Spinoza, Our Mutual Friend: Deleuze and Guattari on Living a Philosophical Life

Abstract

The essay draws together a number of disparate elements from Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s various engagements with Spinoza. Specifically, the essay connects the notion of expressionism, which Deleuze develops in the early work Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, to the notion of living a philosophical life from Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, to the ideas of friendship and conceptual personae in Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? To think philosophically, which following Spinoza Deleuze treats as a matter of thinking immanently and essentially, is to live a philosophical life, that is, to re-express the contingencies of an empirical life in and as the essence of a life. Such is the existential and ethical task Spinoza presents us. The essay argues that a Spinozan existential ethics is realisable only in relation to – only in friendship with – the image of a philosopher as conceptual persona. Further, the essay argues that Spinoza is an exemplary philosopher in this regard because expressionism, which he alone in the history of philosophy conceptualises in fully univocal fashion, presents an image of a philosopher as a friend to one and to all. The ethical implication of thinking immanently and living essentially in the image of Spinoza as a photographic lens is to constitute a community of friends – distant and non-communicative as that community may be. Or, to put the point in Dickensian terms that Deleuze appeals to in ‘Immanence: A Life’, the Ethics is of ethico-existential import in expressing the image of Spinoza as our mutual philosophical friend.