Introduction

To appreciate the philosophical innovations of Stoic theory – including physics, logic, and ethics – we must better understand their challenging theory of incorporeals. The theory is so wild that many hesitate from fully engaging with its strangeness and instead reach for tamer categories in which such wilds can be domesticated. Marcelo Boeri, for example, avoids this strangeness by categorising incorporeality as ‘a necessary condition for the existence of bodies’, elsewhere calling it the ‘indispensable conditions that make up the reality of the corporeal’. While this account grasps the crucial role that incorporeals play in the constitution of the corporeal world, rendering it merely a necessary condition misses the power and perversity of Stoic concepts. To be fair, Boeri correctly characterises the relationship between bodies and incorporeals as one of ‘reciprocal dependence’ or as ‘complementary terms’, thereby affirming the need for incorporeality in a materialist ontology. Yet incorporeals are not mere by-products of corporeal causation: they have a strange sort of sense of causal efficacy, which Deleuze calls ‘quasi-causality’.

To understand what ‘quasi-causality’ means, we need to be precise about the Stoics’ reconceptualisation of causation. As we will see, this involves severing the connection between causes and effects so that causes are strictly corporeal and effects strictly incorporeal. After this separation is articulated, we look to Clement of Alexandria so as to discover the location and meaning of the quasi-cause. The quasi-cause possesses a wild genetic force that we call ‘static genesis’, which is a paradoxical order of generation that is impassive and inactive yet efficacious. We conclude ‘The Yolk B’ by articulating the logic of the incorporeal surface and its power of static genesis through a twist on the logic of Kant's Table of Judgements. With this twist we find a transcendental logic of incorporeality that expresses the distinct organisation of the two-sides – extensive and intensive – of the incorporeal surface. ‘The Yolk B’ thus determines another feature of the perverse materialism that we find in Deleuze's Stoicism. Let us begin by thinking about how the Stoics’ account of causation differs from other ancient etiologies.