For Newton and his colleagues, matter was brute, inert, stupid stuff, and as such had to be set in motion by the external power of the divine will...in the Newtonian view, spiritual forces rule Nature from above rather as monarchs and despots govern their states. For the radical lineage stemming from Spinoza , by contrast, there is no call for such august authorities. Matter itself is alive and self-determining, like the populace of a democratic state...It is thus that one can speak of a politics of matter. To be a materialist in this sense is to invest human beings with a degree of dignity by seeing them as part of a material world which is identical with the Almighty. Such, at least, was the view of the pantheistic Spinoza. (p3, edited a bit)

“Emotions don’t just happen, they emerge out of fields of cause and effect which can be analysed. This means that feelings can be engineered, in a hyperstitional spiral, which has more to do with what Justin Barton calls “lucidity” than with what academic philosophers call Reason. I’m using the term “emotion” rather than “affect” here, very deliberately. Affect as it is now routinely used by academics is pretty much completely opposed to what Spinoza meant by it. The problem begins with Deleuze, and the fatal splicing of Spinoza’s project of emotional engineering with Henri Bergson’s vitalist cult of creativity and unpredictability. It’s hard to think of thinkers more opposed in their fundamental presuppositions and orientations than Spinoza and Henri Bergson — and more or less everything that is wrong with Deleuze, in my view, is tied up with his infatuation with Henri Bergson. It is Henri Bergsonism, rather than Spinozism, which is the true ideology of late capitalism.”

The nonduality of seer and seen: there is no philosophical or religious assertion more striking or more counterintuitive, and yet claims that there is such an experience, and that this experience is more veridical than our usual dualistic experience, are not rare in the Western tradition. Similar statements have been made, in equally stirring language, by such important Western mystical fgures as Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, and William Blake, to name only a few. Philosophers have generally been more hesitant about committing themselves so decisively, but a claim regarding the nonduality of subject and object is explicit or implicit within such thinkers as Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Whitehead—again naming only a few; later I shall argue that similar claims may be found among important contemporary fgures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and perhaps Wittgenstein.

A rereading of H'eliogabale and Les Tarahumaras (Artaud). For Heliogabalus is Spinoza, and Spinoza is Heliogabalus revived. And the Tarahumaras are experimentation, peyote. Spinoza, Heliogabalus, and experimentation have the same formula: anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the multiple...Finally, the difficulty of reaching this world of crowned Anarchy if you go no farther than the organs ("the liver that turns the skin yellow, the brain wracked by syphilis, the intestines that expel filth") and if you stay locked into the organism, or into a stratum that blocks the flows and anchors us in this, our world.

Spinoza’s ethic of joy, of increasing one’s power to affect and be affected, was joined by Deleuze with Nietzsche’s will to power and a reformulated eternal return