Which Way Marxist-Spinozist? On Diefenbach's Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy

 

I have a lot of books from the Spinoza Studies series 

One of the best pieces of advice I got in graduate school came from Warren Montag. He was visiting Binghamton University. We were talking about Spinoza and he said to me to the effect of reading Alexandre Matheron, Pierre Macherey, Pierre François Moreau, etc. was absolutely necessary for understanding Spinoza scholarship, and those books would never be translated into English. They were too big, five volumes in Macherey's case, and too niche of an audience. He told me I needed to get to work learning to read French. So I did.

Twenty five years later quite a few of the books mentioned above have been translated and published in Edinburgh Press' Spinoza Studies series, with more on the way. I am not saying this to say that Warren was wrong, he was right. It was because of him that I translated one of them, Fischbach's Marx with Spinoza, added a preface to another, Sánchez Estop's Althusser and Spinoza, and have reviewed manuscripts and translations for a few more. So much so that I have paid for none of the hardcovers above. Will work for books. I am not trying to take credit for the Spinoza explosion, just saying that I have done my part. 

The publication of twenty or so books in the series has changed, or should change, the status of Spinoza, and Spinozist thought, in the English speaking world. We are long since the point where we could simply say that Deleuze, Althusser, or Negri, are spinozists, explaining their thought with a reference to Spinoza. Such an explanation runs up against the real limitations of the fact that these philosophers do not agree on many things, least of all what Spinoza meant. Deleuze's Spinoza of bodies and powers is very different from Althusser's focus on the imagination and science and both are different from Negri's focus on the multitude. When only a handful of Spinozists were known it perhaps made sense to call someone a spinozist as a explanation of their philosophy; now it has become necessary to ask what kind of Spinozist one is, or what of Spinoza's thought is being retained or interpreted by someone who draws on Spinoza's thought. From one philosophical substance an infinity of perspectives have emerged. 

For that reason Katja Diefenbach's Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy is a welcome edition to the series. It is also a translation of a massive book, this time from German. It is the first book that I have seen that tries to think through the different invocations of Spinoza in "post-marxist philosophy."  I should add that one of the things that interests me about "red spinozism," to use Alberto Toscano phrase, is that in some aspects it is a collective enterprise. There is a great deal of communication and collective research in a lot of the scholarship, concepts proposed by Sévérac taken up by Lordon or Matheron taken up by Fischbach. I have found these collective, or even transindividual, lines of communication and connection more interesting than any debates or disagreements which is not to say that they do not exist. (As an aside, I should say that I have always been drawn to collective projects of thought, my biggest influences have been Althusser's circle, post-autonomist Marxism, and, more recently, Spinozist Marxism, all of which have been structured around the sharing of ideas and projects of research than about the claims to have the one right interpretation, a fight for an intellectual hegemony as William Haver used to say). 

For Diefenbach, the central point of conflict within Marxist-Spinozism is between Antonio Negri and Etienne Balibar. In order to say more about that, it is necessary to discuss her reading of Negri, which is quite brilliant. Negri's intervention with respect to Spinoza has been reduced to a caricature of itself in recent debates, in which it is reduced to the thesis of a division within the Ethics, a division between the transcendent foundation of the Parts One and Two. Diefenbach argues that the real focus of Negri's reading is the opposition between Spinoza and Hobbes. This opposition goes beyond Spinoza's remark in his letters, about the inalienability of power, which Spinoza summed up as, "I always preserve natural right unimpaired and, I maintain that in each state the supreme Magistrate has no more right over its subjects than it has greater power over them," to become a fundamental division of political anthropology (something I have written about here). 

This division of political anthropology concerns the very conditions of relations, of sociality. For Hobbes this concerns not just the infamous state of nature, as nasty, brutish, and short, but the fundamental condition underlying this state of nature, the fact that the original condition of humanity is not just conflict, it is isolation. People relate only through their competition and conflict. This is why Negri says that Hobbes is "the Marx of the bourgeoisie." Isolation and subjugation are necessary conditions for appropriation. For Spinoza such a condition is impossible, not because he has a rosier view of humanity, "man is a god to man" rather than a "wolf to man," but because human beings as finite modes are always already in relation through their mutual dependency and the imitation of affects (relations that are both those of conflict and agreement). An isolated individual, not shaped by relations with others, is an ontological impossibility. Whereas Hobbes argues that politics must in some sense be imposed, made possible by the state, for Spinoza any institution of politics is founded on a sociality that always already exists. As Diefenbach writes, 

"Hobbes conceives all transindividual relations as non-relations of egoistic competition, whose propensity to conflict must be eliminated in the formation of the state by means of the absolute authorization of a sovereign; Spinoza by contrast, incorporates conflict into the genesis of the state by founding the consistency of the process of state formation on the extent to which the powers of the multitude are integral to the life of the institutions. Negri is fully aware that this difference between Spinoza and Hobbes derives its spectacular signification and trenchancy only from the kinship between the two authors, from the shared methodological and physical hypotheses and claims concerning natural right from which they draw different conclusions on all levels of their respective systems."

And later..

"Whereas Hobbes passes from humans, negative interdependency to the institutionalization of social separation and political union without collective interrelation, Spinoza discerns in their relations of interdependency a positive resource that sustains their capacity for transformation."

The idea that society is nothing other than a particular organization of the affects, and its corollary that every affective relation is already organized, even informally, as a common point of reference in Spinozist thought, appearing in different ways in Negri, Balibar, and Lordon. Where Negri differs in in finding a process by which the organization of affects becomes both more expansive and more stable. As Negri writes, 

"The constitutive process of potentia  develops in Spinoza, as we know, through successive integrations and institutional constructions, from conatus to cupiditas and on to the rational expression of amor. At the center of this process stands cupiditas. Cupiditas is the moment in which the physical character of appetitus  and the corollary of conatus, organizing themselves in social experience, produce imagination. The imagination is an anticipation of the constitution of institutions: it is the potency that arrives at the edge of rationality and that structures its journey, that expresses  this advance."

As Diefenbach writes, summing this up,

"In [Negri's] view, the expansiveness of the imitation of the affects--the contagion effects associated with it, which spread to entire groups of individuals, the feedback effects caused by the expectations of reciprocity, the escalation effects that are sparked by the imaginations concerning the strength of other's feelings, and the freedom or powerlessness of their person, reveals a dynamic force of socialization that is not annulled by its inner ambivalence."

It is this last point that becomes crucial to Diefenbach's reading of Negri. The progression of the Ethics, the constitution of a subject that is more rational and active, becomes in Negri's reading a constitution of a collective that is more stable and productive. I am just going to say briefly there there are fundamental similarities, between how Negri reads Spinoza and how Negri reads the history of capital. In each we find a progression in which more and more activity, the increased productive nature of cooperation, produces a new political horizon that of the multitude. As Negri writes with Michael Hardt in Empire,

"The powers of science, knowledge, affect and communication are the principle powers that constitute our anthropological virtuality and are deployed on the surfaces of Empire. This deployment extends across the general linguistic territories that characterize the intersections between production and life. Labor becomes increasingly immaterial and realizes its value through a singular and continuous process of innovation in production it is increasingly capable of consuming or using the services of social reproduction in an even more refined and interactive way. Intelligence and affect (or really the brain coextensive with the body), just when they become the primary productive powers, make production and life coincide across the terrain on which they operate, because life is nothing other than the production and reproduction of the sets of bodies and brains."

The reading of Spinoza for Negri is always political, always caught up with the conjuncture. In each case one looks to the logic of constitution, or what Diefenbach calls collective appropriation, the way in which the powers of sociality, and the socialization of power, expand and are strengthened.  Even if one brackets the question of the "interruption of the system" that Negri is famous for, there is a way in which the speculative argument always takes us back to the political moment. As Negri writes, "The Ethics could not be constituted in a project, in the metaphysics of the mode and reality, if it were not inserted into history, into politics, into the phenomenology of a single and collective life: if it were not to derive new nourishment from that engagement.” At is at this point we are confronted with both the strength of Negri's reading of Spinoza, which always insists on the identity of metaphysics and politics, that the metaphysical is political and the political is metaphysical, and its limitation, the placement of that identity within a teleology, progression, or a least a trajectory of liberation. That Negri does so with respect to Spinoza, who is known for his rejection of final causes is incredibly striking. 

It is also at this point that we get the tension with Etienne Balibar. This tension can be stated simply, for Balibar ambivalence in the constitution of the collective is never annulled or resolved. In fact one can argue that Balibar pushes the ambivalence and tension to its maximum point. At the center of Balibar's reading, of at least the Ethics, is Proposition 37 of Part IV, or more to the point, the two demonstrations that follow from this, one from affects one from reason. Spinoza argues that the state, politics are founded in two ways, first as a logic of imitation, as we all seek that others should love what we love, in the social nature of the affects, and second, as a matter of reason, a recognition that nothing is more useful to man than man. These two foundations do not succeed or supplant one another, they coexist. Social relations are at once rational and affective, imagined and known. As Balibar writes, 

"Sociability is therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence, both of which have real effects. Or, to put it another way, the unity of contraries--of rational identity and affective variability, but also of the irreducible singularity of individuals and the "similarity" of human behavior--is nothing other than what we refer to as society."

Or, as Diefenbach puts it, 

"The fundamental problem of politics 'is to know how reason and imagination interact' and how, out of these interactions, they constitute the sociality of humans. It does not follow that the 'unity' of this process turns the passions into mere means of the realization of reason, as in Hegel, another great theorist of anthropological for whom reason actualizes itself in the necessary detour through the most varied empirical phenomena, passions and particular interests in order to find its objective revelation in the state."

And later,

"Spinoza’s thinking knows no oneness, only oneness-effects. In the field of politics, this deconstruction of the one ungrounds any organic or subjective conception of a collective mind. The thinking of the multitude is not one, in a twofold sense. Where its union of minds originated in nationalist or religious affect-imitations, it is based on the suppression of social difference, rendering it negative and sad to a precarious degree. The mind consists of an aggregate of confused ideas in which the love of neighbour is fused to hatred of others. Despite its considerable forces of cohesion, this sociality resting on affect communication will necessarily disintegrate in historical time and catalyse enormous surges of violence. By contrast, if the togetherness of the multitude is primarily organised by common notions, the imaginary nature of the idea of social oneness becomes comprehensible and the veluti indicates the dismantlement of social stereotypes and the differentiation of social standpoints. Thus, we must recognise that there exists no ‘absolute unification of the thought-of-the-masses’, no ‘maximum of “communal thought”or consciousness in Spinoza. Growing rationality propels a heterogenisation of ideas that in the final instance would concur, in a disjunctive synthesis, only in their difference. The political, however, must not be identified with such a differential concordia of thought; rather, it is guided by the critical and deconstructive acts which, amid social conflicts, erode the efficacy of moral and prescriptive signs, analogical languages and fictional semblances from below and transform governmental mechanisms that rest on the phantasm of a representability of society from inside so that more and more actions in ever broader spheres can be singularised and the tendency of societal struggles to re-erect immunitarian identities can be curbed. "

Such a formulation draws heavily from Balibar, drawing out the implications of a persistent division between affects and reason, imagination and knowledge, in society. Politics is a matter of trying to make society more rational, more democratic, there is no rational society, no society of sages, but there is a process of a society becoming more rational. As with Negri above, this is not just a reading of Spinoza, but a place where the interpretation of Spinoza is interrupted by contemporary socio-political realities, or where Spinoza interrupts the way in which we make sense of existing socio-historical realities. Balibar has analyzed the intersection of reason and imagination in actual existing societies, stressing the way in which the nation, race, or ethnicity or other imaginary identifications undermine and interact with the rationality of the citizen.  

I think that Diefenbach is right to draw out a real tension, even a contradiction, between Negri's reading of a progressive logic of socialization and Balibar's ambivalent division between affects and reason in every social relation, every social formation. We could debate who is correct when it comes to Spinoza (I am with Balibar here) but such a debate misses I think a fundamental point of what it means to be Spinozist Marxist. 

With both Negri and Balibar there is a provocation that draws them to Spinoza, a provocation that goes beyond philosophical questions. For Negri it is a matter of understanding the role of subjectivity, and of labor, in a society in which the old divisions between base and superstructure no longer seemed adequate. Production and culture, production and cooperation cannot be separated because so much of production, in the form of services and cultural production, produces cooperation and social relations. In Spinoza for Our Time, Negri argues that 1968 is a pivotal year in reading Spinoza, not just because that was the year that Deleuze, Gueroult, and Matheron's studies appeared, but that was also the year that marked a transformation in the nature of capital (One is reminded that Althusser also turned to Spinoza in 1968 to understand ideology, and specifically the conflict in the school as the Ideological State Apparatus). Marxist-Spinozism is a response to a crisis in Marxism. In a similar way Balibar's investigation of the conflict between the imagination and reason in social relations stems from a different era, and a different crisis. The rise of conflicts around ethnicity and race, and the effacement of solidarity around class, forces us to rethink the role of imagination and reason in society. (I would add that maybe the reason that Balibar seems to be a better reader of Spinoza to me is because the politics that I have known are more about the conflicts between imaginary identifications and real dependencies than they are about the increasing proliferation of the proletariat through all of society as the multitude). It is difficult to separate the politics of the conjuncture from the reading of the text. One cannot easily separate a theory of the affects from the affective composition of the moment, or the power of the imagination from the existing imagination of power. This brings us to the challenge of Spinoza, as Macherey argues in BdS: Études Spinoziennes, one of the challenges of Spinoza is that ontology, ethics, politics, and I would add, epistemology, or a theory of knowledge, are always pursued at the same time, any division between them is heuristic, which is not to say that it is not necessary. 

Diefenbach's book is an excellent book on the divisions and debates around Spinoza, a necessary read for anyone who is interested in this transformation of thought, but it is also necessary to understand that this transformation of thought is also a transformation of bodies, of relations. We have yet to write that history, or rather, the history that sees them both together.