A Thousand Plateaus III, War and the State, Lecture 1, 24 January 1978

<p><em>The Deleuze Seminars</em> is a collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and English translations of, and supplemental materials from, the lectures French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave during his career at the University of Paris 8.</p>

<p>Following publication of <em>Anti-Oedipus</em> in 1972, Deleuze continues to develop the proliferation of concepts that his collaboration with Guattari had yielded. Throughout the 1970s, Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in expanding these concepts continues, eventually producing the sequel, <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>. Given the title that Deleuze provided for this seminar, ‘War and the State’, the seminar’s focus is clearly on material developed in plateau 12, ‘Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine’.</p>

<p>Only one recording has surfaced as yet for the 1977-78 seminar, and documentation from the Paris 8 archives (specifically, the 1977-78 philosophy department course list) indicates that Deleuze offered an additional seminar in the “second semester”, on Spinoza, to which this lecture on “continuous variation” may very well belong, a topic that also appears frequently in <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>. The lecture of 24 January 1978 is an important example, as Deleuze notes, of his return to the history of philosophy by considering continuous variation in light of Spinoza’s philosophy, and this return continues in the other separate mini-seminar, on Kant, to which Deleuze devoted four sessions in the spring, preserved here in a separate dataset.</p>

<p>Deleuze pauses in his discussion of continuous variation (during the development of <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>) to bring up a related question: what is an idea and affect in Spinoza? Given Spinoza’s important place in <em>A Thousand Plateaus </em>(cf. plateau 10 on becoming), this shift to a probable mini-seminar on Spinoza does not entirely constitute a detour. Referring primarily to books II and III of the <em>Ethics</em>, Deleuze’s approach is deliberately terminological, first distinguishing between the Latin terms <em>affectio </em>and <em>affectus</em>, “affect” corresponding to the latter, <em>affectus</em>, whereas “affection” (<em>sentiment</em>, feeling) corresponding to <em>affectio. </em>As for “idea”, for Spinoza this is simply a mode of thought which represents something, the objective reality, while in contrast, affect is any mode of thought which does not represent anything, non-representational, but with a primacy of the idea over the affect. Whereas our everyday life is not made up solely of ideas succeeding each other, a regime of continuous variation operates perpetually, and this continuous variation for Spinoza means that to exist, one’s power of acting increases or decreases, rendering more or less joy depending on the extent to which the power of acting is inhibited or enhanced, with continuous variation occurring in this ongoing process of increase-dimunition. For Spinoza, there are three sorts of ideas: affection (<em>affectio</em>) ideas (opposed to <em>affectus</em>); notions; and essence ideas, each corresponding to a different level of knowledge. Deleuze shifts toward Spinoza’s next level, ethics as a problem of power (<em>puissance</em>), not duty, and of notion-ideas where escape occurs from the world of passions, no longer the mixture of two bodies, but rather the internal agreement or disagreement of the characteristic relations of the two bodies. By striving to experience affects of joy as a springboard that makes us form the idea of what is common, joyful, to the affecting body and the affected body, leading to greater intelligence. At the third level, there are singular essences, the essence-idea as passage to the world of essence, knowledge of one’s singular essence and God’s singular essence and the singular essence of things. And in this third kind of knowledge, all bodies agree with each other in a world of pure intensities, a mystical point of beatitude or active affect, or auto-affect.</p>

<p>No recording of this session is available currently. This dataset includes three files: a revised French transcription and new English translation in odt format, and the original French transcript from WebDeleuze, also available from the Le Terrier website. [WebDeleuze was founded by Richard Pinhas -- a student in Deleuze's seminars -- who, with the Deleuze family's support, developed transcripts and translations of many of the seminars. Le Terrier is an independent, iconoclastic site that post multimedia documents, with the only guiding statement posted: “A site integrally realized by some less-than-nothings for some good-for-nothings, for no purpose”, http://www.le-terrier.net/index2.html]</p>

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<p>Les Séminaires de Deleuze sont une collection d'enregistrements audio, de transcriptions et de traductions en anglais et de documents complémentaires des conférences que le philosophe français Gilles Deleuze a donné lors de sa carrière à l'Université de Paris 8.</p>

<p>Voici la seule séance disponible de cette année scolaire qui rappelle le texte sur Spinoza que Deleuze a déjà publié, <em>Spinoza</em> (Presses universitaires de France, 1970), et celui qu’il est sans doute en train de préparer, <em>Spinoza: Philosophie pratique</em> (Minuit, 1981), mais aussi aspects du plateau 10 de <em>Mille plateaux.</em> Tout en considérant le thème « Guerre et état » pendant cette année, Deleuze offre, selon le programme de philosophie disponible à Octaviana-Paris 8, un mini-séminaire sur Spinoza en hiver 1977, qui se lie sans doute au second mini-séminaire, sur Kant, qui fait l’object d’un dataset séparé ici.</p>