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.
