Deleuze and Negri on the Spinozist Distinction Between Potentia and Potestas: A Brief Outline In Spinoza’s philosophy, potentia refers to the immanent causal power intrinsic to every mode and ultimately grounded in God/Nature itself, whereas potestas denotes the juridical and institutional authority that emerges from the organization of collective power within a political community. Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze, two of Spinoza’s most influential twentieth-century readers

Without division or interval, the body appears as pure form over content, surface without depth.

Itself in Mind for the Future We see the visible world as somehow inevitable, with all its ratios of movement & rest, its manifold shapes & ecstatic forms, not realising that nature is always busy, acting unseen in all its power, without external cause, producing within itself its own effects, differentiating this idea from that idea, bypassing one potential in favour of another, & making actual a particular mode of being (a mutation, a thing, a body, a colour), while keeping

The World Is Folded in to Every Object The world is folded in to every object And each thing or idea is the folding And unfolding of space, time and history. And the atom is folded and refolded Until the outside becomes inside And matter becomes thought. Matter folded and refolded And unfolded over and again, Until it's thin and translucent, Like consciousness.

To Spinoza nomads we traverse a flat shimmering world breeding images. signs & erratic/ erotic encounters; surfaces effacing depth...we killed being you and I – for what? for the sake of ecstatic form. modes counterfeit substance, producing a synthetic real. If being exists it does so as an effect of the imaginary, of imaging. so, not-being, not-at-all-being then, not even becoming.

Leibniz and the Best of All One-Monad Universes The purpose of this essay is to make the case for a heterodox reading of Leibniz’s The Monadology (published 1720) through the lens of Professor John Wheeler’s hypothesis of the one-electron universe (proposed in 1940). My conjecture is this: That there exists in the knowable universe only one monad; that this monad traverses time in both directions, eventually criss-crossing the entire past and future history of the universe; a

Thinking of Being without Heaviness or Depth Part 1: Being and heaviness People who suffer from depression often complain of a feeling of heaviness; not just in the emotional or mental sense, but as something physical — a visceral sensation pressing on the chest or wrapping itself around the body and the legs. Some sufferers say it is like having lead weights on their legs. Among the DSM-IV criteria for atypical depression is: “Leaden paralysis (i.e. heavy, leaden feelings i

Adam (1951-52) by Barnett Newman Barnett Newman and the Art of Not Making Graven Images Barnett Newman was born in 1905 to Abraham and Anna Newman, Jewish immigrants from Poland who came to New York City in 1900. Although not religious, Barnett’s father was a passionate Zionist and a supporter of the National Hebrew School of the Bronx. As well as attending Hebrew school, Barnett and his brothers and sisters were educated at home by Jewish scholars from Europe. He went on to