Spinoza, Heidegger and Deleuze

Upon finishing Deleuze's book on Spinoza, I admit some defeat on my early reading of the book. Thus a few remarks.

It struck me, in my reading, that Deleuze was trying to draw Heidegger out of Spinoza. Not fully, but enough to distance Spinoza from strictly Cartesian projects. Deleuze certainly has a point that essentia and existentia are placed in parallel, where '[b]y virtue of the cause of itself, the existence of substance is involved in essence, so that essence is an absolutely infinite power of existing. Between essence and existence, then, there is only a distinction of reason, insofar as one distinguishes the thing affirmed from its affirmation' (67). As Deleuze states two pages before, in his commentary on Spinoza's treatment of "Essence," '[t]he attributes are so many forces of existence and acting, while essence is an absolutely infinite power of existing and acting' (65). Deleuze is correct, I think, to put a Heideggerian spin on this and to suggest that these work in tandem, but nonetheless Spinoza does maintain the Cartesian hierarchy between essentia and existentia. Deleuze points out, implicitly, a way in which Heidegger might be Spinozist when he notes that '[e]ach attribute "expresses" a certain essence' (51), in that attributes of a substance are recieved by a subject to further show the essence of that substance. The ways in which the substance is recieved though its attributes, its 'affirmation,' is in existence, by which its essence is recieved. But it is the essence that is shown in existence, stemming from Descartes, which is opposed to Heidegger's inversion of this in Sind und Zeit. To Spinoza's credit, while he does retain this Cartesian heirarchy, he does put essence and existence in tandem, where each relies on the other. Further, this is done without dialectics. To me, this one of the key points of interest in Spinoza, and where the Nietzschean reading is defended best. I read Deleuze with a bit of a smile, as much as I respect him and think he has a solid reading, he nonetheless reads a certain Heideggerian-Marxian edge into Spinoza (words like 'production,' in the way that Deleuze is writing about them, I don't see in Spinoza), and thus the reading might be a bit strong. Though, with the suggestion of 'becoming,' 'threshold' and 'possibility' as key to Spinoza's text, I do not think Deleuze is very far off, though one is maybe getting more Deleuze here than Spinoza.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans: Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988.