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A Physiology of Encounters Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Strange Alliances - Tom Sparrow
A Physiology of Encounters Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Strange Alliances - Tom Sparrow
A Physiology of Encounters Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Strange Alliances - Tom Sparrow
Abstract: The body is central to the philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche. Both think-
ers are concerned with the composition of the body, its potential relations with other
bodies, and the modifications which a body can undergo. Gilles Deleuze has contributed
significantly to the relatively sparse literature which draws out the affinities between
Spinoza and Nietzsche. Deleuze’s reconceptualization of the field of ethology enables
us to bring Spinoza and Nietzsche together as ethologists of the body and to elaborate
their common, physiological perspective on ethico-political composition. This is ac-
complished by reading the concepts of force, power, and affect as they are mobilized
in their discussions of corporeity and intercorporeity. What emerges is a metaphysics
of bodies that can simultaneously be regarded as a physiology of encounters, one
which renders the friend/enemy distinction indiscernible and opens the door for a
rethinking of the nature of political alliances. Both Spinoza and Nietzsche are shown
to be invaluable resources for helping us imagine the potential of the individual’s body
and the body politic.
What Nietzsche calls affect is exactly the same thing as what Spinoza
calls affect, it is on this point that Nietzsche is Spinozist.
—Deleuze, Course at Vincennes, January 20, 1981
W hen you the read the postcard to Overbeck dated July 30, 1881, it is clear
that Nietzsche is completely surprised by what he has come across. He can
hardly believe that he has found in Spinoza a precursor to his own philosophy,
even in light of all the differences which set their work in opposition. Despite
the “divergencies” identified by Nietzsche in Spinoza’s philosophy, they cannot
prevent the German from seeing the Jew as a powerful ally.“In summa,” Nietzsche
© 2010. Epoché, Volume 15, Issue 1 (Fall 2010). ISSN 1085-1968. 165–186
166 Tom Sparrow
force of another body. This is not a weakness or deficiency, but a positive aspect
of composite bodies as such. Indeed, it is that characteristic of life itself which
is seized and compromised by the reactionary evaluations of Good and Evil, as
Pierre Zaoui has noted.9 Nietzsche, of course, does not rejoice in the capacity to
yield, but to impose form. Spinoza is somewhat less partisan in his “brief preface
concerning the nature of bodies,” where he explains that,“Bodies are distinguished
from one another in respect of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not
in respect of substance.” Moreover, his definition of composite bodies indicates
that when a multiplicity of bodies come into contact by virtue of some external
pressure, or when they are “moving at the same or different rates of speed so as to
preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves,” this multiplicity
will function indefinitely as a unit or individual body.10 These multiplicities—in
particular their duration, behavior, resistances, and evolution—represent the basic
object of Deleuzian ethology and the political ontology it engenders.
Considered alongside their respective treatments of friendship and political
alliance, the philosophical ethology of Spinoza and Nietzsche can be read as a
political physiology of bodies, which asks “whether relations (and which ones?)
can compound directly to form a new, more ‘extensive’ relation, or whether ca-
pacities can compound directly to constitute a more ‘intense’ capacity or power.”
With ethology, Deleuze writes,
It is no longer a matter of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and
communities. How do individuals enter into composition with one another
in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take
another being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s
own relations and world?11
Looking at The Will to Power, Nietzsche is more ambiguous in his stance toward as-
similation: “Appropriation and assimilation are above all a desire to overwhelm, a
forming, shaping and reshaping, until at length that which has been overwhelmed
has entirely gone over into the power domain of the aggressor and has increased
the same.”12 At first glance it seems that while Spinoza is anxious about stronger
bodies overtaking their weaker counterparts, Nietzsche sees this process as the
natural order of things, and thus something to be embraced. The matter is more
complex, however. We can begin to untangle this complexity by turning to the
concepts of affect, force, power, nobility, and friendship in Spinoza and Nietzsche.
But first it is necessary to thicken our understanding of what a body is.
According to Spinoza, a single body is, in fact, a composite body constituted by
a great number of parts, each of which is “extremely complex.”13 The body is simul-
taneously a singular and a multiple entity, an intensity made up of a confluence of
forces, affects, and relations. Indeed, its singularity is its multiplicity. An intensity
represents a determinate modification of being, an expression of the body of God,
i.e. Nature, a finite mode of infinite substance and a degree of power.14 Bodies
168 Tom Sparrow
distinguish themselves by virtue of their motion and rest, speed and slowness,
and always agree with one another “in certain respects.”15 This means that taken
together all bodies are essentially, and a fortiori potentially, one body—this fact
is the cause of Spinoza’s optimism about the power of reason to unite individuals
into a harmonious state.16 Since all bodies agree to a certain degree, their respective
qualitative determinations—affirmative or negative, reactive or active, resentful
or joyous—contribute significantly to the determination of their alliances, as we
will see. As Deleuze puts the matter, “The speed and slowness of metabolisms,
perceptions, actions, and reactions link together to constitute a particular indi-
vidual in the world.”17 A human body, as a mode of substance, for instance, is a
singular thing, but a thing whose threshold of power, or intensity, is constituted
by its relations with other singular bodies. A composite body such as a political
state is nothing more than a singular thing of a more expansive sort, comprised
of its own complex extensive and intensive relations, a certain mixture of singular
bodies and thresholds of power. Bodies, then, whether “individual” or “composite,”
are always already composed singularities which do not exist, pre-formed, prior
to the immanent genesis of their composition.18 Whether these bodies affect, or
infect, one another with joy or resentment will make the difference between a
healthy citizen and a sick citizen, a healthy body politic and a sick body politic.19
Politics, for Nietzsche and Spinoza, is entirely a physiological affair.
Nietzsche’s view of the body is that of a physiologist, a “doctor-philosopher.”20
He is always concerned with the power of the body, the forces at play within it,
its health or sickness. For him, any individual human body is an expression of a
quantity of force, the locus of a physical antagonism, and the interface of material
relations. Any signs of consciousness are, as we all know, simply residual effects
of physical antagonisms. There is no “doer” behind the will—the will just is a
“quantum of force.”21 The body is a dynamic multiplicity, a desirous and pas-
sionate organism.22 Above all, Nietzsche always reminds us that the body (of the
subject) is not a unity, but “constantly growing or decreasing, the center of a system
constantly shifting.”23 The body is an intensity, a variable unit whose integrity is
threatened by increases and decreases in power. Nietzsche’s philosophy diagnoses
the symptoms of the body, traces its extremities and breaking points, as well as its
nihilistic and antagonistic tendencies. Does it fear encounters or does it reach out
for more contact? Does it love or despise its enemies? Does it resist or embrace?
Or, is its resistance a form of love, perhaps a nobler form?
The central question in all of this is: What can bodies do? We have no idea,
Spinoza says, because “nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s
capabilities; that is, nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can
and cannot do, without being determined by the mind, solely from the laws of its
nature and in so far as it is considered as corporeal.”24 The power of the body is
for the most part unthought, hence the physical project of the Ethics—to think
A Physiology of Encounters: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Strange Alliances 169
the power of the body in its various relations and modes of expression. A body’s
power is its virtue.25 It is easy to see how the physics of the Ethics can be read
as a politics and an ethics, insofar as it articulates a (meta)physics of the power
of composite bodies. Now, the indeterminacy of a body’s potential implies that
a certain degree of experimentation is necessary in order to realize the power it
possesses. Deleuze points out that, for Spinoza, we cannot know our own power
without the affects produced in us by other bodies.26 This power is principally
the power to exist, to preserve oneself and persevere in one’s capacity to exist.
There is one thing that we do know about bodies: they are guided by a principle
of self-preservation that Spinoza calls conatus, which “is nothing but the actual
essence of the thing itself.”27 What bodies can become, however, over and above
their principle of self-preservation, is largely unknown. This also means that we
do not really know what bodies look like, what they are, in their perfection.
Spinoza postulates that a human body cannot preserve itself without the aid of
other bodies.28 This point orders his critique of Hobbes’s social atomism. Hobbes
not only failed to realize the essential connection—conatus, for Spinoza—which
obtains between the bodies which make up the multitude, he also failed to see
that the power of thought attainable by the many “is necessarily greater than that
of the few,” as Warren Montag has written. Citing Spinoza’s Ethics, Montag puts
the point well:
[J]ust as an individual is nearly powerless in body, so such an individual is
powerless in mind. This fact cuts off any retreat from the society of others,
any withdrawal from the vulgar in pursuit of wisdom. It is thus not a matter
of moral obligation or duty that demands that we concern ourselves with
the condition of the multitude; it is rather a matter of necessity, we are con-
demned to do so. Their power is the condition of our power, their weakness
only weakens us, their fear and hatred are as contagious as the plague that
ravaged Amsterdam in the 1660s, and just as deadly (to reason).29
Spinoza’s critique of liberal individualism, which is essential to an agonistic poli-
tics, is developed by Nietzsche.30 Nietzsche’s physiology of friendship and enmity
shows that bodies are incapable of overcoming themselves without confronting
other powerful bodies. (The image of a hermetic Zarathustra is put out of play
here.) The possible compositions in which a body might find itself cannot be
determined before it undergoes an affection (affectio) caused by an external
body. An affection is the “trace” left on one body by another it has encountered.31
Encounters can be good or bad, active or passive; the latter are to be avoided
because they compromise the integrity of a body, that is, they “[cause] it to be
destroyed, and consequently quite incapable of being affected in many ways.”32
An individual’s aim—which is evident for Nietzsche no less than for Spinoza—is
to become capable of affecting and being affected in as many ways possible. This
is what is “advantageous to man,” or good.33 This is why there is no unconditional
170 Tom Sparrow
all be in such harmony in all respects that their minds and bodies should
compose, as it were, one mind and one body, and that all together should
endeavor as best they can to preserve their own being, and that all together
they should aim at the common advantage of all.43
A common desire for preservation will thrive in a civil society grounded in rela-
tions analogous to those identified in Spinoza’s conception of friendship. The
desire for friendship is the mark of the honorable human being and offers a point
of contact with Nietzsche.44 Honor is a virtue which is guided by reason alone and,
as a desire, derives from the essence of human being. It nourishes itself on the
pleasure of coexisting harmoniously with other human beings. It gives a pathos
of power which generates an ethos of power. The force of the desire for friendship
exceeds the desire which is checked by a painful coexistence, thus a pleasurable
(harmonious) coexistence is stronger than a painful (discordant) one.45 To desire
this harmony and strive to join together and persevere with other human beings,
this is what Spinoza understands the noble life to be. And nobility, along with love,
is the virtuous passion which truly conquers the hearts of human beings and binds
them together into one unified body,46 the most powerful—and precarious!—of
which is that of the multitude in an absolute democracy. As Negri has argued,
In part IV of the Ethics this conviction of the usefulness of man for man and
of the ontological multiplication of virtue in the human community is cease-
lessly repeated. . . . The multitudo is thus nothing but the interconnection
of subjects having become an ontological project of collective power. But at
the same time, the concept of the multitudo is linked to the ambiguity of the
imagination and translated into the theory of political action. This is then the
theoretical genesis of Spinozan democracy.47
Nietzsche’s attitude toward the masses, honor, and democracy is more “aristocrat-
ic” than Spinoza’s. It is not mere elitism, however, which characterizes Nietzsche’s
position. It would be necessary to consider the consequences of conceiving
aristocracy at the physiological level in order to comprehend Nietzschean aristo-
cratism vis-à-vis Spinozan democracy. Consider, for instance, The Will to Power,
§490: “[P]erhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects,
whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our conscious-
ness in general. A kind of aristocracy of ‘cells’ in which dominion resides? To be
sure, an aristocracy of equals, used to ruling jointly and understanding how to
command?”48 I suspect a physiological sympathy between Nietzsche’s cellular
aristocracy and Spinoza’s honorable community.
Nietzsche commonly understands his philosophy of power as fundamentally
critical of Spinoza’s. At the level of the most fundamental principle regarding the
nature of bodies, Nietzsche sets up the will to power against Spinoza’s conatus. Bod-
ies are, basically, driven by the will to power and the desire command. A subject,
A Physiology of Encounters: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Strange Alliances 173
Nietzsche writes, “can transform a weaker subject into its functionary without
destroying it, and to a certain degree form a new unity with it.”49 To claim, as
Spinoza does, that bodies are naturally self-preservative is to fail to see that nature
strives always to surpass itself, precisely because it is always already preserving
itself, while at the same time overflowing with an excess of force and energy. This
excess desires to shape the world in its image, not merely to persist in existing. It
is as though Nietzsche has interpreted Spinozan conatus as a superfluous telos.
“[Spinoza’s] law is false,” Nietzsche says, “the opposite is true. It can be shown
most clearly that every living thing does everything it can not to preserve itself
but to become more—.”50 Nietzsche can only believe this if he fails to recognize
the deep affinity between his account of the will to power and Spinoza’s analysis
of composite bodies. He can only believe this if he fails to recognize that both the
will to power and conatus are virtues—self-generating powers which drive the
body—that are essentially appetitive in nature and constitute the forces which
give rise to more powerful bodies. These forces are determined, for good or ill,
by affections (affectio) enacted on a body through its contact with other bodies.
These are inseparable “from a movement by which they [affections] cause us to
go to a greater or lesser perfection (joy and sadness), depending on whether the
thing encountered enters into composition with us, or on the contrary tends to
decompose us.”51 Put otherwise, both conatus and will to power are active forces
which wage a struggle for life and sustain the integrity of the organism, whether
individual or social, and are linked essentially to a pathos (of honor, distance,
respect, etc.) that qualifies the ethos of a singular body.
One way to develop this affinity between Nietzsche and Spinoza on the relation
between passion and action, pathos and ethos, or affectivity and power, is to look
at Nietzsche’s account of friendship in the light of Spinoza’s theory of corporeal
composition.
An affect (affectus) is an intensive modification arising from an encounter; it
is the generation of a qualitative bodily state effected by the actualization of an
idea (recalled, imagined, perceived). The affect depends on the idea as that which
sets it in motion or triggers it as a response. This all leads back to a previous af-
fection. As Deleuze says in the “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect:” “There
is a primacy of the idea over the affect for the very simple reason that in order to
love it’s necessary to have an idea, however confused it may be, however indeter-
minate it may be, of what is loved.”52 This idea corresponds to an affection caused
by contact with a body encountered and will determine the diagnosis of that
encounter as either healthy or poisonous. Affects describe the genesis or passage
of a body, what Deleuze calls a “becoming.” This passage often goes by the name
of “consciousness” in Nietzsche, as in the case of an individual whose “outward
discharge”53 is inhibited and suddenly becomes aware of their relative weakness
vis-à-vis a powerful opponent. This person has ceased to act instinctively, has
174 Tom Sparrow
only plunge us into hatred and resentment instead of opening the common ground
which obtains between bodies. Our inadequate knowledge of the inequalities of
life itself can take the life right out of us. “Nothing burns one up faster than the
affects of ressentiment,” Nietzsche says.62
The affirmative will opens the body up to the power of other bodies in an
attempt to increase its own power and to give form to the body of nature. Of
course, a healthy will can affirm other bodies more readily than a diseased body,
which naturally feels threatened by the presence of powerful bodies. What makes
a body healthy is the strength to engage spontaneously with other bodies, above
all stronger bodies, and expel some of its excessive strength on those bodies, while
reciprocally sustaining an affection from a stronger body. “A living thing seeks
above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation
is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.”63 The affirmative and
healthy body is the body strong enough to experiment with the chance of the
encounter and stave off the ressentiment which can result from poisonous and
painful contact with oppositional bodies. A resentful body is one whose integ-
rity is decomposed by contact with stronger bodies. The power of affirmation is
achieved only by truly free spirits. As Nietzsche writes in The Anti-Christ: “The
most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others
would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and
others, in experimenting.”64
Nietzsche does not advocate the indiscriminate exercise of the will; rather,
he “affirms all that appears, ‘even the most bitter suffering.’”65 He does not blind
himself to the reality of cruelty and deliberate oppression, but he refuses to de-
nounce it morally. He diagnoses it as a tragic fact of life as such—as one possible
manifestation of the will to power—and gives some hypothesis as to why it occurs.
For Nietzsche, the destruction of another body is not the mark of a strong will
or a healthy body; indiscriminate abuse signifies the presence of a poison in the
abusive body. A violent act against a vulnerable body is actually an indication of
a decadent and weak will.66 This diagnosis becomes clearer when we consider
what Nietzsche has to say about friendship and enmity, both of which represent
typical composite bodies and affective encounters. It does not make sense to ask
how Nietzsche identifies the friend, nor is it worthwhile to pursue the question
of the “elitism” of Nietzsche’s conception of friendship. As they stand, Nietzsche’s
writings contain no univocal definition of the friend. Instead, when he invokes
the friend and the enemy, Nietzsche is wont to discuss various alliances and their
potential effects. Take this passage from The Gay Science, which comes closer to
a definition of friendship than anything else in Nietzsche’s corpus:
Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love
in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a
new desire and lust for possession—a shared higher thirst for an ideal above
176 Tom Sparrow
them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is
friendship.67
The concepts organizing these invocations are that of affection and affect, under-
stood in terms of the increase and decrease of the power of composites. Nietzsche
takes up this motif directly from Spinoza.
Neither Spinoza nor Nietzsche claims to know what the friend’s or the enemy’s
body can do, and they diverge over how to confront this indeterminacy. From
an ethological standpoint, Nietzsche can only prescribe experimentation where
Spinoza champions the power of reason to bring order to our encounters. This
is because friends and enemies, strictly speaking, cannot be said to exist: they
are nothing more than unstable and mobile compositions of affects, energies,
and powers. This conception of friendship and enmity is emblematic of the
non-essentialism of ethics as ethology. For example, a friend can turn out to be
a deceitful toxin, as when Nietzsche indicates the prevalence of a certain measure
of polite dishonesty at the heart of most of our friendships. Nietzsche writes in
Human, All Too Human that,
yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led
them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain
your friend; for such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact
that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon.68
Certainly, the enemy would not care about such niceties, and thus poses less of a
threat to the health of the body than the friend. He or she, that is to say, can offer
the most desirable kind of nourishment—honest resistance. But for this kind
of relation a noble will is needed. To truly engage the enemy in all of his or her
positivity, a person must be strong enough to affirm the power of the enemy and
welcome what affections he or she might offer. Only among healthy, noble wills is
“genuine ‘love of one’s enemies’” a real possibility.“How much reverence,” Nietzsche
writes,“has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.
—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure
no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to
honor!”69 The value of friendship and enmity must be decided experimentally,
that is, through affective encounters with those who are considered to be our
friends as well as those who are designated enemies. Nietzsche is not in the habit
of condemning anyone as evil a priori—this is the business of the Church, the
slave, and the superstitious.70 Only affects can decide who is with us and who is
against us, who will compose and decompose our bodies.71
Joyous passions can come from any individual or any part of another body.
To believe otherwise is a symptom of nihilism. How a body will hold up in an
encounter depends on the nature of the bodies involved and their constitution
at the time of the encounter, whether they are affirmative of chance or resentful
A Physiology of Encounters: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Strange Alliances 177
unlikely proposition, perhaps just a grand illusion that will always remain “a
strange, tempting, dangerous ideal.”82
As a singular composite body, individuals are nothing other than expressions
of a social body which has a singular threshold of power and a singular state of
health. When one body is affected, all bodies are affected. This is why a politics
founded on pity fundamentally misunderstands the ignobility of pity: pity is a
false form of compassion because it misrepresents the suffering body as weak
and isolated, and therefore deficient in “its own” personal strength. No such pro-
priety exists. This isolation is a liberalist myth which all of Nietzscheanism and
Spinozism seeks to dispel along with every one of the sad passions induced by
our superstitious value systems. Pity is a sad passion because it is precisely the
obverse of ressentiment. It is a pathology founded upon negative affects, affects
charged by a base moral consciousness; it threatens the health of the body poli-
tic. “Pity does not depend upon maxims but upon affects; it is pathological. The
suffering of others infects us, pity is an infection.”83 The suffering of the weak is
nothing more nor less than a modal expression of the (imperfect) body politic
or, more generally, the collective power of humanity. Thus Nietzsche can write:
“my humanity does not consist in feeling with men how they are, but in endur-
ing that I feel with them.”84 To feel for the other is to feel with and as the other, to
undergo a passion that is the other’s passions, that is, a single passion expressed
in various modes. Nietzsche substitutes this very Spinozan com-passion—a
pathos exemplified in the “lonesomeness” he endures together with Spinoza in
the July 30, 1881 postcard to Overbeck—for Christian pity. The purpose of this
kind of compassion is to heal the body of its toxic affects and cultivate the pas-
sions that bind bodies together. Above all, we must “guard ourselves, my friends,
against the two worst contagions that may be reserved just for us—against the
great nausea at man! against great pity for man!”85 It is in this light that the striv-
ing of both conatus and will to power must be read, the former as a striving for
the preservation of humanity as a collective power, the latter as a striving for the
purification of all that is base and reactive in humanity. Both of these mark the
struggles of the overman.
Nietzsche’s reading of democracy as decadent and nihilistic has the principles
of equality and pity as its target, but only insofar as these principles make isolation,
timidity, and agoraphobia—rather than power and affirmation—into virtues.
He writes, “as soon as this principle [of equality] is extended, and possibly even
accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what
it really is—a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay.”86
This sentiment derives from Nietzsche’s belief in the fundamentally unequal
nature of forces and the “exploitative” essence of life, that is, the will to power. It
sounds harsh at first, but if we consider this in terms of Spinoza’s question—Of
what is a body capable?—then we see the precise object, and feel the tragic bite,
180 Tom Sparrow
Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Postcard to Overbeck,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), 92.
2. Note the stress in Nietzsche’s postcard when he writes that,“that I should have turned
to him now, was inspired by “instinct.” “Postcard to Overbeck,” 92.
3. This synthesis is not unprecedented. However, the literature on the Spinoza-Nietzsche
connection is still relatively thin. Notable contributions include: Pierre Zaoui, “La
‘grande identité’ Nietzsche-Spinoza, quelle identité?,” Philosophie 47 (September,
1995): 64-84; Jonathan Philippe, “Nietzsche and Spinoza: New Personae in a New
Plane of Thought,” in Jean Khalfa, ed., An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2003), 50-63; Wilhelm S. Wurzer, Nietzsche und Spinoza
(Meisenheim am Glan: Hain Verlag, 1975).
4. Konrad Lorenz, The Foundations of Ethology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981), 1. As
the study of behavior, ethology asks about the cause and adaptation of certain char-
acteristics, as well as their development and evolution. In Lorenz’s words, ethologists
are interested in behavior “in all its wealth of detail, variation, causation, and control”
(Foundations, vii). Deleuze’s conscription of ethology elevates it to an ethical plane
insofar as it describes Spinoza’s method for determining desirable and undesirable
corporeal arrangements, that is, for determining which bodies interact in ways that
are mutually empowering; which bodies interact in ways that are mutually enervating;
and which bodies interact in such a way that only some are strengthened while the
others are weakened. Deleuze also finds in ethology an alternative means of classifica-
tion, one which categorizes individuals according to their affective capacities, rather
than by their specific difference from a given genus.“For example,” Deleuze writes,“J.
von Uexküll will do this for the tick, an animal that sucks the blood of mammals. He
will define this animal by three affects.” Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 124.
5. Affectus: this critical term denoting the qualitative passage of a body from one state
to another, to be distinguished from affectio (affection), is rendered as “emotion” by
Samuel Shirley’s translation of the Ethics (Hackett, 1992). Because of the psychological
baggage that comes with this translation, and following current convention, I have
employed “affect” instead of “emotion” throughout the essay.
6. See Deleuze’s “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect, 24/01/1978.” Available at: www
.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html.
7. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125-126.
A Physiology of Encounters: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Strange Alliances 181
resentment, the ascetic priest, bad conscience, etc. in On the Genealogy of Morals
(cf., for example, Third Essay, §§13-17), and derive from Spinoza’s naturalization
of moral philosophy and ethical metaphysics in the Ethics. For more on the criteria
of health and sickness, see Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans.
Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 1997), especially chapters 4 and 8.
20. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books,
2001), 71.
21. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, §13.
22. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §490.
23. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §488.
24. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 3, P2, Scholium.
25. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 4, Definition 8.
26. Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect, 24/01/1978.” Cf. Spinoza, Ethics,
Book 2.
27. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 3, P7.
28. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 2, P13, Postulate 3.
29. Montag, “The Body of the Multitude,” 82.
30. Cf. Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect
Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
31. Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect, 24/01/1978:” “In other words an
effect, or the action that one body produces on another, once it’s noted that Spinoza,
on the basis of reasons from his Physics, does not believe in action at a distance, ac-
tion always implies a contact, and is even a mixture of bodies. Affectio is a mixture
of two bodies, one body which is said to act on another, and the other receives the
trace of the first.”
32. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 4, P39.
33. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 4, P38.
34. Deleuze indicates the a posteriori nature of our knowledge of particular relations
between bodies. We cannot know ahead of time whether a body will be energized
or decomposed by another body. This knowledge can only be ascertained after an
encounter has already taken place. See Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, chapter 3.
35. In a discussion of the Spinozan/Nietzschean roots of Deleuze’s “immanent ethics,” Dan
Smith (citing Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?) has put it in these terms:
“Modes are no longer ‘judged’ in terms of their degree of proximity to or distance
from an external principle, but are ‘evaluated’ in terms of the manner in which they
‘occupy’ their existence: the intensity of their power, their ‘tenor’ of life.” Daniel W.
Smith,“Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward and Immanent Theory of Ethics,”
Parrhesia 2 (2007): 66-78. Available at: www.parrhesiajournal.org/issue2.html.
36. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 2, P13, Corollary 2, Axiom 2, Definition.
37. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 2, P13, second Corollary, Axiom 1.
38. Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect, 24/01/1978.”
39. On the two kinds of encounter, see Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy:
Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone, 1990), 239–46. This point is admit-
A Physiology of Encounters: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Strange Alliances 183
tedly disputable, and perhaps bears more of Deleuze’s mark than it does Spinoza’s.
Dan Selcer has recently argued contra Deleuze that the ordering of encounters, and
ultimately the total emancipation of the body from bondage, should be seen as the
result of a “fortunate event” rather than the product of strategic planning. This is the
outcome of Spinoza’s identification of freedom and necessity, the basic undermining
of intention in the Ethics, as well as his insistence on the fact that we are both ignorant
of the causes of our actions and uncertain about what our bodies (and the bodies
of others) can do (cf. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 1, Appendix). Selcer’s argument, which
clearly explicates the meaning of “encounter” for Deleuze and discusses its Spinozan
roots, can be found in the paper,“The Order of Encounters: Deleuze, Spinoza, and the
Sensible/Imaginary,” delivered at the Deleuze and Rationalism Conference, Middlesex
University, March 15, 2007.
40. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 262. Cf. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
23: “That individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong) who strives,
insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with
his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and
thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power, and the
composition of powers.”
41. The aleatory component of encounters allows us to conclude that the affections un-
dergone by bodies are fully determined. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter,
eds. Francois Matheron and Oliver Corpet (London: Verso, 2006), 193. From what has
been said above about the a posteriori nature of ethological studies, it is clear that
Althusser’s account of the encounter is borrowed from Deleuze’s analyses of corporeal
relations in Spinoza. See Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 239–42.
42. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), 44.
43. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 4, P18, Scholium.
44. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 4, P37, Scholium 1.
45. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 4, P18.
46. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 3, P59, Scholium; Book 4, Appendix, 11, 12.
47. Antonio Negri, “Reliqua Desiderantur: A Conjecture for a Definition of the Concept
of Democracy in the Final Spinoza,” in The New Spinoza, eds. Warren Montag and
Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 236.
48. Consider, for instance, this remark from The Will to Power, §490: “[P]erhaps it is just
as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is
the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general. A kind of aristocracy of
‘cells’ in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of equals, used to ruling
jointly and understanding how to command?”
49. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §488.
50. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §688. Cf. also, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), §13.
51. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 21. The affections induced by encounters are
inseparable from the qualification of the will of an organism. Affections are basically
corporeal modifications induced by a “chance”/indeterminate mixture or composition.
184 Tom Sparrow
68. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), Volume 1, §376.
69. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1967), First Essay, §10.
70. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/Anti-Christ, 53-54. On superstition, Cf. Deleuze, Ex-
pressionism in Philosophy, 270; on slave morality, cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of
Morals.
71. On this point, Nietzsche’s agonistic politics is fundamentally at odds with Carl
Schmitt’s. For Schmitt, the political as such is founded upon the moment of decision
which marks an “us” against a “them.” But, as Chantal Mouffe has shown, Schmitt
thinks the us/them, friend/enemy distinction in terms of fixed identities. His univer-
salization of the friend/enemy relation is precisely his failure, according to Mouffe.
It seems to me that both Nietzsche and Spinoza could provide further support for
Mouffe’s critique of Schmitt’s agonistic politics, but she rarely draws on either of these
figures. See Chantal Mouffe,“Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy,” in
The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 36-59.
72. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 124.
73. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125.
74. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 40.
75. Philippe, “Nietzsche and Spinoza,” 53.
76. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 43.
77. Cited in Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 204, note 5.
78. Nietzsche prescribes certain strategies for welcoming contact with others and avoid-
ing the wasting of energy on reactive or “no-saying” actions. He implores us to “avoid
situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, one’s
‘freedom’ and initiative and to become a mere reagent.” This is conveyed through
recommendations for nutrition, recreation, climate, and diet in Ecce Homo, “Why I
am So Clever,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), §8, passim. The ethological value
of this essay cannot be underestimated, as it is emblematic of Nietzsche as doctor-
philosopher and is full of prescriptions for sustaining a healthy environment. It also
speaks of Wagner as “toxin” and “poison” (§6), which leads one to imagine a Spinozan
ethological analysis of Nietzsche’s tumultuous relationship with the composer. At first
a kind of food which gave Nietzsche strength, Wagner eventually became poisonous
to Nietzsche’s post-Wagnerian composition.
79. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 268-269. Reason always commands, whereas
passion remains inactive. To overcome the passivity of affections, reason must strive
to think the essence of God, that is, to conceive the causal order of Nature and con-
stitute the mind with adequate ideas. As Spinoza writes in Book 5 of the Ethics, “that
mind is most passive whose greatest part is constituted by inadequate ideas, so that
it is characterized more by passivity than by activity. On the other hand, that mind
is most active whose greater part is constituted by adequate ideas, so that even if the
latter mind contains as many inadequate ideas as the former, it is characterized by
186 Tom Sparrow
those ideas which are attributed to human virtue than by those that point to human
weakness.” Spinoza, Ethics, Book 5, P20, Scholium.
80. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 111. “Ressentiment designates a type in which
reactive forces prevail over active forces.”
81. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 3, P59, Scholium.
82. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 5, §382. Cf. also On the Genealogy of Morals, Second
Essay, §24.
83. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §368.
84. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” §8. Cf. also §4.
85. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, §14.
86. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §259.
87. I must thank Dan Selcer for giving me the tools to craft this paper, and especially for
inciting a love for Spinoza in each one of his students. Also, I must declare my debt
to an anonymous referee at Epoché whose suggestions helped clarify and strengthen
this essay.