Chapter 6 Peace and Love (and Fuck) as the Foundation of the World; Spinoza’s Ethics in Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
In: Literature and the Encounter with ImmanenceSearch for other papers by Stephen Zepke in
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Abstract: In Samuel Delany’s recent utopian science-fiction novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders there is a moment perhaps a third into the book when the narrator, Eric, is given a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. Eric constantly returns to the book over the next 50 years of his life, puzzling, struggling, and then marveling over its contents as they increasingly become a part of his own narrative arc. The general thematic of Delany’s novel - utopian communities, politics understood as physical relationships, a life in Nature punctuated by mystical experience - can clearly be connected to aspects of Spinoza’s Ethics, but the relation between the two books is more than simply the one illustrating the other. Delany’s book is composed around and through Spinoza’s axiom’s of immanence, actualizing them in an ‘ethical’ narrative that draws on the popular genres of sci-fi, sentimental love story and pornographic novel. Delany explores a ‘plane of immanence’ extending Spinoza’s ethical philosophy into a pornographic love story, without ever abandoning one for the other, and always insisting upon their immanence.