Practising Immanence, a Life …

How does a reading of Spinoza's Ethics, further underwritten by the conceptual diagrams of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, suggest ways of following the ethico-aesthetic acts of a creative practitioner working at the threshold between art and architecture? In what follows I will introduce Deleuze's reading of Spinoza's Ethics, specifically in relation to what he calls the ‘three ethics’ (Deleuze 1998) and ‘the three kinds of knowledge’ (Deleuze 2003), understood as series of thresholds through which a mode of life strives in order to arrive at a summit where experimentation gives way momentarily to a calm refuge called beatitude. Beatitude is a concept, or rather a state of blessedness, to which Deleuze dedicates a chapter in his book, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990). He returns to this concept in an essay he wrote shortly before his death, ‘Immanence: A Life…’ (2001), where, alongside a consideration of beatitude, he meditates on ‘pure immanence’ and ‘a life’. Beatitude is a concept that can be easily overlooked if one refers only to the English translation of Deleuze's late essay, where it has been sadly diluted, or quite simply mistranslated, as ‘bliss’, which is another passive-affective modification altogether. It is Deleuze's long engagement with Spinoza, which spans from the onset to the conclusion of his academic life, that explains the presence of this concept of beatitude, and confirms the central importance of this thinker for Deleuze. And so, after Spinoza, Deleuze tells us that beatitude is a mode of life in which one achieves the maximum of active power or force of existing, and the minimum of reactive passions.

For the most part, along the way, a mode of life struggles and strives, and as Deleuze explains, those who experience only inadequate ideas, at the first level of knowledge, while they should be judged as no lesser beings, remain ‘ignorant of causes and natures, reduced to the consciousness of events, condemned to undergo effects, they are slaves of everything, anxious and unhappy, in proportion to their imperfection’ (Deleuze 1988c: 19). Our power of acting is increased, Deleuze explains, ‘proportionately’ (1988c: 28), and something of a ‘transmutation’ takes us across the threshold from one level to the next of Spinoza's three ethics; the three levels of knowledge.