Beth
Lord
Antonio
Negri, Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity, William McCuaig
(tr.), Columbia University Press, New York, 2013, 125 pp.
This collection of four essays with
an introduction continues the trajectory that Negri began so explosively with The
Savage Anomaly (1981), although without that text's energy. Both there and
here, Negri uses Spinoza's ontology to demand and defend a politics of the
common. The "anomaly" is Spinoza's denial of transcendence --
anomalous for a seventeenth-century post-Cartesian philosopher -- and the
potentialities that denial opens up. An immanent ontology redirects our modern
thinking away from individualism, liberalism, and sovereign power, and towards
a freedom that is achievable through the popular reappropriation of common
desires and goods. For Negri, this places Spinoza "beyond modernity"
and makes him a "postmodern" philosopher whose most important legacy
is the idea of a democracy-in-progress that is continually constituted by the
collective desires of the multitude.
The Savage Anomaly is a work of genius: written in prison, it draws the rivulets
of Spinoza's thought into a raging river of political manifesto that moves with
such speed and force that it cannot fail to sweep the reader along. With the
work of Althusser and Balibar, it inaugurated a tradition of post-1968 Marxist
Spinozism that continues to influence and appeal. Negri writes that The
Savage Anomaly succeeded because "the perspective on Spinoza defended
there revives the possibility of willing and acting consciously to transform or
overthrow the capitalist mode of production, of asserting human equality and
the human common" (pp. 2-3). That this is a fairly implausible position to
take from Spinoza is not the point. Negri offers a new way of using
Spinoza, and in particular, of using his ontology to ground an alternative kind
of politics. His interpretation "might not do" for historiography,
"but it [will] do for philosophy that . . . is there to pragmatically help
us advance toward the realization of liberty" (p. 3).
By 'liberty' Negri means freedom in
Spinoza's sense: a freedom that is achieved at the highest degree of one's
power, and that is increased further when combined with the collective power of
a multitude. Negri here retains a distinction, identified in his earlier book,
between two senses of power in Spinoza: potentia ("potency"),
the immanent and constitutive essence of a living being that desires what is
good for its being, and potestas ("power"), the transcendent
power of command assumed by rulers. Potentia gives us the potential to
be free and to enter collectives with those with whom we share a common nature.
Potestas can enable and encourage potentia, or it can be used to
manage it, redirect it, or suppress it. Unlike political concepts of power,
which merely rearrange the furniture of sovereignty and law, the ontological
concept of potentia, for Negri, promises an absolute democracy that is
continually, collectively constituted. For this reason, Negri insists that a
Spinozan politics must be based on Spinoza's ontological text, the Ethics,
and not on his two explicitly political treatises.
This is a short book, but it is not
a quick read. About a third of it consists of an introduction in which Negri
explains some of the themes carried over from The Savage Anomaly and defends
his approach against other interpretations. The four chapters that follow are
texts of conference papers, linked fairly tenuously by these themes. Chapter 1,
"Spinoza: A Heresy of Immanence and of Democracy," is a 2009 lecture
on Spinoza and politics today; chapter 2, "Potency and Ontology," is
a 2006 conference paper pitching Heidegger against Spinoza; chapter 3,
"Multitude and Singularity in the Development of Spinoza's Political
Thought," is a 2007 conference paper on features of the singular and the
common; and chapter 4, "Spinoza: A Sociology of the Affects," is a
2005 conference paper that situates Spinoza's concepts of desire and love
within social life. While the four papers tread the same ground, they are
disconnected pieces that do not build on one another. Negri's ideas are most
effectively set out in the introduction and first chapter. The rest of the
chapters, betraying their origins as spoken texts, are written for auditory
fluidity rather than incisive reading; they neither clarify concepts nor
develop them at enough length to allow for deep reflection. Reading these
pieces demands more time and care than their length suggests, yet the ideas,
once yielded, are frustratingly repetitive. Each chapter boils down to much the
same thing -- and it is the same thing that was expressed so brilliantly in The
Savage Anomaly. Negri's new book functions neither as an introduction to
his thought about Spinoza nor as a development of that thought: instead, it is
a rather tedious vehicle for some exciting ideas that are better expressed
elsewhere.
For me, the joy of reading Negri is
that his ideas are both hugely attractive and utterly objectionable (generating
just the sort of non-complacent thinking that, I suppose, Negri wants to invoke
in his readers). One such idea, arching over the essays, concerns modernity.
Negri posits that Spinoza is not "modern" because Spinoza's is not a
philosophy of individualism. Spinoza is held apart from subject-centred modern
philosophies and contractual political thinking that upholds sovereign power.
In place of the individual subject with its free intentions and choices,
Spinoza understands individuals as variable collections of bodies and desires.
An individual -- whether a human being or a social group -- is always already a
multitude, and constitutes itself in terms of that multitude's common desires
for what is good for it. The Spinozan commonwealth and its institutions are not
constituted through the free will or rational choices of individuals but by
"multitude-making" through collective desire (15).
At the heart of modernity, then,
Spinoza places "the hypothesis of government by the multitude" (17).
Yet rather than concede that modernity is a complex thing with many faces -- as
do those who argue for a "radical Enlightenment" -- Negri insists
that Spinoza is post-modern. Spinoza "is inside modernity only in order to
train his gaze on values that modernity precisely cannot express, because it
has excluded them from its own foundation" (18).
This idea is undoubtedly appealing
to those of us who seek in Spinoza answers to some of the problems generated
and unsolved by modern democratic liberalism. Yet Spinoza's non-modernity -- if
it is such -- does not entail postmodernity, which involves characteristic
modes of thinking and writing that Spinoza demonstrably does not deploy. Even
if we accept that modernity is reducible to individualism and contractualism,
Spinoza's stance might more fittingly be described as pre-modern, drawing on
classical, medieval, and Renaissance ideas of immanent causes, formal essences,
and common notions. The "potency of the common and of love" that
Spinoza posits as an alternative to the modern "potency of the
individual" (p. 21) is surely evidence of a Renaissance, rather than
postmodern, sensibility. To revive a Renaissance notion of the common against
individualism might look revolutionary today; to do so in the seventeenth
century looks conservative and even reactionary. Modernity is surely
characterized by the very different ways that thinkers select and reject such
elements of their intellectual inheritance. Spinoza is modern in this sense,
and revolutionary only depending on our historical perspective.
Negri disapproves both of
historicism and of scepticism about the power of common desire to achieve good
political outcomes. Freedom is the aim and the product of human desire by its
very nature; yet it is key to Spinoza's analysis that desire never operates in
isolation from actual conditions that determine it in other directions. Spinoza
worries about "the mob" that desires totalitarianism and war, but his
point is much broader: both individually and collectively, people desire what
their circumstances make them want, not what their shared nature determines is
good for them. Capitalism, individualism, and liberal democracy -- and also
sexism and racism, as Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd have persuasively argued
-- are, on Spinoza's account, products of human desire caught up in
"collective imaginings" rather than true understanding.
Negri is not unaware of this, and he
does not posit a "pure or primal" human desire. "All we wish is
to keep on rebelling, here and now, enmeshed in this reality," he says (p.
49). It is a matter of transforming our actuality from within. Yet Negri is
"hopeful" that in its ongoing rebellion, the multitude will desire a
common reality of "living labor" freed from exchange value. Spinoza
teaches us to be wary of hope: it is an inconstant joy about an imagined
future, bound up with doubt and confusion. Negri declares himself immune to the
charge that he is too optimistic about the multitude, without explaining why
(pp. 29-30). If the reader insists that Spinoza believes that desire will
always be misdirected and appropriated by more powerful forces, and that consequently
Spinoza endorses strong rulers and laws, Negri will accuse her of basing
Spinoza's political views on his political texts rather than his ontology (pp.
9 and 52). To this one can only respond by pointing out that the political
texts are where Spinoza discusses the complications of actuality.
By what right does Negri move so
seamlessly from ontology to actual politics? The answer presumably consists in
Spinoza's uniquely immanent system. The best political formation is immanent in
our shared human essence, which follows necessarily from God or nature. Does
this mean we have "potential" for a democracy of the multitude?
Undoubtedly yes, but it is not at all clear what that democracy would look
like, or how it would actually function. Spinoza, again, tends to be
conservative in his estimation, and avoids any hopeful prognosis of what
democracy may become. By contrast, despite thinking that we should leave it up
"to the multitude itself to decide what it wants to be" (p. 30),
Negri is certain about what a politics of the common looks like. It looks
collective, progressive, anti-hierarchical and anti-individualist. He trusts
that the "postmodern" multitude will revive a pre-modern primitive
communism that never was. This Marxist hope is nowhere to be found in Spinoza's
corpus; what is so interesting is that his Renaissance thinking seems to
give us occasion to revive it.
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/46667-spinoza-for-our-time-politics-and-postmodernity
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario