Deleuze’s Spinoza and the Enigma of the Doctrine of Attributes

Katja Diefenbach spricht auf der Spinoza-Frühjahrsschule „Hortus Spinozanum III:
Thinking Emancipation“, Montag, 2. Juni, Universität Paris-Nanterre

Although Toni Negri has seen himself as very much a Marxist heir to Spinoza’s French interpreters – most saliently, to Gueroult, Matheron and Deleuze – he parts company with them on one crucial point: He rejects the hypothesis that the major speculative principles of the Ethics – differentiality of being, immanent genesis, positive determination – are anchored in the doctrine of attributes. In French Spinozism of the 1960s, Gueroult was one of the first to affirm the doctrine of attributes and therefore also reject Hegel’s reading, according to which the substance relates to the attributes as to ­external forms of the understanding, whence all becoming in Spinoza tends, in the Neoplatonic sense, to be ‘progressive loss’. Inverting this interpretation, Gueroult demonstrates in a reading of the initial definitions and first fifteen propositions of the Ethics that the substance represents a heterogenesis in which the attributes function as inseparable yet constitutive elements of an immanent differentiation of the infinite. This interpretation prompted Deleuze to elaborate a theory of negationless difference, making conceivable a self-affirmation ‘free from eminence and analogy’ and a differentiality ‘free from opposition and privation’. The lecture will reconstruct the post-Marxist controversies over the theory of attributes with a special focus on Deleuze’s Gueroult reading including its ontological and political implications.