This entry begins with Spinoza’s account of immanent causation. Ethics I, proposition 18 describes God as the immanent rather than transitive cause of things. Finite beings are not explained through a relation between an external creator and independent objects.
This does not erase differences among modes. Their determinate existence and relations still require explanation within nature, without an external governing standard.
Deleuze connects this account to capacities for action and the relations through which a life gains or loses power. Evaluating an encounter involves examining compositions and decompositions rather than applying a transcendent judgment.
The plane of immanence in Deleuze and Guattari’s later account of philosophy belongs to another context. It relates to Spinoza’s proposition without simply restating it. The itinerary moves from causation through ethical interpretation to conceptual reconstruction.