ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Gilles Deleuze conceives materialism and naturalism. Materialism is a general view about what actually exists: everything is material or physical. It originates with the early Greek thinkers, such as Democritus, and materialism is physicalism. The chapter focuses on Elizabeth Grosz's attempt at a "new materialism" and "renaturalization". It looks at Deleuze's Spinozism of the 1960s and the highly innovative thinking that he developed with Felix Guattari in 1980 with the publication of A Thousand Plateaus. For Deleuze, Spinoza is most definitely engaged in a philosophy of nature. But for Deleuze it is also the case that Spinoza belongs to a great tradition of practical philosophy, whose chief task is that of demystification. The difference between natural law and civil law is minimal on Spinoza's naturalistic and monistic account. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari posit nature as a plane of consistency that is "like an immense abstract machine", which they call the "machinic phylum".
