Anatomies of the subject: Spinoza and Deleuze

Abstract

This thesis centres on an examination of Gilles Deleuze's non-subject centred philosophy and the influence of the earlier (seventeenth century) work of Benedict Spinoza, whom Deleuze describes as one of an "alternative" tradition of philosophers, and whom he claims as an antecedent. Historically, the subject has always appeared as a question, or as in question, as a problem around which concepts cluster. The focus here is on Deleuze's approach to the problem of subjectivity, his treatment of it and his attempt to configure an "antisubject" based on his own transformations of Spinozist concepts, which he takes up and modifies for his own purposes. The proposal is that Spinoza provides a key or a way into Deleuzean concepts, and at the same time that Deleuze's readings of Spinoza's theories reinvigorate them. What unites Spinoza and Deleuze, and is a recurring theme of this thesis, is that they both conduct their critiques and elaborate models from within a conceptual framework of a radical immanence that opposes all transcendence, and especially the' transcendent subject of consciousness. It is on the basis of Spinoza's radical immanence and his non-analogical approach to Being/beings that Deleuze constructs a theory of becoming - as "de-individualising" process - that will be his alternative to models of the subject based on identity.