Ilgin Aksoy

At the end of Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza of 1980–1981, he asks his students to “imagine a Spinozist gambler.” Yet he ends the course offering few clues about how to picture this figure. Here we provide an interpretation of the Spinozist gambler based on both its Spinozist conceptual context and its place in Deleuze’s broader philosophy of gambling play. Accordingly, we examine Spinozist gambling in terms of Deleuze’s account of Spinoza’s three types of knowledge, and we compare the Spinozist gambler to Deleuze’s more prominent figure of the Nietzschean dice-thrower. We thereby offer a tripartite characterization of the Spinozist gambler following its place in Spinoza’s epistemology, which we further refine by examining Deleuze’s comments on indeterminism in Spinoza and Nietzsche. We argue that, according to Deleuze, the Spinozist gambler controls chance through rational organization, whereas the Nietzschean gambler affirms and embraces chance itself. And by means of this analysis, we advance our knowledge of both Deleuze’s Spinozism and his philosophy of play.

The traditional treatment of Spinoza’s substance and modes is in a two-category ontology, which can be called ‘category dualism’ or ‘substance-property dualism’ that construes two ontological categories, one of which is the more ontologically fundamental substance, res, subject or object, and other more superficial ones that inhere in, are predicated of, or ontologically depend on the former, traditionally coined as accidents, modes, or more neutrally, properties. The idiosyncrasy of substance-property dualism is to deny a part-whole structure of the relation between its two categories. This seems to be in accordance with Spinoza’s endorsement of substance and modes as the two categories of his ontology, where substance is the fundamental entity and the modes are ontologically dependent on it, as well as the indivisibility of substance into parts. Nevertheless, other scholars have conceived a priority monistic structure of this relationship, which takes substance and modes in a whole-part relationship. In this paper, I argue against category dualism by developing three original objections in favour of a category monistic along with the priority monistic reading.

This article compares Antonio Negri’s and Jacques Derrida’s conceptions of popular power. First, I examine Negri’s reading of the Spinozist concept of multitudo and how it develops from his two conceptions of power: potentia as concrete power and potestas as authorized power. Then, I survey how the popular power of multitudo is organized or unified by sovereign power, the discontent within this unification due to potentia’s competitive nature, and the revolutionary possibilities it harbors. I will draw from Negri’s The Savage Anomaly (1991) and Multitude (Hardt and Negri 2004) to clarify these concepts. Next, I will examine Derrida’s conceptions of specter (Gespenst), spirit (Geist), and hauntology, challenging classical ontology and exploring conjuration as a principle for unifying popular power, along with its revolutionary potentials, as discussed in Specters of Marx (1994) and “Marx and Sons” (2008). Finally, I will compare these two conceptions of popular power by showing their juxtapositions and divergences through the examples of Romanism, Byzantinism, and autonomous Marxism. I ground this theoretical comparison in practical examples of the unification of popular power in Roman and Byzantine histories, as well as contemporary autonomous Marxist endeavors.