Baruch Spinoza

In this course

Spinoza's monism—the idea that mind and body are expressions of a single substance—grounds the course's materialist understanding of affect and capacity, particularly through his concept that bodies have unknowable potential ("we don't even know what a body can do"). Deleuze and Guattari mobilize Spinoza's philosophy of affective becoming and joyful intensification against Kantian critique, positioning him as a "fellow traveller" in their project of rethinking vitalism and creative agency as immanent to matter itself. His influence runs throughout the seminar's engagement with how AI and cybernetic systems might be understood not as external control mechanisms but as affective assemblages capable of generating new bodies and sensibilities.

Background

Baruch (de) Spinoza, also known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza, was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, who was born and lived in the Dutch Republic. A forerunner of the Age of Enlightenment, Spinoza significantly influenced modern biblical criticism, 17th-century rationalism, and Dutch intellectual culture, establishing himself as one of the most important and radical philosophers of the early modern period. Influenced by Stoicism, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Ibn Tufayl, and heterodox Christians, Spinoza was a leading philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age.

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