ABSTRACT
Spinoza and the problem of expression The reading of Spinoza that Gilles Deleuze presents in Expressionism in Philosophy1 is both challenging and controversial: challenging from the point of view of the complexity with which it engages the ideas of Spinoza; and controversial from the point of view of the extent to which it serves to redeploy Spinoza within the context of Deleuze’s own philosophical project. While closely examining his reading of Spinoza, the present work focuses on the more controversial issue of Deleuze’s Spinozism, or the way in which Deleuze redeploys Spinoza, or the Spinozist concepts that he extracts from Spinoza’s philosophy, in his project of constructing a philosophy of difference. Deleuze’s Spinozism is examined in relation to both Expressionism in Philosophy and Difference and Repetition,2 and to the seminars that Deleuze gave on Spinoza.3 What is proposed therefore is a Deleuzian reading of Expressionism in Philosophy that positions itself within the trajectory of the development of Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza is explicated within the context of contemporary French Spinoza studies, particularly in relation to the work of Martial Gueroult and Pierre Macherey. However, it is in relation to Hegel’s interpretation of Spinoza and the position that Hegel assigns to Spinoza in both the dialectical progression of the history of philosophy and the development of his dialectical logic that Deleuze strategically redeploys Spinoza. The process of actualization determined by the Hegelian dialectical logic in relation to the history of philosophy is determinately linear and progressive, insofar as it is predominantly preoccupied with overcoming moments of discontinuity, an example of which would be the system of the philosophy of Spinoza, each of which is ‘at the centre of the necessity of an evolutionary process’, which determines ‘the continuation of “history”’.4
