Antonio
Negri
El
artículo que aquí reproducimos apareció originalmente en Les Temps Modernes 46:539 (junio 1991). Esta es la versión en
inglés publicada en Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal, 18:2 (1995), pp. 1-15. Traducción de Charles T. Wolfe. También está incluido en la colección
de ensayos en inglés: Subversive Spinoza,
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004. Y desde luego en la versión en
español: Spinoza
subversivo, Akal, Madrid, 2000.
1.
Spinoza, the Romantic
The paradox marking Spinoza's
reappearance in modernity is well known. If Mendelssohn wished to "give
him new credence by bringing him closer to the philosophical orthodoxy of
Leibniz and Wolff," and Jacobi, "by presenting him as a heterodox
figure in the literal sense of the term, wanted to do away with him
definitively for modern Christianity"—well, "both failed in their
goal, and it was the heterodox Spinoza who was rehabilitated" [1]. The
Mendelssohn-Jacobi debate can be grafted onto the crisis of a specific
philosophical model. It generates a figure of Spinoza capable of assuaging the
exacerbated spiritual tension of that epoch, and of constituting the systematic
preamble of the relation between power and substance—between subject and
nature. Spinoza, the damned Spinoza, had a resurgence in modernity as a
Romantic philosopher. Lessing won out by recognizing in Spinoza an idea of
nature which was capable of balancing the relation between feeling and
intellect, freedom and necessity, and history and reason. Herder and Goethe,
against the subjective and revolutionary impatience of the Sturm und Drang, based themselves on this powerful image of
synthesis and recomposed objectivity: Spinoza is not only the figure of
Romanticism; he constitutes its grounding and its fulfillment. The omnipotence
of nature was no longer to break off into the tragedy of feeling, but it was to
triumph over it, by opposing it to a kingdom of completed forms. Spinoza's
first reception within Romanticism was thus an aesthetic reception, a
perception of motion and perfection, of dynamism and forms. And it remained
such, even when the general frame and the particular components of Romanticism
were subjected to the labor of philosophical critique. Fichte, the real
philosophical hero of Romanticism, considered both Spinoza's and Kant's systems
to be "perfectly coherent" [2], in the incessant ontological movement
of the I. For the Schelling of the 1790s, the assertion of a radical opposition
between critical philosophy and dogmatic philosophy—that is, between a
philosophy of the absolute I founding itself on the critical philosophy and a
dogmatic philosophy of absolute object and Spinozism—was quickly resolved into
an analysis on which dialectically took on (as Hegel immediately acknowledges)
the weight of the objective [3]. Far from becoming antinomial, the absolute
position of the I composes itself into a necessary process which, above
tragedy, exalts the "spiritual automatism" [4] of the relation
between subject and substance. The aesthetic dimension of this synthesis
consists in ceaselessly and tirelessly bringing back power and substance, the
productive element and the form of production, to perfection. Romanticism,
according to Hegel, is characterized by a capacity to overcome the pure
objectivity of the ideal and the natural as a true idea of beauty and truth,
initially to destroy the union of the idea and its reality, and to locate the
latter in the difference, so as then to bring to manifestation the inner world
of absolute subjectivity and reconstruct its objectivity where the overcoming
of sensibility is appeased in the absolute character of the result [5]. The
filiation of this process is still Lessingian, but the new dialectic expresses
and articulates its motivations, while insisting on the propaedeutic of the
beautiful along the path leading to the absolute. Spinoza, a certain Spinoza,
becomes the central figure in this process.
