which is that of expression’ (13/01/81). Yet these are less strictly opposed than it might seem, since the problem involves a question of capacity, of becoming able to co-determine the nature of what is expressed in linguistic utterances. Moreover, the language we speak and write is one system of signs affecting bodies among others, a variable matter of expression with no particular priority. On the other hand, it leads Deleuze to see the Ethics as both a diagnostic schema for this world of signs and a calculated deployment of language in response to it, for which the goal is to clinically extract more potent or liberating effects. ‘What is this modern problem starting from which I’d also like to consider Spinoza’s text? [… I]t’s what we can call semiology, something that has returned so strongly today, […] overall, the theory of signs. And why then might we think in advance that Spinoza would have something to tell us about the project of a general semiology?’ (27/01/81). As it turns out, this is because Spinoza’s project bridges ‘linguistics’ narrowly conceived with an infinite nature of asignifying semiotics and their uses and abuses for life. In this regard it is worth noting that these seminars from 1980-81 occur immediately after A Thousand Plateaus, which seems to present a change of approach in the treatment of language and specifically a turn away from the quasi-structuralist angles in Deleuze’s earlier work.

Accordingly, we find two distinct uses of ‘semiology’ in Deleuze’s oeuvre. In the seminars on Spinoza as well as Nietzsche and Philosophy, for instance, it refers positively to the study of all the features of a world composed of signs, which includes but is not limited to language: ‘A phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a semeiology’ [18] (p. 3).11 In a 1983 preface to that book Deleuze adds: ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy […] is concerned with […] forms of general semeiology. Phenomena, things, organisms, societies, consciousness and spirits are signs […]. This kind of general semeiology includes linguistics […] as one of its parts’ [18] (p. xvi). In the works with Guattari the term has only the more limited, negative connotation: ‘If we call the signifying semiotic system semiology, then semiology is only one regime of signs among others […]. Hence the necessity of a return to pragmatics, in which language never has universality in itself, self-sufficient formalization, a general semiology, or a meta-language. [… T]he signifying semiotic has no privileged status to apply toward the formation of a general semiology […]. There is no general semiology’ [20] (pp. 111–112, 136). That all of this is happening more or less contemporaneously in the early 1980s suggests that both senses of semiology may be valid, insofar as language or the sociohistorically specific features of the signifying regime are not taken as a general model.

From Deleuze’s point of view, the case of Spinoza may illustrate how the two viewpoints are complementary, requiring an interface of language with physical states of affairs, but also a practical effort to return the virtues of dynamic trajectories of bodies to the very sense of what is said and done—to return the powers of material expression to language, in a context in which we happen to be subject to the regime of signification. The fact that we will understand differently depending on what the body has been affected by or what the mind tends to imagine or remember, as discussed above, is also why the success of the Ethics, in constructing a sense of ‘substance,’ will be indissociably tied to certain ways of living and being affected by what occurs that must be tendentially achieved and not others. It is this conditioning relation between variations in how we live and the sense of what we think and say, which we can see as the only ‘absolute’ point of contact between words and things, that unlocks the affirmative power of univocity, precisely because there is no way represent what things mean once and for all. That words are not understood by all in the same way is not an imperfection in the regime of signs, from this viewpoint, but the crack that runs through it.

The power of language thus turns essentially from nouns to verbs, which constitute the ‘true’ language of distinct expressions: ‘Each attribute is a verb, a primary infinitive proposition, an expression with a distinct sense’ [11] (p. 104). Inhering in bodies are interlinked events of composition, decomposition and recomposition of relations of motion and rest, which must also constitute the manifold senses of the linguistic expressions in which they are attributed to bodies: as Deleuze puts it, ‘Univocity means that it is the same thing which occurs and is said’ [21] (p. 180), which he often marks by referring simply to the ‘sense-event.’ However, that this form of change is an invariant for all things, high and low, large or small—‘a unique event for everything that happens to the most diverse things’ [21] (p. 179)—and that it is indifferent to negation and contradiction—‘the Event alone, Eventum tantum for all contraries, which communicates with itself through its own distance and resonates across all of its disjuncts’ [21] (p. 176)—does not mean that its affirmation is itself necessary, or is equally well accomplished. A mode of living ‘in accordance with nature,’ meeting events along the lines they have in common with us, rather than in what is contrary, is still something that has to be achieved at this interface of words and things. For this, the positive affects are the only indicators, since they constitute the active sense in which our relations are composed with the world. Joy is not just an increase in perfection but literally the distinct interexpression of events. Affirming composition and recomposition outside numerical difference therefore remains an ethical task of selection among encounters that is one with the problem of understanding nature.

10.

From this point of view, the Ethics takes on the appearance of an experimental assemblage, or what could in the light of What is Philosophy? be called an effort of strategic constructivism. This distances our approach to the book from questions of hermeneutics as traditionally conceived. The Ethics does imply a certain theory of language, even of writing and reading in turn, but as the passage below suggests, important aspects of it cannot be stated by the terms it contains, since they depend on thresholds in the actual effects of such terms, as conceptual implications by which an individual is induced to understand more or less well, to increase or decrease in perfection. The connotations of being or other words, right up to the univocal sense, must then be seen as virtual ‘hinges’ in the system of nature rather than idealised differences in signification. They are implicitly marked as such points of contrast in the book ‘insofar as’ this or that degree of power expresses itself. Thus the vital problem of signs to which language is tied is not to be seen as a problem of interpretation narrowly speaking so much as one of participating in a necessarily creative project of expression that quite literally connects the individual to nature.

Imagine a language that would be made of, first, constant expressions; second, systematic expressions; third and foremost, univocal expressions, […] for which each term […] would only have one sense. […] This would be a language of pure univocity […]. As a result, what is it to call for an unequivocal language? Well, it’s committing oneself to build it. It doesn’t arrive fully created! [… T]o create a univocal language is not at all to choose one meaning for a word by saying, that will be the only meaning! […] It will not prevent the word from continuing to be of such a nature that it will have several possible meanings […]. In fact, an extraordinary creation is necessary to invent terms, and to invent meanings, such that these terms will only have one meaning […]. When Spinoza says: ‘I take substance in one and the same sense,’ and concludes, ‘there is only one substance,’ do not think that he is satisfied with isolating one sense of the word substance in order to give preference to it. He undertakes […] to invent a meaning of the word substance such that this meaning might be unique, and that there would only be […] one term that verifies this meaning.

(27/01/81).

As this passage shows, Deleuze would reject the view of Parkinson and others, that transcendentals in the definitions of the Ethics can be assumed to signify common notions. What they signify conceptually is not independent of a sense they are given only in the creative process of attributing events (verbs) to affections in the world, which the reader is forced to participate in with Spinoza.

Instead, Deleuze muses that ‘breaking associations’ has always been the condition for introducing something new into the world, generating all the ‘reasons for life, and all the reasons for art’ (27/01/81). Spinoza’s project to invent a univocity in language requires an extraordinary creation, but it is essential to the creative act that it break free of habitual circuits of association, so as to lift the conjunction of images and bring joy and the increase in perfection of which it is the sign directly into play. The equivocity of words is bound up in a transindividual memory of series of associations between images and the passivity of individuals with respect to them. It is to this extent as well that we remain fixated on the writing of the world on bodies, retracing the course of its wounds: from an impression in sand to thoughts of war, ‘and so on …’ as Spinoza says, along the lines of associated senses that we and those we resemble have experienced before. Escaping the world of signs should therefore not be seen as interpreting or clarifying: ‘Is it a matter of making signs clear? No. The signs cannot be clarified since […] it is in their very nature that they are variable, associative, equivocal. So, it’s really a matter diverting oneself away from the world of signs. It’s about conquering another world’ (27/01/81). Breaking associations is not the first step to a more dependable signification, but a more varied and capable mode of life, a form of active and continuous modification affirmed for itself. The subtext is that the sign of an author’s having diagnosed the problem described is no doubt their effort to set free a sort of perpetuum mobile within the effects of language, putting into play an oriented series of partial dependencies between the things that are words and the world of things in general, with associated positive or negative affects to the extent that sequences of forced choices are made in the relevant circumstances. This would allow for an intuitive grasp of the purpose of quatenus, binding the sense of words to a moving point of division between greater and lesser quantities. Ideally, it might ‘dissociate’ thought, setting it travelling among compositions of relations independently of their being actualised in mutually exclusive terms.

It is worth comparing here the suggestions made by Laerke, one of the few interpreters to have given much thought to how language works in Spinoza. Laerke sees Spinoza’s project and particularly his use of geometric method as involving a ‘careful and systematic distortion’ of the associative chains in which the words of natural language are caught, so that they gradually acquire transparency and stability: ‘for Spinoza, the arbitrariness and mind-relativity of linguistic signification are not obstacles, but rather necessary conditions for the constitution of a philosophical language. Since the connection between the signifying and the signified chains of images in language are based only on […] individual or, more often, collective mental histories, nothing in principle prevents adapting or modifying the associative contexts supporting ordinary language use’ [13] (p. 535). However, the question is whether this constitution falls to the philosopher alone, or confronts every individual as an original, abiding problem. Are the relevant differences supporting ordinary language use open to individual adaptation, or do they precede the author no less than the reader, being neither general nor individual nor even strictly historical in nature? Does the philosopher aim to establish, in contrast to the fluctuations of everyday language but by means of certain locutions nevertheless, an exclusive, permanent choice in the meaning of things or words, which it would remain our task as readers to recognise in the text? On the problems of definition, Laerke’s view is that ‘rather than indicating blatant contradictions, such texts suggest that one will have to assign different meanings to the same word in different contexts. […] To be sure, operating with such equivocations could appear to yield nothing but confusion. But the question is whether Spinoza does not […] provide the reader with some explicit indication as to which sense of a word he addresses’ [13] (pp. 525–526).

Deleuze’s point in the passage quoted seems to be that precisely this ambition is impossible: to invent a univocal language, he says, ‘is not at all to choose one meaning for a word by saying, that will be the only meaning’; ‘do not think that he [Spinoza] is satisfied with isolating one sense of the word substance in order to give preference to it.’ Ultimately, ‘a univocal language is not a language in which there is a meaning fixed once and for all’ (27/01/81), simply because nothing will prevent words—including those by which meanings are meant to be assigned—from having multiple, ambivalent senses. The implication is that any ‘solution’ to the problem of the Ethics cannot be sought just at the level of the representative functions of language, which aim to refer to the objective context of its use, indicate a speaker’s intentions, and mobilise the law of noncontradiction for general notions. Spinoza’s geometric apparatus is a deliberate effort to reveal through language the natural condition that underlies its ordinary denoting, manifesting and signifying functions. At its heart we should find neither logical contradictions nor stipulated meanings that ‘signify adequate common notions’ [13] (p. 526), but an interconsistency of distinctions unique and proper to a concept of the absolutely infinite. Its endoconsistency, to use the term from What is Philosophy?, is thought by progressively reconstructing a distinct sense of all events from a singular perspective. This revolves around the perpetually mobile point that is the term of art of this concept, its means of implying a selective mechanism in the genesis of sense—quatenus. Originally a device in scholastic logical theory, Spinoza makes an alogical or paraconsistent use of it to which we now turn.

11.

Readers of Spinoza have long recognised that the very frequent occurrence of quatenus in the Ethics is significant. Laerke has counted no less than 444 uses of the term in the book [22] (p. 262). It occurs throughout all of Spinoza’s work, including the early treatises, the study of Cartesian philosophy and the letters, as well as the later political works, but the Ethics manifests a quantitative and qualitative shift. There, its singular insistence suddenly makes itself felt, often appearing up to ten times on a single page (cf. for instance E3p1, where it occurs a dozen times in one proposition), and scattered through propositions, demonstrations, corollaries and scholia alike. In a typical passage Spinoza writes, ‘we conceive that water is divided and its parts separated from one another—insofar as it is water, but not insofar as it is corporeal substance. For insofar as it is substance, it is neither separated nor divided. Again, water, insofar as it is water, is generated and corrupted, but insofar as it is substance, it is neither generated nor corrupted’ (E1p15s5). This has obvious relevance for the problem raised at the end of the previous section, which is also one of the principal themes of Book I of the Ethics as Deleuze describes it: ‘What is the character of distinction within infinity? What sort of distinction can one introduce into what is absolute, into the nature of God?’ [11] (p. 28). Clearly, these distinctions are not perceptible in water as it is ordinarily encountered, divided into quantities and consumed.

According to a handbook article, ‘The scholastic doctrine of quatenus originated in logic. […] Quatenus on the one hand specified the ways in which a term is to be understood in order to make a proposition true. […] On the other hand it could also be used “reduplicatively,” that is indicating the reason why the predicate adheres to the subject’; more specifically,

We may use quatenus in a formal, abstract […], causal or conditional sense. Used in the first sense quatenus denotes that in a proposition the predicate is essentially included in the subject. For example ‘quantity as substance is indivisible, unique and infinite’ (E1p15s). In an abstract sense quatenus denotes the quality by which we conceive a thing. ‘Man as man is a species,’ i.e., not as an individual man […]. In the third sense quatenus denotes the cause or reason why a predicate may be attributed to a subject. […]. In the final sense quatenus specifies the necessary condition of an effect. ‘The fire as far as it is near causes the burning of the wood.’ [… B]eing near as such does not cause the combustion, but is only a necessary precondition. Apparently, Spinoza used quatenus in all four connotations. It occurs particularly often however in combination with words such as ‘consider,’ ‘with respect to,’ ‘conceive’ etc.

[23] (pp. 364–365).

Where its frequent occurrence in Spinoza has been specifically remarked on, however, the predominant interpretation has been to address distinctions in the ‘causal’ sense, i.e., as a question of sufficient reasons for predication and thus of logical consistency.

Bayle’s famous objection looms large here—that, since only substances can be bearers of predicates, if two modes have contradictory properties, they must be attributed to a God who contradicts himself. Thus no less a difference than contradiction is introduced into God in Spinoza’s monist system. We get a flavour of the profundity of this logical problem and its putative solution in this passage from an article by Carriero:

Bayle argues that it follows from Spinoza’s ontology that God is the subject of contradictory properties. For example, George does not like broccoli, so God, the ultimate subject underlying George, does not like broccoli; but Michael likes broccoli, so God, the ultimate subject underlying Michael, likes broccoli; hence, God both does not like and likes broccoli. [… But] even if it is true that God in some way likes broccoli, this is compatible with its being true that God in some other way does not like broccoli. Indeed, it seems to me that Spinoza often uses the Latin quatenus to mark out these different ‘ways’ or ‘respects.’

[24] (p. 262).

In the background is the traditional Aristotelian-scholastic conception of the relation of inherence between substance and accident (or mode). Since the existence of an accident depends on the substance in which it inheres, on that view, one thing that is certainly not possible is that an accident be defined—or even, strictly speaking, understood—without reference to a substance. Thus on one hand, even if being rational and liking broccoli are essential and inessential predicates of human, respectively (or first and second modes of per se predication, in the scholastic terminology), neither ‘to be rational’ nor ‘to like broccoli’ can float free of the subject of which they are predicated and on which they depend. On the other hand, while this tradition, as Carriero shows, accepted particular accidents as real beings—i.e., the rationality of George, or his distaste for broccoli—their inherence in a single subject rules out George simultaneously liking and disliking broccoli no less than it does his being both rational and irrational. Spinoza’s relation of inherence between substance and modes allows for the latter to be particular accidents, but they still depend on a single substance. How could inserting the term quatenus help, as Spinoza and his readers clearly think it does?12 Would it deny that God is both rational and irrational, or effectively affirm it, ‘in a certain sense’? Is the expression of contrary modal predicates like that of multiple drives, between which there is no contradiction in the unconscious?

The basic move is of the type ‘that God, not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar as he is explained through the nature of the human mind, or insofar as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, has this or that idea’ (E2p11c). Carriero concludes: ‘Spinoza would reply, then, to Bayle, that God […] quatenus he constitutes the essence of George’s mind does not like broccoli, and quatenus he constitutes the essence of Michael’s mind likes broccoli’ [24] (p. 263). This is the ‘reduplicative’ or ‘causal’ use, giving the reasons why a predicate can be attributed to a subject. Yet as Douglas objects, ‘Although many Spinoza scholars have accepted this reply, it is not obvious how it resolves the difficulty. What does “insofar as” mean in this context? We need to offer some explanation of why saying this saves Spinoza from self-contradiction, and that requires us to situate “insofar as” expressions in the context of a broader logical-semantic theory’ [6] (pp. 261–262).13 Carriero points out that in Aristotelian logic ‘a definition […] is not an explication of the meaning of a term, but rather an account of a thing’s being or essence’ [24] (p. 248). Yet there is good reason to think that quatenus cannot settle such accounts in Spinoza’s broader metaphysics without some grasp of how the sense of a proposition is modified by its locutory force. An unsympathetic view would be that the solution restates the problem and rests satisfied. It should also be noted that the four uses distinguished above do not seem to exhaust the differentiations quatenus introduces, not just because they multiply in combination with other terms but because it often works against the reader’s reliance on categories, including an Aristotelian framework that Spinoza in large part rejects. The variations and discrepancies in its discursive range are part of its resistance to tradition, a deliberate effort to break the associations certain terms have. This cannot help but shift the focus back to explication, the role of language and the problem of the sense and function of words. The question is not just what ‘insofar as’ means in this or that context, but what semantic operation and type of distinction it marks.

12.

On the final page of Expressionism, Deleuze seems to lay his cards on the table at last:

[W]hat is expressed everywhere intervenes as a third term that transforms dualities. Beyond real causality, beyond ideal representation, what is expressed is discovered as a third term that makes distinctions infinitely more real and identity infinitely better thought. What is expressed is sense: deeper than the relation of causality, deeper than the relation of representation. The body has a mechanism in reality, there is an automatism of thought in the order of ideality; but we learn that the corporeal mechanism and the spiritual automaton are most expressive when they find their ‘sense’ and their ‘correspondence’ in the necessary reason that was everywhere lacking in Cartesianism.

[11] (p. 335).

Here Deleuze describes Spinoza’s system as a causal mechanism of bodies on one side, a spiritual automatism of ideas on the other. Insofar as these refer to attributes, they follow a single order and connection of formal essences with powers of acting causally on one another. The inadequate ideas that we are caused to have of things that affect us, however, are also pure ‘effects,’ objective essences that imply a power of thinking: ‘Like the Stoics, Spinoza breaks causality into two distinct chains: effects between themselves, on the condition that one in turn grasp causes between themselves. Effects refer to effects just as signs refer to signs: consequences separated from their premises. We have knowledge of bodies only through the shadows they cast upon us’ [27] (p. 141). Between causes in the attributes there are transitive partes extra partes interactions that exclude one another; but between effects there are only differential relations, independent of the order in which they are realised, insofar as they are comprehended in what Spinoza calls the infinite intellect, which explains the nature of things and what happens between them.14 We can think, as Deleuze notes, of such things as the Kelvin effect, the Seebeck effect or the Zeeman effect [21] (p. 70). The first, for instance, is a differential effect between vapour pressure and the radius of a curved surface.

To cut, to bleed, to live or to die are also pure effects—events that maintain differential relations with one another independently of the infinite ways they may be determined in one or another sequence of causes (and clauses), ‘following laws which perhaps express in each case the relative unity or mixture of bodies on which they depend for their real causes’ [21] (p. 6)—I cut someone and they die, you cut me but I recovered, etc. On this basis, all the ideas we are caused to have participate to some degree in the power of the immediate infinite mode of thought to comprehend the interconnected reasons for everything occurring in nature, insofar as relevant thresholds in the mixtures of bodies can be extracted as singular points—for instance, the point at which to live and to die diverge. This means that, as in the framework of Logic of Sense, between the two series of causes and effects, there is the problematic articulation of sense itself, as a composition of events that are both attributed to bodies (and ideas) that are causes to one another, and expressed by ideas that take them as their objects. It is the structure of this articulation that individuates both, and in which not only the knowledge of nature but our guide to action and becoming more capable (avoiding death, for starters) must be based. This articulation, it is important to note, is not itself causal, strictly speaking.

Though advanced openly only at the end of Expressionism, this centrality of sense lurks around the edges of the entire book, as perhaps it does in the Ethics too: ‘Spinoza is too careful a grammarian to allow us to miss the linguistic origins of “expression”’ [11] (p. 104). Deleuze draws Spinoza’s ambition to demystify nature and affirm its immanence closer in this way to what he describes as the Stoic reorientation of the image of thought along the surface of sense, rather than toward the heights of transcendent universals or the depths of bodies in their ceaseless interpenetrating mixtures. Immanence is the immanence of sense in its expressions—‘indifferent to all opposites’ [21] (p. 35), ‘neither particular nor general, neither universal nor personal’ [21] (p. 101). Spinoza’s project to replace the abstract universals and transcendent generalities of judging things from words with the singularities of adequate thought would be impossible without this purely expressive component of ideas. As in Logic of Sense, the implication is that it is not enough that causes proceed among bodies and differential effects correspond to them, because sense is also the locus of an ethical imperative—to participate in creating the sense of what occurs to us, to relate events in new ways and affirm their infinite connections as an explanation of our lives, to make the ideas that one is caused to have in this way more or even ‘most expressive.’ The selective task is to think and live a sense of encounters such that our dual powers are reciprocally determined to increase.

What strange type of instance is sufficient to establish the correspondence here—not the correspondence of attributes, that is, but of the sense of ideas and the events in bodies—is a problem resounding through Deleuze’s work and back into his reading of Spinoza. As he writes in the conclusion to Expressionism,

An effect does of course express its cause; but at a deeper level causes and effects form a series that must itself express something, and something identical (or similar) to what another parallel series expresses. Real causality is thus located in expressive series between which there are noncausal correspondences. Similarly, an idea represents an object, and in a way expresses it; but at a deeper level idea and object express something that is at once common to them, and yet belongs to each: a power, or the absolute in two of its powers, those of thinking or knowing, and being or acting.

[11] (pp. 334–335).

We will return to this problem below. For now, we should note that to become worthy of the affections we undergo, this fragile interface between what a body can do and ‘actions of the mind’—something at once common yet proper to each—is of vital significance, but never guaranteed to be augmentative. The order of bodily affections is fully determined, but what makes them the prison of the mind is its incapacity to discover in the world of signs and the interconnection of effects the requisite bifurcations, the immanent causes of a ‘free necessity,’ as Spinoza puts it in Letter 58 [12] (p. 909).

In this division of the cause-effect relation and the associated reorientation of what it means to think, according to Deleuze, ‘the principal frontier is displaced. It no longer passes, in terms of height, between the universal and the particular; nor, in terms of depth, does it pass between substance and accident. […] It is a frontier drawn between the thing such as it is, denoted by the proposition, and the expressed, which does not exist outside of the proposition’ [21] (pp. 132–133). When Spinoza insists that, in contrast to the definition of truth—‘A true idea must agree with its object’ (E1a6)—he intends to emphasise by the adequacy of an idea its intrinsic denominations, without relation to an object—‘I say intrinsic to exclude what is extrinsic, i.e., the agreement of the idea with its object’ (E2d4e)—the distinction is isomorphic to the sense of a locution and its denotation. As Deleuze argues, it is by means of this redrawn frontier that we come to see that the condition of truth ‘ought to have something unconditioned capable of assuring a real genesis of denotation and of the other dimensions of the proposition. Thus the condition of truth would be defined […] as ideational material or “stratum,” that is to say, no longer as signification, but rather as sense. [… T]he expressed of the proposition is an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, […] a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition’ [21] (p. 19).

Likewise, in Spinoza, ‘This connection of ideas does not derive from their representative order, or from the order of what they represent; on the contrary, they represent things as they are only because they connect according to their own autonomous order’ [7] (p. 85)—that is, according to their sense, an order of intrinsic denominations. This implies that the structural and genetic functions of sense, played out along this frontier between objects denoted and the expressed of propositions—or between an idea’s relation to an object and the events it expresses—is also the structure and genesis of Spinoza’s philosophy. It forms the condition for a certain originary movement of the system:

Each attribute is a verb, a primary infinitive proposition, an expression with a distinct sense; but all attributes designate substance as one and the same thing. The traditional distinction between the sense expressed and the object designated […] thus finds in Spinozism direct application. The distinction necessarily generates a certain movement of expression. For the sense of an initial proposition must in its turn be made the designatum of a second, which will itself have a new sense, and so on. Thus the substance they designate is expressed in the attributes […]. Then the attributes are in their turn expressed: they express themselves in modes which designate them […]. Modes are truly ‘participial’ propositions which derive from the primary infinitive ones.

[11] (pp. 104–105).

This is a genesis of expression, the real or objective order of which goes from the absolute infinitives of sense (the essence of substance, as pure verbs or attributes) to modes as propositions expressing the sense of these attributes, modified in determinate ways.

13.

At first this genesis may resemble the view that in Spinoza everything begins in substance and ends with a whimper in modes: ‘the first level of expression must be understood as the very constitution, a genealogy almost, of the essence of substance. The second must be understood as the very production of particular things’ [11] (p. 14).15 Deleuze has in mind, however, two characteristics of sense, described as a ‘double causality’ of quasi-causation and causation: ‘The autonomy of the effect is thus defined initially by its difference in nature from the cause; in the second place, it is defined by its relation to the quasi-cause. These two aspects, however, give sense very different and even apparently opposed characteristics’ [21] (p. 95). Beginning with the second level of ‘production,’ what is expressed appears as an effect of particular transitive causes (modes), yet as radically different in kind to what produces it; and, ‘insofar as it affirms its difference in nature from corporeal causes, […] sense as an effect or event is characterized by a striking impassibility’ [21] (p. 95). Sense is a pure effect that remains inseparable from specific propositions that express it, as events are from the states of affairs to which they are attributed. From this perspective, each locution, according to its designating, manifesting and signifying functions, expresses a modification of the infinitive verb; their senses, however, maintain a neutrality with respect to both words and things, or appear as ‘sterile doubles,’ impassible (unable to be affected) instead of consequential. Another way to think of this would be that as the mind–body mode moves through time, from one idea we are caused to have to the next, it expresses in turn a series of relations and acts as a singular perspective on a constellation of events that is continually reconfigured. A series of causes and, like a lens travelling over the infinite, a shifting inherence of effects.

On a first level, however, sense-events have a primary and genetic role that must be understood as the constitution of the elements of a proposition and, at the same time, the individuation of the bodies that fulfill them. The mobility of our individual point of view upon the complex interexpression of events depends on and itself expresses a folding of the entire field as a single event that reciprocally determines both series, in their relation and their passage.

[A]s soon as sense is grasped in its relation to the quasi-cause which produces and distributes it at the surface, it inherits, participates in, and even envelops and possesses the force of this ideational cause. We have seen that this cause is nothing outside of its effect, […] and that it maintains with the effect an immanent relation which turns the product […] into something productive. [… S]ense is essentially produced. It is never originary but is always caused and derived. However, this derivation is two-fold and, in relation to the immanence of the quasi-cause, it creates the paths which it traces and causes to bifurcate. [… W]e must understand this genetic power in relation to the proposition itself, insofar as the expressed sense must engender the other dimensions of the proposition […]. But we must also understand it […] in relation to that which fulfills these dimensions.

[21] (pp. 95–96).

The expression of a series of events, in the things we do and the words we say, is possible because a quasi-causal element creates a single virtual path from point to point, or a series of forking paths between which it alone ‘decides.’ Individuals are the incarnation of this quasi-cause in the flesh, at the same time as the objects they recognise and act toward, the attitudes and qualities they manifest and the general solutions they mobilise express it.

Now, if modes ‘are truly “participial” propositions which derive from primary infinitive ones’ [11] (p. 105), two confusions can be avoided. This dual derivation does not make modes unreal with respect to substance, since modes are the causes to one another of the effects in which an immanent cause is participated. Nor does substance recede into sterility, since to every individuated body with its powers of acting there corresponds a modification of thinking whose powers of connecting ideas according to their autonomous order inflect its connection of affections without in any way ‘causing’ it to alter from outside. Relations of composition (infinitive verbs) are the distinct expressed of modes, but nevertheless explain their capacities to affect and be affected. This simply means that, by way of such relations, modes participate in, as Deleuze writes, the force of an ideational cause that turns the product into something productive, or effects into something quasi-causal. Thus the two characteristics of sense, as what is expressed, prevent us from considering modes as vanishing nothings, troubled by a lack of sufficient reason even Spinoza scholars have lamented at times. They are the efficient, transitive causes of effects in which an immanent cause is enveloped and traces out the branchings of a ratio that individuates what things can do and what can be said of them at once. This ideational cause is revealed to us because the sense of our ideas is independent of the exteriorities they designate. Yet the primacy of genesis means that ‘ideational’ here does not imply an element belonging to thought alone, but a single event that co-determines thinking and acting.

The openness of the paths to be created by this determination is why the distinction between sense and designatum, which as Deleuze notes is common today but goes back to Stoic logic [11] (p. 358, n. 18), is so important. In Frege’s well-known example, the ‘morning star’ and the ‘evening star’ designate the same object but express different senses; otherwise, it would not be possible to affirm of the first but deny of the second that it is Venus. But, much more importantly for the purpose of making our ideas adequate and our bodies capable of acting, nor would it be possible to learn that they are one and the same. In Spinoza, the attributes are ‘names’ of God with distinct senses, but this does not introduce division into God. It only introduces, according to Deleuze, a Scotist formal distinction, which is objective and real without being substantial or numerical. This must be characterised in such a way as to admit progressive determination into our ideas, which, as Spinoza readily admits, always begin at the lowest ebb of their power, compelled to register affections from outside, measure quantities and numerically distinguish objects. Formal distinction is an ‘apprehension of distinct quiddities that nevertheless belong to the same subject,’ an act of understanding that ‘objectively apprehends actually distinct forms which yet, as such, together make up a single identical subject’ [11] (p. 64). Real distinctions within the infinite are ‘unlimited, ultimate, irreducible formal reasons’ [11] (p. 49), grasped objectively—infinitive verbs or distinctions of sense, events of which all things are effectuations.

It is because attributes are themselves expressions that they are necessarily referred to the understanding as to the only capacity for perceiving what is expressed […,] a sense that has no existence outside the expression; it must thus be referred to an understanding that grasps it objectively, that is, ideally. But it is predicated of the thing […]; understanding relates it to the object designated, as the essence of that object. One can then conceive how names may be distinguished by their senses, while these […] relate to the same designated object whose essence they constitute.

[11] (pp. 61–62).

In the framework of the Ethics, an individual could not learn anything of nature if real differences were conflated with numerical distinctions and presumed to be incapable of affirmative coexistence in the immanent multiplicity of substance, i.e., if there were only a form of generality. This would render unthinkable the formation of the most simple, ‘two-body’ common notions involving the same differential effects, and ultimately the common participation of modification as such in the infinitive verbs that are absolute powers (to think and to act). It is a condition of coming to link ideas according to their own autonomous order that their connection in the mind not be constrained to follow the order of what they represent, with its external causes and exclusive disjunctions, but admit an order of singularity in what exists.

The noncoincidence of the sense of our ideas with the objects that they designate and that make them true or false thus introduces a time of learning into the world that Spinoza will call ‘method.’ This time is not comprehensible in terms of being affected in such a way as to cease to affirm of the false that it is true, but as the progressive determination of an autonomous order by an unconditioned immanent cause in which we participate. It is a ‘motionless’ form of time in which distinctions of sense are conceived—events, in other words, that can never be identified with affections as their cause, because they create the paths along which causes proceed.16 It is a problem of differentials in power, and the necessity of this point of adequation appears as the only absolute in thinking: ‘I deny absolutely that we require an equal power of thinking, to affirm that what is true is true, as to affirm that what is false is true’ (E2p49s). Or, as Deleuze puts it, ‘We always have as much truth as we deserve in accordance with the sense of what we say’ [30] (p. 154). Sense-events in their genetic power are relationally and quantitatively, i.e., intensively, individuated and individuating, both of what we think and what we think of. Thus it is not because we follow a single causal order in two attributes that we become able to learn and better express the infinite, but because the ideas we are caused to have in this way travel a frontier between two powers, the two ‘sides’ of the absolute [11] (p. 118).

14.

Spinoza shows that he is well aware of this logic:

However, you want me to explain by example—though it is not at all necessary—how one and the same thing can be signified by two names. Not to appear ungenerous, I will give you two examples. First, by ‘Israel’ I mean the third patriarch: by ‘Jacob’ I mean that same person, the latter name being given to him because he seized his brother’s heel. Secondly, by a ‘plane surface’ I mean one that reflects all rays of light without any change. I mean the same by ‘white surface,’ except that it is called white in respect of a man looking at it.

[12] (p. 783).

‘Because’ and ‘in respect of’ here play the role of quatenus, marking a distinction in sense under which different names can be applied to a single thing. ‘Because’ was one translation of quatenus in a dictionary typical of the period, according to Douglas [6] (p. 266).17 Quatenus intervenes between the sense in which a term is to be taken and the object to which it refers. In the common case of modal distinctions, quatenus marks the difference between using and mentioning a term that extends the sense expressed/object designated distinction laterally through all of language. In ‘water insofar as it is water’ (E1p15s), for instance, the two occurrences of the name ‘water’ do not have the same functional role—one designates the sense expressed by the other.

As Deleuze emphasises, the sense of a proposition or name can only be stated by another proposition or name, whose own sense, however, the latter cannot state. Formal reasons cannot directly be the object of a speech act that presupposes them, as its condition for referring to something, declaring an attitude or deploying generally accepted, logical provisions for its veracity. ‘What do you mean?’ is never answered by repeating word for word the terms in which a problem was indistinctly resolved—an increase in understanding is only gained by participating in a certain variation intrinsic to meaning, seeking reflexively to achieve a better determined degree of expression. Distinctions of sense as pure events that, as Deleuze will say, are never present but always still to come or already past [21] (p. 100), are therefore elusive and frustratingly immaterial, which is to say that the problem to which acts of denotation, manifestation and signification respond is irresolvable in any final way. Or in positive terms, the problem is infinite and inexhaustible, amenable only to partial resolutions that are better or worse, more or less perspicuous: ‘By means of an appropriate process, the problem is determined in space and time and, as it is determined, it determines the solutions in which it persists. The synthesis of the problem with its conditions engenders propositions, their dimensions and their correlates. Sense is thus expressed as the problem to which propositions correspond insofar as they indicate particular responses, signify instances of a general solution, and manifest subjective acts of resolution’ [21] (p. 121).

Quatenus in Spinoza can be seen as an attempt to set such an appropriate process into motion, which therefore always implies discontinuous branchings or bifurcations in the senses of things and words between which forced choices must be made. In the broadest terms, it puts laterally into play the practical constitution of adequate ideas, which cannot be stated in the terms in which the theory is expressed precisely because they depend on the negotiation of obstacles and thresholds in the effects of our singular, embodied lives, i.e., on diverging series of events in which distinct senses are first engendered for this or that causal sequence. When Spinoza distinguishes ‘water insofar as it is water’ from ‘water insofar as it is substance,’ for instance, the terms following quatenus clearly designate the sense of those preceding it. One could write ‘water insofar as it is “water”’ to underline that, while the sense of water cannot be stated directly simply by using the term, the name ‘water’ will denote it. Thus it is possible to designate and differentiate the senses of a term by the use of further names, which is what Spinoza does deliberately by the continuous deployment of ‘insofar as.’ Quatenus water/quatenus substance is a forking path in sense, the question being what immanent cause will be sufficient to ‘decide’ in each case.

Deleuze refers to this as a paradox of regress or indefinite proliferation, which stands at the origin of all the paradoxes of sense.

When I designate something, I always suppose that the sense is understood […], one is established ‘from the outset’ within sense. Sense is like the sphere in which I am already established in order to enact possible denotations, and even to think their conditions. […] I never state the sense of what I am saying. But […] I can always take the sense of what I say as the object of another proposition whose sense, in turn, I cannot state. I thus enter into the infinite regress of that which is presupposed. [… E]very name which denotes an object may itself become the object of a new name which denotes its sense: n₁ refers to n₂, which denotes the sense of n₁; n₂ refers to n₃; etc. For each one of its names, language must contain a name for the sense of this name.

[21] (pp. 28–29).

The logical consequence is that the process continues indefinitely, since each name will make some sense in turn. ‘Insofar as it is …’ marks the imposition of a name—and thus of a bifurcation point—in the indefinite suspension and envelopment of sense throughout the series that, with each name, denotes the sense of what its object, in turn, refers to, as another name. It shows, contrary to Savan’s suggestion, that Spinoza is very much interested in demonstrating how the equivocal terms of language can progressively determine the sense of affirmative, adequate expressions, depending on the forced choices to be made and the synthesis of disparate capacities (to think and to act) that creates the bifurcations. This proliferation is not just a logical problem of the ongoing production of effects of sense at the surface of language, but a question of genetic power, involving a series of bodily affections and the virtues of a mode of life at the same time.

In Spinoza’s theory of ideas, the distinction between an idea’s sense (intrinsic denominations) and denotation (its relation to an object) implies the same movement. Considered in themselves, all modifications have formal being, even thoughts about things. Just as a locution about some state of affairs must have its sense (as something unconditioned, independent or in excess of its designated object) addressed by another locution, so must objective essence be grasped formally by another idea: ‘the idea of the idea is nothing but the form of the idea insofar as this is considered as a mode of thinking without relation to the object’ (E2p21s). The idea of the idea is the idea’s sense grasped now for itself, i.e., as a formal reality, taken as the object of another idea. As Mark describes it, ‘physical objects are not the only things that can be said to exist formally; an idea has relations with other ideas—it has a real status as an idea—and thus it too can be said to have formal being. As something real, an idea I₁ can be thought about, becoming the object of another idea I₂. I₂ is then the idea of an idea (idea ideae), I₁ exists objectively in I₂, which is to say that I₂ contains the objective essence of I₁’; the logical consequence is that ‘this process can be continued indefinitely, since all ideas have some real (formal) being’ [31] (pp. 20–21). Even a false, inadequate or contradictory idea makes some sense, which can be taken as the object of another idea that deals with or inflects this sense, so as to make it more or less expressive of events, more or less adequate.

Every idea, in other words, implies at least a minimal objective power of thinking, in order to be referred to the understanding as the capacity for perceiving the expressed to a certain extent. This inherence must be there from the start: ‘Method is nothing but a reflexive knowledge, or an idea of an idea; and because there is no idea of an idea, unless there is first an idea, there will be no method unless there is first an idea’ (Emendation, ¶38) [2] (p. 19). Only in this way, at the beginning of the Ethics, are we ‘established in God from the outset’—we are established in an immanent, transcendental field, in sense, in which an ideal cause operates. Conceived as powers of the infinite Idea, the series of ideas of ideas (of ideas …) implies an autonomous order of differential relations among effects, rather than a representative order and connection of affections one by one. It involves the singularities of objective essence—a series of distinctions in sense that are simultaneous with and subdivide every point of the causal sequence. This is why Spinoza can say that, ‘as soon as someone knows something, he thereby knows that he knows it, and at the same time knows that he knows that he knows, and so on, to infinity’ (E2p21s). It is a ‘synthesis of the instant,’ in Deleuze’s terminology—a pure form of time in which we learn.

The regress at the surface of language testifies, Deleuze notes, first to the ‘impotence’ of the speaker, ‘but also the infinite power of language to speak about words’ [21] (p. 28). In the Ethics, quatenus makes n₁ refer to n₂, which denotes the sense of n₁, etc., testifying to our limited capacity to express the whole of sense, since the ideas we are caused to have must conform to objects. Our incapacity to make all the ideas we have fully expressive is a function of the body’s partitive composition and process of acting and being acted on, bit by bit. We can name or determine in turn the ideas we are caused to have, but cannot at one and the same time conceive their infinite relations or completely determine the idea that we are. The objective power of these effects, however, inherits a genetic element of synthesis by which the two series differing in kind—causes and effects—are reciprocally determined to express a single event.18 Each time we are caused to distinguish the sense of a term, we ourselves envelop, participate in and express the force of an immanent cause, which governs the forking paths of causes in the body and effects in the understanding at one and the same time. Thus quatenus also marks an ethical selection that takes place at every instant, amongst a multiplicity of potential series of selves and lives. It points out, as if saying its own (non)sense, that nothing predetermines absolutely the meaning that words or things will come to have in our becoming who we are. Everything comes down to a disjunctive synthesis of powers (to think and to act) that is not causal but quasi-causal. This at least makes sense of the place of language in Spinoza’s work. It also seems to make sense of the notion of an open ethical project for an individual and a collective in a world of causal physical forces.

Ultimately, the function of quatenus must depend on its naming a real differentiating element that traverses heterogeneous series, explaining what locutory force it has to determine real distinctions in actual ideas or concepts and in existing bodies, and thus to fuse ontological and ethical aspects in Spinoza’s philosophy. In effect, Deleuze’s view seems to be that, in his rejection of the Cartesian model, Spinoza recognised this, even if he did not have the resources to give it an explicit place:

[W]e must rethink the individual defined as a composite of soul and body. For though the supposition of a real causality may be the simplest way of understanding the phenomena [… it] overlooks the rich and deep world of noncausal correspondences. It is possible, moreover, that real causality is established and reigns only in certain regions of this world of noncausal correspondences, and actually presupposes it. [… S]oul and body have at once a sort of identity that removes the need for any real causality between them, and a heterogeneity, a heteronomy, that renders it impossible. The identity or quasi-identity is an ‘invariance,’ and the heteronomy is that between two varying series […]. Now real causality enters into each of these series on their own account; but the relation between the two series, and their relation to what is invariant between them, depends on noncausal correspondence. [… Expression] goes farther than causality, since it brings a correspondence and a resonance into series that are altogether foreign to one another.

[11] (pp. 326–327).

He concludes that now ‘[e]xpression takes its place at the heart of the individual,’ and that Spinoza, ‘by mode, understands nothing other than an individual as an expressive center’ [11] (p. 327). This mobile centre turns quatenus from an element of scholastic logic meant to reconcile contradiction and prevent paradox, at the level of words, into a paradoxical element making heterogeneous series resonate, in words and things. For all of Spinoza’s determinism, this joint reverberation cannot reduce to a single order unfolding in body and mind. As generations of readers have recognised, any attempt to do so is to introduce a fatal flaw into Spinoza’s theory of ideas, which stick out of that order in various ways, claiming the power to take a number of modes, or modes of all other attributes, as their objects, even as they ‘correspond’ to them in a single order. Ilyenkov puts it rather well in his description of Spinoza’s parallelism: ‘although we have two full, quite adequate descriptions of one and the same event, equivalent to one another, the event itself falls outside both descriptions, as the “third thing,” the very “one and the same” that was not yet understood or explained’ [32] (p. 20). Deleuze refers to an invariant, but the point is that an aleatory element is first in the order of explanation because it does not depend on prior causes—it cannot, such causes being internal to the series in question—and determines succession in those series no less than it determines the relation between series as such.

15.

For Spinoza then, this logic points to a conclusion that Frege could never accept: not only that distinct and even opposing senses—like thinking nature and extended nature, at the limit—may give rise to the new truth that they are predicated of a single object, but that, in every case, they express sides of the absolute that co-determine what occurs. Thus in the end we must come to understand that, although there are as many senses as there are names (or linguistic utterances), there is only one ‘thing’ to which they are attributed: ‘Thus all expressed senses together form the “expressible” or the essence of substance’ [11] (p. 62). This is why expression is ‘on the one hand an explication, an unfolding of what expresses itself, the One manifesting itself in the Many’—giving rise to a multiplicity of expression, a proliferation of names and indeed of senses—while its ‘multiple expression, on the other hand, involves Unity’ [11] (p. 16)—in that, as we learn about the internal relations of nature, we discover the connections, conjunctions and disjunctions among events that can only be attributed to the absolutely infinite, immanent cause.

An ‘adequate’ idea does not therefore have the sense of something sufficiently complete and finished, with a meaning that is fixed, but is an affirmation of the interexpression of events that we determine quasi-causally in the course of our lives. If we are to live well, Spinoza thinks, we must attribute the manifold senses of everything that can be named or said to a single element, in which all the objects of ideas participate so as to be thinkable at all. Insofar as we are slaves to the imagination and live accordingly, water will have the sense of ‘water’; insofar as we better resolve a problem in which all events are complicated, it will come to have the sense of ‘substance.’ Insofar as we think our mode of being is different in kind from the infinitely superior essence of God, we will be saddened, riven with guilt and sin; insofar as we conceive ourselves univocally, participating directly in the singular, we will experience joy, which is a ‘passage from a lesser to a greater perfection’ (E3DA2). The best translation of quatenus, then, would be neither ‘insofar as’ nor ‘to the extent that,’ but ‘in the sense of.’ It is literally in the Event, in the sense-event, that we discover the simultaneity of a host of directions in which the relations of bodily composition can go, and the ethical problem of a selection among paths that increase or decrease our capacities to think and act.