Michael Hardt's Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy was a formative book for me in graduate school. Formative in the sense that it shaped my reading of Deleuze, but also in that it shaped my idea of what a book on a philosopher could or should do. What impressed me about Michael's book way back then is that he did the necessary work to excavate some of the concepts underlying Deleuze's books, not just Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, but also Dun Scotus and Hegel, while at the same time recognizing that Deleuze's work is not pointed towards the past, to its history, but to debates with such philosophers as Althusser and with such movements such as autonomy. It is rare to find a book that is equally comfortable discussing scholastics and Nanni Balestrini.
I thought of this book and this encounter when reading Gilah Kletenik's Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality. Kletenik's book can be understood to have two intertwining objectives; first, as the title suggests it is an attempt to trace the critique of "sovereignty" in Spinoza's thought. Sovereignty is understood to be multifaceted, ranging from the ontological sovereignty of God, to the anthropological sovereignty of humanity as a kingdom within a kingdom, to political sovereignty. This expansive sense of sovereignty, form ontology to politics, is justified by its second objective, situating Spinoza's thought within the trajectories of Jewish and Islamic philosophy that is its true source. As Kletenik writes, "In the rivulets of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy to which Spinoza is heir, the philosophical is political and the political is philosophical." In order to appreciate what is at stake in Spinoza's critique of sovereignty and his thought overall, it is necessary to situate his thought within the Jewish and Islamic traditions that influenced it.
It is with respect to this first aspect, with Sovereignty that Kletenik's book proves to be situated towards the present. As Kelentik writes, "The hierarchy that underpins sovereignty and the superiority it secures configure familiar 'Western dominations' such as cishet male supremacy, white supremacy and human supremacy. These supremacies are all promoted by additional doctrines enrooted in sovereignty to witt, that nature is hierarchically arranged and reason is supreme." Such a claim is going to seem painfully anachronistic to many. One has to be clear about what Kletenik is claiming here, it is that a particular conception of sovereignty, of humanity sovereign to nature, and reason sovereign to emotion, that has undergirded much of the logics of racism, sexism, etc. and that Spinoza is a not such much a critic of those later developments, which he was largely unaware of, but as a critic of sovereignty he undermines them in a way that is quite useful. On this point Kletenik is quite clear on the difference between what Spinoza the person thought and what Spinoza as a philosophy makes clear. As she writes,
"There is no reason to apologize for, explain away, or diminish Spinoza's sexism. It is real. To be clear, I am suspicious of efforts to plumb the so-called canon merely to excavate materials that might confirm the truths that many have only now come to grasp. Much as Spinoza cast aspersions upon the need to rely on the authority of other philosophers to validate his views, I too do not seek the authority of Spinoza to confirm my queer conceptions of sexgender. But I am keen to think with Spinoza. I regard his critique of teleology and the epistemic missteps that precipitate it as generative for probing sexgender."
On this point I am reminded of what Warren Montag says, that Spinoza's fundamental assertion that we are all affected, subject to the imagination, applies to Spinoza as well. Spinoza's limits are not ours, and we can use what is productive in his thought to move beyond his all too human, or should we say "all too modal" limitations. As Kletenik makes clear a few pages later, his critique of universals, and the human tendency to seek an imagined order in nature is quite useful for undermining the supposed natural binary of sex.
"The binary system of sexgender classification exemplifies the perils that Spinoza delineates as inherent to universal notions. It also typifies the ways in which nature refuses to bend itself to our categories, repeatedly validating that "order in nature" is nothing but "a relation to our imagination." What is "male" and what is "female"? Much as Spinoza demonstrates with the category "human," determining sex depends on whom you ask: Is the difference anatomical? Chromosomal? Hormonal? Something else? There is no agreement on the matter. The fact that tens of millions of people--at least 1.7 percent of humans--do not "satisfy" the "conventional" metrics for assigning "sex" underscores the imprecision, contingency, and failure of the classificatory system. The routinely perceived "ambiguity" displayed by the anatomical "markers" of certain individuals, not to mention the regular "disagreement" between a given person's "sex traits," betrays the fallacious of these sovereign constructs."
The same claim can be made with respect to colonialism, it is not that Spinoza himself was a critic of the colonial order that is important, but that much of the logic of colonialism is predicated on a kind of logic of sovereignty. Hence the importance of Descartes to the logic of colonialism. As Kletenik writes,
"A central thesis of this book is that how we perceive reality at once reflects and simultaneously reinforces our commitments. Constructions of reality anchored in purports to sovereignty naturalize it and, in turn, sanction exercises in it. Sovereignties beget further sovereignties. By presenting an ontology stripped of sovereign pretenses, Spinoza denaturalizes sovereignty, rejecting its most pervasive manifestations. This is especially pertinent in the context of reason and rationality, which have conventionally supported human pretenses to superiority and purports to exceptionalism. By rejecting these sovereignties, Spinoza tenders an innovative epistemology, which packs not yet fully tapped potential for thinking reason otherwise."
With respect to the second aspect, Spinoza's Jewish and Islamic sources, Kletenik not only brings to light the way such thinkers as Maimonides, Gersonides, and Ibn Sina influences Spinoza, but the way that anti-Judaism has shaped Spinoza's reception. I am sure that many people are aware of Hegel's remarks about Spinoza, but what is perhaps surprising is how much this figure of the Jewish other persists in readings of Spinoza. As Kletenik writes about Zizek.
"These currents persist in Zizek's more recent ventures, wherein he proclaims: 'Spinoza spoke from the interstices of the social space(s), neither a Jew nor a Christian' and proceeds to assert that 'we should act like Saint Paul' by recognizing the constraints of particularity. Here not only is Spinoza's Jewishness indispensable to grasping his thought, but it also warrants Zizek--following Hegel--to parrot that classic Christian critique of Judaism, its particularism. Spinozism is thus to be overcome 'the passage from the Spinozan One qua the neutral medium/container of its modes and the One's inherent gap is the very passage from Substance to Subject.' Indeed, philosophy 'seems to repeat itself again and again, Oriental spirituality, Parmenides, Spinoza--all stand for the inaugural gesture of philosophy which has to be left behind if we are to progress on the long road from Substance to Subject.' Jewish Spinoza and is 'Oriental' thinking are to be sublated and superseded as 'Western' philosophy marches onwards. Even as 'Western' philosophy supposedly advances, its anti-Judaism remains consistent across the centuries."
I was a little surprised to read this, but I admit that I stopped following Zizek several books ago. What was more surprising was what Kletenik has to say about Deleuze.
"Before proceeding, it bears emphasis that Deleuze never wavers in Christianizing Spinoza. This surfaces not only in the systematic transubstantiation of Spinoza's theories into Deleuze's philosophy but also manifests in his portrayal of Spinoza's philosophical contributions. Deleuze, together with Félix Guattari, conceptualizes Spinoza's 'plane of immanence' as 'the nonthought within thought.'...[W]hat matters here is what they proceed to purport that 'the supreme act of philosophy' is 'not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every place...that which cannot be thought, which was thought once, as Christ was incarnated once, in order to show that one time, the possibility of the impossible.' And so they proclaim: 'Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery.' Deleuze is not satisfied in simply Christianizing Spinoza's ideas, which is par for the course in 'Western' philosophy, he must forcibly convert Spinoza himself, much as his converso ancestors were during the Inquisition, under the penalty of death. While they were only expected to ritualistically digest the Body of Christ, Spinoza has now been incarnated as Christ or the Christ of philosophers to testify to the impossible."
As someone who came to Spinoza by Deleuze, I considered myself as someone who made peace with Deleuze's misreadings. As is often the case with Deleuze, what is wrong about the philosopher in question, such as parallelism, is interesting in Deleuze and Guattari's work. However, I had never seen things in quite this light. To me the line about the Christ of philosophers just seemed like one of those points of hyperbole Deleuze gets into from time to time. I now think about it differently after reading Kletenik's book, which has transformed my understanding of Spinoza.
I am struck by Kletenik's ability to wrest Spinoza's insights from his own limitations, finding a critique of heterosexism and racism, in a philosopher who was subject to his own imaginations of patriarchy and colonialism, while at the same time her criticism that such a transformation, a wresting from particularity, might be the inaugural gesture of philosophical anti-Judaism. I am not saying that these are the same, but it raises the question as to how some ideas reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies and some break free. Kletenik makes a direct connection between the order and connection of ideas and social relations, connecting Spinoza and Marx. As she writes,
"Furthermore, Spinoza is not only affirming that our ways of perceiving reality are socially conditioned but that precisely the perceptions of reality that gain traction are those which reinforces the existing power structures in society, as Marx later enunciates: 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."
And later
"What we think and why we think it, the ideas that become most influential, as Marx reminds us--in a move unmistakably influenced by Spinoza's appendix to part I--are so precisely because they are the ideas of those in power, and the ideas of those in power are such because they serve their interests. It bears emphasizing how this line of inquiry is incoherent by the precepts of Augustinian, Cartesian, 'Western' dualism. Such ruminations are foreclosed by a posture that presumes the mind to transcend its body, to exist in a realm beyond the corporeal. The specks of Jewish immanence that Spinoza absorbs from Maimonides and Gersonides rebuff dissevering of mind from body, confirming all thinking in humans as tethered to a body that exists in time and space. This coincides with the ethical investment that fuels this tradition, its focus on life lived in society, its decidedly political orientation."
Of course I am sympathetic to this Marx/Spinoza connection, even if I think that the relationship between Spinoza's appendix and Marx's thought might be more complex. More importantly, I think that Kletenik's reading of Spinoza, which demonstrates that Spinoza's thought can be dissevered from his limitations of his particular time and place while at the same time showing that the reception of Spinoza still carries with it a motley collection of ancient prejudices, forces us to think both the identity of the order and connection of ideas with the social order and those differences that make change possible.
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