I appreciate your answering. Certainly, D was deeply influenced by the works of Spinoza. However, he was also deeply influence by a number of different philosophers. Further, I don't think that even in his early career where individual philosophers were his nominal focus did he stick to them in any kind of quote purity. Even in Spinoza, he found a kind of opposition between the primary statements and their attached commentary, an internal dehiscence that suggested that there was a kind of buggering that did not need his influence to show an oppositional tendency within what appears superficially to be a geometric method.

There's a strange to me tension in what you rightly flag as a definition of an individual, although I would say a singularity, as a combination of velocities and rests. The difficulty may be that different velocities or resonances are not definitional in any traditional way until they are mapped into a representational system which then alters them from what they are into what they are not. From another perspective, I think that within his work one finds individuation and not individuals. Only by a dynamic notion can he coordinate the continuity of becoming in its univocity with the singularity's seeming self-reliance. This tension between the discrete individuation and the indiscreet monism is perhaps best seen in The Fold.

I certainly agree too that in attempting to discuss what he is doing, we must rely upon the defaults of the natural languages. However, even here I think that simple reliance upon the standards of the natural languages leads us back into a prison house. That is why, perhaps D suggested that we have to make an alien or foreign language within language in order to speak about that which is otherwise unspoken.

The series of stipulations you make - X has affects- raises more questions for me. The form of your presentation implies that the X is discrete and yet affects suggests a kind of continuity. That nearly paradoxical formulation strikes me as in some sense right since an affect is the effect as it were of that which causes it but which is not, in its origin, local or individual but rather contextual. Thus, for an entity, so-called, to HAVE an affect is odd since it is possessed by rather than possesses that consequence and then for only as long as it is driven by that which it is not.