Strange Bedfellows: On Vaysse's Totalité et Finitude: Spinoza et Heidegger

 

Translation is the closest that I have ever come to demonic possession. Let me explain, I used to think that there were books I read, books I wrote about, and books I taught, each category representing a deeper level of familiarity, even intimacy to the point where it is harder and harder to tell where the book's thoughts end and my thoughts begin. Translation, however, is on a whole different level. It is thinking someone else's thoughts. 

Production and Labor: Two Alienations, Two Liberations

My drawing of Laika and Loukanikos

 

The conclusion of Franck Fishbach's La Production des Hommes: Marx Avec Spinoza ends with a discussion of Heidegger's understanding of production in contrast to the book's focus on the intersection of Marx and Spinoza. A Fischbach argues the contrast could not be more clear, whereas Marx and Spinoza posited a thought of production that broke with idealism and with a philosophy of the subject, Heidegger saw production as the basis and culmination of the metaphysics of subjectivity. According to Heidegger, our conceptions of substance, being, and actuality all stem from humanity's productive comportment and this understanding of being culminates in the idea of a world in which what exists exists to be manipulated, produced, and transformed; all of being exists as an object for a subject. Production is the realization of the metaphysics of subjectivity.

Two Great Tastes Part Two: The Introduction to Fischbach's La Production des Hommes

 

What follows is a draft of the translation of the introduction to Franck Fischbach's La Production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza which will be published by Edinburgh University Press as Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History. Posted here in preparation for my forthcoming event with the Marx Education Project, and as part of the process of editing it. 

The relation of Marx with Spinoza has often been driven—most notably with respect to Althusser and the Althusserian tradition—by the project of “giving Marxism the metaphysics that it needs,” according to an expression used by Pierre Macherey specifically with respect to Althusser. The intention was laudable, but times having changed, our project can no longer be exactly that. We begin from the idea that the philosophy specific to Marx or the specifically Marxist philosophy is still largely unknown, that Marx as a philosopher is still largely and for the most part unknown. For a long time this was due reasons largely external to the thought of Marx: initially it was due to the urgency of militant practice, then it remains thanks to theme of the rupture with philosophy that is expressed by the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach or in The German Ideology, any reading of Marx that is resolutely philosophical was suspected as being ideological. Then on the verge of orthodoxy, several authors—and not insignificant ones—both at the heart of the history of Marxism , and outside of it , have maintained that there is a critique of philosophy in Marx , this critique would still be a determinant practice of philosophy. However, the ignorance of “Marx’s philosophy” equally lies in reasons that internal to Marx’s work: the critical relation that Marx enters with philosophy implies in effect that the latter appears in terms of disconcerting new features, which are not those of a doctrine expressed as such (Marx, who never completed any of his grand works, always refused any dogmatic or systematic presentation of his thoughts), but are also not that of fragments. Neither systematic, nor fragmentary, philosophy with respect to Marx, appears diluted, omnipresent but always mixed and everywhere combined with elements of the discourse of history, of political economy, but also the sciences of nature and literature. It is not necessary to reconstruct or reconstitute the philosophy of Marx: that would suggest that it is only present in a fragmentary and dispersed state, and that it is necessary to reassemble and unify—which would lead to dogmatic and systemic presentation that is perfectly alien to the Marxist practice of philosophy. 

Incomplete Me

As someone who reads, teaches, and writes on a great deal of French philosophy I hate to get caught up in the phenomena of the “next big thing from France”: the way in which there always seems to be a new French philosopher of the moment, from Derrida, to Foucault, to Deleuze, to Badiou, etc. For me “French Philosophy” is interesting for the questions it addresses, questions that ultimately have to do with the constitution of subjectivity and the formation of knowledge, but are not limited to that. Moreover, these are not exclusively French concerns, extending into the work of Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri and drawing on the work of Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche (to name a few). All of this is really nothing more than an apology, however, for what follows: a discussion of the work of Bernard Stiegler, arguably “the newest thing” from France.

In the last month two translations of Stiegler’s works have come out from Stanford Press. This is to some extent odd, since it is not as if people were clamoring for new translations. I bought a copy of the first volume of Technics and Time a while ago, up until this point the only work of his to appear in translation, and it is a used copy that had been taken out of circulation by a university library. So, based on my incredibly unscientific sampling, I would say that there has not been much of an interest in Stiegler up until now.

(Perhaps it has already been done, but someone should do a study of the politics and chronology of translations of French philosophers, but not just the French: it seems to me that there are odd itineraries and incomplete translations that produce their own odd receptions. Case in point: Stiegler has now been translated but Gerard Granel, his teacher, has largely not been translated. Or a similar point could be made with Badiou, whose works of the seventies and eighties, works in dialogue with Lacan, Deleuze, and Althusser, are just now being translated.)

I first learned of Stiegler when I watched, and then screened, the film The Ister. I was initially struck by his theory of historical time as something that is dependent upon technology, understood in its broadest sense. To put it too simply: we have an understanding of ourselves as historical beings because we have artifacts, relics of past ages. These things, such as tools, art, and writing, create a memory, which is fundamentally different from the individual memory that dies with us and the species’ genetic memory that cannot be transformed in our life. Since watching that film, which is primarily about Heidegger, I became further interested in Stiegler when I saw that he cited Simondon. Thus started an inquiry into Stiegler’s work.

To offer something of a brief encapsulation of what I find interesting about Stiegler, I would like to follow Balibar’s suggestion that works of philosophy “incomplete” other works of philosophy, and themselves. Balibar’s examples here are the way in which almost all of Marx’s corpus could be considered to actively “incomplete” Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, calling into question the dialectical sublimation of civil society into the state, but also works such as Heidegger’s Being and Time, which incompletes itself, rendering a second volume impossible. Following this idea of the way in which philosophical works interrupt others, calling into question their theoretical unity, or completing their own unraveling, I could describe Stiegler’s work through two interruptions.

First, and this is close to Balibar’s point, Stiegler completes (or perhaps incompletes) Heidegger’s line of demarcation with Husserl. As Stiegler argues, one of the key points of demarcation between Husserl and Heidegger is the discussion of historicity in the second part of Being and Time. For Heidegger memory, temporality, is not just a synthesis of an individual’s experience, but necessarily involves the already there of traditions and histories. Memory is always already materialized in institutions, structures, tools, and techniques. Second, and in a point that seems to be initially distinct, Stiegler argues that Simondon never connected his concept of the social with his analysis of technology. These two interruptions intersect in that obscure region where the constitution of subjectivity, or modes of being in the world, intersects with objectivity, with things structures and institutions: or, as Stiegler puts it, where the consitution of the who intersects with the what.

To step back a bit, it is perhaps worth clarifying just what precisely is Simondon’s account of sociality. On this point Stiegler stresses that Simondon’s concept of transindividuality is the mutual individuation of the “I” and the “we,” in which individuals are only constituted through collectivities and vice versa.

“In effect, if every I is inscribed in the we that constitutes it, and that it constitutes, if the I and the we are two faces of the same process of individuation, at the core of which develops their tendency to become-indivisible, ceaselessly projecting their accomplished unity, this projection is never concretized except by default, in other words by ceaselessly deferring this completion which, if realized, would be the end of the process of individuation or, in other words, the end of the individual.”

This mutually constitution of the individual and the collective, the “I” and the “we,” is what makes up a history; a history in which a third thing, a culture or a language, is also individuated. If one needed a classical reference for this process, Stiegler argues that this relation of transindividuality can be seen in Plato’s Apology and Crito: the first asserts Socrates’ individuality, his eccentric nature with respect to the community, while the second underscores his belonging to this community. In the interplay between the two, according to Stiegler, a third “individual” is constituted, and that is philosophy. Philosophy remains then for Stiegler an exploration of the relation between the “I” and the “we,” the exploration of their mutual constitution.

This link, constitutive of the “who,” is inseparable from the “what” from the technologies and techniques that constitute memory, from writing to the internet. It is the intersection of the three, the “I,” the “we,” and the “what,” that interests me, as technologies transform the conditions of individuation and the constitution of collectivities. I should add at this point that I have only begun to read the second volume of Time and Technics, and thus begun to explore this relation, but, and his will have to serve as a conclusion it strikes me that Stiegler’s emphasis on the present is in the disorientation of the “I” and the “we” produced by the transformation of the “what,” the deterritorialization of self and community made possible by the industrialization and then digitization of memory. This is in contrast with the work of Paolo Virno, who also takes inspiration from Simondon: for Virno the introduction of the transindividual, language, habits, and affects, into the production process opens up the possibility of the articulation of the common. In a future post I hope to explore the tension between these two Left-Simondonians, as well as the larger question of what Simondon’s concept of the transindividual offers for politics.

The Matter of Thought

Lately, I have been reading some Gilbert Simondon. The particular book I have is L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information which includes both L’individu et sa genèse psycho-biologique (which initially appeared in 1964, and was influential for Deleuze) and L’individuation psychique et collective (which was published in 1989, and develops the idea of transindividuality, important for Balibar and Virno), as well as an unfinished Histoire de la Notion de’Individu. I am primarily interested in the latter two, or at least the latter two fit my current areas of research, but there is something in the first book/section that struck me as interesting.

Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic model of understanding the constitution of individuality, the idea that individual things are defined by a particular combination of form and matter. In examining this idea, Simondon relates it back to its technological conditions, the practices that would seem to generate the model. Simondon argues that even those activities that would seem to exemplify this idea of form and matter, such as brick making, are actually more complex than the model would suggest. Clay is not just a formless, generic matter, but must itself be selected and prepared according to the way in which specific qualities lend themselves to particular forms. Not to mention the fact that the form, in this case the mould is not a pure idea, but must be made of matter, with particular qualities and limitations. There is always more matter in form and more form in matter than the model would suggest. This leads Simondon to argue that the form/matter pair is not simply a practical idea that has been extended to explain everything from the soul to human reproduction (as in Aristotle), but is ultimately the effect of a particular social relation. “One could say that in a civilization that divides men into two groups, those who give orders and those who execute them, the principal of individuation, following a technological example, is necessarily attributed either to form or to matter, but never the two together. (pg. 58)” Thus we could say that the form/matter distinction is the effect of a particular division of mental and manual labor.

This is the idea that interests me: the connection between a metaphysical concept and a particular social formation, an immediate connection not just between base and superstructure, but between the very possibility of thought and the most basic practical activities. Perhaps the most audacious example of such a short circuit comes from Marx himself, who writes the following in Capital:

“The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.” (page 172)

It seems to me that at this point we are not speaking of ideology, at least as it is generally understood. Ideology generally designates a specific doctrine, or set of representations, and not, as in the above examples, such generic an unavoidable ideas as form/matter or abstract humanity. Understood broadly this idea does not just appear in Marx. Heidegger at times makes the argument that metaphysical concepts are simply the effects of our pre-reflexive understanding of being, an understanding rooted in practical comportments. As Heidegger writes:

“In production, therefore, we come up against just what does not need to be produced. In the course of producing and using beings we come up against the actuality of what is already there before all producing, products, and producibles, or of what offers resistance to the formative process that produces things. The concepts of matter and material have their origin in the understanding of being that is oriented to production.” (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology pg. 116).

The passage refers specifically to matter, but in full section Heidegger is referring to the practical basis of the medieval metaphysical (predominantly Aquinas) of existence and essence. It is not just that the idea of matte comes from production, but substance as well. My point is not equate these various assertions, far from it. For Simondon and Marx the connection is between social relations and conceptual production, while for Heidegger it is production in a technological (or even anthropological sense). What interests is the sporadic appearance of this “short circuit,” appearing primarily as an aside and rarely as a theory. (The exception would perhaps be Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor). A few questions follow from this: What does it mean to trace the origin of some metaphysical concept to some social and practical structure? What does this say about practice or thought? What does it mean that such origins are always effaced? Finally, what about the limitations of such a project; that is, what are the social conditions or the connection between concepts and social conditions?