God & the Unconscious Part Two: Further Applications of Spinoza

This section is organized as a conceptual roadmap to demonstrate the applicability of a substance-unconscious for a contemporary diagnosis. It begins with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ideas of the plane of consistency and becoming-animal, connecting through Friedrich Nietzsche’s unhistorical man and horizonality to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s caution of a third unconscious arising out of the post-coronavirus crisis, which is encapsulated by Catherine Malabou’s idea of destructive plasticity that underscores the depressive and depersonalized states of the body when the mind is in distress. To conclude, I will speculate what could arise as the third unconscious. Each concept carries forward, implicitly or explicitly, Spinoza’s insistence of the body and affect, and the importance of creation with regard to the unconscious, and each philosopher offers a stepping-stone to a larger and integrated understanding of how we can conceptualize a substance-unconscious.

Manifesto for the Second Subject. Part 2: The Second Subject

“I am innately genital […] There are some fools who think of themselves as beings, as innately being. I am he who, in order to be, must whip his innateness. One who innately must be a being, that is always whipping this sort of non-existent kennel, O bitches of impossibility! … Underneath grammar there lies thought, an infamy harder to conquer, an infinitely more shrewdish maid, rougher to overcome when taken as an innate fact. For thought is a matron who has not always existed.” – Antonin Artaud

Manifesto for the Second Subject. Part One: The Dogmatic Image

Deleuze contends that philosophy requires a pure beginning not indebted to a presupposition. There is a difference between true philosophical thinking and an Image of thought. Thinking is movement, creation, it is the real as in real experience and is the participle of individuation. The Image of thought is representational, it involves an act of recognition and constructs identity. Deleuze argues that the majority of philosophers participating in so-called philosophical thought have done nothing but promote an Image through subjective presuppositions that direct the thinker towards a recognition of an object and furthermore into a predetermined representational field. Deleuze demands philosophy to start unbeholden to any presuppositions in order to witness true thinking—a movement alongside the real.