Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

simplest thing can reveal infinity. In this sense the fart is
a relatively innocuous example, for the book will make
the same point about racist sex-play, sex with animals,
incestuous and non-incestuous pedophilia, gerontophilia,
coprophilia, etc. In all these things human behaviour simply
takes its place with everything else as a part of Nature, a
Nature ordered through its immanent ethics of joy and
sadness, of active and passive passions, of the increase and
decrease of power.
The order of Nature, as the Preface to Part III of the
Ethics makes clear (and as Eric reads a little further on), is
the cause of all things and determines what happens to
us, rather than any ‘vice of human nature’ that we might
‘bewail, or disdain, or (as usually happens) cure’ (EIII
Pref., quoted 708). Nature is always already perfect, and in
behaving ethically – in giving and receiving joy – we come
to know it more completely. This is a continual theme of
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which repeatedly
employs the Spinozian device of the common notion.
According to Spinoza a joyful and active affect arises from
my body’s action on another, one that increases my power
to act. This is the first kind of knowledge, and motivates
almost all the actions of the book, from singular sexual
exchanges to the founding and running of the Dump by
the black gay millionaire Robert Kyle. When, however,
I understand that my joyful affect arises because I share
something essential with what it is I affect (and in particular
an increase in power) – what Spinoza terms a ‘common
notion’ – then I understand modal essence through the
second type of knowledge, and so understand more of
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