READING GUIDE TO: Hardt M.  (1993) Gilles Deleuze.  An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. London: UCL Press Limited. Introduction Post structuralism should be understood as posing alternatives within modernity, within the philosophical tradition, as critical and constructive, not just negating theoretical foundations and traditions.  Post structuralism opposes not philosophy as such, but Hegelianism.  Hegel had been dominant as the centre of philosophy and social theory, as difficult to break with as Plato.  It was essential to confront Hegel radically and actively reject him, or to be incorporated into the Hegelian problematic.  Deleuze therefore attempted to confront Hegel and dialectical thought, not to rescue it, but to separate completely from it.  Even he was not totally successful, though, and we still find him addressing 'typical Hegelian problems—the determination of being, the unity of the One and the Multiple, and so on' (xi).  It is always a dilemma to attempt to oppose Hegel without simply offering a further negation which can be reincorporated.  There is an argument that says that anti Hegelian work is only really an 'unconscious repetition of Hegelian dramas'.  Deleuze has gone further than most. In particular, he has developed 'a non dialectical conception of negation and a constitutive theory of practice'(xii).  It is difficult to separate difference from Hegelian negation, which appeals because of its connections to synthesis/resurrection: Deleuzian difference looks nihilist [and endless], although Hardt claims it is descriptive, although also 'pure'.  It clears the ground for creation, but not synthesis.  It is also an older tradition, rooted in skepticism.  Deleuze's critique thus raises the question of what makes reality possible at all.  He retains an interest in ontological speculation, but insists on alternatives to Hegel.  These are not to be seen as further speculations about being itself: Deleuze develops 'a strictly immanent and materialist ontological discourse that refuses any deep or hidden foundations of being' (xiii) [until he gets to chaosmosis and all that?].  Being is not to be subordinated to thought, or in some way realised by it.  Instead, practice and power of the key terms—'the complex dynamics of behaviour…  The superficial interactions of bodies' (xiv).  Nor is this only philosophical or theoretical practice.  The traditional terms such as necessity and reason are to be rethought. It is possible to see Deleuze's approach unfolding as he discusses various authors.  Bergson, for example proposes 'an absolutely positive movement of being that rests on an efficient and internal notion of causality', and he introduces the notion of multiplicity of becoming.  Nietzsche added an 'ethical horizon', by discussing the affirmation of being as active expression.  Spinoza is also useful, seeing 'the affirmation of practice, or joy, at the centre of ontology', something constitutive of being.  Together, these represent a systematic alternative to Hegel.This helps us see that post structuralism does not just reject foundations, only certain versions of them.  Transcendentalism is replaced with immanence, teleology with open practice, final and formal causes with efficient causes—Hardt wants to argue that efficient cause is crucial to the whole discussion of difference.  The notion of some order of being or truth, is replaced by a notion of organization: 'the coordination and accumulation of accidental (in the philosophical sense, i.e., non necessary) encounters and developments from below, from within the immanent field of forces' (xv).  There is no blueprint, but a form of composition that is 'always an art'. So we're going to read Deleuze as developing the break with traditional philosophy, and exploring contemporary possibilities. Preliminary Remark (on methodology).  Even the earliest work develops the project as a theory of the institution, to reveal something positive and inventive.  The book on Hume pursues some of the issues, although it also introduces 'an extensive ontological detour'before returning to the original idea (xvii).  This detour to the form of a critique in order to clear the ground, an attack on Hegelianism and on the negative.  We see in his early criticism of Christianity, a principle that says it important to isolate principal concepts, to 'recognise the object and the terms of the primary antagonism ('xviii) [that is to recognise that it was Hegelianism that needed to be attacked].  Deleuze wanted to develop a positive philosophy and ontology, 'in order to establish a positive theory of ethics and social organization', and the earlier detours through western philosophy are an essential beginning.  This is not just postmodernism, despite the clear enjoyment of leaving philosophy to take on works of art and literature and so on, but this is no 'line of flight', but rather an affirmation of a suppressed line of thought—hence Hardt's second principle 'Read Deleuze philosophically' (xix).  Deleuze does pursue selective readings of his heroes, choosing bits that help his own project, although this is still a rigorous reading.  Nevertheless, the third principle is 'recognise Deleuze's selectivity'.  Each of these early monographs asks a specific question, and each one builds on the earlier work ,although this is sometimes obscure.  The books should be read as an evolution of Deleuze's thought, and not the history of philosophy, and even here, not a unilinear progression but 'a sort of theoretical process of aggregation'—an apprenticeship in philosophy.  Hence the final principle 'read Deleuze's thought as an evolution' (xx).  Even the gaps in his work can be read as an evolution, for example a shift from a 'Hume - Bergson axis 'to a 'Nietzsche - Spinoza identity' (xx). In any event, the early works are crucial since they develop a vocabulary and foundation [sic]  that will explain the mature work.  The latter are 'reworkings of the cluster of problems developed in this formative period of intense and independent research', 'the subterranean Deleuze' (xxi). Chapter one Bergsonian Ontology The Positive Movement of Being. Bergson looks as if he's developing a psychology or phenomenology, but Deleuze is interested in the work as an ontology, 'an absolutely positive logic of being rooted in time' (1).  He begins by seeing Bergson as a source of criticism of the dominant philosophical tradition, especially Hegelian logic, which is his own particular interest.  Bergson is interested in ontological movement and difference as the dynamic of being, and sees a temporal dimension: this can be used critically to attack Hegel, and to contribute to the more positive interests as above.  The interest produced two pieces, early articles and chapters, and then the book, which already shows the effects of Nietzsche. The early work attacks the concept of negative determinations in Hegel, grounded in the initial opposition between being and nothingness as a form of absolute difference.  This already introduces the themes of 'static contrast' and 'dynamic conflict' (3) in Hegel.  [This also led Hegel to critique Spinoza on the grounds that his notion of being contains no contradictions and therefore no movement.  The active management of negation is what leads to things being determined, and this gives a central place to negation, and a reason why nothingness does not triumph as a result of sheer indifference].  Deleuze accepts this role for negation, but sees a need to move from abstract to more concrete and specific forms of difference [see Difference and Repetition or D&R].  Deleuze's objection involves the notion of a third term, first by criticizing mechanicism and Platonism. The technique here is to address 'proximate enemies', before getting to the 'fundamental enemies' like Hegel.  This is a way of establishing a common terrain for critique in the first place [by getting agreement that the proximate enemies are flawed? Also to begin to work out his own position. Mostly it seems a matter of invoking the old philosophical technique of saying that even philosophers disagreed with other philosophers and surely no-one would want to go back etc].  Apparently, Mechanicists are good at explaining the evolution of differences, but at the expense of 'the substantial, necessary quality of being' (4).  This involves the argument that for being to be necessary, it must be indeterminate, [thus cannot be mechanically determined?].  The difference is spelled out by seeing determination as only external [sounds very much like the difference between the extensive and the intensive, the disregard of purely quantitative difference?].  Bergson apparently stresses internal difference, which cannot be simply determined—some differences might be accidental or determined by chance.  Full determination implies some exterior other [which runs the risk of reducing difference to the same again?].  This is however an unusual argument which reverses the usual terms—it is not a matter of how being gains a determinate and differentiated form, but rather how difference sustains its being.  Difference becomes a source of necessity for being. Apparently, this depends on certain Scholastic conceptions of causality, denying material and final causes as well as total contingency, since each retains a notion of cause as external to the effect [presumably the internal causes are going to be tied up with expressionism?].  The scholastic philosophers called this notion of internal cause 'the efficient cause' (5).  This produces the idea that difference is the 'internal  motor of being', so being has a cause in itself. The critique of Plato again focuses on the difference between an external and an internal account of difference.  Plato has a notion of final cause, ultimate destination, the Good.  In Bergson 'difference is driven by an internal motor (which Bergson calls intuition)' (6), and there is no logical difference between cause and effect, and no determining end or goal—'difference has become the thing itself'.  Only this conception can explain difference in its full connection with being. Deleuze likes the distinction in Bergson between differences of nature and differences of degree [differences of degree are the quantitative ones again—but Hardt says there is more].  In Scholasticism, differences of nature imply necessity and substance, while differences of degree imply only accidents.  We need to emphasize the former in order to get to central, pure concepts of difference.  Hegel works with an exterior notion of difference—a notion of a 'final cause and teleology', critique via Plato (7), and flawed notions of determinations and negative movements in the dialectic, which implies not an internal difference, but a negative relation with some other thing, indeed a relation which is further confined to contradiction, implying a complete kind of difference with the other.  In Hegelian dialectic, the cause is external to the effect [another kind of complete difference as in contradiction], and mediation is also externally caused.  The Scholastic critique would argue that this means that being cannot be necessary or substantial in itself, and that these external movements must therefore be accidental and contingent [I thought Deleuze liked accident and contingency?  Isn't all that pants about the throw of the dice introducing an externality?  It's playfully rendered as god, but what actually is it—the contingent forces of the chaosmosis?].  This means that Hegelian differences are only abstract, unlike the concrete notion of reality in Bergson, which might even combine two antagonistic concepts [as a multiplicity?] There is also a problem in explaining how to opposite terms get synthesized if they are external to each other—there can only be an abstract synthesis, since nothing real can emerge [and later, concepts contain 'no degrees or nuances', which makes them abstract].  For Deleuze, Hegel has not analyzed difference, but imposed an abstract process [so in this sense, Hegel operates with a certain indetermination.  Maybe it is this that makes him dangerously likely to compromise with actual concrete social formations like Prussia?].  However, can Bergson be also seen as indeterminate, [in the sense of not explaining the direction of change?].  Deleuze says that Bergson sees things as making themselves, as a result of difference, suggesting creativity and originality in being, and also something 'unforeseeable'(10) and positive.   Hardt insists that this argument, in the early work on Bergson appears only in a derivative form in D & R. The later book on Bergson focuses more on the multiplicity, already implied in the earlier work, and understandable as an attack on Hegel this time on the One and the Multiple.  Deleuze attacks several theories of how the one and the multiple relate, including seeing them as linked in a dialectical movement.  Again, contradiction is too abstract a term to describe this relation; there is the wrongly conceived movement between concepts and reality, and an ultimate account of accidental relations; dialectical synthesis operates with the flawed procedure of combining one inadequate concept with an inadequate opposite.  [Deleuze actually says combining two generalities will never produce a singularity -- 11].  Whether this is real Hegel or not is disputable, [and Hardt defends Hegel a bit, 11 f—seems to be about rescuing bits in Hegel about becoming as a result of things relating to their abstract and multiple others.  Again, Deleuze would argue that these relations are external, and heading towards some idealised synthesis, and that concrete reality is insufficiently analysed in the first place].  Hardt identifies a political issue in the argument, since the relation between the one and the multiple in Hegel 'is an (analogical) foundation for a theory of social organization, an ontological basis for politics' (13).  The unity of the one and the multiple serves to provide an organic model of the state, instead of recognizing real differences [more or less the critical theory critique].  Hardt sees this as an emerging political interest between the early and the later works on Bergson, advocacy of 'a pluralism of organization against a pluralism of order' (13).  The multiplicity overcomes this problem, although Deleuze has to attack those 'proximate enemies' [Riemann and Einstein] who see multiplicities simply in terms of numerical or quantitative terms.  Bergson's multiplicity is based on differences in nature, a matter not of order but of organization [and Hegel can be replaced with téhis notion of two types of multiplicity]. The later book also stresses the positive nature of Bergson, the movement that produces singularity and specificity as qualitative difference.  Bergson is working towards the notion of the virtual as 'the simplicity of being, in itself,  pure recollection' (14).  This virtual being is not abstract but real, an aspect of life itself, containing its own dynamic differences, animated by the 'elan vital'.  Processes of realization and actualization qualify and limit pure difference.  So the task is to explain the two levels of reality as a unity and a multiplicity.  In Bergson, the difference between time and space, duration and matter is crucial—the former contains differences of nature, the latter can only accommodate quantitative variation.  Duration shows how qualitative differences emerge, not just repetitions.  This is used to support the view that substance has its own causes, and Deleuze uses scholastic terms to describe Bergson's distinctions between time and space [Bergson provides the best examples, but he's just being used here through Deleuzian generalization?].  So spatial multiplicities are quantitatively differentiated, 'a multiplicity of order' (15), while duration shows us internal multiplicities, 'a heterogeneity of qualitative differentiation, a multiplicity of organization'.  The second multiplicity is more profound, and more unified.  This is why the notion of time as the universal impersonal force is important. Bergson talks about differentiation and actualization as an unfolding or an emanation of being, as a basic process of life, an unfolding of difference.  This is not to be understood as a platonic copying of the ideal in the real, but as a more positive production, a creation, an outpouring of the 'explosive internal force that life carries in itself' (16), with no end.  However, actualization is the process in time that produces spatial differentiation.  Bergson argues this through discussing memory.  Deleuze wants to use Bergson's argument to found a more general ontology, 'to offer an adequate critique of the notion of the possible'.  To do this, he has to translate discussions of the possible and the real into discussions of the virtual and the actual.  This leads him to argue that virtualities are always real, unlike possibilities [which have other problems as in Logic of Sense].  Possibilities can never have sufficient reality to produce actualities, in scholastic terms. Deleuze wants to suggest that realization assumes resemblance [to the real] and limitation [of the possibilities] rather than difference and creation like actualization does, and so realization cannot capture creativity.  By contrast, the virtual must be creative in order to actualise, producing something original.  Again the terms order versus organisation might be implied, the difference between static and pregiven multiplicities as opposed to unforeseen dynamic multiplicities. Hegel could return however in demanding to know what the process of continuous formation actually is—Spinozan emanation would not be creative enough for Hegel.  Bergson has no idea of reflection as an aspect of movement, and thus cannot counter the Hegelian argument that actualizations might involve progressive losses instead of positive creativity.  There is a political problem too in explaining order [and neglecting sociology], in favour of organization.  This is where Deleuze needs to go beyond Bergson, to explain this time how multiplicities can produce unities as an organizational movement [an ordering movement, surely?].  Deleuze thinks that actualizations can converge or intersect.  This implies that being is univocal, since it can be always 'traced back along convergent paths to one unique virtual point' (20), but only on the virtual plane.  However, the virtual and the actual can communicate—in Bergson, these are movements of memory, the dilating recollection and the contracting particularity.  Yet this is still one directional in terms of time—can there be further movements from particularities towards a new recollection as a kind of future memory? Deleuze addresses this issue only in the final pages of the book, trying to explain how human beings can control the processes of differentiation and actualization and thus depart from the plan of nature.  Again, he does not accept a social dimension, since society features not only intelligence but 'irrational factors'(21).  Instead, he has to depend on 'the virtual instinct', and the ability to create fables.  And there is something else, 'between human intelligence and socialization', and Deleuze calls this intuition or 'creative emotion', drawing on some 'cosmic memory', 'a mystical Bergsonian sociability that is available to the "privileged souls"…  And that is capable of tracing the design of an open society, a society of creators' (21).  Luckily this is incarnated every now and then—'a weak echo of the voice of Zarathustra…  creative pathos'(22).  Deleuze needs Nietzsche to fill out these claims. Nevertheless, we see in the shift of emphasis between the two studies, 'the pressure to bring the ontological to the social and the ethical'.  It also leads to a need for Nietzsche, a shift from logic to values, a further step in the development of a positive ontology. [The argument so far also shows the importance of the methodological principles].  When discussing Bergson, Deleuze is interested in critiquing the dialectic and its negative ontology, and this produces a selective reading.  It is a mistake to see Bergson and Deleuze as perfectly in agreement [there is a critique of some other critics like Rose].  There are also translation problems.  [The specific issue is whether or not Deleuze supports some natural philosophy, where the elan vital becomes conscious of itself, as above—Hardt says no].  Similar disputes arise over the religious nature of Bergson's thought which really informs the stuff about going beyond the human condition, which leads to an admission that Deleuze 'strains' to unite Bergson and Nietzsche (24), and a further critique that Deleuze has not properly interpreted Bergson.  [some waspish stuff here].  The particular problem is that later Deleuze, as in D&R on univocal being as nomadic and crowned anarchy is different from the discussion about univocal being in Bergson.  Hardt also denies that the bit about crowned anarchy is political, since the links between the ontology and the politics are more complex, and require more mediating steps, as in what follows. Chapter two Nietzschean Ethics From Efficient Power To an Ethics of Affirmation Deleuze moves on from considering Bergson to a position 'where all the logical issues are posed now in terms of sense and of value' (26), or power [in the general humanist sense].  Nietzsche comes between Bergson and Spinoza, producing an ethical horizon before considering social practice.  The antagonism with Hegel is still apparent, but the struggle is also widened, to include discussing Nietzsche's relation to Kant [to avoid an exclusive focus on Hegel, to work through proximate enemies].  Nietzsche showed the way here in broadening his own critique of Hegel to include Kant, and Deleuze wants to work through this stage in order to avoid arranging Nietzsche as some pure negation of Hegel, or reaction, driven by ressentiment.  This tactic is worked out by noticing how Nietzsche shifts couples of opposing theorists in his work on tragedy, shifting from the proximate enemy of Socrates to focus on the real enemy of Zarathustra—Christ.  This raises the possibility of a new kind of negation [which will be a total one] 'an absolutely destructive negation this bears nothing from its force and recuperates nothing from its enemy' (28). Nietzsche is seen first to correct the limits of Kantian critique.  The discovery of the transcendental realm offers 'a refuge against critical forces', as opposed to a total critique.  By posing this transcendental field of values, 'Kant effectively grant immunity to the established values of the ruling order…  [It]…  Functions to reinforce the established values and make us obedient to them' (29).  Even if we overthrow the rule of god, the state, and our parents, we must still obey the dictates of reason.  Kant is also accused of being too polite, whereas really 'critique is always violence', and the point is to discuss its limits.  Only with such total critique can we move to the positive phase and the constructive moment.  Nietzsche says that Kant never got there, because he was too enmeshed in traditional values, and thus unable to clear them away to be replaced by more constructive ones.  To abandon transcendentalism, however, leaves only the immanent plane, and instead of absolute interests, we have more specific ones.  'Therefore, the only possible principle of a total critique is perspectivism' (30).  Nietzsche makes a similar point when attacking Platonism and its interest in what is.  The point is to change that question to a matter of who is or which one is.  What is lead us to transcendental values and ideals, whereas who is 'is a materialist questions that looks to the movement of real forces from a specific perspective' (30).  Asking those questions produces 'the method of dramatization' for Deleuze, and it clearly extends ontology to a critique of interests and values. There is no transcendental space, and therefore nothing beyond such questioning, no essences, no formal and final causes, only 'an immanent dynamic of being, an internal, efficient force of differentiation'. In an aside, Hardt argues that this who is question does not relate to individuals or collectives, but rather to events, 'the forces in their various relationships in a proposition'[citing Deleuze's only introduction to the book on Nietzsche].  It is an impersonal who.  Nietzsche himself often seems to use personalist terms, and this has to be selected out by Deleuze, 'as a political selection' (31), and this helps rescue Nietzsche from individualism and reactionary politics.  This tendency also means that Deleuze has to go beyond Nietzsche eventually. Turning to Nietzsche on Hegel directly, Deleuze renews his critique that the dialectic is negative and abstract, unable to lead to concrete determinations.  This is just asserted in the book on Nietzsche, but it clearly builds on the book on Bergson.  Deleuze takes a Bergsonian line on Nietzsche too, emphasizing practical and affirmative elements of difference.  But at the same time, Nietzsche are helps Deleuze move away from logical categories to talk rather in terms of values, esp. affirmative ones, and the whole issue of interiority vs. exteriority.  This can be seen in the discussion on slave logic.  The dialectic is going to be seen as a form of thinking of slaves, as opposed to thought which affirms and develops difference.  Master and slave become 'dramatic personae representing the two' positions (33).  Hardt wants to argue that this is not so much a critique of the master slave dialectic itself, because that would mean that Nietzsche is reading is inadequate: there is another specific arguments in Hegel, not the Phenomenology but the Science of Logic.  Deleuze is able to see the argument as a suitable dramatisation [and there is a quibble later as to whether or master and slave mean individuals, or are just names for events].  The discussion looks as if it is about self affirmation, the development of consciousness, but this is the dramatised form.  What Deleuze does is to argue that there is a difference between the assertions made by slaves and master, both of whom argue that they are good therefore the other must be evil.  The master's logic represents a position where evil simply describes the master's power, it follows logically [follows from the definition?].  In the slaves' case, there is a more external operation, which can only become affirmative indirectly, by positing some external accidental argument against masters [arguing, in effect that mastery is arbitrary?].  Masters are actually performing an evaluation, and this is affirmative in the sense that strength is being exercised without restraint.  The slave argument has to divide strength or force—strength itself is not evil, but it is if it is carried into slavery.  The slave argument in fact maintains the notion that power is some abstract or transcendental capacity, disconnected from the field of forces, purely formal, only a possibility.  The master's argument insists that power cannot be separated like this, but must be manifested. Of course real slaves do have real power [but we're doing philosophy].  It is simply that the master is somehow on the side of particular notions of ontology as productive, active [in Deleuze and also in scholasticism, and in Spinoza too]—being and power are one and the same thing, manifestation is internal to being.  [Pretty much by definition—Deleuze is cited to argue that 'the power of being is necessarily, efficiently linked to its manifestation, that the force of being is inseparable from "what it can do"].  Slaves arguments do not recognise [the reality] the nature of being, and so slave power cannot express substance, while the masters' conception does [all this is becoming extremely apologetic].  So Nietzsche's rants about slavishness refers to the quality not the quantity of the power of the weak—Nietzsche 'judges the power internal to its manifestation as noble'(36).  This provides an ethics and a politics.  The provision of law to restrain power can be seen as a triumph of the weak over the strong [which might explain Deleuze's contempt for social order?]. We are also close to Spinoza on politics, and his criticism of the law as constraining.  We're still only doing critique of the law and of jurisprudence, however [juridicism is the actual term].  It is also clear that it's not a direct critique of Hegel, because his master slave dialectic is about developing consciousness and independence, staving off death and extinction rather than fleshing out values more specifically.  Hardt says this shows that Deleuze is not directly critiquing for a full account in the Phenomenology, but is instead criticising Hegel's abstract notion of logic—the question is who wills this logic.  So this is not a direct attack, but it does help Deleuze break away from Hegelian thought. [All this is typical really -- it's another example of ideology, the happy coincidence between the nature of being and the strong. The other thing is the monotonous reccurence of the dramatization stuff followed by stern warnings that we cannot personalize. Really the whole thing depends on us consenting to what we know of powerful people -- we use our common knowledge of leaders who caused problems but launched important revolutions etc. Also it makes no sense to tie this to an ethics if we are really only talking about abstract forces. We are left in the difficult position of having to argue that Nature is good if she develops and differentiates -- new deadly bacteria are good, climate change is good etc. Stoicism is the only possibility here -- amor fati. Why struggle to do liberated politics {why not any politics} if nature is indiffernet. And all the usual problems with utilitiatrianism -- what if my strength is your weakness, I expand at your expense etc -- Net sum counts?] Hardt discusses alternative readings justifying Hegel against Nietzsche and Deleuze.  One critic says that we still need the idea of negative logic in order to move things towards determination, and that the stuff on the development of the self is neglected.  The defence is that Deleuze sees negative movements as external ones only, and to insist that they are always involved is abstract: this is better developed in the book on Bergson than in the one on Nietzsche [which just assumes it].  It might be true that Deleuze does exaggerate the Hegelian case, though.  Deleuze is not interested either in the development of self consciousness, which might require negative dialectics—'Deleuze, on the contrary, wants to have nothing to do with self consciousness and the self it gives rise to…  He views it as a sickness, a ressentiment caused by the reflection of a force back into itself' (38).  He wants a productive exteriority based on affirmation. If we do apply the discussion to the master slave dialectic in the Phenomenology, we might read Hegel here as arguing for the development of self consciousness.  The slave argument is not so much that the master is evil, but more that the slave fears death but must work, and therefore can claim to be 'an independent self consciousness' (39).  Only when we see death is the negation of everything can we arrive at the pure self consciousness, based on an idea of the purity of being.  However, for Hardt, this is flawed, because death does not negate everything in thought, 'because it preserves the "essential nature of the consciousness"'.  This means that Hegel is typically constrained in stopping negation in a conservative way.  Even if we accept the general mechanism, that the thing about life is that it resists and opposes death, then life can still appears to be 'merely unsubstantial…  the result of chance or hazard'.  Further, seeing death in general as contradicting life in general is too abstract and imprecise.  Overall, the consolation of the slave 'can only be abstract and hollow'.  For masters, it might be different.  They do not negate but bring things about, in the form of specific work from slaves.  This is the independent self consciousness the slaves confront, and they have to work to earn recognition from their masters.  However, slaves can see the objects of their labour as alien, and rediscover themselves through transforming them.  This is a permanent kind of resistance, but one that has positive effects.  It emerges in a sequence after the first negation of death 'This educational fear prepares the slave for his work' (40), and in work lies true self realization. However, the whole argument is slippery in the sense that we don't know if masters and slaves should be seen as real individuals, social classes, or just  'the logical movement of Spirit' (41) [a common problem with an awful lot of philosophy—are slaves meant to be people or concepts?] Is this some personal political drama or an impersonal logical one?  Perhaps Hegel's ambiguity should be read as a clever way of uniting the different aspects [Deleuze does this all the time -- it is a variant of the 'slippery pronoun'].  If he refers mostly to persons, he can be seen as offering a 'liberal ethics of mutual respect'.  However, there clearly are generalizations, as when the notion of the master extends to death as some absolute Lord, or when slaves gain recognition not from other people but from their work.  This must involve some impersonal logic.  The issue raised in turn is whether the slave's drama is personal, a route to personal consciousness, or again a purely logical development. In logical terms, master or slave dialectic shows two forms of negation and how they relate.  The absolute form of negation involves the death of the slave to suit the purposes of the master, while the slave negation is more modulated and more positive because it produces labour [rendered in Hegel as '"desire held in check"'].  We can translate this into Nietzschean terms.  The first kind is simply destructive force, 'inseparable from its manifestation', while slave power is something 'restrained from full expression'(42).  For Nietzsche, this restraint leading to self consciousness is a kind of interiorization of force, and Nietzsche disagrees with Hegel in wanting to contrast this with a fully manifested force '(the will to power or exteriority)'.  Interiorization, for Nietzsche and Deleuze, has the bad effects of 'pain, guilt, and sin', and this will eventually be contrasted with the ability to deploy power fully to gain joy and affirmation.  The slave's second moment, exerting power through work, 'is not really productive but rather revelatory', as the slave realizes what he truly is.  Labour alone will not make progress [it is a limited form of creation—nice implications for Marxist theory are discussed below].  The whole analysis makes the slave into a hero, but this still preserves slavery.  Only the exercise of the master's full negation can clear the decks with total critique. All this is operated with formal logic rather than personal content.  Introducing content raises further problems, because it seems to place servitude centrally—after all the development, slave labour persists.  Even Marxist thought incorporates this assumption, when it heroicizes workers and their struggle, 'to affirm the essential nature of work', and sees class struggle as an educational drama ending in liberation of workers, but only by seeing work as essential to them.  Marx rejected this idea, in favour of a more expansive notion of the essence of the worker—'not as work but as a force: power, the will to power, living labour, creation' (44).  But first there must be total critique, however, even of the values that define the worker at the moment.  Workers must themselves engage in this critique, as in 'Marxist workerism'[with reference to Tronti], which is 'a beautiful means of understanding Nietzsche's "man who wants to perish and to be overcome"': the very essence of labour as capitalist work must be destroyed.  Hegelianism would only reform.  'A total critique is necessarily an insurrectional critique', and so Deleuze, Nietzsche and Lenin are all on the same side [!]. Deleuze's reading permits this unusual connection, and Hardt goes on to discuss Italian workerism and workers' power, the refusal of work as a radical critique of the capitalist essence of the worker [most of this is related through discussing a novel about an Italian workerist in the sixties].  Why celebrate work, as Fascism and the PCI alike do?  Better to have a lack of conventional political values, since at least that releases imagination and creation.  However, the hero of the novel needs to go on to develop a commonality with other workers, and to replace the individual with a collectivity, whose consciousness increased with their collective practice.  In the novel, it all ends with a recognition of the joy of being free to create, an affirmative moment.  Here, the collective dimension is important, a spatial dimension for the development of the will to power—'The workers form a powerful assemblage'(47).  Workers also actualize their critique in the form of political action, and this brings joy.  The whole story raises additional problems for Deleuze and Nietzsche—how to synthesise forces, and then how to manifest them in practice. [Why not turn to Marx or even to sociology -- D turns to Spinoza instead!] [It is still a fantasy, a novel! In reality monopoly capitalists will do total critique of work and replace it etc] Deleuze sees Hegel as not grasping multiplicity, except by contrasting it to the unity of the One.  Bergson's notion of multiplicity was seen as an improvement, a proper multiple of differences of nature, which cannot easily be reduced to unity.  However, organization [actualization?] then becomes a problem.  Nietzsche helps Deleuze here with his notion of the dice throw, 'Nietzsche's alternative to the dialectic of the One and the Multiple' (48 ).  There are two throws of the dice, which helps affirm chance and multiplicity, as principles, as arguments for indeterminacy, emanation, or creative evolution for Bergson, the becoming of being for Nietzsche.  When the dice fall, we can see this as a matter of affirming necessity after an initial affirmation of chance, so that '" being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity"'(citing Deleuze, 48).  So the necessary emerges not from simple determinism, but as 'a moment of the organisation of unity…  The active creation of being'.  We need the idea of the eternal return to flesh this out.  It is the second moment, the result of the dice throw, but also an implication relating to the first movement, the affirmation of chance itself [further dice throws are implied] .  All the parts of chance come together in 'an original organization…  The original elements of chance in a coherent whole'.  In this way, chance is also seen to return.  There is a 'perpetual series of shattering and gathering' (49). [lots of little bangs]. We have to understand this not just as a pure ontology, but 'in terms of force and value', moved by a dynamic will.  The will to power is what makes being from becoming, and it also asserts the necessity of chance.  'In effect, the will to power is the principle of the eternal return in that it plays the role of a primary cause', but there is an ethics involved, a selective ontology, because not every will returns.  'in Nietzsche; being must be willed', and  'the ethical will is the will that returns…  wills being…  The will to power wills unity in time'. [Only becasue ethics has already been defined in terms of creative power]  This produces the ethical rule that we should will events only if we also will their eternal return.  This helps us select by reference to the eternal return, so even though we are urged to do what we will by Nietzsche, there is an ethical principle.  [Feeble in practice, another justification for male heroics]. Hardt argues that 'A Scholastic logic runs through this series' (50) [from difference internal to things, the notion of efficient power to bring things about, and now 'the ethical centrality of the efficient will'].  In particular indeterminism and being are reconciled—what comes to exist affirms the indetermination of the dice throw. [Classic philosophical reasoning where things MUST follow to be consistent with past philosophies, even if we get daft results like the ternal return. This 'solves' philosophical problems of being and becoming etc --who cares if it solves any real social or political ones] Deleuze now proposes that social critique should be seen as a matter of a '" transmutation"'.  It should still be total at first, indeed nihilistic.  This might be painful, but it reveals knowledge of ourselves, and we come to see that the the will to power cannot actually be known directly—it becomes a kind of knowledge of the outside, something 'beyond interiority, beyond suffering' (51).  However, it is at least 'an active will to nothingness', self destruction, but also a kind of liberation from conventional ideas of man [?].  Ideally, it will end in a movement to creation and affirmation, from suffering to joy, and this too is beyond rational knowledge.  However, the consolation is that exteriority is the basis of joy as well, of affirmation, so that human life is no longer dominated by 'negativity, interiority, and consciousness as such'.  'Being is primary over knowledge'. [Pathos in Nietzsche here --it's not his fault he was ill etc] Back to the argument that it is difficult to critique Hegel because it is so easy to recuperate opposition [Judith Butler is the reference here], any attempt to be other than Hegel simply invites recuperation to become 'an "other" within Hegelianism'(52).  However, Deleuze proposes not dialectical opposition, but 'a complete rupture…  an unrestrained, savage attack'.  The incompleteness of Kant can also be remedied in this way [Nietzsche' s explicit target].  A further implication is that philosophy proceeds through discontinuity and disruption, so that Hegel can never be reconciled with Nietzsche.  Deleuze's own break is revealed to the extent that he does not even use Hegelian language, but attempts 'to move away from the dialectic, to forget the dialectic': even the bits in D&R are just a repetition of the earlier critique.  Hegel has been exorcised, and this has 'created an autonomous plane for thought' (53) [that is, a new research programme] . 'A philosophy of joy is necessarily a philosophy of practice', and we need to clarify this.  Deleuze's work on Nietzsche is not intended to investigate consciousness or understanding, not a new interiority but 'the creation of exteriority through the power of affirmation'.  However, we still need to introduce a corporeal dimension.  This emerges better with a discussion of Spinoza and his notion of interaction between bodies and the power to effect or be affected.  This is a way of actualizing  power, and because it focuses on affect or sensation,  it 'affords Deleuze…  a means of posing inner experience as a mode of corporeal exteriority' (54).  [So he uses this C17th account rather than anything more recent?]. This involves a reworking of suffering as an notion of affectivity, an attribute of power, where bodily activity becomes joyful.  Nietzsche's conception of joy is abstract, and he tends to see sorrow simply as a matter of ressentiment and bad conscience.  This is an insufficient basis for 'the development of a practical struggle against the sad passions'.  We need to discuss not only the will, but also desire.  This will reintroduce the notions of practical agents, however—Spinoza comes to the rescue just in time by seeing individuals as bodies, corporeal agents [ocupying points of view?] .  Spinoza also helps Deleuze develops the idea of 'the spatial or social synthesis' (55) not just the temporal synthesis of the eternal return. Chapter three.  Spinozian Practice Affirmation and Joy Deleuze's big book on Spinoza was a part of his doctoral thesis, and is comparatively complex and unresolved, but develops 'a series of interpretative strategies in the process of development' (56).  We should see this work again as the completion of an evolutionary movement towards politics and practice, and remember that 'Deleuze carries his baggage with him.  Nietzsche and ethics is Bergsonian ontology transported to the field of value; Spinozian politics is Bergsonian ontology and Nietzschan ethics transported to the field of practice' (57).  What this means is that politics is grounded in ontology.  Further, Deleuze sees Spinoza as operating with two phases, one speculative and the other practical, and this helps him deal with some of the traditional criticisms of Spinoza [especially idealism as we shall see].  There is also a double movement, from substance to things, and then operating in the other direction.  Hardt wants to use German terms for these two movements— forschung for the analytic and speculative, and darstellung for both presentation and practice.  The two perspectives influence how we should understand Spinozian concepts, and each perspective should be seen as autonomous.  Deleuze is clearly more interested in the second moment, and to get there, involves a detailed analysis of the notion of power, both ontologically, in terms of the productivity of being, and then developing into an ethics based on the distinction between active and reactive passions.  With this development, we can get to practice, and this is the focus of the chapter. The speculative phase.  Spinoza apparently innocently begins with thinking about the infinite, and his effort is to establish some kind of distinction within the infinite.  Deleuze proposes a Bergsonian reading on the positive nature of difference.  The argument starts with a critique of Descartes.  Spinoza denies that there are real distinctions between substances, and sees them only as numerical distinctions, which have nothing to do with substance, Deleuze asserts.  Numerical properties only limit the movements of being, and assumes some additional cause.  Instead, the same substance appears in all the attributes.  This will lead to god as possessing an absolute infinity of attributes, and is therefore unique—infinity is not a numerical matter.  This informs Deleuze's notion of difference which is not numerical either, nor based on negation, but something in itself, lying beneath all the other distinctions, found again in the work on Bergson.  This makes difference absolute, caused only by itself, possessing an 'internal causal dynamic' (62), which produces real distinctions, or difference in nature.  This is positive difference, difference in itself.  Spinoza defends this approach by talking of the singularity of being, thought of first as 'the union of monism with the absolute positivity of pantheism', something unique which 'infuses and animates the entire world'(62).  In Deleuze's terms, 'Being is singular…  In that it is remarkable', not related to anything outside itself, but not in different, something 'both infinite and definite: Being is remarkable' (63), singular, and 'Singularity, in Deleuze, has nothing to do with individuality or particularity.  It is, rather, the correlate of efficient causality and internal difference: The singular is remarkable because it is different in itself' (63).  In this, Spinoza and Bergson seem to have similar conceptions. However, Spinoza develops his argument through the theory of the attributes, which helps us to see that 'the real distinction is also a formal distinction'[a strange philosophical way of arguing that epistemology and ontology are connected?].  The attributes lead us to the idea of the univocity of being.  Attributes are expressions of being, they express an essence and attributed to substance. This is worked through in Spinoza in terms of divine names, apparently, for some theologians, the divine essence always transcends its expression so god must be eminent and transcendent.  For other theologians god is both cause and essence, but some argue for an analogical relation between god and the world, but this introduces equivocity.  God alone must be immanent, or we would need two substances, and there would be no univocity [so this is a matter of philosophical consistency again?]The attribute is different—it expresses different essences, but has the common form with the other attributes [so attributes are immanent in what they express].  Attributes have a common form.  They should not be confused with properties which are not expressive in this sense, but are better seen as signs or revelations, and lacking a common form.  At best they give us grounds to believe.  Expression is different, and here modes 'participate fully in divine substance' (65).  Signs can never be properly understood, but expressions can lead to greater knowledge. Attributes are plural when looked at from the outside, but common in form internally .  This is expressed as a 'formal commonality embodied in each infinite attribute'.  However there are also formal distinctions [and must be if god is to be expressed in an infinite number of attributes].  Deleuze returns to Duns Scotus for clarification, to provide a difference between formal distinction and ontological identity, two orders of reason and being.  'Univocity means precisely that being is expressed always and everywhere in the same voice; in other words the attributes each express being in a different form but in the same sense' (66).  [Rather misleadingly, different sense means ontological commonality].  In Spinoza, this leads to a clear univocity, a matter of formal affirmation of being.  For Deleuze, this means that Spinoza argues for the 'full expressivity of being'[oddly rendered here as 'the heroic moment of a pure, speculative philosophy']. So, for Hardt, Deleuze's Spinoza can be seen as quite different from Hegelian speculation, unlike most other French philosophers.  This follows from the reading of Nietzsche, and is not explicitly pursued in the work on Spinoza.  Nevertheless, Hegel had argued that Spinozan substance could not produce determinations, because there is no other to negate or limit it.  For Hegel, being is not singular.  For Deleuze, difference persists as a matter of real distinction, and singular being is not indifferent or abstract [but 'remarkable' again].  There can be no opposition between singular being and determinate being, where a singular being is somehow indeterminate.  There is no external cause operating on substance: substance itself produces the real determinations of the world.  Here, Deleuze departs from Bergson's anxieties about determinations, which remained within Hegelianism.  Hegel saw Spinozan attributes as a limit on the indeterminate substance, or a determination, but argues that Spinoza missed out the role of negation.  Deleuze says that the attributes 'fill the role of expression' (68), not determination.  Similarly, Hegel saw Spinoza as arguing for emanation, where specific beings are seen as degradations of some universal being.  Deleuze wants to argue that immanence is not the same as emanation.  The difference turns on whether effects are immanent in causes all along—if so, there can be no degradation.  Immanence again 'demands a univocal being' (69), with no hierarchical levels.  Deleuze introduces the medieval term 'complication', and its couple 'explication', to refer to the nature of expression as both appearing in specific forms, and, conversely,  specific forms are showing themselves to be complications of an expression [this is my gloss, having read the small book on Spinoza]. So the speculative phase has produced a notion of substance as a logical matter, possessing the qualities of singularity and univocity.  [Somehow] this helps us see that the definition of god as a real definition, emerging as some necessary ontological principle.  Everything follows from the original conception of substance, which, in philosophy, means that 'the principles that demonstrate the reality of the definition of God are those of the life of substance itself; they are the a priori constitution of being' (70).  Deleuze uses the term 'genetic definition', meaning that being is active, and somehow 'unfolds' from the principles that Spinoza has identified.  However, speculation like this can only go so far in producing principles, and Spinoza has to move on to develop 'an ontological practice, which is autonomous from the field of speculation' (70), and here, Spinoza differs again from Hegel in terms of how valuable speculation is. Speculation is not analytic enough.  We need an account of power. This account emerges through a critique of Descartes.  Descartes attempts a logical proof of the existence of god—an effects must have the same reality as its cause, the idea of god must be caused, therefore there must be a real god.  Spinoza modifies this to argue that the power of thinking is involved—thinking about objects is limited by their actual power to exist or to act.  This is later extended to further argument about the existence of god, which in one case, suggests that: '(1) to be able to exist is to have power; (2) it would be absurd to say that finite beings exist while an absolutely infinite being does not exist, because that would be to say that the finite beings are more powerful; (3) therefore, either nothing exists for an absolutely infinite being also exists;(4) since we exist, an absolutely infinite being necessarily exists' (71) [classic philosophical reasoning depending on an appeal not to be absurd, and then spelling out the logical implications, which are mostly tautological].  Deleuze takes this to mean that power brings essence into existence, raising the notion of a dynamic project of action involving power.  This might be naturalist in Spinoza, suggesting that nature is spontaneous.  Deleuze argues that we can also understand this in terms of materialism—in this case 'a principle of affection' (72) [a philosophical notion of materialism].  This means that power is both active and passive, a 'power to effect and the power to be affected, production and sensibility'.  It follows from this that god also has the power to be affected in an absolutely infinite number of ways. Deleuze makes a link with Nietzsche: 'the will to power is always accompanied by a feeling of power', and being affected should not be seen as suffering, but as playing an active role.  Hardt reminds us that for Spinoza an affection can be an action or a passion, the formal arising from an internal, and the latter from an external cause [so being open to power is also a kind of power].  In another terminology, internal affections are called active, and external ones passive.  In the diagram, page 73, power is first divided into power to exist and an equal power to be affected, and that power to be affected is then divided into active and passive affections [in a kind of logical tree].  We can't get very far by looking at how power manifests itself in existence, but we can make more progress investigating the power to be affected and its types, both internal and external, active and passive.  This becomes an ethical or political project to favour active affections and minimize passive ones.  [If we insist on the active busy role of the modern individual?  We are really close to Maslow here?].  This is depicted as a last minute, timely conversion to practice, but it has to be fleshed out with reference to the original principles of 'singularity, univocity, and power' (73). We have to clear away a perceived subjectivist or idealist tendency in Spinoza, and offer a strictly materialist interpretation instead, which could involve tensions between Spinoza and Deleuze.  We begin with noticing the philosophical notion of materialism as opposed to idealism, which asserts the priority of mind over body.  Materialism insists on an 'equality in principle between the corporeal and the intellectual' (74).  Deleuze wants to go further [?] and assert the priority of being in all the attributes, including thought.  The alternative would be to allow dependence on thought, as in idealism.  The problem arises when Spinoza defines an attribute as something that the intellect perceives of a substance, and argues later that it's even possible that the same thing can be designated by two names, introducing a nominalism, and the role of the perceiving subject.  The sections have long been controversial.  Hegel takes the idealist line, seeing the attribute as something in the intellect that limits substance or determines it, something external to it.  However, the intellect, strictly speaking, is a mode of thought, something coming after the attributes, including the attribute of thought.  Hegel apparently deals with this by blaming Spinoza for inconsistency.  Deleuze's reading is different, and for him, the intellect plays only a secondary role, 'as an objective and invisible agent of representation' (75).  Perceptions offered to the intellect are representations of the forms as they appear.  However, there is a prior relation of attribute to a substance, an undistorted ontological relation [only perceptible to the god-like Deleuze, presumably, and not dependent on his intellect?].  This preserves 'the ontological integrity of the system and resolves the contradiction' in Spinoza (76) [so consistency is the main argument]. We're not out of the woods, though because we still need to explain this representation and reproduction—'certainly a very weak conception of expression' (76).  Deleuze simply passes on, refusing to be sidetracked in Hardt's terms: preserving ontological integrity is more important than clarifying the text.  Deleuze's materialist ontology is being developed here. Hardt notices that this makes Deleuze quite different from the other French philosophers of the time, who would have followed the subjectiviste readings.  The differences are explored through Althusser on Marx [!].  Althusser wanted to stress  reading as an active form of production, to dismiss the idea of immediate vision and other specular metaphors.  Knowledge has its own domain, however, but this is prior in the sense that we need to first consider how things are presented to us [Hardt says this is similar to phenomenology].  We never simply perceive objects.  However, Deleuze argues that the intellect only perceives, reproducing the forms that it grasps, reproducing, not actively producing.  The primary production is somewhere else, in being.  Hardt says this might mean that the intellect in its reproduction is a kind of 'affirmation of the productive role of being'(78), but the activity of being is antecedent to the intellect.  Deleuze also has a different domain in mind, not society or capital, but being and its rather simple basic principles [whether Deleuze should have analysed society or capital is the issue here, surely, especially for a political radical like Hardt?], and again, he wants to maintain ontological foundations in Spinoza and in his own work.  Hardt says that Deleuze is interested in other matters like empirical practice, but says we need empirical terms to grasp them [so a massive inconsistency between philosophical and empirical analysis?].  Althusser still wants to argue that we need to see knowledge as a production to fight off idealist views of knowledge, to see it as theoretical practice.  The Deleuzian position does not examine this practice [!], and so is an idealist.    Althusser seems particularly good at suggesting that the normal conception of practice is only the mirror image of theory in a specular system. it would follow from this that 'Deleuze's philosophy can have no practical power; it can merely attempt to think the world,  not change it' (79).  Hardt intends to use this challenge to guide future analysis of Deleuze on practice. Deleuze wants to avoid a different kind of idealism in the work on Spinoza, one that would assert the priority of mind over body.  The argument proceeds through the notion of 'ontological parallelism' (80).  This follows from the university of being, which implies that the attributes are all equal expressions.  They are further argued to be autonomous, again reasserting that the mind is not primary, drawing upon Spinoza's critique of Descartes.  Mind and body are autonomous.  The mind is a spiritual automaton [at last!] Following only the laws of thought, and the body is a corporeal automaton, following only the laws of extension.  As autonomous, one cannot control the other.  However, attributes are autonomous but also organized in 'a parallel order', also known as an 'equality of principle'(81).  This is to be understood as having autonomous and equal ways of participating in being, as being expressed by being, 'said in the same voice'.  From the point of view of substance, they are the same expression, properly parallel ontologically.  It follows that the processes of modification to produce modes is also the same modification [same process, but down a stage].  An implication follows for speculation—any proposition about one of the attributes must be affirmed equally to the others [remember that we only know two, thought and extension]: so structures in the mind should have parallel structures or functions in the body [Hardt's suggest that if we follow this consistently, we should be able to identify the true acts of the body]. This consistent development of parallelism helps dethrone the apparent priority of thought, even if Spinoza himself does not argue that.  [There is an attempt to rework Spinoza's apparent priority of thought as a different kind of parallelism on the epistemological level] there is an ambiguity in Spinoza especially in a scholium accompanying this commentary, which helps Deleuze try out an argument to be developed later—that there was an epistemological detour in order to reach ontological parallelism.  Hardt's suggest that this is  'not very well substantiated in the text'(83), but Deleuze's reading is at least possible.  Deleuze's argument further separates powers and attributes—the latter infinite, but the former confined to the power to exist and the power to think.  The power to exist 'is the formal essence of god.  All the attributes participate equally in this essence'(83).  This reasserts ontological parallelism.  However, the power to think is a different 'objective essence of god'[graspable by the intellect?  Something that arises once god has existed?].  This helps Deleuze argues that the power to think is only the same as the power to act and exist, not prior: indeed, Deleuze wants to argue that the power to think is dependent on the power to exist, argued in terms of objective being requiring formal being. What about the ability of thought to generate ideas of ideas, to reflect?  This would be an early accounts of the structure of interior consciousness, threatening ontological priority, and replacing the dynamism of being with the dynamism of thought.  Deleuze is concerned 'to preserve the ontologically quality of the attributes'(84).  He does this by distinguishing powers and attributes again, and then formal and objective powers—the power to think is an objective power working on ideas, but ideas are dependent on the formal power of existing in the first place.  Further, ideas about things involve connections between different attributes, while ideas take place only as modes of thought, operating merely with conceptual distinctions.  These are not real distinctions found in being, not formal distinctions, mere differences of degree not differences of nature.  Although this might be an important human quality [and obviously central to the idea of critical politics], 'this privilege is ontologically insignificant'(85) [the moment where the scholastic agenda triumphs?]. Hardt's own view is that another argument is possible.  Negri, apparently has seen an evolution in Spinozan thought, where the theory of the attributes becomes less relevant anyway [as his political commitments changed?] Hardt suggests another alternative—that thought is privileged because Spinoza is pursuing an inquiry, and there is a confusion between 'the form of... research...[and]...  The nature of being' (86) [the moment when philosophers assume that they really are speaking on behalf of being and all the rest of us].  Marx has made clear the difference between the mode of enquiry and the mode of presentation [forschung and darstellung], arguing that you need to work through the material first and tracked down the inner connections, and then present the results in a different way.  Spinoza can therefore be seen as discussing the attributes in order only to get to the connections of being and its real movement.  The movement also allows a shift from speculation to practice based on the body not the mind.  Again the notion of power is going to be the crucial hinge. Deleuze develops Spinoza more positively in his discussion of the true and the adequate idea, initially seen as the discussion about the best way to speculate.  Adequacy is seen as a matter of being as the expression of causes.  The notion of the mind as spiritual automaton that produces ideas autonomously, helps reject a correspondence theory of truth, which is rejected as a mere formal connection, not an account of the activity of the development of true ideas.  Descartes notion of clear and distinct ideas as the basis of truth is more promising, because at least it refers to the content of the idea.  But this is still a matter of representation rather than the causes of ideas [produced by the spiritual automaton, so that 'the cause of any idea is always another idea'(89)].  We can't see how ideas are connected by simply seeing their clarity or distinctness.  The proper power to think involves examining the causes of ideas.  [There is also a curious phrase about the spiritual automaton reproducing reality in producing ideas in the proper order, 89].  Without tracing ideas back to causes, we have not explained them, no matter how clear or distinct they might be.  Clarity and distinctness are only the superficial qualities of true ideas any way—the issue really is one of 'expression of causality, production and power'. Hence the shift to the adequate idea, the notion of the true relation of an idea to its cause [proximate cause is another idea, formal cause is the power to think].  When the spiritual automaton joins ideas, it produces a 'unity of logical form and expressive content', a movement internal to thought.  [Some notion of the automatic development of true ideas?].  Truth is defined, singularly, like being, as something which 'envelops and expresses its own cause'(90) [circularity again, but clearly referring to adequacy].  This involves a shift towards ontological truth—'Adequate ideas are expressive, and inadequate ideas are mute'in terms of their ability to reveal the structures of being and/or thought, which is parallel anyway.  It follows that adequate ideas increase the power of thought by revealing more and more about 'the structure and connections of being'.  Clearly, this argument depends on ontological parallelism. However, most of us don't get that far, and have to operate with inadequate ideas.  Spinoza's project is to change this situation, to develop truth and the power to think.  Ontological parallelism means that this will be a project involving the body, hence the importance of asking what a body can do. How can we increase our power to think, or approach god in theological terms?  We won't get far if we remain with an epistemological foundation, relying on the activities of the mind alone.  We have to shift to the body and examine empirically how they are composed.  Again we do this in a characteristic 17th century way to determine the laws of the interactions of bodies [why did Deleuze not use more modern studies of bodies and the origins of ideas?  Hardt's view all along is that he is been modestly concerned with examining resources for his own views—why Spinoza?  Scholasticism and the role of the university must be equally important]. Bodies are seen as dynamic relationships subject to change, and that encounters between them produce in difference, compatibility, or incompatibility, as in the action of poison etc.  An examination of these activities, 'Spinoza's physics' will provide an ethical foundation.  The question of what a body can do is to be seen as a question of what powers it might have, not the power to act spontaneously but the power to be affected.  Again, being affected involves being influenced by active and passive affections, and increasing power means developing more active ones.  Passive affections, including suffering, express nothing, and are to be seen as 'the lowest degree of our power to act'[quoting Deleuze's big book on Spinoza, 92].  So asking what the body can do is really a question about what powers might be achieved.  Spinoza's notion of conatus is central [here, it is defined as striving, rather than some attempt to persist].  Conatus is 'the motor that animates being as the world'(93), but it is also a sensibility driven by passions [only for humans?].  In most cases, we are filled with passive affections, since the power of nature is greater than our own power [early modernist project?]. Passive affections themselves can be divided.  They arise from encounters which can be random or driven by chance, and this can lead to positive or negative relationships depending on how 'composable' the bodies are.  Positive relationships tend to be seen as good or useful and to produce a joyful form of affection.  This increases the power to act.  Negative relationships produce sadness.  Actual encounters 'are more complicated than either of these two limit cases'[as the utilitarians discovered] (94), but we can produce a new chart.  The power to exist equals the power to be affected.  The power to be affected has two components active and passive affections, and passive affections themselves are divided into joyful and sad passive affections [so we have already simplified by leaving out the mixed cases].  Because the passions affect us differently, it is difficult to reach agreement 'and the large majority of chance encounters are sad'(95).  But is Spinoza downhearted?  This pessimism leads to a practical project to become active, as in Nietzsche.  Spinoza, however adds the dimension of social experience to maximize joy. Here we have to move from speculation to practice [or politics].  It should begin with joy, as a practical equivalent to philosophical affirmation.  We might begin by minimising sadness [by withdrawing from contact with most plebs?].  More positively, we should investigate bodies to see if they can produce common relationships with us, seek out compatible encounters.  [Already it's looking pretty conservative].  We should be guided here by the formation of common notions, which always depend on 'an idea of the similarity of composition in existing modes' (96).  Again, there are different types, some more universal than others, some turning on a general similarity of human bodies, and, more useful less universal common notions, involving local points of view and specific interactions.  Common notions will be adequate ideas, formally thinkable, and materially indicating expression [not unlike Weber's idea of adequacy].  Adequate ideas develop from an initial recognition of something in common.  However, the tests of adequacy should still remember the material or biological dimensions, and should be seen as fundamentally practical regardless of their speculative qualities, even though they are presented speculatively in early Spinoza. 'The experience of joy is the spark'(98) for the development of further ideas, moving through the idea of a common notion.  However, joy can still be a passive affection and we must go further, to develop common notions until they are adequate, to get active joy, 'substituting an internal cause from external cause; or, more precisely,…  Enveloping or comprehending the cause within the encounter itself' (99), a combination of corporeal and epistemological logic.  [This looks awfully like rationalising what happens anyway, deciding to choose and celebrate the options you're  provided with, as with Bourdieu].  We seem to develop the active joys when we develop adequate ideas rather than joyful experiences, when we grasp commonality, overcoming passive passions.  Deleuze really rates this argument.  Hardt says it involves seeing being as a composition of possibilities, capable of producing more powerful relationships, more powerful bodies as processes 'envelop' causes.  [It is the old argument that knowledge and only knowledge is power?].  Another chart, on page 100, shows a dynamic relation: there are active affections and passive affections, and passive ones can be either sad or joyful.  This time, however joyful passive affections can lead to the development of common notions which will feedback and become active affections.  This is an analysis from below, as it were, complementing the speculative analysis from above.  Conatus 'animates this entire operation', which adds desire to the analysis of motion and rest.  Deleuze identifies in this whole analysis a learning process, learning to become active, '"an educational process"'.  Hardt describes this as 'an apprenticeship in power, an education in virtue'. Practice produces a parallel epistemology, complimenting the formal epistemology of the earlier work: an activist interpretation of common notions as opposed to a logical one.  Now, 'The formation of common notions is the practical constitution of reason' (101).  Hardt says this particularly material notion of the intellect also owes something to the birth of modern industry, and the development of tools—there are intellectual tools as well which can improve our productivity. Spinoza therefore has different kinds of knowledge—imagination and opinion, reason, and finally intuition.  These are organized in a hierarchy, and we should begin with the first kind, even though it is necessarily false [because it does not speculate about causes?], and even though most of our knowledge is of this kind.  Reason will not guide most of every day life.  We must build on opinions, which involves the recognition that they might be partially true.  This is because they are formed from signs rather than expressions, implying that they are externally caused.  However, the imagination can reveal the possibility of forming common notions.  In the first place, experience provides us with 'indicative signs' (102): opinion and revelation only offer us 'imperative signs'whose origin is obscure.  Imagination can be influenced by future corporeal encounters.  Common notions originate in imagination, and reason should be seen as linked to imagination 'on a continuum as different stages or planes in the process of intellectual constitution' (103).  However, we shift to reason when we begin to consider things not as contingent but as necessary [having a necessary cause?]: This enables us to build a permanent and consistent understanding, a deliberate construction of the common notion, based on '"necessity, presence and frequency"'(103) [we know from Durkheim's discussion of social facts that necessity and frequency involve really two different sorts of arguments].  Common notions can preserve affections even while developing reason, moving from contingency to necessity.  This is an epistemological practice, demonstrated in another diagram, on page 103: there are two kinds of knowledge, the first kind involves opinion and imagination, but imagination can help to develop a common notion, which will then produce the second kind of knowledge [reason].  This is a way of demystifying reason, seeing how it is produced, and linked to common knowledge.  Again, this is not the dialectic of the progressive movement, where the common notion does not negate imagination but preserves it, and there is no total split between reason and imagination. Hardt can then return to the Althusserian critique.  Deleuze finds in Spinoza 'an extended drama' (104) about the relation between theory and practice, or between speculation and ontology [through the difference between investigation and presentation as above—a kind of model to link theory and practice?  However, practice is very theoretically constrained, and seen as an embryonic theory?].  This is not too far away from Althusser—theory draws from practice, and practices dependent on theory in the classic Marxist work, and it is not dissimilar in Deleuze's Spinoza, given the change from speculation to the idea of constitutive practice.  In an interview with Foucault, Deleuze talks about relays between theory and practice: '"Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, theories are relayed from one practice to another.  No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, a practice is necessary for piercing this wall"' (105).  Theory provides the terrain on which practice can arise, and vice versa: 'Each provides the conditions for the existence and development of the other'.  However, Althusser  finally gives the priority to theory, as when the October revolution was based on Capital.  Even in his later self criticism , he does not really repent, despite his acknowledgement of theoreticism, which failed to connect philosophical struggles to class struggles.  This is because he remained 'too Hegelian'(107). For Deleuze there can be no synthesis of theory and practice and no priority, and the two activities are 'autonomous and equal in principle' (106) [but then he is not interested in revolutionary overthrow and the development of revolutionary consciousness which will never emerge from common notions, for Marxists.  Hardt  and Negri are going to disagree with this of course].  Deleuze corrects his own theoreticism with his insistence on materialist philosophy, in the sense that thought is not privileged [Scholasticism is not corrected].  The relation between theory and practice can be understood exactly as the relation between body and mind, as above.  There might be 'a theoretical automaton and a practical automaton as expressions that equally refer back to the power of being' (107). However, these are really polemical positions, to avoid subordination of one by the other, and to deny the sufficiency of theoretical reasons for revolution.  In 1917, for example there was a 'an accumulation of desires, imaginations, and powers that coincided and bec[a]me necessary in the event', a process that turned joyful passions into action.  This is only polemical, but nobody yet has realized 'what practice can do'.  There is a need to bring bodies back in, to rescue practice from recuperation as theory, to see constitution as having a different logic, a different form of accumulation of elements from below with creative and unforeseeable consequences, 'an open logic of organization'.  [You can see the elements of Autonomism and the later work with Negri]. Politics emerges as an issue for bodies, and Deleuze realizes this through Spinoza's discussion of the power of the body and the development of common notions 'in terms of the logic of assemblage' (108), as constitutive.  'the common notion is an ontological mechanism that forges being out of becoming, necessity out of chance'.  Joyful passions turn into adequate reason.  We therefore have an ontological account of politics, which in Spinoza turns into an argument to defend the theory of right—what bodies can do involves 'natural right'.  This develops first through considering the lowest forms of social organization—no one is born rational and no one is born a citizen, but we have to work with what we have, including a fundamental weakness of the human condition.  At least this means that it is pointless to impose some order based on transcendent elements, including ideas of duty or morality.  We must begin with power and its expression, to develop the utmost of what we can do, how we can escalate our powers beyond limits, free from external order.  This is 'the open expression of multiplicity…  the freedom of multiplicity, the freedom of society in anarchy' (109).  We must move away from the existing state of sadness and limit, by organizing more productive encounters, and this is the role of the civil state, to permit us to combine and extend our power.  This builds on natural right, which is preserved and rationalised. 'In this transformation the multiplicity of society is forged into a multitude' (110) [and note 20 says this 'Spinozan conception' is discussed further by Negri in The Savage Anomaly].  The multitude is similarly  'open to antagonism and conflict', (110) but is struggling to develop its power and develop its civil right.  'And the rule of the multitude is democracy', a form of a 'anarchy in democracy…  The absolute role of the multitude through the equality of its constituent members'(110), arising from increased positive encounters.  There should therefore be, in politics, a parallel process to the epistemological development of common notions, 'a corporeal common notion that serves to organize the…  encounters of social bodies into coherent, adequate and joyful encounters' (110), and which will develop reason in the form of community. Thrilling as these ideas are, we can only get so far by developing a theory, as Deleuze does in his reading of Spinoza.  'Only social practice can break through this wall by giving body to the process of political assemblage' (111). Chapter four Conclusion An Apprenticeship in Philosophy We have red Deleuze's work as a progressive evolution, with the intention of showing that metaphysics is not dead and that it contains radical alternatives 'still very alive in the contemporary problems we face' (112).  This is also Hardt's own apprenticeship. There are four major themes Ontology.  This is grounded in the notion of difference and singularity in Bergson and Spinoza.  Deleuze gets the notion of the positive movement of being from Bergson, and it is distinguished from mechanicism and platonic difference.  Above all, it opposes hegelian difference and its abstractions, including causality and contradiction, which are classically external.  Bergson operates with efficient causality so that 'the cause always inheres within its effect' (113).  In Spinoza, this positivity of being is described as its singularity and univocity.  Singularity means that 'being is different in itself' and thus able to express other distinctions.  This makes it remarkable.  It requires no external reference and thus is singular for all stop being expresses itself in its movement, and thus expression can be seen as a form of internal causality.  It also implies univocity.  This puts it on the highest plane.  Deleuze is work shifts 'from negation to difference'(114), avoiding the dialectic.  In this sense, Hegel is being rebuked by an appeal to earlier work that he thought he had transcended.  The 'efficient difference' of being produces real multiplicity.  Only materialism can grasp this, leading to arguments to reject the priority of mind over body and replace it with an equality.  'Deleuze's ontology requires a materialist perspective because any priority accorded to thought would weaken the internal structure of being'[and we can't have that, given all the earlier work to establish it].  Being lies behind both thought and matter—'it is both logically prior to, and comprehensive of thought and extension equally'.  [Luckily], expression means that 'being is always already actual…  Fully expressed in body and thought' (115).  Overall, Deleuze establishes the alternative tradition to the one we're used to.  Hardt also likes it because 'A positive, materialist ontology is above all an ontology of power' Affirmation.  This has long been seen as a bad thing by the Hegelian tradition including the Frankfurt School who saw it as a matter of passive acceptance or naive optimism.  Contemporary Hegelians like Butler still think the power of negation is important to critical thinking.  However, although Deleuze rejects the Hegelian form of negation, he still has an alternative conceptions of critique.  'Affirmation is intimately tied to antagonism', especially the total critique that will alone lead to proper construction.  This negation is not dialectical and is thus more complete [affirmation fully destabilizes reified patterns?] We first saw this argument in Nietzsche's critique of Kant [repeated later in difference and repetition?] that says that Kantian critique is partial because it still preservesthe transcendental, the 'suprasensible as a privileged terrain' (116).  As a result 'Kant can treat claims to truth and morality without endangering truth and morality  themselves'.  This leaves conventional values intact.  Total critics are 'always insurrectional' by comparison, refusing any relation, even a dialectical one, with the conservative attitude, and certainly not attempting to recuperate the real essence of its enemy.  It is the force of the critique is total, however: 'This is not to say that all that is present is negated'[a weasel here surely?  Reoccurs in Maasumi's radicalism about the destruction of all categories?]. The point in Deleuze is to open the possibility of affirmation, the release of creative forces, breaking with repetition.  [For the second time, this is argued with a reference to an obscure bit about Nietzsche and the relation between Ariadne and Dionysus!  The point is to argue that this is real affirmation, 'the affirmation of affirmation itself'].  At the same time, there is an notion of vulgar affirmation, which Deleuze is not supporting—'The yes of the ass, the yes of the one who does not know how to say no…  only the one who knows how to wield the power for negation can pose a real affirmation' (116-7) [only philosophers then?].  There is also a certain release from responsibility for what is, not to bother with existing values but to create new ones [so to ignore Marxism in favour of some vague values to come?].  For Deleuze, 'affirmation is actually the creation of being'(117), which is handy because this links ontology to ethics.  [I have just notice that in Empire, Hardt and Negri suggest that this is their main role as revolutionary philosophers, to provide an ontology of the multitude.  As if revolutions happen as a result of philosophy —which, incidentally, Hardt has denied earlier himself in the bit about the October revolution] Practice.  Ethics must enter the field of practice, and here the conception of joy in Spinoza helps.  The joy that practice brings complements the affirmation of philosophy [speculation is the Spinozian term].  This leads Deleuze to investigate power again based on the productivity of being.  Deleuze distinguishes active and reactive forms of power, fleshed out in the discussion on Spinoza as a matter of adequacy and inadequacy.  Only the adequate 'gives full view to both the productivity and producability of being'(118).  [I think the argument here is that being produces actively but also has a power to be affected—by politics?].  Back at the human level, the power to act and exist looks like inexplicable spontaneity, so we need the additional classifications of power into joyful and sad passive affections.  Sad passive affections dominate human life, but this is realistic rather than pessimistic, introducing the need to increase our power to become joyful.  This leads to the mechanism of chance encounters, some of which agree with us and increase our power, and this passive joyful perfection, or passion can be made more adequate by forming common notions—'they are the raw material for the construction of the common notion…  [which]…is already latent in the joyful passion' (118) [only a definitional matter really, turning on how you define joy?].  Common notions are adequate in the sense that they comprehend the cause of the affection, and this also makes them active, 'no longer contingent on the chance encounter…  the joy that returns' (119).  This is the link with ontology, and its notions of composability of being—'Being is a hybrid structure constituted through joyful practice'.  Common notions help us create new assemblages by comprehending the cause, and these are 'ontological assemblages, and thus the active constitution of being' (119).  [So much to unpack here—is this connection between human politics and the modes of being workable? Surely it is only an analogy?  What are the political implications?  We have to operate with being, but luckily being is really constructive and creative, much more creative than bureaucracies or capitalism?  The main role for an activist is to make the point about operating with being, to encourage activism by arguing that it is supported by modern philosophy? We have no choice long term anyway because no-one can hold off being for long?]. Constitution.  This has arisen in the U.S. in terms of debating the political consequences of post structuralism, obviously with different possibilities as with all philosophy.  We can manage this by asking 'what can Deleuze's thought afford us?…  What are the useful tools we find in his philosophy for furthering our own political endeavours?'.  Hardt sees Deleuze as offering 'tools for the constitution of a radical democracy'.  The multiplicity of organization is to be contrasted with the multiplicity of order, and the notion of power as an assemblage with actual deployments of power. This can look at first as if it were liberalism, an advocacy of an open society driven by the activities of its members.  However, 'this political refusal of teleology leads directly to a philosophical refusal of ontology, because ontology itself is presumed to carry with it a transcendental determination of the good' (120).  This shows the residual power of Plato and Hegel. However, there are ontological radical alternatives, as Deleuze has discovered.  'Deleuzian being is open to the intervention of political creations and social becomings', which are to be seen as the producibility of being [so human agents are required after all?  Or is human politics merely a subset of the general producibility of being which goes on somehow without them as well?].  Hardt again argues that the power of the society also means that it has a power to be affected.  Overall, power involves, as an expression 'the free conflict and composition of the field of social forces'[getting to be a kind of conflict sociology?]. However there can be no plan or blueprint, only 'a continual process of composition and decomposition through social encounters on an immanent field of forces' (120-1) [the immanent field of forces is interesting—as a limit?  As a long-term trend towards democracy rooted in being itself—assuming this process of composition and decomposition is democracy].  This means that radical change is possible in principle at any time.  The normal vertical structure of social institutions also 'receive a strictly immanent determination, and thus remain always and completely susceptible to restructuring, reform and destruction'[and the Communards are admired here].  To the transcendent construction of social order from above, correspond the assemblages, 'the mechanisms of social organization from below' (121).  At this level, practice is 'the motor of social creation', another necessary connection between productivity and the producibility of being. Practice will also bring about destruction and decomposition, however.  'The model of this constitution is the general assembly, the absolute and equal inclusion of the entire immanent plane'. The notion of social assemblage exceeds individualism, and promises constant change in relationships [a new and better kind of individual relation to the collective].  The 'development of joyful social relationships moves instead between multiplicity and the multitude'.  [Almost defined here as a social body or plane of composition that is 'ever more powerful, while they remain at the same time open to internal antagonisms'].  The multitude has 'a common set of behaviours, needs and desires'.  Multitude emerge from 'the dead forces of social order', just as labour reemerges from its exploitation by capital for Marx.  In this way, the constitution of the multitude 'raises the multiplicity to a higher level of power' (122). However, we only have hints here which we need to flesh out, 'a general orientation' that might guide research into contemporary social assemblages.  There is also an embryonic political programme to construct assemblages from 'social bodies with compatible internal relationships, with composable practices and desires'.  This involves investigating 'the material mechanisms of social aggregation that can constitute adequate, affirmative, joyful relationships', and Hardt thinks we might be able to find these 'in the existing social practices, in the affective expressions of popular culture, in the networks of laboring cooperation'.  Thus 'Filling out the passage from multiplicity to multitude remains for us the central project for a democratic political practice'(122) [Reads better as a programme for the liberation from constraint of the restless culturally equipped new petit bourgeoisie?] back to Deleuze page