Spinoza

Then and Now, Essays

Antonio Negri, Ed Emery

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509503544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

This third and final volume of the series of writings by Antonio Negri examines how Spinoza's thought constitutes a radical break with past ideas and an essential tool for envisaging a form of politics beyond capitalism. Negri shows how Spinoza's ideas have facilitated radical renewal from their beginnings to the present day. It was the democratic freedoms and spirit of solidarity fostered in The Netherlands of the 17th century that allowed Spinoza to develop a radically new form of thought, redefining notions of the state and outlining a republican alternative to absolutist monarchy. In our own era, Negri argues that the rediscovery of Spinoza was critical in reinvigorating political theory. Instead of acquiescing to the economic order of capitalism and abandoning the class struggle, Spinoza's ideas enable us to reconstruct a revolutionary perspective. His treatment of concepts such as multitude, necessity, and liberty have given us new ways of looking critically at our present, revealing that power must always be seen as a question of antagonism and class struggle. The writings that make up this volume – some written from prison as Negri fought for his own freedom – provide an important account of the enduring relevance of Spinoza's thought. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and political theory, as well anyone interested in radical politics today.

Part I
Spinoza in 1968

1
Starting from Masaniello …
Deleuze and Spinoza, a political becoming

On being revolutionaries

Other than here, I have written about Deleuze’s relationship with Spinoza in ‘Gilles Felix’ (published in Marx and Foucault, Polity, 2018) and in ‘Spinoza and Deleuze: The good moment’ (chapter 2 in this volume). It was a relationship that exploded in political form in 1968, when Deleuze took Spinoza on board as a symbol of the revolution of desire. Now, as we know, 1968 is the year in which Deleuze also met Félix [Guattari]. It was the right moment for making a break with structuralism by developing a radical critique of psychoanalysis. From there began a journey characterised by the desire to go beyond working on concepts only, but also to base his analysis on a theoretical and practical conception of the unconscious as a machine. What was the reason for this radical reorientation of his philosophical efforts? Deleuze replies: it’s the fact that we are in a state of revolution. Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are the books in which Spinoza becomes a political revolutionary. Let us reread this famous passage in A Thousand Plateaus:

After all, is not Spinoza’s Ethics the great book of the BwO [body without organs = CsO, corps sans organes]? The attributes are types or genuses of BwO’s substances, powers, zero intensities as matrices of production. The modes are everything that comes to pass: waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix. […] It is a problem not of the One or the Multiple but of a fusional multiplicity that effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one and the multiple. […] The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it). (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, pp. 170–1)

For ten years, the actor of this revolution of desire ‘is Spinoza in the garb of a Neapolitan revolutionary’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1982, p. 28 = 1999, p. 37): Spinoza = Masaniello.

How does this symbolic typology come to be established? We will not understand it if we stay glued to the letter of the text and generally fail to raise the matter of the context of these statements. How is the life in which they are inscribed? What does ‘being revolutionaries’ mean in 1968? It means bringing about what the ‘resistance’ against fascism and the military victory of 1944 had promised but had not achieved: liberating the passion for freedom and joining it with the passion for what is common; dismantling all the repressive and fascistoid structures of society and building new ‘forms of life’; getting one’s hands on the capitalist machine and submitting it to the desire for human happiness. ‘The real problem of revolution, a revolution without bureaucracy, would be the problem of new social relations where singularities come into play, active minorities, in a nomad space without property or enclosure’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 145 = 2002, p. 201).

We need to make the concepts materialise and to understand how they were proclaimed among militants in the course of struggle. This is because, for Deleuze and Guattari’s interlocutors, the liberation of desire meant the construction of a new democracy, the end of capitalism, the renewed development of social life, and the invention of a new system of production. Deleuze and Guattari are militants. They don’t care about Marcuse, or about Freudian Marxism – they want to talk in the movement and to the movement. Deleuze’s preface to Guattari’s Psychanalyse et transversalité is a discourse on this going ‘beyond’ Freudian Marxism, beyond Reich, to a place where the libido does not empty itself into the negative but is constructed in the social:

It is indeed a question of libido as such, as the essence of desire and sexuality: but now it invests and disinvests flows of every kind as they trickle through the social field, and it effects cuts in these flows, stoppages, leaks and retentions. To be sure, it does not operate in a manifest manner, as do the objective interests of consciousness or the chains of historical causality. It deploys a latent desire coextensive with the social field, entailing ruptures in causality and the emergences of singularities, sticking points as well as leaks. The year 1936 is not only an event in historical consciousness, it is also a complex of the unconscious. Our love affairs, our sexual choices, are less the by-products of a mythical Mommy-Daddy, than the excesses of a social reality, the interferences and effects of flows invested by the libido. (Deleuze 2004, p. 194 = 2002, pp. 271–2)

Deleuze and Guattari’s interlocutors are the young people of the Mouvement du 22 Mars [Movement of 22 March 1968], anarchocommunists, or the organisations and groups that break with the French Communist Party and with Trotskyism on libertarian terms. It is towards these groups and their militant experience that the discourse of Deleuze and Guattari reaches; but it also delves deeply into those experiences and behaviours. The Anti-Oedipus continuously forges togther the intensity of the militant groups, the experiences of liberation, and critical work. Intensity and compositional differences, organisational slogans, analysis of the dynamics of nomadism, of micropolitics, of sexual liberation, and so on are concepts and practices pulled out from the life of groups. The idea was to build a toolkit [boîte à outils], and to build it for them.

What does Spinoza offer for the preparation of this toolkit? It seems to me that he offers the concept of revolutionary institution. This proposal is the unique mechanism [dispositivo] that Deleuze and Guattari offer to the movements of ’68. It is an ‘abstract machine’ that allows one to imagine, and eventually to cause to function together, both insurrection and institution and that unites them in representing a demand for power and a transformation of life. In this figure there come together the immediacy of conatus [striving] and the all-encompassing dynamic of cupiditas [passion], the corporeal materiality of appetitus [longing] and the tension of amor [love] – these are passion-related modes that do not designate processes but constitute mechanisms and promote the ontological consistency of the advancement of passions. For revolution is not only an uninterrupted continuity, but a repository of institutions and the development of freedom. Deleuze and Guattari draw from the Spinozist geometry the design of a continuous movement of affects and of their consistency in bodily intercrossings. Spinoza or the ‘revolutionary institution’ – therefore Deleuze and Guattari are not anarchists, they are communists who want to describe and organise the movement of liberation. Here the constructive phylum of the ‘abstract machine’ recovers and organises the wealth of the desiring world and puts it into production. As in Spinoza, the theory of passions becomes a course of action. Thus Anti-Oedipus is within the great rhizome that was built by 1968. This helps us to understand that Spinoza in the uniform of a Neapolitan revolutionary is not a caricature and that he must be understood in this light, as producer of a revolutionary institution of desire.

The revolutionary institution of desire

Spinoza has a commanding position in the development of the Anti-Oedipus. First of all, in the struggle against the mystification that Oedipus imposes – the situation where the productivity of desire is shut within a development that downgrades desire to a ‘need due to lack’ and considers it dominated by a ‘miraculous’ force, which expropriates its productivity. ‘Refuge of ignorance’, as Spinoza would say, ‘[c]apital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1982, p. 10). ‘The body without organs now falls back on [se rabat sur] desiring-production, attracts it, and appropriates it for its own’ (ibid., p. 11); it reduces it to a production of ghosts – precisely the point of triumph of the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack and not as a production. But desire resists and produces reality. The pages in Anti-Oedipus that surround the sentence about ‘Spinoza in the garb of a Neapolitan revolutionary’ – of Masaniello – build the factory, l’usine du désir [‘the worshop of desire’]. They are a summary of Books III and IV of Spinoza’s Ethics. And, as in Ethics, the appearance of an act of social repression of the expression of desire does not interrupt it but stimulates its production. What is being proposed here, in Spinozist form, is a real process of ontological constitution. Desiring machines organise themselves as technical social machines; the desiring production transforms itself into social production; in short, desiring machines are both technical and social (ibid., pp. 36–7). This is where their principle and the beginning of their ‘becoming institution’ lie, because they are not given only as sparks of becoming but also as tendencies, continuities of their selfmaking. Here Spinoza is represented as the revolutionary intellectual rather than as Masaniello; he plays the Marxist, toys with the law of the falling rate of profit (ibid., p. 33), and moves within the social institution of revolutionary desire. If the reason for the collapse of capitalist development is in this development itself, then Spinozist cupiditas can operate savagely on the destruction of the capitalist order, when we look at its destiny from the point of view of desire. And yet desire emerges from the fray, proposing itself as an institution regulated in freedom, through an infinite process of liberation – as construction of being.

Two observations. The first one starts from an objection raised by Serge Leclaire. He says: ‘In my opinion, you yourselves have disarmed your desiring machine, which should work only by breaking down, through its failures and backfires: whereas thanks to this “positive” object and the absence of any duality, as well as any lack, it is going to work like… a Swiss clock!’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 222 = 2002, p. 309).

Is this not a paradoxical accusation of ‘Spinozism’ (when Spinoza is read in the Hegelian way) raised against the revolutionary institutionality of desire? The answer comes from the new figure that Spinoza acquired in Deleuze’s reading – which is here claimed not simply as a product of the ethical Spinoza, but as an ontological effect. Deleuze and Guattari are faithful Spinozists on the ontological terrain, while Leclaire’s objection brings us back to that classical image of a God-Nature (irreducible multiplicity of attributes – infinity of ways), which was brusquely overturned in the ‘Neapolitan’ reference to the whole BwO. Not without reason, Deleuze reminds us of a proposition by Gueroult that he cited when rejecting Leclaire’s objection: ‘On two occasions, moreover, Gueroult uses the term “motley” [bigarré]: God is simple insofar as he is not composed of parts, but no less complex insofar as he is constituted by prima elementa, which alone are absolutely simple; God is thus a motley ens realissimum, not a pure, ineffable and unqualifiable ens simplicissimum in which all differences would disappear’; ‘God is motley, but unfragmentable, constituted of heterogeneous but inseparable attributes’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 150 = 2002, p. 209). Here is another observation, this time by François Châtelet – who, in the fabulous discussion of the Anti-Oedipus organised by Maurice Nadeau, recognis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Author’s preface: Two histories for Spinoza
• Part I Spinoza in 1968
• Part II Spinoza Today
• Part III Spinoza in the Seventeenth Century
• Bibliography
• End User License Agreement