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Analysis Of Spinoza And Nietzsche 's ' Spinoza '

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“Spinoza,” Deleuze tells us in his 1978 lectures, doesn 't make up a morality, for a very simple reason: he never asks what we must do, he always asks what we are capable of, what 's in our power, ethics is a problem of power, never a problem of duty. In this sense Spinoza is profoundly immoral. Regarding the moral problem, good and evil…he doesn 't even comprehend what this means. What he comprehends are good encounters, bad encounters, increases and diminutions of power. Thus he makes an ethics and not at all a morality. This is why he so struck Nietzsche.
Historically, the distinction between ethics and morality was set up to distinguish between an Aristotelian/Stoic emphasis on the good or virtuous life and a Kantian emphasis on the moral law. Spinoza and Nietzsche are heretic hiccups in this history and Deleuze draws upon them heavily, working out an immanent theory of ethics in his early monographs on them. He expanded upon a matching ontology much later, in Anti-Oedipus, which Foucault called “the first book of ethics to be written in France in a long time.” The connection between ontology and ethics is inseverable, and Deleuze’s focus on the primacy of ethics natural, for there is only one [immanent] cause, and…this influences practice. Spinoza didn 't entitle his book Ontology, he 's too shrewd for that, he entitles it Ethics. Which is a way of saying that, whatever the importance of my speculative propositions may be, you can only judge them at the level of
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