from Hypatia Volume 14, Number 1

A Queer Supplement: Reading Spinoza after Grosz

CATHERINE MARY DALE

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This article critiques Elizabeth Grosz's understanding that queer theory is unproductive insofar as it disrupts the specific identities of gay and lesbian. Reconsidering ideas about desire, the body, and identity that Grosz takes from Gilles Deleuze's work on Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza, this essay argues that, despite her productive reworking of homophobia in terms of "active" and "reactive" forces, Grosz's application of Spinoza is only partial. Focusing on Spinoza's evaluation of bodies, the essay both critiques Grosz's approach to experimental desire and observes Spinozist preoccupations in order to talk about the experimental body. It concludes that if Grosz were to attend more seriously to the Spinozist imperative to analyze a body in terms of its capabilities-- that is, its power to be affected--the epistemological basis of her argument would change. It would be difficult to dismiss the plurality and sensibility of a queer body or its challenge to lesbian and gay as the source of a primary identity.

Elizabeth Grosz begins "Experimental Desire" (1993) by defining the main features that constitute oppression in order to point out the peculiar oppression of homophobia. In order to talk about homophobia, Grosz turns to the seventeenth century rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza and his most ambivalent fan, Friedrich Nietzsche.¹ Briefly, Spinoza and Nietzsche are both concerned with a certain philosophical incomprehension of the body. They offer an alternative to viewing bodies (social and individual) as fixed identities. Through the models they enable, Grosz analyzes the operations of homophobia and the modes by which it judges the homosexual and the lesbian body.

Spinoza analyzes the affectivity of a body, while Nietzsche thinks of the body in terms of its forces. Spinoza and Nietzsche provide Grosz with a way of reevaluating the values of bodies and their relations by breaking bodies down into joyful and sad affects, and dominant and dominated forces. This means that Grosz can discuss homophobia in such a way that the details of its force and its affect highlight its slavish or weak character. While following Nietzsche's trajectory, Grosz's essay curiously makes only a partial reading of Spinoza. She focuses on Nietzschean forces and neglects Spinozist affects. The significance of this move is that an advanced notion of queer is ultimately dismissed. The question to be addressed therefore is: What implications would a fuller reading of Spinoza offer in terms of a theory of queer?

Forces

Unlike other kinds of oppression that do not separate a body and its actions, Grosz suggests that homophobia is precisely the oppression that does: it separates what a body is from what it can do, thus marking a difference "between an ontology and a pragmatics . . . " (Grosz 1995, 214). Gays and lesbians are "not just distinguished by sex, race, and class characteristics, but also by sexual desires and practices" (1995, 214). In order to appraise the conflicting relations operating within the oppression of homosexuality, Grosz uses Nietzsche's noble and slavish dynamic forces, discussing them, following Gilles Deleuze, as active and reactive forces (see Deleuze 1983). "Every relationship of forces constitutes a bodywhether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship. And this relationship is the fruit of chance, and for Nietzsche it appears as the most 'astonishing' thing, much more astonishing, in fact, than consciousness and spirit" (Grosz 1995, 215). Summarily, active forces are innocent, open, and aggressive, while reactive forces are cunning and obedient. An active force "moves in its direction without regard for anything other than its own free expansion, mindless of others" (1995, 215). Reactive forces, on the other hand, live "in modes of sensibility and sentiment"; they restrict chance and appear most significantly in religion, morality, and law (1995, 215). It must be remembered that a reactive force is also related to power, but its power can only be grasped in its relation--its reaction--to superior or active forces. Reactive forces are separate from what they can do, "they separate a force from its effects through the relation of myth, symbolism, fantasy, and falsification" (1995, 215). For example, the oppression of homophobia separates the homosexual body from its effects because it is what the homosexual body does, and not what it is, that is considered objectionable. Grosz then adds a Spinozist formula: what is done is inseparable from the being of the body that does it.² The combination of Spinoza and Nietzsche demonstrates how the reactive forces of homophobia convert the expansive and active forces of a homosexual body into an identity, reducing that body to what it is and separating it from what it can do.

Grosz suggests that resistant and outlawed sexualities such as gay and lesbian are most often regarded as reactive forces because they struggle against normalization, while heterosexuality is commonly viewed as an active force with the power to command and oppress. Effectively reversing these opinions, Grosz names homophobia and heterosexism reactive forces "which function in part to prevent alternatives, to negate them and to ruminate on how to destroy them; [while] gay and lesbian sexualities and lifestyles can be seen as innovative, inventive, productive, and thus active insofar as they aim at their own pleasures, their own distributions, their own free expansion" (1995, 216). But as Grosz observes, the situation is more complicated: gay and lesbian identities can also be straight in the sense of maintaining the fixed and traditional status quo, for example, homosexual marriages and the setting up of nuclear families where nothing is new except the facts of gender. Similarly, heterosexual lives can abound in transgressions, defying the frames of the celebrated "couple" and the expectation of procreation. Within the composite individual, it becomes more complex again. "In each of us there are elements and impulses that strive for conformity and elements which seek instability and change" (1995, 216). Despite ramifying the sexual possibilities of identification, Grosz's argument still tends toward the maintenance of a strict binary foundation. Ultimately, Grosz's project is more interested in gay and lesbian identities than in the notion of a multiple order such as queer.

Queer Discriminations

For the purposes of this essay, queer is understood as a fluctuating and fluid arena rather than a cohesive and fixed community. In this sense, solid identities such as gay and lesbian are seen as regimenting the sexual diversity and singular relations that characterize queer. The power relations between gay and lesbian and queer are complicated through the introduction of active and reactive forces. The heterosexual power relations that structure lesbian and gay as deviations from a moral and legal path are paralleled by a lesbian and gay structuring of queer in much the same way. In this sense, queer is a crowded and clamorous force disrupting Grosz's system of gay and lesbian bodies, just as the latter continues its legacy of disrupting heterosexuality. Grosz points out that change, in the form of gay and lesbian identities, is dangerous to reactive forces. But if, as this essay will suggest, Grosz's own resistance to queer is reactive, this is because queer is dangerous twice: first, to gay and lesbian identities; second, to normative heterosexuality. Grosz's argument is reactive and in a certain sense reactionary because it aims to maintain the separate identities of gay and lesbian, which it regards as providing a cohesive and socially intelligible order unlike queer, whose very plurality determines its failure as a singular object of study.

In contrast to her singular caution about queer's usefulness, Grosz's characterizations of queer are far less succinct, referring, as she does, to a number of conflicting definitions. For example, she writes, "gays, lesbians and other queers" (1995, 216), which implies that queer is both a parallel construction to gay and lesbian and a nonexclusive alternative. Conversely, Grosz's "queers of whatever type" suggests that queer is a term all inclusive of gays, lesbians, and significant others (1995, 216). This ambivalence toward the meaning or position of queer is developed in a section on "Pleasures," where Grosz declares that in terms of sexual specificity and sexual difference she "can no longer afford to generalize about 'queerness': this term covers a vast range of sexual practices, partners, aims, and objects (heterosexual as well as homosexual). The term 'queer' as it is currently used is basically a reactive category that sees itself in opposition to a straight norm. . . . These others--deviant sexual practices of whatever kind--may find that they share very little in common with each other (indeed they may be the site of profound tension and contradiction)" (1995, 219). Grosz's criticism separates the internal from the external: queer is too broadly defined to maintain a cohesive political agenda both with outside groups and within its own group. Indeed, Grosz even uses queer as a multifarious lever of opposition against which she raises her analyses of single sexual desires. According to Grosz, the vastness of queer means that it cannot avoid making sweeping claims about categories or typologies of oppressions.³ This view emerges when Grosz wants to analyze specific sexualities. "I find it less useful to talk about queerness or even gayness when theorising sexed bodies and their sexual relations than specifying at least broadly the kinds of bodies and desires in question" (1995, 219). In critiquing queer's lack of specificity, Grosz remains committed to locating both sexual difference and the sex of the love object as factors that crucially underpin lesbian and gay political projects. But these factors become a problem when demands for the right to same-sex relations, which do not arise from strictly gay or lesbian identities, for example, sadomasochist relations, are susceptible to charges of political illegitimacy. When Grosz talks about "[t]he proliferation of sexualities beyond the notion of two" she exclaims parenthetically, "the assertion of two [gay and lesbian] has been difficult enough" (1995, 250 n.1), implying that an unfolding of something queer will be too hard and more than enough. In summary, it appears that Grosz assumes that queer identity requires the same treatment and operates by the same political and social methods as gay and lesbian. Hence her ideas about the failure of queer emerge from a principle of dualism rather than multiplicity.

But there is an alternative view of queer as a term productive of positive difference. A positive expression of difference is a difference that is not structured by negation. This pure difference expresses the immanence of the multiple and the one, rather than the eminence of this over that, of one or many, of identity or chaos. Pure difference is the positive play of all events (effects) and their productions. There is no essential identity nor loss or lack, only affirmation. Thus queer denotes the inclusion of its own difference. For example, queer includes gay and lesbian at the same time as it distinguishes them from each other and from itself. As a multiplicity queer is equated with an indeterminate number of bodies or groups at any given time, and these appear as aleatory and undetermined potential.⁴ In acknowledging its difference from itself, queer upsets the usual mechanisms of social recognition: social identity implies the division of potential social relations into designated sets and individuals. In short, queer can violently deny identity simply because it is without the position or mode of being that normally characterizes things in general, structural, and analogous terms. In Spinoza's Ethics, distinctions between bodies are not hierarchical because the judgment of bodies is no longer based on a morality of superior and inferior species or genus; instead, two bodies may have something else in common. Consequently, difference is not based on negation (a lesbian is not queer because she is inextricably lesbian), nor analogy (a lesbian is queer because she is like a gay man or a transsexual in this or that characteristic, for example, in her sexual deviance), nor transcendence (a lesbian is not God (Nature) but represents something of God's Substance). Queer does not elide gay and lesbian in favor of liberating an open door policy that would destroy all definition. Rather, it apprehends new alliances and irreconcilable differences and treats them as no less than productive. The structure of queer is indeed "a site of profound tension and contradiction" (Grosz 1995, 219), but it is more inclined toward the difficult task of relinquishing the expectation of communitythe expectation that any group that shares the same name must also acknowledge the same interests and an overt sense of commonality. For example, feminist concerns often clash with queer agendas; certain sectors of feminism criticize queer for not only overlooking the specific issues of women (gender), but of destroying them in favor of relations (sexuality). The multiplicity of a queer body raises the question of legitimacy and political loyalty because it struggles with the exclusive and unifying aspects of identifying with any single group.

Now, when Grosz declares that there "is both power and danger posed by lesbian and gay sexual relations: that what one does, how one does it, with whom and with what effects are ontologically open questions, that sexuality in and for all of us is fundamentally provisional, tenuous, mobile . . . " (1995, 227), she could as easily be talking about queer. The description of a sexuality that challenges the normative and the complacent by maintaining a positive ambiguity and an unstable identity easily applies to queer, even more so. Similarly, when Grosz characterizes an active force as proceeding "without regard for anything other than its own free expansion, mindless of others" (1995, 215), does this not also describe queer? To read queer as simply reactive means to overlook its incessant and self-proliferating production of desire.

Although Grosz does affirm that dispersed polysexuality frees identity from its fixed position, she is still more concerned about the misuse of the term queer. As a rapidly expanding domain Grosz fears that queer's lack of specific categories will be exploited by "extreme forms of heterosexual and patriarchal power games" (1995, 24950 n.1). These powers will manipulate the terms under which queer operates, allowing certain "undesirables" to share the banner of oppression under which gays and lesbians are organized.

Grosz's fears have a paranoid quality most evident in her own manipulation of sexual categories. In an extended footnote on "queer theory," Grosz points out that "[h]eterosexual sadists, pederasts, fetishists, pornographers, pimps, voyeurs all suffer from social sanctions" (1995, 24950 n.1). Separately she discusses her concerns over the inclusion of "bisexuality, heterosexual transvesticism, transsexualism, and sado-masochistic heterosexuality" (1995, 24950 n.1). These points were included as both a list of sexual minorities and a list of purportedly ignoble impostors in Grosz's conference paper. Ironically, Grosz's categories display the very lack of discrimination she is wary of in queer. A curious aspect of her two classifications is that pederasts, fetishists, pornographers, pimps, and voyeurs are viewed as exclusively sexual, albeit disgraceful, identities; alternative concretions are overlooked. These "types" are also expressions of commercialism and criminality, and the quotidian actualization of a way of life. On the other hand, bisexual, heterosexual transvestitism, transsexualism, and sadomasochistic heterosexuality are activities usually associated with variations on the crisscrossing of sexual identities, but these are also ways of life. The argument against sex criminals and entrepreneurs is directed at their ability to claim identities as members of the oppressed, while the trans-sex group is listed in order to demonstrate the confused blurring of sexual identity perpetuated by queer. And yet, although the first group appears most obviously sinister, in terms of Grosz's overall argument, it is not necessarily the most dangerous of the two lists. Given the second group's proximity to a critique of queer, Grosz seems more concerned to reveal and emphasize their inimical power. After all, it is the trans-sex group that is more likely to contaminate the properties of gay and lesbian via its putative imitation and disregard for their respective demarcations. Grosz already regards the commercial and criminal series as distant from gay and lesbian, and as appearing to serve not so much as a threat to gay and lesbian but as useful in providing the block of reasoning upon which to lay suspicion against the trans-sex series. In discussing the appropriation of the label of oppression, Grosz's argument implies the existence of authentic and inauthentic claims to oppression, an argument which is prevalent in identity politics. In this logic, the more ambiguous or fluid a group--for example, sadomasochists who identify as sadomasochists and not as lesbian, gay, or heterosexual--the less legitimate its identity.

Detail

Like Deleuze, Grosz begins using Nietzschean forces by first invoking Spinoza's "declaration of ignorance," about what a body is capable of (Deleuze 1988, 18). Again, like Deleuze, she considers bodies as consisting of multifaceted and complex series of power, which in turn consist of irreducible active and reactive forces. However, Grosz fails to further an affirmation of queer when she leaves aside her initial argument about "what a body can do," failing to extend it into an investigation of Spinozist affectivity. Affectivity refers to a Spinozist method of defining a body by its power to affect and be affected. Incidentally, at the level of analysis, a body can be anything, "it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity" (Deleuze 1988, 127). Spinoza cites two kinds of affects (the modifications or changes made through the encounter with another body): actions, where a body is its own cause of action generated from internal affects; and passions, where a body is acted upon by external bodies and where actions or effects are produced through the relations between bodies. Passions are the most common kind of affects. They arise through the parallel mind's and body's inadequate knowledge and are also comprised of two kinds: sad and joyful. When a body enters into good relations with our body, that is, when relations with another body increase our powers of acting, Spinoza calls this passion joyful.

Alternatively, when we encounter a body that decomposes us, diminishing our power of acting, he calls this passion sad. Summarily, it is through relations with other bodies that our power becomes added or subtracted. By analyzing agreeable and disagreeable relations between bodies, Spinoza's method invents a new ontology for the body and, thus, for identity. The practice of viewing a body by breaking it down or dissembling it in order to appraise its ability to act makes it impossible to maintain the domination and authority of single primary identities. Moira Gatens's "Power, Ethics and Sexual Imaginaries," (1996) offers a corrective to Grosz's inattention to Spinozist detail. Gatens analyzes sexual difference using the complexity of a Spinozist classification of bodies in order to distinguish between profitable and damaging sexual relations. As Gatens explains, this materialist taxonomy need not refer solely to biology: a person's capacity is determined by the body, "but also by everything which makes up the context in which that body is acted upon and acts" (1996, 131).⁵ Gatens's Spinozist reading rearranges the differences between the sexes. She demonstrates that when individuals are judged by their affective context and composition the idea that to be means to be sexed disappears. Sexual reductionism "belongs to a system of classifications (genus, species, kind) that is quite foreign to Spinoza's thought" (1996, 131). For example, in a Spinozist system, a man and woman may have more in

common depending on context, than two men and two women.⁶ As noted earlier, Spinoza's taxonomies are relevant to minority groups, where an individual will align itself with a particular group, for example, where lesbian, gay or straight s/m practitioners choose to identify primarily as and with s/m, rather than with lesbian, homosexual, or heterosexual. As a result, political solidarity is called into questioning the structures that frame it as a group.

Spinoza's actions and passions are practical additions to Grosz's argument; his practical philosophy is suited to the politics of the social body, in particular to Grosz's discussion of gay and lesbian identities. This is primarily because Spinoza's material philosophy makes provision for a local politics, while Nietzsche's forces are too easily co-opted as universal representations of types of identities. If Grosz were to adopt Spinoza's practical theories, the epistemological basis of her argument would change. Her omission of Spinoza's affects becomes especially problematic when she wants to talk about the social body and its agency rather than about large bodies of desire. In fact, it is precisely when Grosz introduces a specific lesbian desire and specific lesbian bodies that her argument would benefit most from the detailing of a Spinozist methodology. The missed question here is: What would a comprehensive Spinozian model do to lesbian or any other specific desire? On active and reactive forces, Deleuze writes "whatever the ambivalence of sense and values we cannot conclude that a reactive force becomes active by going to the limit of what it can do . . . when a reactive force drives to its ultimate consequence it does this in relation to negation, to the will to nothingness which serves as its motive force. Becoming active, on the contrary, presupposes the affinity of action and affirmation" (1983, 68). Unlike reactive forces, however, there is a potential for Spinoza's passions to go to the limit of their joyfulness and, in turn, experience something of active affections.⁷

To increase one's power of acting means to preserve and accumulate the affections of joyful passions. This entails that a body become affected in as many ways as possible. "Whatsoever disposes the human body that it can be affected in a great many ways, or renders it capable of affecting external bodies in a great many ways, is useful to man . . . " (Spinoza 1994, 221).

A Spinozist practice of joy presents the opportunity to be more specific about any body of affections because of the complexity of the passions and the way external relations affect them. When the body is affected with joy it "strives to imagine only those things which posit its power of acting" (Spinoza 1994, 18485).

The practical process of forming active affections is bridged by what Spinoza calls "common notions." Briefly, this process begins with the least general notions that two or more bodies share. This entails questioning the structure of a body by observing its relations with other bodies in order to ascertain what is common between them and thereby to enable their production of joyful affects. These affects are not passions but rather "active joys that join the first passions and then take their place" (Deleuze 1988, 56; emphasis added). Spinoza says that common notions are able to form even with bodies that do not agree in nature. In terms of the disparate nature of queer, the theory of common notions transforms queer as an identity into queer as a relation.

Relations

As a relation, queer is also a practice, a way or a manner of being. A manner of being is better expressed as a becoming rather than a being if we mean by the latter an unvarying identity. Where we have been using queer as a noun designating an identity, albeit an irregular one, using queer as an adverb transforms it into a practice. In addition, queer is sometimes used as a verb, albeit absurdly, for example, "to queer the human race," or "queering the town." As an adverb and a verb queer becomes active explicitly. It underscores what a body can do rather than what a body is.

Admittedly Grosz's purpose is to single out the oppression of gay men and lesbians by analyzing the forces that separate them from their power. But "gay and lesbian" unavoidably assume sexuality as identity rather than as the practice of bodies and their affects. It is in the area of relations between bodies that Spinoza provides the opportunity to theorize a queer body as a multiple open system. He provides a method for investigating a body as if it were an experiment. This experimental body is synonymous with the potential of queer. Due to Spinoza's attention to detail, however, queer resists becoming a part of what Grosz's argument regards as a lazy all-inclusive queer umbrella. Grosz suggests that the plurality of queer has become an obstacle to sexual identity, yet surely it is sexual difference that is the obstacle to the plurality of queer (Dale 1997, 155). Through the practical and detailed addition of Spinoza's affections, passions and actions enter the social body reconfiguring the sexes, transforming sexual relations into supraliminal sexual relations, and affirming that queer's openness is precisely its strength. Queer, like Spinoza's unknown body, involves an indefinite and unknowable system of distinctions of power. Moreover, because it is an indefinite system, it is continuously able to increase its relations with bodies, its joyful passions, and therefore, its power of acting.

If it is true that as a fluctuating and fluid system queer lacks discernment, this is not necessarily a defect. Queer is like a crowd: it remains open to speculation and in this sense it is futuristic, unpredictable, and full of the potential for unknown transformations. In this sense, the more solid identities, such as gay and lesbian, regiment the sexual diversity and singular relations that both transcend and characterize queer. The identification of sexed bodies and their relations amounts to a kind of crowd control. For example, the names lesbian and gay rise up out of the crowd to identify themselves, but this attempt to speak above the noise of the raucous crowd seems to silence the irritating but perhaps also profitable noise of confusion. One of the problems associated with thinking about queer is this tension between the multiplicity of sexual relations and individual names but also between queer's own clamor and its use as designating an identity.

Queer is an aesthetics of relations intent on securing good encounters by capitalizing on joyful passions. If queer is an embodiment of the future, it still remains to be seen whether queer has a future or is the future. In another sense, the future of queer is already the present because it is being debated now. One of the things to come from this debate is the proposal that sexual identification is incompatible with an ideal model of queer. Queer's own proper object is its movement and undetectable change, and identity breaks this up. Identity segments the undetectable continuity of queer's transformations. As queer's virtual feature the continuity of change is most accurately described as queer's aestheticism.

Grosz declares the importance of "the desire to enjoy, to experience, to make pleasure for its own sake" (1995, 227) rather than for a greater political reason, but she stops short of the extremism of such a stand by claiming it as "one but not the only trajectory or direction in the lives of sexed bodies" (Grosz 1995, 227). If it is important to make pleasure for its own sakepleasure signifying the augmentation of one's power to actthen the Spinozist accumulation of joyful passions and their conversion through common notions to active affects and adequate knowledge offers a practical and ethical definition of queer. The ethics of queer emphasizes the idea that ethics is not a stand but a way of life. Through his reading of Spinoza, Deleuze poses the ultimate ethical question: "How does one arrive at a maximum of joyful passions?" (Deleuze 1988, 28). Spinoza's Ethics is in many ways a practical manual offering a method for generating new ways of life. Queer advocates the creative action of desire advancing the notion of pleasure for its own sake.⁸ Reading Spinoza beyond Grosz's limited use of his work provides a framework for queer relations in their ardent quest for what a body is capable of. Spinozism enables a coherent theorization of queer as an inclusive, but not bland, system practiced by the differential constitution of a body, not as a fixed unit, but as, in, and with, a relation.

Notes

Thank you to Annamarie Jagose.

1. This essay primarily reads Spinoza's Ethics (in 1994). The central secondary text is Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Deleuze 1988). Grosz follows Deleuze's combination of Spinoza and Nietzsche in this volume. This study of Spinoza concentrates on his emphasis on communal social relations, and I develop this emphasis for its relevance to relations between various sexual identities and identity politics generally. Deleuze's larger study of Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1992) is consequently less relevant.

2. Indeed, for Spinoza, the mind is a thinking thing, while the body is an extending thing of the one reality or Substance. Unlike Descartes's dualism of mind and body, Spinoza is a monist. In his schema, there is only one substance. This substance has infinite attributes although we only know two: thought and extension. Attributes, in turn, have modes. The mind is a mode of thought, while matter or the body is a mode of extension.

3. See David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995, 626, 11213), Teresa de Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, An Introduction" (1991, iii), and Shelia Jeffreys, The Lesbian Heresy (1993, 113-14).

4. The synthesis of the multiple and the one is something that concerns both Spinoza and Deleuze's readings of Spinoza. Deleuze positions Spinoza against Descartes, whose dialectical reasoning limits difference to a series of dualistic antagonisms whereby difference is born by recognition, analogy, and identification of the same, of the one. In his introduction to Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Robert Hurley writes of Spinoza that "the historical problem was what to make of limited composites such as human beings, in their involvement with perfect, i.e., infinite, forces that make up the form known as God" (Deleuze 1988, i).

5. This is still inadequate knowledge for Spinoza, but he does not want to ignore ignorance because it is a part of human intelligibility.

6. Like Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd uses Spinoza to discuss sex differences as manifestations of power. She writes, "Spinozistic minds . . . are multi-faceted, reflecting the complexity of the bodies of which they are ideas" (1989, 21). Further, Lloyd says that although sex differences apply to minds no less than bodies for Spinoza, this "does not involve the affirmation of any male or female content, existing independently of operations of power" (1989, 21). The important thing is that Grosz still wants to judge a body by its gay-ness or lesbian-ness.

7. Spinoza's actions and passions are not completely transferable as Nietzschean active and reactive forces, but the aspect of the passions that separate a body from its power to act do share with reactive forces the activity of separating a body from what it can do.

8. This is also one of the criticisms directed at queer, its hedonism, and therefore, its supposed apoliticality. See, for example, Halperin (1995, 62-66, 112-13).

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---1988. Spinoza: Practical philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights.

---1992. Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone.

Gatens, Moira. 1996. Power, ethics and sexual imaginaries. New York: Routledge.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 1993. Experimental desire: Bodies and pleasures in queer theory. Paper read at conference on Sexualities: Public Discourse and Academic Knowledges, 7 Aug. at University of Melbourne, Australia.

---1995. Space, time and perversion. New York: Routledge.

Halperin, David. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Jeffreys, Sheila. 1993. The lesbian heresy. Melbourne: Spinifex.

Lauretis, Teresa de. 1991. Queer theory: Lesbian and gay sexualities, an introduction. differences 3 (2): iii.

Lloyd, Genevieve. 1989. Sex, gender and subjectivity. Australian Feminist Studies 10.

---1994. Part of nature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Spinoza, Baruch. 1994. The Spinoza reader. Ed. and Trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press.