Constructing a New Body Poetics: Deleuze's Rewriting of Spinoza's Theory.

In the 1960s, there was an upsurge for the study of Spinoza in French ideological circles. Spinoza regarded God as a kind of infinite power and divided it into multiple modifications of capacity, differentiation, and unevenness based on the modes of substance, attribute, and shape. As one of these modifications, body is also a force of differentiation and multiplication. Deleuze obtained the ideological resources from Spinoza and tried to construct a kind of different, intense and dynamic body poetics. Therefore, the body is no longer a degenerate puppet set up by the soul. In a state of self-existence, self-reproduction, and constant nomadizing, the body itself processes enormous but unknown potential. While staying in such a state, different bodies may demonstrate their own multiple changes and form a deterritorial and tuberous multiploid through mutual accommodation, mutual influence, and reorganization. A body like this is no longer that tamed beast in the conflict of body and soul. Instead, it is an ever generating and endlessly thriving force of desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]