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T H E A R T S O F S P I N O Z A
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GÖKHAN KODALAK

Spinoza’s affective aesthetics:
Art and architecture from the
viewpoint of life

There is a peculiar aesthetic undercurrent traversing Baruch Spinoza’s phi-
losophy, harbouring untapped potentials and far-reaching implications for
contemporary discussions on aesthetics.1 The relationship between aesthetics
and Spinoza’s philosophy, however, has been nothing but a huge missed encoun-
ter, resulting in the publication of only a few books and a handful of articles for
more than three and a half centuries.2 This begs the question: is there, despite
our persistent negligence, much more to the relationship of Spinoza and aesthet-
ics than first meets the eye? I will argue that there might be. For once Spinoza’s
philosophy as a whole, ranging from his philosophical and political treatises to
his private letters and unfinished manuscripts, is read between the lines, latent
seeds of a peculiar aesthetic theory become visible—an aesthetic theory that
moves beyond subjective and objective approaches that have come to dominate
the field, and rather grounds itself on affective interactions and morphogenet-
ic processes. That is, although Spinoza did not work on an independent theory
of art and architecture built upon conventional aesthetic values, he developed,
and grounded his philosophy on, a highly elaborate logic of affective operations,
from which all aesthetic interactions immanently arise, including creative and
experiential activities of art and architecture. A subterranean journey through
Spinoza’s affective aesthetics constitutes the subject matter of this paper, which
interweaves subtle aesthetic hints buried deep within his philosophical archive,
while unfolding relevant ramifications of these promising discoveries in rela-
tion to confluent artistic and architectural approaches for the current aesthetic
discourse.3

I. Implicating affectivities

In Spinoza’s philosophy, modalities of existence (modus)—whether humans,
animals, artworks, or architectural constructs—are all constituted by an im-
manent process of substantial individuation, which gives them their singular
capacities, potencies, and rhythms. So, morphogenetic individuation of artistic
and architectural modalities, that is, their coming into being, begins with a pro-
cess of implication—as in plicating inwards, as in enfolding substantial forces
of life. This is the initial voyage when artists and architects encounter an affec-
tive continuum beneath everyday forms, confront constitutive forces underlying

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extensive environments, and expose themselves to this chaotic dimension, to
this turbulent undercurrent. In Spinoza’s terminology, this process deals with
substantial affectivities (substantiae affectiones), that is, how substantial forces of
life (Being) are translated into everyday forms and events (beings) (E1D5).4 What
is peculiar to Spinoza’s approach is that formative potencies of cosmos (Natura
naturans) are immanent to their formed expressions (Natura naturata) (E1P29S,
KV 1.8–9). Which is to say, substantial affectivities that individuate everyday
modalities are not situated above or beyond cosmos, do not transcend individ-
ual artworks or architectural buildings, but subsist in each and every process of
individuation, like magmatic flows underlying tectonic mountains (KV 2.26, TP
2.2). Cézanne, who obsessively painted Mont Sainte-Victoire again and again in
a series of oil paintings for more than twenty years at the turn of the twentieth
century, shares Spinoza’s morphogenetic concern, when he defines his obsession
in this mountain as follows: “Look at Sainte-Victoire there. What élan… These
masses were made of fire, and fire is in them still” (quoted in Gasquet, 1991: 82–
83). This is the aesthetic vision that accompanies each process of implication,
the vision that does not only see a mountain’s extensive contours, colours, and
forms, but more importantly, recognises what caused that mountain to be, and
what still flows beneath its unbending posture.

At the beginning of each aesthetic implication, an encounter takes place; art-
ists and architects come across substantial affectivities or tangled forces of life.
This encounter is not initiated by a brush, a pen, or an instrument; it is anteri-
or to the first sketch, the first line, the first melody. What initiates it, rather, is
an overwhelming confrontation with formative forces before they have assumed
their actual forms. Yet why is this confrontation overwhelming? For it does not
take place in zones of comfort, but in underground passages. For it does not rely
on ready-made experiences of actual forms, but grounds itself on elusive expe-
riences of substantial affectivities. In conceptual confluence with Spinoza, Olga
Rozanova, the early twentieth-century abstract painter and theorist, explains
this initial process elegantly: “How does the world reveal itself to us? How does
our soul reflect the world? In order to reflect, it is necessary to perceive…. The
artist’s primary aspiration to create arises from this confrontation with nature”
(1976: 103). And László Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus artist and architect, shares this
intuitive trajectory, when he argues that architecture is not construction of build-
ings “from visible, measurable, and well-proportioned volumes;” rather, “real
spatial experience rests...on the often invisible play of forces,” that is, “space cre-
ation is an interweaving of the parts of space, which are anchored, for the most
part, in clearly traceable relations extending in all directions as a fluctuating play
of forces,” rendering architecture “the medium of space-creating relations” (1947:
62). Does not Moholy-Nagy refer to what Spinoza calls substantial affectivities
and formative forces of life, when he talks about “fluctuating play of forces” and
“space-creating relations” in architecture? In a way, he does. For artists and ar-
chitects are peculiar personae who find their own way to dive deep and witness
subterranean affectivities beneath extensive landscapes and final forms, who
endure extreme pressures and come back up from the fiery depths, with ringing
eardrums, bloodshot eyes, and singular sears of their own. Yet it is also important
to recognize that aesthetic implication is not a unilateral process, in which all
forms of agency are consolidated within artists, architects, namely, within con-
ventional subjects. For affectivities also express their presence in this encounter
as formative events, as play of forces surrounding singularities of attraction and

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bifurcation. Affectivities strike artists and architects, not with their beauty or
ugliness, but with their magnitude, radiance, and potence. And the humble role
of artists and architects at this initial stage is nothing but to take notice, to af-
firm that aesthetic production does not begin with their subjective invention, but
with a laborious discovery of substantial forces of life.

But on its own, an encounter with substantial affectivities means nothing, if it
is not supplemented with a selective gesture. Despite its onto-epistemological
focus, Spinoza called his magnum opus the Ethics, for what interested him was
to make conceivable new ways of being and thinking, insofar as this conception
makes way for a new ethos of surfing and curating one’s own encounters in life.
This means, at its core, Ethics is an exploration about how to harness substan-
tial affectivities from everyday encounters, and select empowering compositions
over weakening ones (E4Pref ). This is Spinoza’s ethico-aesthetic journey, in
which the art of living and the life of art tend to become two expressions of one
and the same reality.5 In other words, Spinoza’s ethics of curating one’s own life
runs parallel to his aesthetics of curating the life of artistic and architectural mo-
dalities. But how does this curation, this selective gesture function? Once artists
and architects come to notice substantial affectivities, they start supplementing
their discovery with activities of vigilance and selection; they recognize different
levels of magnitude and luminescence, capture them according to their radiance,
enfold them according to their intensities, and channel them according to their
potence (potentia) towards the genesis of their aesthetic production.6 Paul Klee,
the modernist abstract painter, addresses a shared problem with Spinoza, when
he defines this relationship as follows: “Our pounding heart drives us down, deep
down to the source of all,” but “what springs from this source...must be taken
seriously only if it unites with the proper creative means to form a work of art”
(Klee, 1966: 51). Subterranean encounters are incorporated into aesthetic pro-
ductions only if they can be captured via creative selections. And for this reason,
artists and architects capture topological curvatures underlying topographical
landscapes; they take in subsisting forces of life; they channel radiant affectiv-
ities to pass through their alembic. All to prepare the generative conditions of
their artwork-in-the-making. All to affirm the blending of the art of living and the
life of art.

But who are these artists; who are these architects? Are they autonomous subjects
or privileged authors, who command substantial affectivities from above, and
create aesthetic artifacts with their omnipotent will? They are not, in Spinoza’s
aesthetics. For Spinoza argues that individuals, whether artists or architects,
are not discrete, self-contained subjects, but entangled modalities that expand
and contract via dynamic interactions within a distributed network of affective
agencies. That is, if two or more modalities come to share compatible rhythms
of existence, they might as well constitute a novel collective modality with emer-
gent capacities of its own (E2P13Def ). This means that an artist or an architect is
never a solitary subject, but an enmeshed multiplicity, made of human bodies
and minds, painting brushes and drawing pens, canvases and blueprints, artist
studios and architectural offices, cultural inputs and economic exchanges, and
all the common habits, specific discourses, and singular techniques emerging
out of these interactions. Spinoza’s philosophy neither endows aesthetic authors
sacred roles and transcendent thrones, nor professes the death of the author by
reactively rushing to the opposite pole, but presents nuanced ways of distribut-
ing agency and authorship within dynamic milieus.7 This conception implies

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that the author of an aesthetic production is not a human subject; it is not an
entity, but an affective activity: a distributed network of aesthetic agencies and
substantial affectivities, an entangled event evolving through the interaction of
artists, architects, and all the actors that come to affect and be affected by this
creative process. From Spinoza’s peculiar lens, all modalities are aesthetic au-
thors, albeit with different capabilities.

II. Complicating affections

As substantial affectivities are implicated into aesthetic production, another
process emerges en route, a process of complication—as in plicating together,
as in folding affectivities into complex compositions. In Spinoza’s terminology,
this process deals with modal affections (affectio). Modal affections are trans-in-
dividual encounters, in which the activity of an affecting modality, an external
cause, is enveloped by and transcribed in the affected modality as an affective
trace (E2P16). During this process, artists and architects complicate substantial
affectivities by expressing them via modal affections. Through their creative ex-
change with canvases, constructs, and rhythms in the making, they orchestrate
artistic sensations, architectural formations, and musical compositions. This is
the stage of transmuting subterranean forces into terrestrial relations, the stage
of expressing topological dynamics via topographical gestures, the stage of going
back and forth between immaterial relations and material expressions.

At this stage, artists and architects transform the vitality of their initial encoun-
ters into aesthetic affections expressible within their specific medium. Yet there
is a danger here, the danger of complicating via reduction rather than contrac-
tion. If the vitality of substantial affectivities is reduced while being translated
into lines and colours, into sounds and rhythms, into forms and materials, then
the artwork suffers, loses its intensity, becomes weakened. Reduction comes in
many guises, diluting the intensity of aesthetic production. Imitative techniques
may reduce artworks to derivative copies; symbolic representations may subordi-
nate them into carriers of meanings external to their mode of existence; seductive
clichés may curb their exuberance by channelling them towards paths already
taken. According to Spinoza, moving beyond inadequate comprehension and
reduction can only be attained via contemplating substantial affectivities, imma-
nently, by contracting and expressing them in modal affections (E5P36). Artists
and architects always run the risk of limiting substantial forces of life with weak-
ening transformations, whereas their primary pursuit is to contract affectivities
without depriving them of their singular intensity. John Cage, the experimental
composer and music theorist, shares this insight of expressive contraction, as
he argues that the musician’s role is to “give up the desire to control sound,” so
as to “set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than ve-
hicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments,” which is an
affirmation of sounds in their substantial intensity, and hence, “an affirmation of
life” (Cage, 1961: 10–12). This is the latent ethos underlying processes of complica-
tion from the viewpoint of Spinoza’s aesthetics: an affective transformation that,
rather than reducing and subjugating life forces, affirms and contracts them.

During aesthetic complication, contracting and transforming substantial af-
fectivities run parallel to experiments in constructing and composing modal
affections. Composing modal affections on a specific artistic medium is the

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moment when the infinite speed of substantial affectivities finds a characteristic
rhythm in finitude. Only by framing an acquired portion of chaos, by marking
a partial multiplicity of substantial affectivities, works of art and architecture
can contract the infinite, immanently, in a finite composition. This composi-
tion amounts to an aesthetic artefact’s singular potence, characteristic rhythm,
or conatus in Spinoza’s words, which constitutes its mode of existence, affective
capacities, and what its body can and cannot do in everyday relations (E2P13,
E3P6–7). Artists and architects compose artworks and architectural constructs
by way of framing their web of affective interactions. During this act of framing,
however, a new danger arises, the danger of assuming the frame of composition
an absolute limit that confines affections, rather than a permeable interface that
catalyses contracted forces to open themselves up from within. For Spinoza,
the characteristic rhythm or conative potence of an individual modality does
not amount to, as is sometimes interpreted, an inward-looking mechanism
foregrounding self-preservation and conservative autonomy. Rather, cona-
tive potence means the capability of an individual modality to open itself up to
outside forces, affect and be affected by its environment, endure internal fluctu-
ations and surf external oscillations, while at the same time acting and persisting
in its own dynamic mode of being.8 Spinoza’s memorable remark, that “nobody
as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities: that is, nobody as yet
has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do” can be interpret-
ed, not only as a frontal attack against mental supremacy over bodily experience,
but also as a novel way of envisioning bodily capabilities in affective and conative
terms (E3P2S). We cannot know what the body of an aesthetic artefact can and
cannot do, because its infinite capacities are actualized in finitude only through
affective interactions with other bodies. Accordingly, an individual artwork or
architectural construct cannot be limited with pre-given properties or reduced
to fixed modes of behaviour—despite how much effort goes into these activities
of limiting and fixing—because its capacities, tendencies, and affects will un-
fold only through trans-individual interactions on the fly. This means that each
interaction with a work of art or architecture harbours the potential to unravel
emergent capabilities beyond our initial predictions. Cedric Price, the eccentric
architect of postwar England, addresses a shared problem with Spinoza, when he
argues for “calculated uncertainty” in architecture, which means affirming and
augmenting affective openness of spatial interactions, rather than limiting and
controlling them.9 Calculated, because there is, indeed, a finite frame of com-
position. Yet what is calculated is uncertainty; what is composed is openness of
affective interactions; what is pursued is rendering open-ended relations as gen-
erative and empowering as possible. For Spinoza, this affective experimentation
constitutes our ethico-aesthetic journey in life: pushing the limits of our power
always to new heights, opening up to as many affective relations as possible, and
rendering these affections, to the best of our capability, empowering interactions
for all the parties involved (E5P39–40).

The agency of an artwork-in-the-making makes itself felt to its artist the most
during the process of complication. For an artwork is not a passive surface that
registers the transcendent imposition of an artist’s will, nor is an architectur-
al construct a neutral container shaped by the autarchic order of an architect’s
pre-conceived plan. At every turn during the process of composition, an art-
work-in-the-making renders unforeseen trajectories visible, develops deflecting
resistances to certain approaches, reveals enticing tendencies for certain others.

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Francis Bacon, the painter of affectively charged raw imagery, argues that each
painting “has a life completely of its own,” and adds: “In the way I work, I don’t in
fact know very often, what the paint will do, and it does many things, which are
very much better, than I could make it do” (Sylvester, 1987: 17). This gesture re-
minds us, once again, that aesthetic production is a developmental field charged
with a myriad of intersecting agencies. And in this sense, Spinoza’s ontology is
pan-affective in composition, acknowledging the agency of each and every mo-
dality and affirming their equal share in existing, acting, affecting, and making a
difference. This means artworks or architectural constructs are no longer devoid
of agency; no longer mere reflections of cultural conventions; no longer mere
receptacles mirroring their creators’ subjective intentions. From Spinoza’s aes-
thetic lens, artworks and architectural modalities are all singularly “alive, albeit
in different degrees” (E2P13S).

III. Explicating affects

As modal affections are complicated, yet another process of aesthetic production
emerges, the process of explication—as in plicating outwards, as in unfolding.
This is the time when artworks and architectural constructs stand up on their
own, present new sensations in expanded magnitude, and turn life back in on
itself. In Spinoza’s lexicon, aesthetic explication deals with affects (affectus).
Affects translate modal affections, or affective traces of external causes, into a
passage of power, into a modification of one’s existence (E3D3). That is, affects
are empowering or weakening transitions that result from modal encounters;
they are what come to traverse interacting parties during the expressive un-
packing of aesthetic experience. At this crucial point, we need to be careful not
to confuse affects with feelings or emotions in the conventional sense of these
terms. Rather, affects are unfolded expressions and explicated intensities of life
penetrating our bodies and minds, which we only subsequently translate in the
form of feelings. Affects are immanent modifications in our modes of being and
acting, as we come face to face with a painting that overwhelms us, with a musi-
cal piece that takes us over, with a literary text that cracks our skull open, with an
architectural building that astounds us.

Explication process begins, as soon as aesthetic artefacts come to attain their
singular modes of existence. A painting comes to life, an architectural construct
emerges into space, with complicated affections composed into lines and colours
or forms and materials, as these artefacts start unfolding substantial affectivi-
ties enveloped in their newly constituted body through affects and sensations.
As works of art and architecture come to interact with their audience, with us, a
myriad of affections surge forward, a selection of which infiltrate our body and
mind, affecting us, altering our power of existence, modifying our rhythm of life.
This is how activities of affecting and being affected bring together processes of
aesthetic production and aesthetic reception. Once we come face to face with aes-
thetic artefacts that perform an intensive explication, we witness an unfamiliar
affect taking hold of our body, sending shock waves through our senses, twisting
our nerves from within, showing us a sudden flash of what lies beneath. What is
curious about this affective impact is that it is not limited to a single moment.
Affects have their untimely dimension of their own; artworks and architectural
constructs produce ever-changing affects at different times, in different places,
in interaction with different individual and collective modalities (E4P9–10). This

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means that once works of art and architecture come to life, they no longer rely on
their initial producers or immediate audience for their indefinite existence. From
then on, they continue to express and unfold ever new affects. Artworks and ar-
chitectural constructs are monuments, neither to their conceivers, nor to their
perceivers, but to affective activity of life itself.

During aesthetic explication, the frame thrown over substantial affectivities is
deframed once again; artworks and architectural constructs present their affec-
tive potence back to excessive forces of life; aesthetic interaction blends into life
expressing and expanding its own affective repertoire. In Spinoza’s words, au-
to-affectivity of life by way of modal explication is called beatitude (beatitudo)
(E5P35–36). Beatitude has nothing to do with beauty in its conventional sense, as
beatitude does not emerge from subjective judgements or objective qualities as
beauty is believed to do (Ep. 54). Rather, beatitude is an affective procedure; it is
the expression of explicated affects becoming one with their substantial affectiv-
ities; the journey of infinite multiplicities passing through finite modalities and
reaching back to their substantial infinity. Artworks and architectural constructs
participate in beatitude, in ecstatic expansion of life, insofar as they render sensi-
ble affectivities hitherto insensible, make visible forces previously invisible, make
experienceable spatial relations that were formerly inexperienceable. With each
explication of unforeseen affects, and sensations unheard of in their emergent
intensity, life expands; works of art and architecture bring forth new ways of be-
ing; affective capacities of life are enriched. What aesthetic explication achieves,
as Virginia Woolf the modernist writer subtly puts, is to “saturate every atom,”
that is, “to put practically everything in; yet to saturate,” so as to return forces of
life more vigorously back to life itself.10 This is the primary struggle of aesthetic
production: how to harness imperceptible forces from substantial affectivities;
how to extract modal affections from infinite fluctuations; how to convert these
affections into intensified affects; how to compose these affects into aesthetic
constructs; and how to make these constructs instigate affective journeys of beati-
tude, by expressing and intensifying the superabundance of life itself.

Implication of substantial affectivities, complication of modal affections, expli-
cation of expressive affects.11 Enduring an overwhelming exposure, constituting
a complex composure, orchestrating an explosive release. For centuries now,
scholars and commentators have pointed out that Spinoza does not pay atten-
tion to conventional aesthetics from the viewpoint of subjects or objects.12 And
I am willing to grant that this is largely right. But what they have overlooked are
latent seeds of a different aesthetic theory that moves not only beyond aesthetic
judgements made by ready-made mental faculties of autonomous subjects, but
also beyond aesthetic values found inherent to essential qualities of independent
objects. Spinoza’s aesthetic theory, rather, grounds itself on affective interactions
immanent to and distributed within the interlacing of substantial and modal
fields, which includes the agencies of both subject-based and object-based actors,
yet is irreducible to one, or the other, or even both together. This is an aesthet-
ic theory grounded on what goes in-between dimensions, processes, agencies,
and milieus; an aesthetic theory of relationality, interactivity, and affectivity.
Spinoza’s philosophy potentiates affective aesthetics, not from the viewpoint of
subjects or objects, but, in his subtle words, sub specie aeternitatis; that is, aes-
thetics from the viewpoint of life (E4P38, E5P29–36).13

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Morrison, J. (1989). Why Spinoza
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Price, C., & Littlewood, J. (1968).
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Rice, L. (1996). Spinoza’s
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ENDNOTES

1 For English translations, I will
use, and modify as necessary,
the works of Samuel Shirley and
Edwin Curley (Spinoza, 2002)
(Spinoza, 1985, 2016), while
referring to Lexicon Spinozanum
by Boscherini for close reading of
Latin terms (Boscherini, 1970).

2 For the limited scholarship
on Spinoza’s aesthetics, see, for
starters: Schlerath (1920), Mignini
(1981), Rice (1996), and Gatens
(2015). See also the chapters
on art and architecture in Beth
Lord’s edited books (2015 and
2018). Finally, Deleuze’s peculiar
aesthetic theory that operates via
dual conceptions of percepts and
affects (as in What is philosophy?,
1994) or affections and affects
(in his books on Spinoza, 1988
and 1990) can be deemed to
largely flourish on Spinoza’s
affective grounds (while partially
drawing from Nietzschean
aesthetics, phenomenological
trajectories like that of Maldiney,
and his own singular tendencies).
So, although Deleuze already
connected certain dots and
laid some of the groundwork for
unpacking Spinoza’s aesthetics
for which I am grateful, what I
construct in this paper, in the
form of a tripartite affective
system (implicating substantial
affectivities, complicating
affections, and explicating
affects) is not based on Deleuze’s
dual constructions or any other
previous scholarship on Spinoza’s
aesthetics (Deleuze & Guattari,
1994).

Spinoza’s affective aesthetics: Art and architecture from the viewpoint of life T H E A R T S O F S P I N O Z A
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3 For the sake of a concise
introduction to Spinoza’s
aesthetics, this paper focuses
less on operational singularity
of each aesthetic field (albeit
implicitly laying the groundwork
for this future analysis),
and more on how art and
architecture constitute a single
continuum when it comes to
affective processes of aesthetic
construction and perception.

4 In E1D5 Spinoza says: “By
modality, I mean substantial
affectivities [substantiae
affectiones], or that which exists
in, and is conceived through,
something other than itself.” This
notion, substantiae affectiones,
is highly overlooked in Spinoza
scholarship: it is usually translated
either as “modifications of
substance” (as in Elwes), or
“affections of substance” (as in
Curley and Shirley), and reduced
to being equivalent to modalities.
Yet, while trying to establish the
primary distinction between
substance and modalities,
Spinoza is making a further
conceptual gesture here. He
defines substantial affectivities
not as modalities themselves
in the modal dimension, but as
the self-causation of substance
[causa sui], as expressed in
the modal dimension. That is,
substantial affectivities are
substance affecting itself, which
also equates, by way of immanent
causation, to modalities. So,
substantial affectivities as self-
causation and self-affectivity of
substance (1), is formally distinct
from yet immanently expressed
by and as modal existence (2).
Hence, developing substantial
affectivity as a full-fledged
concept grounded on this subtle
distinction promises interesting
insights into Spinoza’s latent
aesthetics. For this reason,
I am translating substantiae
affectiones, as substantial
affectivities deliberately, for
“affections of substance,”
“modifications of substance,” and
“substantial affections” can be
very confusing to readers who
are not well versed in Spinoza’s
philosophy, and might be easily
mixed up with “modal affections,”
which refer to efficient causes
and inter-individual relations,
as will be defined in the next
section. Therefore, distinguishing
substantial affectivities from
modal affections is a task as

crucial as distinguishing modal
affections from affects. By doing
so, we arrive at the curious trilogy
of affectivities, affections, and
affects.

5 To see the development of this
argument about the art of living
(ars vivendi) being Spinoza’s
aesthetic motor, see Gatens
(2015) and Mignini (1981).

6 Spinoza concept of potence
(potentia) corresponds to the
definition of a modality by what
it can do, or set of potentialities
that define an entity’s capability of
action and modification (potentia
agendi, or vis existendi).

7 For the modern evolution of
discussions on authorship, see for
starters: Benjamin (1970), Barthes
(1977), Foucault (1984), and
Certeau (1988).

8 See Wolfson for how Spinoza
expands the meaning of conatus
to all human and nonhuman
modalities while previously, from
Stoicism to Hobbes, it was only
reserved for humans and animals
(Wolfson, 1969: 195-201). And see
Deleuze for an interpretation that
does justice to Spinoza’s dynamic
conception of conatus (Deleuze,
1990: 230–31; 1988: 98–102).

9 Cedric Price articulates
his concept of calculated
uncertainty at the concluding
remarks of a speech called “Has
the architectural profession
a future?” that he gave at AA,
London, in 1975: “What worries
me is that our profession doesn’t
like the idea of uncertainty. If
something is uncertain, they
call it crisis and panic... Now
unless architecture realizes that
calculated uncertainty is one
of the great generators of what
it should be doing in the future,
then I think the profession has no
future. But I think, architecture
has one. Thank you.” To witness
the epitome of Price’s approach
to architecture, see his Fun
Palace project (1963-74), which
explores how architecture can not
only undergo, but also instigate
constant change with the help of
user potentiation and cybernetic
intelligence (Price & Littlewood,
1968).

10 This entry is from Woolf ’s
diaries, dated “Wednesday,
November 28th, 1928” (Woolf,
1980: 209-210). In his aesthetic
discussions, Deleuze likes to often
refer to this passage as well, as

part of his idiosyncratic strategy
of revealing how artists are as
intuitive of affective operations as
philosophers, albeit with unique
sensitivities of their own.

11 The conceptual triad of
implication-complication-
explication addresses the
problems of ontological
individuation and the relationship
of Being and beings, which
has a long history of evolution
in Western philosophy before
Spinoza radicalized it in his own
work. The latent seeds of these
concepts lie in the Neoplatonic
problem of emanation of the
One and participation of the
many, developed by Plotinus, and
published by his student Porphyry
in Enneads (ca. 270). Following
this trajectory, Boethius applied
the terms comprehendere
and complectiri to unity and
eternity of Being in Consolation
of Philosophy (De consolatione
philosophiae, 523 A.D.), which are
in turn subordinately unfolded
as plurality and temporality of
beings. In the following centuries,
Boethius’s commentators
developed his conceptual
couple of complicatio-explicatio,
culminating in the rigorous
teachings of Ecole de Chartres in
the twelfth century. Inheriting this
conceptual mechanism of folding
from the school of Chartres
but channeling it away from
emanation towards immanence,
Nicholas of Cusa argued in Bk.
II, Ch.3 of On learned ignorance
(De docta ignorantia, 1440) that
“God is the enfolding of all things
in that all things are in him; and he
is the unfolding of all things in that
he is in all things.” Finally, bringing
together a variety of sources from
Neoplatonism and Cartesianism
to radical Abrahamic and
Scholastic traditions, Spinoza
pushed this relationship to its
own limit by grounding it on
absolute immanence. With
Spinoza’s radical gesture, which
was most rigorously uncovered
and developed by Gilles Deleuze,
the successive and hierarchical
emanation of Neoplatonism gave
way to adequate expression and
immediate co-presence of three
movements: modal beings, while
remaining in substance, implicate
(imply, involve) and explicate
(explain, express) substance, and
substance, while remaining in
itself, complicate (comprehend,
contain) modal beings (TTP, ch.

4). By focusing on the conceptual
triad of implication-complication-
explication, this paper argues
that Spinoza’s conception of
ontological individuation runs
parallel to his conception of
aesthetic individuation. For more
information on this conceptual
triad, see Plotinus (1989),
Boethius (2008), Cusa (2001),
Deleuze (1988: 68-69).

12 See especially how Morrison
(1989), based on his rationalist
reading, goes as far as declaring
that Spinoza cannot have an
aesthetic theory, as he is not
interested in subjective intentions
and judgements.

13 Sub specie aeternitatis is
usually translated in Spinoza
scholarship as “from the
viewpoint of eternity.” What
Spinoza means with this term,
however, is to see things from the
viewpoint of substantial forces of
life, or which amounts to the same
thing, from the viewpoint of how
things are immanently generated,
from the viewpoint of life. And
by “life” here, in the title, and in
the entire text, I follow Spinoza’s
definition from Metaphysical
thoughts, in which he equates life
both to conative potence of each
modality and to the substantial
continuity of God or Nature
itself: “So we understand by life,
the force through which things
persevere in their own being,” and
“because that force is different
from the things themselves,
we say properly that things
themselves have life,” and hence:
“So they speak best who call
God life…. God is life, and is not
distinguished from life….” (CM 2.6
/ G1:260).