ABSTRACT
The distinction between joyful passive affections and sad passive affections In the article ‘The encounter with Spinoza’, Macherey gives an account of Deleuze’s project in Expressionism in Philosophy. According to Macherey , ‘Deleuze’s expressionist reading of Spinoza … forces the text out of itself by introducing the minimal dislocations needed to get it moving’.1 He argues that Deleuze carries out the process of introducing dislocations to the text ‘with an extraordinary precision that quite forbids any suggestion of arbitrariness’, however he does suggest that ‘Deleuze might be said to stray from the text, not by introducing completely foreign elements, but by amplifying certain themes that are not fully developed, thereby modifying the internal economy of their relations with other more prominent aspects to which historians of philosophy have devoted most attention, but which seem from this viewpoint less significant’.2 One of these not ‘completely foreign elements’ that is ‘amplified’ by Deleuze is the theme of ‘joyful passions’. In his interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of relations in Expressionism in Philosophy, Deleuze assigns a specific role to joyful passions. They are characterized as a significant determinant in the dynamic changes or transformations of the characteristic relations of finite existing modes. The theme of joyful passions is pivotal in further distinguishing Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s theory of relations from that offered by Macherey in Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza, la cinquième partie. The dynamic changes or transformations of the characteristic relations, or global integrations, determinative of a finite existing mode occur when the mode’s level of activity increases or inversely when its level of activity decreases, that is, with the changes in the extent to which it is further differenciated.3 It is while
1 Macherey, ‘The encounter with Spinoza’, p. 148. 2 Ibid., p. 149 3 See the section of chapter 6 entitled ‘The ethical view of modal existence’, p. 152,
problem which effectively distinguishes his interpretation of this aspect of the Ethics from that of Deleuze. He raises the following question: ‘Can the soul be completely active, without at all being passive, or does it rather find itself permanently placed between the two extremes of passivity and activity, following regimes which make it lean sometimes to the side of activity sometimes to that of passivity? And then what are the thresholds which swing one of these regimes into the other?’5 Each interpreter approaches this problem differently. Macherey’s reading of the Ethics is progressive, moving carefully through each part of the text reconstructing the consistency of its arguments, following the developments of the relations characteristic of singular things, as the text proceeds up to the problematic transformations of the fifth and final part of the Ethics. In fact, the first of the fivevolume study to appear is devoted to the fifth part of the Ethics.6 Indeed Macherey argues that ‘the end coincides in a certain manner with the beginning. It is therefore no more absurd to take the Ethics by its end than by its beginning’.7 There is therefore a retrospective consistency to Macherey’s study which provides an interpretation that, from a Deleuzian point of view, can be considered to be characteristic of the physical view of the Ethics. Deleuze’s reading, however, follows a different trajectory, one that is characteristic of the ethical view, which already takes the transformations of the fifth part into account, offering rather an interpretation of modal existence as conceived at the end of the Ethics, or from the point of view of the Ethics as a whole. Macherey and Deleuze are in accord in regards to the fixity of singular essence, but their interpretations differ in regards to the transformations of the characteristic relations determinative of singular things. According to Macherey, the affective life of a singular thing is constituted by its ideas or passions which are expressed as an ‘uninterrupted affective flux’.8 The transformations of the characteristic relations of a singular thing correspond to the varying degrees to which the uninterrupted affective flux hinders or limits the active expression of a mode’s power to act to within the range of a maximum and a minimum. All of a mode’s power to act is expressed, however, according to the uninterrupted affective flux, it
integrations in which it is involved; the greater is its capacity to be affected, and, consequently, the greater is its power to act’.
