Deleuze and the First ‘Ethics’

Chapter 6 addresses affect in Deleuze’s final encounter with the Spinozist system in ‘Spinoza and the Three “Ethics”’. In the ‘Three “Ethics”’, his most refined reading of Spinoza’s system, Deleuze associates ‘affects’ with what Spinoza calls the first genre of knowledge in the Ethics, ‘concepts’ with the second, and ‘percepts’ with the third. By conceiving the three genres as a progression, Deleuze privileges affect as an irreducible origin. This privilege, however, is at the same time cause for mistrust. Not only because the percepts of the third genre of knowledge remain the final goal but also and above all because the affects upon which the entire chain depends remain unreliable and even obstructive. My final chapter thus comes full circle by demonstrating that what I call ‘the sensible hitch’ in my first chapter on Deleuze’s early philosophy still structures and jeopardises philosophy in his late reading of Spinoza.