ABSTRACT
Deleuze reclaims the logic of the differential relation insofar as it effectively characterizes the conditions according to which the differential or composite relation constitutive of each singular modal essence has a consistency even though it ceases to be effected by extensive parts. In the seminars on Spinoza, he argues that there is ‘a consistency of the relation … independent of the terms which effect it’, such that ‘that which disappears with death is the effectuation of the relation, it is not the relation itself’.11 Deleuze further characterizes this distinction between the effectuation of the differential relation and the differential relation itself with the claim that it is ‘the relation and the essence [it creates that] are said [by Spinoza] to be eternal, or to have a species of eternity’.12 The singular modal essence and the composite relations in which it expresses itself, that is, in which it is further differenciated, can therefore also be characterized as ‘eternal’.13 However, the eternity that Spinoza speaks of is ‘a species of eternity’(sub specie aeternitatis), according to which ‘the relation and the essence’, which are for Deleuze the differential or composite relation and the essential singularity or singular modal essence it creates, are each ‘eternal by virtue of its cause, rather than by virtue of itself’.14 The ‘cause’ referred to by Deleuze is the ‘immanent cause’, which has already been explicated in chapter 4 in relation to the concept of the univocity of being, where Deleuze argues that ‘it is the idea of immanent cause that takes over, in Spinoza, from univocity’.15 The concept of immanent cause characterizes the immanent nature of the expressive relation between substance and modes such that Spinozist substance, in the sense that it is cause of itself (causa sui), is the immanent cause of all things, that is, of the immanent existence of singular modal essence and of the durational existence of the corresponding finite existing mode. Therefore, as far as Deleuze is concerned, to be eternal is for Spinoza to have a species of eternity, which is to be eternal by virtue of the immanent causality that characterizes the expressive relation between substance and modes, a relation which functions according to the logic of different/ciation. It is in Difference and Repetition, in relation to the concept of the univocity of being, that the immanent nature of the expressive relation between substance and modes in the Ethics is further explicated. In the first chapter, entitled ‘Difference in Itself’, Deleuze argues that there are ‘three principal moments in the history of the
11 Deleuze, ‘sur Spinoza’, 10 March 1981. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 ‘The relation and the essence are said to be eternal, or to have a species of eternity,
that is, insofar as each is eternal by virtue of its cause and not by virtue of itself’ (Ibid.).
