Translation: A Spinozist Noo-Politics: Reconsideration of two recent books on Spinoza by Lorenzo Vinciguerra and Pascal Sévérac by Yves Citton

This is a draft translation of an early review by Yves Citton 

Published in Multitudes 

Picture from The Brain from Planet Arous

In his latest work, Maurizio Lazzarato proposed designating as "noo-politics" the "new power relations that take memory—and its conatus (attention)—as their object." Noo-politics (as it is currently exercised through "wireless, audiovisual, and telematic networks, and through the constitution of public opinion, perception, and collective intelligence") effects "the modulation of flows of desires and beliefs, as well as of the forces (memory and attention) that circulate them within the cooperation between brains" (This neologism—which, as a footnote clarifies, is to be situated at the intersection of the Greek noûs ("the highest part of the soul, the intellect") and the Internet service provider Noos—is rooted in a tradition of thought that the author explicitly traces back to Gabriel Tarde and Leibniz. Just as Tarde took pains to clarify his relationship to Leibniz in a lengthy essay devoted to the link between "Monadology and Sociology," so too does Maurizio Lazzarato propose a "neo-monadology" that draws upon Leibniz for the concepts of "event" and "possible world"—the very concepts upon which he constructs his political analysis of early twenty-first-century social movements. 

Marx's Basement Demo Tapes: On Monferrand's La Nature du Capital

 

Illustrated with a few pictures of enjoying the weather

As many readers of this blog probably know, there is a new translation of Capital coming out this month. I am sure that this new translation will have a great deal of new revelations drawn from the work of considering the text in light of its multiple variations and Marx's notes.  However, it seems to me that the book that we are in need of reconsidering is not so much Capital but the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. 

What Does it Mean to be a Materialist: Thoughts After Spinoza after Marx

 

Of all of the zoom events, conferences, and presentations that I have attended (zoomed?) this year the one dedicated to Spinoza after Marx was the most engaging, the one most capable of breaking through the zoom screen that makes everything feel further away even as it is so close, inches away even. This is in part because of the participants, but it was also due to the work of the organizers who, in an interesting variation on organizing around a common theme, presented a common set of theses that were discussed and debated over the course of the three days. Of course as great as this was as an online event it is hard not to think about how those conversations would have continued over dinner, at bars, and coffee shops. The event did create a collective act of thought, of thinking in common, but as Spinoza and Marx both know there is no thinking together, thinking in common, without acting and feeling in common.

Red Spinozism: Towards and Against a Spinozist Theory of Alienation

It is possible to understand the interest in Marxist Spinozism, Spinozist Marxism, or, as Alberto Toscano once put it, Red Spinozism, as a kind of funhouse mirror, where the concepts from one philosopher take on new shapes and forms when reflected through the other. The two most well known of Marx’s concepts that have made it through this hall of mirrors are ideology, which has been refracted through Spinoza’s theory of imagination and the first kind of knowledge in Althusser, and living labor, which has been expanded to an ontological level of production through Negri’s reading of the productive nature of reason and desire. Moreover, Spinoza’s concepts of structural or immanent causality have been read through the mode of production and the multitude has been read through class struggle and the autonomist hypothesis. I hastily list these different concept refractions and transformations in order to stress that has been absent, namely alienation.