Intro­duct­ory Note

This highly insight­ful and inform­at­ive paper was presen­ted by Alberto Toscano at the Cul­tural Research Bur­eau of Iran, Tehran, Janu­ary 4, 2005. We are grate­ful to him for allow­ing us to pub­lish it here.

As many schol­ars have noted, Spinoza’s rela­tion to the his­tory and prac­tice of philo­sophy is unique. Though often por­trayed in the academy as a thinker integ­rated into the ‘ration­al­ist’ tra­di­tion, Spinoza has repeatedly emerged as what Ant­o­nio Negri fam­ously called a ‘sav­age anom­aly’. Whether in the rad­ical enlight­en­ment of the late 17^th and 18^th cen­tur­ies, the Pan­the­ism con­tro­versy that played such a form­at­ive role within Ger­man Ideal­ism, or in the philo­soph­ical rad­ic­al­ism cata­lysed by May 1968, Spinoza has been repeatedly invoked as a point of ref­er­ence and inspir­a­tion at moments when the very mean­ing of philo­sophy and its link to the con­tem­por­ary world was at stake. Toscano’s ini­tial ques­tion is there­fore the fol­low­ing: How is it that a philo­sopher renowned for think­ing, with supreme detach­ment, ‘sub specie aetern­i­tatis’, could play such a force­ful part in debates over what Michel Fou­cault called ‘the onto­logy of the present’? In order to address this mat­ter, Toscano con­cen­trates spe­cific­ally on the latest ‘wave’ in the long his­tory of Spinozism, and focuses on three thinkers who have played a cru­cial role in the recent resur­gence of interest in the work of the Dutch philo­sopher: Gilles Deleuze, Etienne Balibar, and Ant­o­nio Negri. More spe­cific­ally, Toscano is con­cerned with how Spinoza has served as a spur for these three thinkers in their rad­ical inter­rog­a­tions of the mean­ing of polit­ics, demo­cracy and the com­mon. He does this by flesh­ing out three con­cepts through which Deleuze, Balibar and Negri respect­ively affirm the rel­ev­ance of Spinoza’s onto­logy and eth­ics to any reflec­tion on the con­tem­por­ary status of the polit­ical: com­pos­i­tion, com­mu­nic­a­tion and constitution.

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Let me begin by extend­ing my sin­cere thanks to Ramin Jahan­be­gloo and the Cul­tural Research Bur­eau for hav­ing invited me to this unique occa­sion. I can­not fail to take this oppor­tun­ity to express my grat­it­ude to Toni Negri who, before Deleuze, was the first ‘inter­cessor’ in my own encounter with Spinoza. Some years ago, at the very begin­ning of my stud­ies in philo­sophy, I devoured his book The Sav­age Anom­aly with the some­what undis­cip­lined pas­sion of the neo­phyte. It remains for me a model, both styl­istic and meth­od­o­lo­gical, of how to trans­mit the inner ten­sion, his­tor­ical embed­ded­ness and con­tem­por­ary urgency of a philo­soph­ical thought. It is quite a priv­ilege to be sit­ting with him here today.

My own ‘schol­arly’ encounter with Spinoza’s philo­sophy has always taken the guise of look­ing at Spinoza in or Spinoza with other thinkers (for example Schelling, Deleuze, Althusser). Today I would simply like to address — guided, alas, by my pas­sions and pre­ju­dices — the role and the dif­fer­ent guises taken by Spinoza’s thought, over the past 35 years or so, within the ambit of European philo­sophy. I do not wish, how­ever, to sub­ject you, in the register of the his­tory of ideas, to a painstak­ing recon­struc­tion of the most recent Spinoza renais­sance and the vari­ous guises it has adop­ted over the years (for which I highly recom­mend the col­lec­tion The New Spinoza, edited by War­ren Montag). Rather, I want to give you a pre­lim­in­ary sense of some of the ways in which the thought of Spinoza, and his polit­ical think­ing in par­tic­u­lar, has been revital­ised and re-​actualized in the last few dec­ades. Remain­ing wed­ded, to a con­sid­er­able extent, to Gilles Deleuze’s defin­i­tion of philo­soph­ical prac­tice as a cre­ation of con­cepts, I would like to focus on two con­cepts that have emerged as deeply sig­ni­fic­ant in recent read­ings of Spinoza’s work, the con­cepts of com­pos­i­tion and com­mu­nic­a­tion (my ori­ginal inten­tion was to con­sider the notion of con­sti­tu­tion in Negri’s work, but time con­straints have forced me to trun­cate this trin­ity and let Negri speak for himself).

Not only — and des­pite the aca­demic attempt to depict him as a straight­for­ward ‘ration­al­ist’ — is Spinoza con­vin­cingly char­ac­ter­ized as an anom­aly in his own time and in the ‘time­less time’ of philo­sophy, as both Negri and Deleuze have affirmed, but the his­tory of Spinoza’s recep­tion is also wholly unique. To take some of the more strik­ing, if anec­dotal, cases, three great Ger­man philo­soph­ers — Schelling, Niet­z­sche and Marx — under­went genu­ine trans­form­at­ive encoun­ters with the thought of Spinoza. In 1795, Schelling, as a pre­co­cious philo­sopher try­ing to con­struct a philo­sophy that would provide an ‘imman­ent­istic affirm­a­tion of the infin­ite’ (Sem­er­ari 1996: 83) and under­mine the stric­tures of dogma, dashed off a let­ter to his then close friend Hegel, enthu­si­ast­ic­ally con­fess­ing: ‘I have become a Spinozist!’. In 1881, Niet­z­sche him­self, in a let­ter to Over­beck, remarked on Spinoza: ‘I am amazed, delighted! I have a pre­cursor, and what a pre­cursor!’, before list­ing his close­ness to the fun­da­mental ten­ets of Spinoza’s thought. Marx him­self, in his form­at­ive years, once com­posed an entire note­book con­sist­ing of a com­plete rearrange­ment of one of Spinoza’s treat­ises, and then quix­ot­ic­ally entitled it ‘Tractatus Theologico-​Politicus by Karl Marx’. Yirmi­ahu Yovel, in his study Spinoza and Other Heretics, has provided a use­ful account of these strange alle­gi­ances and affin­it­ies. In terms of move­ments, rather than fig­ures, Spinoza func­tioned as the some­times sub­ter­ranean cata­lyst behind the many-​headed move­ment for rad­ical enlight­en­ment that swept Europe in the late 17^th and early 18^th cen­tury, and as the elu­sive centre of the polem­ics out of which the vari­ous strands of Ger­man ideal­ism were woven — to take two notori­ous and cru­cial instances, painstak­ingly invest­ig­ated by Jonathan Israel and Fre­d­er­ick Beiser, respect­ively¹ — Spinoza’s very name was the dis­puted cur­rency in some of the fiercest philo­soph­ical, polit­ical and theo­lo­gical con­tro­ver­sies. And yet, we might be temp­ted to argue, this did not, in most cases, entail a crit­ical appro­pri­ation of his con­cepts and of the intric­ate, often for­bid­ding, dynamic of his thought. Rather, as is the case with most polem­ics, here Spinoza became a meta­phor of a host of badly defined com­plexes: athe­ism, pan­the­ism, mater­i­al­ism, ideal­ism… And even for some of his par­tis­ans, his philo­sophy became a kind of motiv­at­ing myth in the struggle against the iner­tias of tra­di­tion. But, as the Argen­tine poet Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his poem ‘Spinoza’, this was a thinker ‘freed from myth and meta­phor’. Indeed it is both the crys­tal­line con­cep­tual rigour (recall that Eth­ics, his prin­cipal work, is sub­titled More Geo­met­rico Demon­strata) and the sin­gu­lar real­ism of his philo­sophy that might account for his sin­gu­lar place in con­tem­por­ary thought.²

How then are we to char­ac­ter­ize the ‘actu­al­ity’ of Spinoza? Why is the rela­tion­ship of Spinoza to the present (not just our own, but that of 18^th cen­tury Italian rad­ic­als or 19^th cen­tury Ger­man philo­soph­ers) of a dif­fer­ent order than that of, say, Descartes or Leib­niz? In what sense could we even say that Spinoza is always ahead of us, that he is even a ‘philo­sopher of the future’? This ques­tion is not simply that of the polit­ical and his­tor­ical inser­tion of Spinoza’s thought into vari­ous con­texts and con­junc­tures, it is a pro­foundly philo­soph­ical ques­tion which has occu­pied those thinkers who have sought to under­stand the power of Spinoza’s eth­ics and polit­ics as tools for inter­ven­ing in the present. After all, the most obvi­ous image of Spinoza is as a philo­sopher of etern­ity (‘a god-​intoxicated man’, even), and one wed­ded to a rad­ical sys­tem of determ­in­ism which under­mines any pos­tu­late of free will, if not free­dom tout court. How then could such a fig­ure, seem­ingly the least ‘his­tor­ical’ of philo­soph­ers, provide thinkers con­cerned with trans­form­a­tion, nov­elty, the event, with the where­withal to advance rad­ical pro­jects of thought? Why is Spinoza repeatedly be invoked in the most urgent of polit­ical and ideo­lo­gical polem­ics? How could a philo­sophy turned toward the etern­ity of being (an onto­logy) link up with the attempt to under­stand the col­lect­ive con­struc­tion of a com­mon polit­ical space and the some­times cata­strophic incur­sion of worldly events?

Per­mit me then, to read to you a longish quote from Pierre Macherey’s per­spicu­ous treat­ment of Spinoza’s actuality:

Per­haps then we shall take note that the etern­ity of sub­stance is not, as Spinoza him­self reflec­ted, dir­ectly assim­il­able to the per­man­ence of a nature already given in itself, in an abstract and static man­ner, accord­ing to the idea of “sub­stance which has not yet become sub­ject” developed by Hegel regard­ing Spinoza; but, to the extent that this sub­stance is insep­ar­able from its pro­ductiv­ity, that it mani­fests itself nowhere else than in the total­ity of its modal real­iz­a­tions, in which it is abso­lutely imman­ent, it is a nature that is itself pro­duced in a his­tory, and under con­di­tions that the lat­ter neces­sar­ily attaches to it. Thus for the soul to attain the under­stand­ing of its union with the whole of nature is also to recog­nize his­tor­ic­ally what con­fers on it its own iden­tity, and it is in a cer­tain way, then, to respond to the ques­tion “Who am I now?” (Macherey 1998: 134)

It is per­haps the for­bid­ding but cru­cial theme of imman­ence that allows an inroad into the ever renewed force of Spinoza’s thought. It is in this concept, which tra­verses phys­ics, eth­ics and polit­ics, that we can dis­cern the clue to the idea of a being that is both eternal and rad­ic­ally in and of the now, of a praxis and a tem­por­al­ity that would not sep­ar­ate an immacu­late realm of eternal val­ues and ideas from the vicis­situdes of col­lect­ive human life. To para­phrase Yovel, imman­ence is not a kind of static indif­fer­ence, but is always caught in dynam­isms, in adven­tures, and some of these adven­tures are the adven­tures of men. By approach­ing the enigma of imman­ence, of a thought (and indis­so­ci­ably, a prac­tice) that would not refer to some form of external legit­im­a­tion, to a sup­ple­ment­ary dimen­sion of any sort, we could per­haps begin to unravel the seem­ing para­dox of Spinoza’ recep­tion. This is also per­haps why, in its sin­gu­lar mix of exact­ing schol­ar­ship and prac­tical urgency, recent Spinozism is qual­it­at­ively dif­fer­ent than its pre­curs­ors and has really begun to artic­u­late what is most puzz­ling and potent about this great philo­sopher. It has done so pre­cisely in its emphasis on the con­sequences and unique­ness of the thesis of imman­ence and on the key, and pre­vi­ously under­es­tim­ated, role of Spinoza’s polit­ical thought, more pre­cisely on the resources that Spinoza provides for rethink­ing the very concept of demo­cracy in our present con­junc­ture. To be more pre­cise and anti­cip­ate some of the themes I will intro­duce shortly, what is at stake in this ‘new Spinoza’ is a way of think­ing Spinoza’s philo­sophy, and even his concept of etern­ity, in terms of what, for want of a bet­ter term, I would call forms of inter­ac­tion, ways of mov­ing bey­ond the imme­di­ate link­ing of onto­logy and eth­ics toward a thought of how the col­lect­ive con­struc­tion of polit­ical rela­tions social­izes both the eth­ical and the onto­lo­gical, how polit­ics amp­li­fies or inter­feres with the expres­sion and affirm­a­tion of power, both at the onto­lo­gical and eth­ical level. Polit­ics — and the imman­ent tend­ency of polit­ics, demo­cracy — is thus argu­ably the priv­ileged way of relat­ing Spinoza’s onto­logy to what Fou­cault once called the ‘onto­logy of the present’.

As the French philo­sopher Louis Althusser wrote in his 1976 Essays in Self-​Criticism, much late 20^th cen­tury Spinozism has pro­ceeded by ‘attrib­ut­ing to the author of the Tractatus Theologico-​Politicus and the Eth­ics a num­ber of theses which he would surely never have acknow­ledged, though they did not actu­ally con­tra­dict him. But to be a heretical Spinozist is almost ortho­dox Spinozism, if Spinozism can be said to be one of the greatest les­sons in heresy that the world has seen!’ (Althusser 1976: 132). Though Spinozists have exis­ted ever since the rad­ical circles that rippled through Europe in the wake of Spinoza’s death, I think it is fair to say that only in the past 50 years or so has there been a Spinozism to match in her­men­eutic rigour and cre­at­ive inter­ven­tions the his­tory of Kan­tian­ism or Hegel­ian­ism, that only now has the hereti­cism that Althusser referred to been com­ple­men­ted by the labour of the concept. Argu­ably, it is only now then that the scope of his thought and its rel­ev­ance to our social and polit­ical exist­ence can be truly appre­ci­ated, at a his­tor­ical junc­ture when the com­mu­nic­at­ive power of the mul­ti­tude and of what Marx called the gen­eral intel­lect is so intens­i­fied that the phys­ics, eth­ics, onto­logy and polit­ics of Spinoza (what are ulti­mately indis­so­ci­able facets of his philo­soph­iz­ing) can be thought sim­ul­tan­eously. Today more than ever, one might argue, is Spinoza, as Pierre Macherey puts it, ‘an irre­place­able reactor and developer’ (Macherey 1998: 135). To fol­low another of Althusser’s sug­ges­tions, we could pose that much of what is most liv­ing in the European philo­sophy that fol­lowed upon the struc­tur­al­ist epis­ode is imbued by this Spinozist ele­ment, and that it is a cer­tain under­stand­ing of the artic­u­la­tion of polit­ics and onto­logy, an artic­u­la­tion which sim­ul­tan­eously eschews the turn to straight­for­ward polit­ical lib­er­al­ism and the seduc­tions of Heidegger’s onto­logy which is at the heart of the turn to Spinoza ini­ti­ated by Deleuze and Matheron, following Guer­oult, in the late 60s.³

Dig­ging deeper, and remain­ing with our Althus­serian ref­er­ence, we must also con­sider the cru­cial role that Spinoza’s meta­phys­ics played in the ideo­lo­gical struggles, through­out the 20^th cen­tury, against the dom­in­a­tion of dia­lect­ical thought. One of the century’s guid­ing philo­soph­ical altern­at­ives, to bor­row the title of one of Macherey’s books:‘Hegel or Spinoza’. And inas­much as dia­lectics can be regarded as the cul­min­a­tion of a cer­tain vari­ant of philo­soph­ical and polit­ical mod­ern­ity, we can begin to see why Spinoza’s has been presen­ted as a sin­gu­lar alternative, a thinker of a kind of anti-​modernity. Let me now turn to two points, two con­cepts, through which the Spinozan altern­at­ive has been iden­ti­fied. This is the altern­at­ive rep­res­en­ted by a philo­sophy of affirm­a­tion, both at the onto­lo­gical level (dynamic plen­it­ude of the single sub­stance) and the eth­ical level (the struggle of joy against the sad pas­sions) — what Macherey has called ‘Spinoza’s pos­it­iv­ism’, the intel­lec­tion of being ‘without medi­ation, that is, without the inter­ven­tion of a neg­at­ive rela­tion of self to being’ (Macherey 1998: 128).⁴ As Balibar notes, we can thus argue there is a pro­found polit­ical sig­ni­fic­ance in the dif­fer­ence between Spinoza’s and other philosophies.

Part 2 »