Immanence, transindividuality and the free multitude

Since the late 1960s there has been a resurgence of interest in Spinozism in France: Gilles Deleuze was among the first who gave life to a ‘new Spinoza’ with his seminal book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968). While Deleuze was primarily interested in Spinoza’s ontology and ethics, the contemporary French philosopher Étienne Balibar focuses on the political writings. Despite their common fascination for Spinoza’s relational definition of the individual, both thinkers have drawn very different consequences from the Spinozist inspiration regarding the relevance of his philosophy for a contemporary ethical and political thought. Deleuze draws from Spinoza an ethics of the encounter, an ‘ethology’ that is concerned with the composition of bodies on a plane of immanence. Balibar, on the contrary, deals with the modes of communication that we institute between one another and that are always effectuations on two levels at once: the real and the imaginary. Whereas Deleuze emphasizes the conception of a univocal plane of immanence, Balibar insists on a double expression of the real and the imaginary in any transindividual practice. The aim of this paper is to compare and finally assess their respective contributions to a conception of collective political action: the question of constitution of the ‘free multitude’.