Deleuze on Spinoza: "Before Nietzsche, he denounces all the falsifications of life, all the values in the name of which we disparage life" (PP, 26).
1.2. Living is always a lot of untangling prejudices before you can access tasty things. This is ideally the case even when one is living high on the hog. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you're already in serious trouble.
1.3. Spinoza sees most men using reason in order to offend reason most egregiously. Spinoza decries all tendencies to look for arbitrators or things/creatures in abstract conceptual non-spaces when everything is just nature doing nature all the livelong day. Spinoza puts himself in a position to be declared a heretic, and he only deepens his own radical crisis by addressing these possible charges early and often. He writes (in the 17th century!): "there have arisen prejudices concerning good and bad, merit and wrongdoing, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness, and other things of this kind" (Ethics, 31). For all his fancy footwork, again and again Spinoza makes clear that he's having none of it.
1.4. People don't need to make the world intelligible in order to possess Greater Truth, but rather as a condition and project for living. If people don't like doubt, they show us an insecure hand pretty damn nakedly.
1.5. Because they know they are driven by drives and pulsed by impulses, Spinoza believes his contemporaries are dishonest with their bodies and, in fact, with all extended substance. Part of what appears to drive people is the need to not hear anything inconvenient. Doubt is an enemy to most people and when they are scared of their enemy they will demonstrate that fear by reasserting all the more aggressively the (conveniently simple) abstract model. The drives and impulses must come from a Intentional Divine Will that is Good, or the frightened person will not stop being frightened. In Practical Philosophy, Deleuze reminds us of Proposition XXXII from the "Concerning God" section of Spinoza's Ethics: "Will can only be a necessary cause not a free one" (Ethics, 26). Simple people view things with simple and reasonable end results in mind. This is why they assume that material effects in the world and even the whole of nature conform to the designs of an intentional intelligence: they "are satisfied, for then they have no cause of further doubt" (Ethics, 32).
1.6. If God were an intentional deity, why then all the hardship and calamity? Simple and very foolish people have traditionally had to make themselves believe these are mysterious punishments for known or unknown indiscretions. This is the modular opposite of the right path. Nietzsche will later call it 'reactive nihilism.'
1.7. Nature cannot have any fixed ends and is conditionally infinite. Spinoza: "Infinite things in infinite ways (that is, all things which can fall under an infinite intellect) must necessarily follow from the necessity of the divine nature" (Ethics, 16). God must be defined, as Deleuze and Guattari will go on to say, as omnitudo realitatas (the whole of the real, the Oneness of Infinite Substance). Now you can start actually having intelligibility. Man's greatest crime against reason is merely the habitual mistaking of an effect for a cause.
1.8. You are not going to like this, but suffering is not negative, it is positive, just like ecstasy. The body only knows protons.
1.9. Deleuze: "There is, then, a philosophy of 'life' in Spinoza; it consists precisely in denouncing all that separates us from life, all the transcendental values that are turned against life, these values that are attached to the conditions and illusions of consciousness. Life is poisoned by the categories of Good and Evil, of blame and merit, of sin and redemption" (PP, 26).
1.10. There ends up being three tridents of Spinozist critique: 1) critique of consciousness; 2) critique of higher values; and 3) critique of the "sad passions." We have thoughts, and maybe even a great many distinct categories of kinds of thoughts, but we do not have "consciousness" per se. We have bodies, and yet we have only begun to learn what they are capable of doing.
1.11. Infinite possibilities or realities for mode and attribute within a unified infinite substance ("absolutely infinite").
1.12. Consciousness is enslaved by illusions (illusions of "finality" or "freedom" or "Theological Illusion" (PP, 19)).
1.13. What is needed is not the blind authority (or governance) of illusions, naturally, but rather a rescuing of mind and intellection from subservience...as well as the repositioning of the work of mentality around an immanent/natural plane of effects. Thoughts only have positive information value, not truth value, but that 'positive information value' is still very much ACTIVE VALUE, ACTING.
1.14. Deleuze attributes to Spinoza the drawing of a fundamental and crucial distinction between good and bad (affinity/value) as opposed to good and evil (moral determination). Obviously this is thematic material Deleuze cannot help but also touch upon in his famous study of Nietzsche (written before Spinoza: Practical Philosophy). Negotiated and/or critically contested values become the Loadstar of a Philosophy of Life; Lived Experience is the Best Teacher—
2.1. Friedrich Nietzsche is a very bad and scary man. In "From Ressentiment to Bad Conscience," the fourth chapter of his legendary 1962 book (or extended monograph) Nietzsche and Philosophy, our resident commentator would have his moustachioed German predecessor wholesale condemning anybody, it would seem, impudent enough to share the planet with him. Although...let's wait a second, and not so fast. Who or what earned this beastly rhetorician's most scalding ire? The reactive man and the nihilist. These are Brother Friedrich's sworn enemies. It is the reactive man and the nihilist who uphold prejudice, higher values, sad passions, and dialectic. A climax is or will be (or eternally will be, repetitively) arriving in the form of the last man, the most miserable sub-toll-bridge troll-person: pure domesticated, passive sufferer; a wretched and debased creature.
2.2. Active forces are forces that are able to act. To be able to act is to be able to do what you are capable of. The master is a master simply because he is in a position to act his reactions. In him, forces are made active because he can externalize them without much threat of penalty. If reactive forces are to stay dormant, and thus remain reactive, "reaction ceases to be something acted and becomes something felt (senti)" (NP, 111). The reactive mind has its own more active and more reactive dimensions. Mnemonic imprints form lasting impressions. Reactive forces get hung up on imprints and their traces (as though the whole thicket were tangled fishing line). The energy of the unconscious of thought itself is a terrible frothing vacuum-like caterwaul of impulsive-impulsal demands!! The conscious mind needs order in order to...order. Unfortunately, it becomes a tiresome terminal idiot, over and over, popularly, as a statistical-type median. People become dumber and dumber in order to corral their fear, cordon it off, scrutinize a pathetically tiny piece of it. If you don't fall in line they will become mean and bullish. It's okay, though. They're total idiots. It's pretty funny.
2.3. One active faculty of mind is that of instrumental or 'pragmatic' forgetting. Without this faculty, Deleuze has Nietzsche arguing, we could only ever be presented philosophically with a 'being-in-mind' whose foremost problem would surely have to be never being able to be done with anything. No? "We can finally see in what way reactive forces prevail over active ones: when the trace takes the place of the excitation in the reactive apparatus, reaction itself takes the place of action..." (NP, 114).
2.4. If Spinoza doesn't think we humans have a general sort of "consciousness," Nietzsche definitely thinks shitty people have a general sort of reactivity complex.
2.5. Nietzsche believes we all have a problem and we'd all be better served by dealing with it effectively. "One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything—everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experience strikes one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound" (NP, 116). It is the cost of over-reaction, it is its own actual economics (double-ledger), and each of us will find ourselves in the red from time to time. Use these lessons to learn; or, alternatively, damn thee to the flies...
2.6. The way out is always through—
2.7. The reactive man is angry at things proportionate to their direct effect on his body. The Spirit of Revenge mystifies and confounds his memory. Hark! There comes to emerge: the Venomous Spider of Vengeful Memory, spinning its web "on the plane of the subject" (NP, 116). Weakness wants to triumph as weakness.
2.8. The slave is a real goddamn Protestant. Driven by a morality of utility, the slave is the agent of profit, gain, and possessive paranoia. The slave is always accusing. This is the sad passions in all their shades of grey, blue, and white hot. What the slave is really pissed off about is...Life.
2.9. "When would the men of ressentiment achieve the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly if they succeeded in poisoning the conscience of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their own good fortune and perhaps said to one another: 'it is disgraceful to be fortunate: there is too much misery!'" (NP, 128).
2.10. Anybody who has passed through roiling trauma into active recovery comes to discover that the question originally posed by the trauma (and subsequently by its imprints) is: okay, now what?
2.11. Nietzsche called "culture" the "species activity of man." Deleuze logically formalizes Nietzsche's roving critiques of culture by way of three more tridents: 1) pre-historic; 2) post-historic; 3) historic. The ground of pre-history is the grounding operation that demands there be a law about having laws. Culture quickly becomes the process of systematizing prejudices for a reactive citizenry. Models and habits. Culture counteracts the active faculty of forgetting. It fields memory. Creditor/debtor relationships come to predominate. Memory becomes the pathological conditionality for making promises and telling lies. Suddenly memory stars plotting and conniving. It does this in and around culture. It does this on the distant outskirts, also. A great lie conditions the condition of all conditions: Injury Caused = Pain Undergone. Culture wants us to believe we are responsible for arbitrary debts and if we balk it consolidates and finds ways to punish us.
2.12. Pleasure is being generated from all the punishment—that's for sure! that's pure economics!—but the reactive man is in debt and doesn't get to enjoy it...not really. It is profoundly cruel!
2.13. Punishment cannot awaken a feeling of true guilt in the culprit. It can only excite the Spirit of Revenge (NP, 136).
2.14. "Man's species activity constitutes him as responsible for his reactive forces: responsibility-debt. But the responsibility is only a means of training and selection: it progressively measures the suitability of reactive forces for being acted. The finished product of species activity is not the responsible man himself or the moral man, but the autonomous and supra-moral man, that is to say the one who actively acts his reactive forces and in whom all forces are acted" (NP, 137)
3.1. Nietzsche was too early; he could not see clearly enough the hovering spectre of the schizo/catatonic that he himself became.
3.2. In 1972's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and his collaborator—institutional psychiatrist and Jacques Lacan successor-manqué Félix Guattari—trace the development of administrative logics of debt from primitive territorial machines to new binding despotic enterprises (early modernity) with modified infrastructures of alliance and filiation (and punishment, and culture). With respect to the book in question, the process leads up to (without terminating in) deterritorialized and destratified civilizing capitalist machines. You can live both in the city and the hills at one and the same time. Like a guerilla.
3.3. It was Nietzsche, Deleuze reminded us in his earlier book, who was first to declare himself all names in history. But Nietzsche couldn't properly see beyond the last man; his view was obstructed. History was always the heraldry of triumphant weakness. It made a lot of fuckin' noise.
3.4. A bad psychotic episode is all the impulses freaking out all at once.
3.5. There is still always a future and it still always asks now what?
