God & the Unconscious Part One: Spinoza

We arrive at a conception of the unconscious through the God of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. The Ethics supports the integration of the unconscious into specific actions of a person’s life by emphasizing the importance of the body’s movement, as it will be shown that the body is the site of unconscious production and expression. I will be using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rendition, that the unconscious is a productive force that generates ideas and flows that are ever-creating, interconnecting, and at each moment rise anew. Despite its various definitions, the unconscious is that realm of existence we do not have immediate, conscious access to; the unconscious is immanent and requires mediation. For Spinoza a similar definition follows with what he calls substance: a productive immanent force that is Being, or God, containing all beings and producing all movement in the world. In the Ethics, beings are those things that mediate the ideas of God and put them into motion, or express them — with the body being the apparatus of God and the vessel of God’s creation. I will demonstrate how the unconscious and Spinoza’s substance operate similarly and will argue that the unconscious is immanent — is involved in and sustains everything.

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.