Finite Dialectic, Part II: The Spinozist Dialectic Or, Remarks on a Comment by Macherey

Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar via Décalages 

Sometimes I waste time by thinking of classes that I will never get a chance to teach, classes that would be for graduate students (which we do not have at USM), or entail books which have yet to be translated, or classes that are just too long. One class that meets all three would be a class on the dialectic and vicissitudes, this class would focus on the attempt to to rethink that dialectic in twentieth century philosophy, texts would include Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Althusser's For Marx, Badiou's Theory of the Subject.  That would just be the big ones. Of course it would help if this class was preceded by one on Hegel and Marx, and perhaps followed by a class on Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida (to name a few). At this point it has become completely unmanageable. I have long since come to the conclusion that what is often presented as the conflict between postmodernism and Marxism, or whatever you'd like to call it, is perhaps best understood as a division between those who maintain the dialectic, with some changes, and those who depart from it. 

My list above only covers the well known books, often the big ones, which make reforming or redefining the dialectic central. It overlooks the way that some of these questions, questions of the dialectic, and its limits, have shown up in other places, less immediately recognizable. I have argued that the thought of Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, have continued the question of what constitutes a materialist dialectic in their various writings, both when they are writing about Hegel, and when they are not. 

Of course it was Macherey who initially posed the question of a materialist dialect at the end of Hegel or Spinoza. As Macherey writes, 

"The most obvious perspectives are thus reversed: it is Spinoza who refutes the Hegelian dialectic. But does that also mean that he refutes all dialectics? Could we not equally say that what he refutes in the Hegelian dialectic is that which is exactly not dialectical, what Marx himself called his idealism? Because we must put aside (as absolutely devoid of philosophical interest) the idea that all dialectics are idealist in themselves or reactive; for a historical materialism of thought the expression “all dialectics” is completely without meaning. The real question is, What is the limit that separates an idealist dialectic from a materialist one? Under what conditions can a dialectic become materialist? We recognize that Spinoza helps us ask this question and that he gives it a content: What is or what would be a dialectic that functioned in the absence of all guarantees, in an absolutely causal manner, without a prior orientation that would establish within it, from the beginning, the principle of absolute negativity, without the promise that all the contradictions in which it engages are by rights resolved, because they carry within them the conditions of their resolution? When Marx wrote the famous sentence, “Humanity only poses for itself problems that it can resolve,” he was still completely part of the lineage of Hegelian evolutionism. The subsequent history of Marxism would demonstrate exactly in the course of events that a question is not resolved simply by the fact that it is asked. But it is already something significant to pose a question, even if it can promise nothing as its answer. To read Spinoza following Hegel, but not according to Hegel, allows us to pose the question of a non-Hegelian dialectic, but we must also admit, and this is also a way of being Spinozist, that this does not enable us at the same time to answer it."

Those lines were initially written in nineteen seventy nine, even if they were not translated until fifteen years ago. At first glance it would appear that Macherey never returned to this question, writing instead books on the university, everyday life, utopia, subjection,  Spinoza,  Jules Verne, and philosophy. In one of the books that I did not include in the last, his book À l'Essai  there is the following passage in the introduction. 

"This theme of crisis and negative values is directly linked to that of a rematerialized, dialectic without ends, which, instead of speculating on contradictions whose statement and basic premise would already and in themselves offer the condition and promise of their resolution, prioritizes the consideration of endlessly polarized oppositions between balance and disequilibrium; thereby stimulates, on a simultaneously cognitive and behavioral level, research conducted amidst anxiety and anguish, the program of which cannot be planned in advance nor does it respond to a retrograde movement, neither of the true, nor the beautiful, or the good in itself. All that remains is to exist and to think between the poles of activity and passivity that are impossible to separate. It is in this difficult context that an ethic of liberation takes its path, one founded on the conviction that a state of perfect liberty, practiced in pure innocence and a good conscience, is inaccessible: all that it is possible to hope is arriving, in the midst of difficulty, at negotiating—one dares not say tinkering—between peace and war, between knowledge and ignorance, between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between one's own utility and the common good, between nature and artifice, between order and disorder, between permanence and impermanence, between consensus and dissensus, between autonomy and servitude, between inside and outside, between invention and discovery, of provisional solutions which are the least bad possible, even if it means looking for others if the situation requires it. In these conditions, the status of the negative and the manner in which it intervenes in the order of things, either to disrupt it or to restore it, is present under a new visage, between the positive and the negative, between Eros and Thanatos, we must renounce deciding the absolute; we can never have one entirely without the other, and the only question that can reasonably be asked is what relationship they maintain in a given conjuncture, that is to say, to estimate which of the two opposing tendencies they represent prevails at the moment; this diagnosis is essential for their relationship to be re-examined, with a view to changing the situation as much as possible within the limits, as they say, of simple reason, a reason that does not know everything and cannot do everything."

Macherey's formulation of the dialectic here would seem to renounce what Hegel called the absolute, and still seems to be what is maintained in materialist versions which see the dialectic, or dialectical materialism, as a science that could explain the totality. What it posits in its place is something much more partial, contingent, and finite. I am tempted to call this a Spinozist dialectic not just because of the Spinoza or Hegel of the earlier book, but because of the way in which Spinoza's own text constantly draws our attention to the place where activity and passivity, knowledge and ignorance, intertwine. 

To take two examples. Spinoza famously writes in the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics that we are born "conscious of our appetites and ignorance of the causes of things." The combination of this consciousness and ignorance leads to the entire upside down world of superstition which makes sense of the world not according to how it is caused, but how it effects us, taking these effects, the way some things hinder or help us, as the things themselves. Appetite is not just the basis for ignorance, however, it is also the cornerstone of knowledge.  As Spinoza will write later in the Ethics, "Desire is the very essence of main in so far as he is conceived as determined to any action from any given affection of itself." What appears at first as a vague apprehension that leads to ignorance is itself the kernel of knowledge. Desire is both what leads knowledge astray and the basis for an understanding of our essence." There is knowledge in ignorance. The reverse can also be asserted, as Spinoza makes clear in his criticism of universals, there is a bit of imagination in every concept. As Spinoza writes,

"Those notions they call Universal, like Man, Horse, Dog, and the like, have arisen from similar causes, namely, because so many images (e.g., of men) are formed at one time in the human body that they surpass the power of imagining-not entirely, of course, but still to the point where the mind can imagine neither slight differences of the singular [men] (such as the color and size of each one, etc.) nor their determinate number, and imagines distinctly only what they all agree in, insofar as they affect the body. For the body has been affected most [NS: forcefully] by [what is common], since each singular has affected it [by this property]. And [NS: the mind] expresses this by the word man, and predicates it of infinitely many singulars. For as we have said, it cannot imagine a determinate number of singulars." (EIIP40Schol1). 

 Of course this is a passage about universals, and one could argue that ignorance, or imagination, is not constitutive of common notions, but I think that would miss the point that universals are still part of our language and vocabulary. In other words, there is ignorance in knowledge. Thus, ignorance and knowledge are not two separate and opposed things, but are each present in the other. 

One could say the same thing about the relation between activity and passivity. One of the reasons that Spinoza's formulation, "fighting for servitude as if it were salvation" seems so relevant is that it captures the fact that subjection is not something that is just passively endured, but entails active striving.  There is activity in passivity. The corollary of this would have to be that there is passivity in activity. We find this in the formulation, stressed by Pascal Sévérac, that one has to experience many things in order to think many things, and that passivity, the receptivity of multiple encounters and relations leads to activity. Spinoza thus things the more things we experience, the more things that affect us (positively), the more we can act. As Spinoza writes, 

"It is the part of a wise man, I say to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another. For the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which constantly require new and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of all the things which can follow from its nature, and hence, so that the mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things at once." (EIVP45Schol).

Speaking of the beauty of green plants, here is the bonsai I have been working on 

I quoted the whole passage just because it is refreshing to see a philosopher propose some other path to the good life than simply asserting, "study more philosophy," but the operative line is the last sentence which makes a connection between a body which is capable of many things and a mind which can understand many things. This because the body and mind are two sides of the same thing, such that what happens in one happens in the other, but no less important is the way in which this entails a kind of aesthetics of existence, which constitutes in its own way a connection between passivity and activity, between experiencing many things and thinking many things. There is thus passivity in activity. 

In each case it is not the knowledge and ignorance, activity and passivity, are always present in the same amount, even less are they the same, in some kind of night when all the cats are black. They are not only different, but are constantly articulated in different ways, at each moment we are dealing with different articulations of knowledge and ignorance, passivity and activity. These articulations are hardly static, it is a matter of both a becoming active or becoming passive, a becoming knowledgeable or ignorant. As Etienne Balibar stresses, Spinoza's politics is one of tendencies and counter tendencies; not a theory of democracy but of democratization. 

Macherey gives us a list of such oppositions, not just activity and passivity, knowledge and ignorance, but also "nature and artifice," "order and disorder," "autonomy and servitude," and so on. However, I think that it would be a mistake to see this list as just a series of different oppositions, each of which can be viewed separately. As in the example from Spinoza passivity and activity, knowledge and ignorance, cannot be rigorously separated from each other. In fact the whole list that Macherey presents is filled with such points of overlap. It would be difficult to separate autonomy from activity or ignorance from servitude. Thus, following Nick Nesbitt, I would argue that the dialectic Macherey is proposing here is one in which the different contradictions intersect and accumulate, becoming so many different aspects of an overdetermined situation.  This is perhaps the method that one finds in Macherey's own books on the university, everyday life, etc., which add different disciplinary levels, looking at the thing in question through both imagination and reason. It puts forward an image in which the absolute, the telos of contradiction, etc., is jettisoned, and in its place there is the overdetermination of the specific conjuncture.