Deleuze’s Spinozist Gambler: Lessons on Games of Chance

Date

2026-02-01

Author

Aksoy, Ilgin
Shores, Corry Michael

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At the end of Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza of 1980–1981, he asks his students to “imagine a Spinozist gambler.” Yet he ends the course offering few clues about how to picture this figure. Here we provide an interpretation of the Spinozist gambler based on both its Spinozist conceptual context and its place in Deleuze’s broader philosophy of gambling play. Accordingly, we examine Spinozist gambling in terms of Deleuze’s account of Spinoza’s three types of knowledge, and we compare the Spinozist gambler to Deleuze’s more prominent figure of the Nietzschean dice-thrower. We thereby offer a tripartite characterization of the Spinozist gambler following its place in Spinoza’s epistemology, which we further refine by examining Deleuze’s comments on indeterminism in Spinoza and Nietzsche. We argue that, according to Deleuze, the Spinozist gambler controls chance through rational organization, whereas the Nietzschean gambler affirms and embraces chance itself. And by means of this analysis, we advance our knowledge of both Deleuze’s Spinozism and his philosophy of play.

Subject Keywords

Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, gambling, Gilles Deleuze, indeterminism, play, Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge

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https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=105031270468&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118895

Collections

Department of Philosophy, Article