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Okay, here goes. . .
In 1664 a nut job named William de Blyenburgh wrote a letter to Spinoza asking the latter about some of his points made in The Ethics (the relevant letters are included in the edition I linked to). De Blyenburgh was concerned that Spinoza was claiming in some way that God was/imperfect. Spinoza's argued this interpretation, claiming that God was in fact perfect, and that he had never said anything other than that. (It is important to understand here that Spinoza's concept of God was spiritual, but hardly Judeo-Christian in the traditional sense. God was more or less equated with Nature, or the entirety of existence. As an atheist, I have no problem with Spinoza's notion of God or his expression of God's perfection. Perfection does not equal "better than everything," but merely "adequate to the task for which it exists.") Anyway, in terms of Genesis, Spinoza argued that if God had forbade Adam to eat the forbidden fruit then Adam could not have eaten it, as nothing can contradict God's decree. (Spinoza would, in a similar vein, claim that while juridical law can constrain a human, can make a human go to jail for example, no law can force one to fly. In other words, there are natural laws that cannot be bent or broken. If it were truly unnatural, against nature/God, to eat the fruit it would simply not be possible.) Instead of forbidding Adam/Eve the fruit, God merely expressed to them what would happen if they were to eat it. It is at this point that Deleuze comes in.
Before I get to that, I just want to make a a point about the distinction between the two interpretations of Genesis I mentioned here. In the first case, wherein God forbids Adam/Eve, we have a morality at work. Moralities (and I am here working from a Spinozan cum Deleuzean definition, so no one should try this at home or, say, in the presence of a Badiouian or an acolyte of Levinas) place limits on bodies and are (in the best cases) static. The 10 Commandments are a morality, or a series of moral doctrines. The US Constitution is a morality. In many cases morality is bad, in that, again, it limits affect, or what the body can do (more on this notion below). Sometimes, however, it is necessary. No matter what we think of the mandate to keep holy the Sabbath, "Thou shalt not kill" sounds like pretty sound advice to me. This morality is necessary, despite the fact that it limits bodies to not kill because it allows other bodies to be and become without being killed. Moralities work best when the are applied at a societal level in the service of society, rather than say being applied at a societal level in the service of a segment of society (gay marraige amendment anyone?). Moralities must be enforced universally and without exception (eg free speech). Of course this begs the question of interpretation and who exactly gets to decide on what morality is, but that's is perhaps a question for another time.
The second reading of Genesis, Spinoza's, leads away from morality and twoards ethics. Ethics is not a universal, but is ultra specific. Ethics deals with the body's abilities and capacities. So when God told Adam/Eve not to eat the fruit he warned them that it would be bad for their bodies, that it would alter their bodies' relationships to themselves and to the world. Thus they were cast out of Eden because their bodies changed in the way they were able to deal with Nature. The best way to understand this idea is in the concept of poison, and not just arsenic. Virtually anything can be poisonous in the right quantity. Eat enough food and you will get sick. This action is unethical because it is bad for the body. It alters the bodies capacities in a negative manner. Eating the correct foods in eth correct amounts will increase the bodies ability to affect the world and be affected by it (this sum of these two movements is called "affect" with a short "a" sound). So the fruit of the Genesis myth had a negative and therefore unethical impact on Adam and Eve's body.
Okay, so as my father would say, "What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" Well Deleuze reads this argument in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy and runs with it. (Much of the running is done in later texts like A Thousand Plateuas, although one has to read between the lines to see it.) One of the most difficult tasks for anyone trying to find a moral/ethical stance on an issue is the specter of relativism. The Ten Commandments only works (seemingly) if you believe in an all powerful God who wrote them. God in this instance cannot simply be nature, but must be an actual being with agency who, by the very fact that its words is law, can never, ever be wrong. If this sort of God is removed from the equation, who's to say who's right? Well in steps Spinozan ethics. The shorthand for the idea (and this is me readin deleuze reading Spinoza, so I don't expect that it is ever just stated clearly in any of the texts I am citing) goes like this: the body is never wrong. If a body reacts badly to poison, it is reacting correctly. Better put, the body will interpret the poison correctly, as something harmful to itself. It should interpret food correctly as well, as something beneficial to itself.
The issue hinges on what we understand interpretation to be. Current debates over judicial activism in the US are caught up in a fight over the status of interpretation. The Dems and lefties in general claim that a judge must be free to interpret the COnstitution as s/he sees fit. The right claims (implicitly) that there is no interpretation of the Constitution (or the Bible), but that there is one inherent meaning, to which they seem to hold the key. (Note that early Puritans were all convinced that there was one abslutely, intrisically, and incontrovertably correct interpretation of the Bible. They just couldn't agree on what it was.)
THe probelm with interpreting what we understand to be texts is that what you say is true may be different than what I say is true, and there is no possibility of proving who is right without recourse to some higher authority (eg God). But in the case of the body, the way it interprets the world is always right. (and when I say interpretation I mean that a basketball player interprets space during a game with he/r body. A dancer does much the same thing. There is very little cognition in the moment of the act in either of these two cases.) Thus interpretation becomes possible without recourse to GOd or to an anthing-goes style relativism where what's true is a matter of either sophistry or of power. No amount of argumentation or coersion can make a human flap he/r arms and fly.
Of course there are several problems here, not with the theory, but rather with where it leaves us. One: we have to get rid of the idea of the normal altogether. Otherwise, we would have to say that there is a normal interpretation of sugar. Diabetics would be considered abnormal in such an understanding because they don't read sugar like other people. There are many other, far more sinister variations on this theme. People have been fighting normative powers for years, and many do a much better job than do D+G, but this is a radical destruction of normalcy, under which it becomes difficult to create any but the most provisional and shaky taxonomies. (What happens to the nation, or to religious groups, or to families when there can be no "normal" standard against which to judge their membership to the group?) Two: we can't really know the correct interpretation of anything without experimentation. In other words, if you want to interpret that tasty looking but potentially deadly mushroom growing on that tree over there you're gonna have to eat it. Maybe it'll increase your affect. Maybe you'll die. This dilemma is, I think, what Deleuze has in mind when he claims that Nietzsche is a Spinozan at heart. Finally, there is the problem of how to take ethics--which is a local and specific to individuals (or to parts of individuals, as D+G would claim that the individual is largely a myth, an attempt to "organize" [vis-a-vis the Body without Organs) that which is actually but an aggregate of loosely associated parts coming together in a temporary alliance, much like a wasp and an orchid in the midst of pollination)--and turn it into morality. I have some thoughts on the subject, but I will leave off for now not having meant to go on so long.
Oh, and just let me mention one of the best books you can read in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari is Brain Massumi's Parables for the Virtual. Who else could write so intelligently (if difficultly) about Ronald Reagan's voice, Frank Sinatra's eyes, and soccer as philosophy? |
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