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HENT DE VRIES

The imitative expression of the affects anticipates some of Spinoza’s later views in
the unfinishedTractatus Politicus, which seeks a solution for the perpetuation—even the
‘‘eternity,’’ that is to say, the internal causation—of the state’s stability in a ‘‘play’’ of
‘‘counter-balance’’ and ‘‘counterweights.’’^71 Spinoza’s problem is thus less that of the
‘‘constitution’’ (foundation, institution) of the state than of its ‘‘victory over the forces of
destruction, once it is constituted.’’^72
What emerges in Spinoza is a deeply paradoxical—indeed, aporetic—account of the
structural nature of opposition, which, in political life (in and between states or federa-
tions of states) can take the form of antagonism and agonism, competition and com-
merce, the dogmatic suppression or the free expression of ideas, just as in social life it can
lead to envy, contempt, and allergy, according to a self-destructive tendency that Derrida
terms ‘‘auto-immunity,’’ by which he means the disturbing biological possibility that ‘‘a
living organism destroys the conditions of its own protection,’’ in other words, that the
body ‘‘destroys its proper defenses or organizes in itself... the destructive forces that will
attack its immunitary reactions.’’^73
Spinoza conceives of destructive forces and affects on the basis of a ‘‘universal model
of poisoning’’: ‘‘internal, immunal affections are the forms by means of which we become
conscious of ourselves, of other things, and of God, from within and eternally, essen-
tially.’’ The reverse tendency can also be discerned: ‘‘what is bad should be conceived of
as an intoxication, a poisoning, an indigestion—or even, taking account of individuating
factors, as an intolerance or an allergy.’’^74 The latter process, Deleuze explains, can have
dire consequences:

the modification can be such that the modified part of ourselves behaves like a poison

that disintegrates the other parts and turns against them (in certain diseases and, in

the extreme case, suicide). The model of poisoning is valid for all these cases in their

complexity. It applies not only to the harm that we suffer, but to the harm that we

do. We are not only poisoned, we are also poisoners; we act as toxins and poisons.^75

Since in Spinoza this dynamic between two or more individual and social bodies is
quasi-automatic and quasi-mechanical (as if billiard balls were hitting each other, with
the same amount of energy maintained), one wonders whether and how novelty, that is
to say, creativity and innovation, difference and repetition (plus change), can ever arise.
How, in this perspective, is asymmetry produced, let alone maintained (as clearly it is, for
good and for ill)? Is this because energy (appetite, desire,conatus) transfers from one
body to the next (and, although sometimes only partially, back)? Perhaps, but it would
seem that excess, gift, the event—again, difference and repetition—have no place here.
Or is the dynamism, indeed, the automaticity, also quasi-spiritual, meaning that what
appears, under one aspect of Nature (or God), to be merely mechanical exchange of force
reveals itself, under another aspect, to be an expression of something else—concerning

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