BADIOU ON SPINOZA (2): Badiou’s reading of Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza

This is my commentary on the first section of Badiou’s talk.

Badiou’s contrast between Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza and his own hinges on his interpretation of Deleuze’s notion that

« the attributes are irreducible to genera or categories because while they are formally distinct they all remain equal and ontologically one, and introduce no division into the substance which is said or expressed through them in a single and same sense (in other words, the real distinction between attributes is a formal, not a numerical distinction) » from the Conclusion of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, page 303.

According to Deleuze, the distinction of attributes is not ontologically real, it is a merely formal  plurality, even if it is grounded ontologically. Deleuze and Guattari reiterate this idea in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS:

« A formal multiplicity of substantial attributes that, as such, constitutes the ontological unity of substance ».

So, interpreting Badiou interpreting Deleuze, we can say that an attribute is a point of view or a perspective, but not in a subjective sense. It is an objective form or objective perspective.

I don’t think this is a straw-manning of Deleuze, but at this level of abstraction I find the distinction between the expressivist and the compositionist views unclear. Deleuze calls the plane of immanence a plane of composition, and he often insists on the immanent productivity of the plane. So Badiou and Deleuze agree on immanence, composition and productivity as central concepts at the level of infinite Substance.

However, if we descend a level to that of attributes it seems that it is Deleuze’s pluralism (and NOT as Badiou warns the danger of the reductionist concept of isomorphism) in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS that makes him conflate at least partially attributes and modes. In contrast, Badiou maintains a strong distinction between attributes and modes and does much more with the idea of an infinity of attributes.

I used to think that Badiou was simply misunderstanding or misrepresenting Deleuze, but in the light of his more recent immanence of truths project I have come to think that there is some significant confusion in Deleuze’s concept of the infinite, and that Badiou’s conceptual distinctions drawn from mathematics can help us see that Deleuze is producing and working with a number of different concepts of infinity without distinguishing or theorising them explicitly.