Étienne Balibar approaches Spinoza as a thinker of interaction, of the constitutive character of relations. Spinoza’s question, in Balibar’s view, is the following: ‘What is the mode of reciprocal action that characterizes the existence of a body politic?’

In this respect, the uniqueness of Spinoza is that of taking the movement (both outer and inner, so to speak) of the masses as the object of political science, and not just the legitimacy of sovereignty or the claims of order. (Of course, we may be tempted to ask, to what extent are the masses, or rather the multitude, the subject or object of politics?)

From here derives, in Balibar’s reading, both the centrality and aporetic character of the notion of democracy. Democracy is defined as a ‘united body of men which corporately possesses sovereign right over everything within its power’, as the combination of the reciprocity of duties and the equality of rights. As both Macherey and Negri note, this is not to be understood simply as another figure in a political typology of forms of government, but is an immanent tendency of political life, inscribed in the dynamic of reason and into the vicissitudes of human nature. Or, as Balibar puts it, democracy is both a kind of political order and the truth of every political order. Democracy can also be understood as the power of the multitude coordinated, cultivated and instituted without the imaginary displacement represented by sovereignty, by the alienation of the power of human singularities into the empty and formally unified place of power (the Hobbesian option, as it were). Whence the radical novelty of Spinoza’s question: How does power originate in the multitude? And, one should add, how does it continue and persevere, how is power not just originated, but also continuously constructed, in and by the multitude?

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 17th and 18th 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 our guest in this col­loquium, 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.