Hasana, Sharp - Between Hegel and Spinoza. A Volume Of Critical Essays 1

Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy Between Hegel and Spinoza

Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy is a major monograph series from Bloomsbury. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the whole field of philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Aesthetic in Kant, James Kirwan Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion, Aaron Preston Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus, Christopher Brown Augustine and Roman Virtue, Brian Harding The Challenge of Relativism, Patrick Phillips Demands of Taste in Kant’s Aesthetics, Brent Kalar Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature, Justin Skirry Descartes’ Theory of Ideas, David Clemenson Dialectic of Romanticism, Peter Murphy and David Roberts Duns Scotus and the Problem of Universals, Todd Bates Hegel’s Philosophy of Language, Jim Vernon Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, David James Hegel’s Theory of Recognition, Sybol S. C. Anderson The History of Intentionality, Ryan Hickerson Kantian Deeds, Henrik Jøker Bjerre Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory, Alison Assiter Kierkegaard’s Analysis of Radical Evil, David A. Roberts Leibniz Re-interpreted, Lloyd Strickland Metaphysics and the End of Philosophy, HO Mounce Nietzsche and the Greeks, Dale Wilkerson Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Delbert Reed Philosophy of Miracles, David Corner Platonism, Music and the Listener’s Share, Christopher Norris Popper’s Theory of Science, Carlos Garcia Postanalytic and Metacontinental, edited by James Williams, Jack Reynolds, James Chase and Ed Mares Rationality and Feminist Philosophy, Deborah K. Heikes Re-thinking the Cogito, Christopher Norris Role of God in Spinoza’s Metaphysics, Sherry Deveaux Rousseau and Radical Democracy, Kevin Inston Rousseau and the Ethics of Virtue, James Delaney Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom, Matthew Simpson Spinoza and the Stoics, Firmin DeBrabander Spinoza’s Radical Cartesian Mind, Tammy Nyden-Bullock St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War, John Mark Mattox St. Augustine of Hippo, R. W. Dyson Thomas Aquinas & John Duns Scotus, Alex Hall Tolerance and the Ethical Life, Andrew Fiala

Between Hegel and Spinoza A Volume of Critical Essays Edited by Hasana Sharp and Jason E. Smith

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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www.bloomsbury.com First published 2012 © Hasana Sharp, Jason E. Smith and Contributors, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-8404-7 e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-5052-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Between Hegel and Spinoza: a volume of critical essays/edited by Hasana Sharp and Jason E. Smith. p. cm. – (Continuum studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-8404-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-5052-3 (ebook pdf: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-6690-6 (ebook epub: alk. paper) 1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. 2. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677. I. Sharp, Hasana. II. Smith, Jason E. B2948.B463 2012 193–dc23 2012016909 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents Notes on Contributors List of Abbreviations

Introduction Hasana Sharp and Jason E. Smith Part 1 The Individual and Transindividuality between Ontology and Politics

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The Misunderstanding of the Mode. Spinoza in Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812–16) Vittorio Morfino

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“Desire is Man’s Very Essence”: Spinoza and Hegel as Philosophers of Transindividuality Jason Read

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The Problem of the Beginning in Political Philosophy: Spinoza after Hegel Andre Santos Campos

Part 2 Hegel’s Spinoza

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Hegel, sive Spinoza: Hegel as His Own True Other Warren Montag

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Hegel’s Treatment of Spinoza: Its Scope and its Limits Vance Maxwell

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Hegel’s Reconciliation with Spinoza John McCumber

Part 3 The Psychic Life of Negation

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Affirmative Pathology: Spinoza and Hegel on Illness and Self-Repair Christopher Lauer

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Of Suicide and Falling Stones: Finitude, Contingency, and Corporeal Vulnerability in (Judith Butler’s) Spinoza Gordon Hull

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Thinking the Space of the Subject between Hegel and Spinoza Caroline Williams

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Contents

Part 4 Judaism beyond Hegel and Spinoza

10 The Paradox of a Perfect Democracy: From Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise to Marx’s Critique of Ideology Idit Dobbs-Weinstein 11 Spinoza, Hegel, and Adorno on Judaism and History Jeffrey A. Bernstein Bibliography Index

Notes on Contributors Jeffrey A. Bernstein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, USA. He works in the areas of Spinoza, German philosophy, and Jewish thought. He is currently at work on a book-length study entitled Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History. André Santos Campos is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Legal Theory at the Lusiad University of Lisbon, Portugal, and Research Fellow in the New University of Lisbon, specializing in legal philosophy, political theory, and early modern philosophy. He is the author of Jus sive Potentia (Lisbon: CFUL, 2010) and of Spinoza’s Revolutions in Natural Law (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). Idit Dobbs-Weinstein is an Associate Professor of Philosophy with secondary appointments in Jewish Studies and the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. Her research and writing seeks to retrieve an other, occluded materialist Aristotelian tradition from Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic medieval philosophy to the Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Her publications include Maimonides and St. Thomas on the Limits of Reason, Maimonides and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, and Maimonides and His Heritage. She is currently finishing a manuscript whose provisional title is Whose History, Which Politics? Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs. Gordon Hull is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA. He works on the history of modern philosophy, as well as issues in moral and political philosophy surrounding new technologies, where his focus is on intellectual property and privacy. In the history of philosophy, he has written primarily on Spinoza and Hobbes, including the book Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought (Continuum, 2009). Christopher Lauer is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, USA. He works primarily in German Idealism and the ethics of

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Notes on Contributors

recognition and is the author of The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling (Continuum, 2010). He is currently at work on a book on intimacy. Vance Maxwell has retired as a Professor of Philosophy from the Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland-Labrador, Canada, after a long teaching career. In various journals, he has published reviews, critical notices, and articles on Spinoza, Spinoza-Hume, and Spinoza-Hegel. He is currently writing a book which will offer a Spinozan philosophy of mathematics. He also intends to write a work proposing a Spinozan aesthetic. John McCumber received his PhD in philosophy and Greek from the University of Toronto and has taught at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA, the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, and Northwestern University, Illinois, USA. He is currently Professor of Germanic Languages at UCLA. He has written many books and article on the history of philosophy and its implications, most recently Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought (Acumen 2011) and On Philosophy: Notes from a Crisis (Stanford, 2012). Warren Montag is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College, California, USA. His most recent book, Philosophy’s Perpetual War: Althusser and his Contemporaries, will appear in 2013. Vittorio Morfino is a Senior Researcher in the History of Philosophy at the Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy. He is the author of Substantia sive Organismus (1997), Sulla violenza. Una lettura di Hegel (2000), Il tempo e l’occasione. L’incontro Spinoza Machiavelli (2002), Incursioni spinoziste (2002), and Il tempo della moltitudine (2005). He has edited Spinoza contra Leibniz (1994), La Spinoza Renaissance nella Germania di fine Settecento (2000), L’abisso dell’unica sostanza (2009), as well as the Italian edition of the late writings of Louis Althusser (2000). He is an editor of Quaderni materialisti and of Décalages. Jason Read is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, USA. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (2003) as well as numerous articles on Althusser, Negri, Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. He is currently completing a manuscript titled Relations of Production: Transindividuality between Economics and Politics for the Historical Materialism book series.

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Hasana Sharp is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Quebec, Canada. She is author of Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (University of Chicago, 2011). Jason E. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, USA. He writes primarily about contemporary art, political thought, and philosophy. He recently published, with Philip Armstrong and Jean-Luc Nancy, Politique et au-dèla (Galilée, 2011). Caroline Williams is a Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. She is author of Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject (2001) as well as articles on Spinoza, Althusser, Lacan, Castoriadis, poststructuralism, and subjectivity. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Spinoza and Political Critique: Thinking the Political in the Wake of Althusser.

List of Abbreviations Spinoza’s works E

Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order (…) (Ethica…) App Appendix Ax Axiom C Corollary D Definition Def. Affs. Definition of the Affects Dem Demonstration Lem Lemma P Proposition Pos Postulate Pref Preface S Scholium Ep Correspondence (Epistola) KV Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (Korte Verhandeling…) TIE Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione) TP Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus) TTP Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus)

Hegel’s works EL The “Encyclopedia Logic” (Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) EPS Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences EPR Elements of the Philosophy of Right (also referred to as: The Philosophy of Right) ETW Early Theological Writings

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List of Abbreviations

IPH “Introduction,” Lectures on the Philosophy of History LHP Lectures on the History of Philosophy LPH Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Volume III, unless otherwise noted) LPR Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion LPS Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit PhS Phenomenology of Spirit SL Science of Logic

Introduction Hasana Sharp and Jason E. Smith

If Kant is the widely acknowledged intellectual father of the Enlightenment, Hegel has always had an important place by his side as a sympathetic but exacting critic. Hegel, as is well known, objected to Kant’s “formalism,” to which he opposed a more demanding view of freedom as an historically achieved reconciliation of one’s will with the moral law, civil society, and the State.1 Hegel thereby requires the political theorist, for example, to consider not only the requirements for a legitimate form of rule but also the process by which subjects come to desire, animate, and identify with laws and social codes. A recent, influential reassessment of the Enlightenment champions Spinoza as the progenitor of the “radical” Enlightenment, which differs from the received tradition by virtue of a more profound commitment to its hallmark ideals: reason, equality, and democracy.2 According to this interpretation, and as his contemporaries feared, Spinoza inaugurates an atheist tradition of radical materialism that dissolves God into nature, and, with the fall of metaphysical hierarchy, the first truly democratic vision becomes possible. Spinoza and Hegel thus point the way toward alternatives to the dominant wisdom that continues to govern our age. Just a word on the relationship of each philosopher to what we will loosely call “the received tradition of the Enlightenment”: Hegel sees in Kant’s philosophy the distillation of the conflict animating Enlightenment “man”: the irreconcilable tension between autonomy and heteronomy.3 The ideal of perfect autonomy by which each individual subordinates himself or herself only to a self-authorized law (self-authorized because given by reason) appears in the Kantian picture to be at odds with our dependency upon the forces of nature, including bodily needs and the labor and care of other people. Yet, Hegel sees in modern society the possibility of reconciling this tension and thereby revisiting the Enlightenment ideal of freedom. Modern society has structured human life such that we can finally experience the profound co-implications of dependency and freedom, social obligations, and self-assertion. It is our bodily need, for example, that

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Between Hegel and Spinoza

generates the division of labor necessary to meet those needs, which engenders a society in which we can come to exercise our reason reflectively.4 The form that this Hegelian reconciliation of dependency and freedom might take has historically been divided into “right” and “left” camps. Hegel is seen to satisfy the individual yearning for freedom by way of total identification with the State and God (for the “right” Hegelian) or by way of a community of free producers (to allude only to the most famous “left Hegelian,” Karl Marx). We see in this very brief account why Hegel is an immanent critic of Enlightenment ideals. While freedom and rationality remain paramount, the self-determination of individuals can only be realized by virtue of a system of relationships, a complex network of dependencies, and a mutually supportive system for developing our capacities and satisfying our aims. Freedom and reason, then, ought not be seen in strict opposition to dependency and nature. We might find in Spinoza’s philosophy a similarly valiant effort to resolve the conflict between self-determination and natural-determination that came to characterize Enlightenment thought. Spinoza’s solution may rightfully be considered “radical” in that he utterly rejects the terms of the opposition by denying that there is anything other than natural determination. From the point of view of the received tradition, Spinoza’s “solution” is nothing but the total victory of heteronomy or determination by external forces. Yet, Spinoza labors to show that freedom as human reason is the effect of natural powers coming together in a felicitous way so as to amplify one another.5 There are parallels, albeit imperfect ones, between Hegel’s critique of Kant’s ideal of freedom and Spinoza’s critique of Descartes’ freedom of the will. Just as Hegel resists the idea of freedom as the form of human rationality itself, Spinoza denies Descartes’ view that the faculty of the will is fundamentally unconstrained. Thus, they each endeavor to paint a picture of freedom that is integrated with bodily life, natural determination, and social dependency. Such revisions of ideals of freedom, in our current age of free-market rational choice, are sorely needed. Yet, for many philosophers, political and ethical theorists today, one must choose between Hegel and Spinoza. Each is acknowledged as a valuable critic of the received Enlightenment tradition and its corresponding politics; nevertheless, it is hardly possible to adopt their alternatives together and neither can one discover a position between them. Both Hegel and Spinoza might be seen, for example, to challenge the abstract individualism of the Kantian moral subject,6 yet the insistence of each thinker on the relational dimensions of existence is understood to be so different as to be incompatible. Hegel’s vision of human life is stamped by the image of the master and slave, engaged in a violent struggle to

Introduction

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the death.7 Even if this is but a moment of Hegel’s picture of human existence, it so often remains the defining moment. Humans are death-bent and destructive by nature, even as Spirit, expressed in human history, strives to resolve our natural bellicosity. In contrast, rather than underscoring the fundamentally antagonistic character of social relations, Spinoza’s interpreters often celebrate his emphasis upon the human bond (“man is a God to man”) and the absolutely affirmative character of human desire.8 If Hegel represents the thinker of violent antagonism and its resolution, Spinoza is often seen as the herald of love and unequivocal self-affirmation. On a certain understanding, between Hegel and Spinoza, we find only an abyss. As Deleuze’s influential interpretation maintains, Hegel exemplifies and promotes the “cults of death,” while Spinoza embodies an irrepressible “appetite for living.”9 Hegel is the figure of negation, while Spinoza is the thinker of “pure affirmation.”10 Perhaps paradoxically, Deleuze reflects Hegel’s own judgment of the relationship between these two thinkers, even as he inverts his evaluation. Whereas, for Deleuze, Spinoza has “enough confidence in life to denounce all the phantoms of the negative,”11 for Hegel, Spinoza’s philosophy remains “rigid” and “motionless” by virtue of its inability to incorporate the majestic labor of the negative.12 For Hegel, the absence of negativity in Spinoza leads to the inability of individuals to act as the motors of their own transformation. Without an internal principle of opposition, change must arrive from the outside. If development is external, humans do not enjoy any genuine autonomy or power of selfdetermination. For Deleuze, the lack of internal opposition reflects Spinoza’s courageous refusal of the constitutive necessity of death and self-destruction. With war surrounding him, Spinoza produced a heroic alternative to “all the ways of humiliating and breaking life.”13 Deleuze’s portrait of Spinoza as the doctor of life, who refuses avant la lettre the lure of any capitulation to despair, has been highly influential in Continental ethics and politics, such that it appears nearly impossible to harness the resources of these two major alternatives to our inherited tradition. As provocative and brilliant as Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza often is, we might be wary of how Deleuze’s view of the chasm between Hegel and Spinoza mirrors Hegel’s. Although, for Deleuze, the opposition between Hegel and Spinoza clearly yields a favorable assessment of Spinoza, he adopts Hegel’s terms. On one side of the chasm, we find affirmation, positivity, and life. On the other, there is negation, negativity, and death.14 Yet, between Hegel and Spinoza, there is not only opposition. This collection of essays seeks to find the suppressed kinship between Hegel and Spinoza. If Spinoza was an important ally for Deleuze

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and others against the Hegelianism of France in the 1960s and 1970s, it is not clear that philosophy, ethics, or political theory continue to be served by their opposition today. Moreover, while it is important not to suppress any important differences between them, what they bequeathed to us is much more similar than we tend to recognize. They both offer rigorous and profound alternatives to the methodological individualism of classical liberalism. In addition, they sketch portraits of reason that are much more context-responsive and emotionally charged than typical Enlightenment portraits and which make better sense of our embodied and historical existence. In a word, they are the most powerful living alternatives to mainstream Enlightenment thought. The common ground that lies between them should not remain obscured by the differences that hold them apart. The obfuscation of their kinship is surely owed in part to Hegel’s urgent, yet conflicted disavowal of his own Spinozism.15 There is no better analysis of Hegel’s systematic blindness with respect to this silently productive kinship than Pierre Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza, a book whose translation has finally appeared.16 Some context for this under appreciated work is in order. A decade and a half after the publication of two important texts in postwar French Marxism, Reading Capital and For a Theory of Literary Production, Macherey published Hegel or Spinoza in 1979. During those long 15 years, much had happened in the fields of politics and philosophy. During this same period, Macherey had published little, almost nothing. We can imagine, nonetheless, that Hegel or Spinoza represents the result of a silent, patient, and meticulous philosophical labor. It is a book that, in many ways, had to be written: a book that stages a veritable Auseinandersetzung between the actual, literal, or material practice of Spinoza’s text and Hegel’s magisterial exposition of Spinoza’s philosophical system. A book that had to be written, then, because much of the most important work accomplished by Althusser and what came to be called his “circle” presupposes this philosophical labor. Indeed, the circle opposed the Hegelianism and humanist Marxism promoted by the most public intellectuals at the time, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Yet, nowhere in the work of Althusser, Macherey, or Balibar, among others, do we find an explicit articulation of what Macherey will call the “essential divergence” between these two images of thought and these two competing figures of rationality. And yet it seems that the silent presence of Spinoza’s antiteleological, “antihumanist” materialism was what supported their efforts to purge Marx’s materialist dialectic of its Hegelian residues. Why, in the course of this operation, Spinoza could only be invoked obliquely is no

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doubt a matter of strategy, on the philosophical and political fronts, in a very determinate situation.17 Suffice it to say that the conjuncture in 1979, on the philosophical and political fronts, was much different. An operation that, in the mid-1960s, assumed the form of a semiclandestine strategic hypothesis could now take place, in its smallest details, out in the open. Hegel or Spinoza appears to propose a bifurcation in the history of thought: either/or, either Hegel or Spinoza. But this provocative title does little justice, in fact, to the complex and overdetermined relations between these two philosophical systems, relations that Macherey draws out. Indeed, at moments, as the title to Montag’s contribution to this volume suggests, the “or” may just as well be an inclusive “or”: Hegel or Spinoza; Hegel, which is to say, Spinoza. Macherey is concerned primarily with how Hegel “misses” Spinoza, how Hegel’s seemingly attentive examination of Spinoza’s thought is in fact a missed encounter, a nonevent that nevertheless leaves symptomatic, legible traces in Hegel’s own thought.18 Whether it is a question of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s peculiar deployment of the geometric method, the misreading of the famous formula, omnis determinatio est negatio, or the relation between substance and attributes in the first two books of the Ethics, Hegel is shown to consistently “say exactly the opposite of [what Spinoza’s thought] establishes.”19 This, we can assume, reveals less about Spinoza’s own philosophical system than it does the conditions of Hegel’s own discourse. It is as if these inversions are scars internal to Hegel’s thought, a blindness to what is right before his eyes, a blind spot that is the historical and material condition for the emergence of Hegel’s thought. More enigmatically, Macherey underlines on several occasions that this blindness is all the more blind in those moments when Spinoza’s thought seems to anticipate Hegel’s avant la lettre. Speaking of Hegel’s false characterization of Spinoza’s substance as “dead” and the relation between substance and attributes as at once mechanical and external to one another, Macherey demonstrates that, to the contrary, substance is “in its immanent life . . . a movement toward self, affirmation of self ”—that is, a notion of substance as an absolute process in which the attribute of thought is a point of immanent reflection or inflexion that is perilously close to Hegel’s own.20 It is at these moments, Macherey emphasizes, when an “essential convergence” between these two thoughts occurs, that Hegel’s interpretation “diverges” most dramatically from the actual formulations of Spinoza’s text. It is this play of proximity and distance, of divergence and convergence, that constitutes the space of the missed encounter between Hegel and Spinoza.

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Macherey’s localization of these points of convergence should, however, give us some pause. Much of the work done on Spinoza in Europe since the late 1960s, whether that of the Althusserian circle, Deleuze, Matheron, or Negri, as we have already observed, was undertaken in view of affirming the divergence between Hegel’s and Spinoza’s thought: what interest is there, after all, in affirming that Spinoza’s doctrine of substance is identical with Hegel’s, that he anticipates it by a century and a half? What interest is there in affirming that Hegel’s thought, the Hegel of absolute idealism, the Hegel for whom the absolute is both substance and subject, is already found in what is supposed to be a thought committed to a critique of finalism? What is at stake for Macherey is not only the actuality of Spinoza’s text but the symptomatic nature of Hegel’s inability to characterize that text accurately. What is implicit in this enterprise is another scansion of the history of philosophy and the historicity of thought: a history in which Hegel does not succeed Spinoza so much as merely repeat him in their points of convergence, and even regress to a pre-Spinozan position at certain moments where they diverge? Nonetheless, Macherey’s philosophical strategy leaves open, and perhaps calls for, still another approach to Hegel, an approach that would seek out those configurations in Hegel’s thought that diverge from Hegel’s own understanding of his philosophical system. For three decades of Continental thought, to invoke Spinoza was to take one’s distance from Hegel, and this distance was itself often a way of drawing a line of demarcation internal to Marx’s thought, cleaving it from its lingering Hegelianism, and from every religious, that is teleological, conception of history. Much rarer are those occasions when we witness the inverse operation: the operation that folds the materialism of Spinoza back onto Hegel’s own text, using Spinoza as a weapon to draw a line of demarcation internal to Hegel’s system, between Hegel the philosopher of absolute idealism and Hegel the thinker of history as a process without subject or end.21 Spinoza, would be, in this scenario, the necessary detour required to accomplish the task that Lenin, in his notebooks on the Logic, set out for himself: to read Hegel as a materialist. That is, as Spinozist. The ambition of this collection of critical essays is to begin to explore this possibility of reading Hegel and Spinoza again, after and in light of the extraordinary philosophical labor performed on Spinoza’s thought in, among other places, France and Italy over the past 30 years. This work has needed a fictional Hegel in order to assume the distance taken from him, a fictional Hegel whose textual and philosophical practice is assumed to coincide with its own declared “consciousness” of that practice. Such an undertaking, however, will

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have to reflect on its own conditions of possibility. Why is it possible to begin the process of locating these moments of divergence or deviation internal to Hegel’s thought today, at a certain moment in the history of thought? Why has it been necessary, over the past three decades, to treat Hegel’s philosophy as a homogenous bloc of thought, unmarked by internal distances and immanent décalages, unscathed by the war at the heart of every thought? And why, in turn, does it fall to Spinoza, and Spinoza alone—this singular thought—to make this new Hegel come to light? If these questions are not answered in this collection, they are clearly the inspiration for the essays. Part I concerns Spinoza’s account of the individual. This account is a difficult one, a difficulty often avoided in the history of philosophy by reducing the individual to a mere dissipation of substance, its degradation or diminution, or by assimilating Spinoza’s thought—in particular his political thought—to the methodological individualism of Hobbes. In this part, Vittorio Morfino, Jason Read, and André Santos Campos address, in various ways, the problem of the individual in Hegel and Spinoza, and all do so through the concept of “transindividuality.” This concept was first developed by Gilbert Simondon in his posthumously published book L’individuation psychique et collective,22 and expanded by Etienne Balibar, first in relation to Spinoza’s ontology and later in a wider ranging reflection that includes Hegel himself within the philosophical tradition of thinking transindividuality.23 Spinoza’s thought of the individual, according to Balibar, escapes the dilemma of individualism or holism, which is also understood in another register as the dilemma of the exteriority of relations characteristic of civil society (e.g. as described by Hegel) or the interiority of an essential community. Balibar therefore speaks of a “transindividuality,” which is meant to describe a process of individuation in greater specificity, including the process of the production of the individual outlined by Spinoza as well as the relations (of exchange, modification, destruction, or combination) between individuals without which the individual could not exist. Beginning with the schema of causality proposed in Book 1 of the Ethics, it is possible to understand nature not as an undivided substance that subsequently breaks apart into an infinity of attributes and modes but as “nothing other,” insists Balibar, than its distribution into the infinite multiplicity of modes, the infinite process of their production, and the infinity of causal relations among them. The immanent causality of substance is, therefore, not to be conceived or represented as a linear series of causes but to be conceived as an “infinite network of singular modulations,”24 in which the individual is constantly transformed in its

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encounters with others. Within this structure of causality, the individual is identified not with the corpora simplicissima referred to in the short treatise on physics in part 2 of the Ethics, but as a composite body made up of parts (including the simple bodies), which never exist unto themselves, but which are always integrated into and exchanged between individuals that are themselves only fragile configurations striving, through these exchanges, to continue to exist. The individual, then, is not best understood as a form, but rather as a perpetually variable and adaptive encounter between bodies. The individual is a point of equilibrium within a field of forces that must constantly maintain itself—affirm itself—in a process of decomposing and recomposing itself through exchanges with other bodies. Conatus, the self-affirmation of the individual mode, is a strategy (to use the term proposed by Laurent Bove25), a constant warding off of encounters that would result in the total or “fatal” decomposition of a body in conflictual exchanges with others, and a simultaneous entering into combinations (convenientiae) or associations that allow an individual to protect itself against just such dangers, increasing its power of existence and action—that is, its autonomy—through collective processes. This collective process is thus the very condition of individuation, that is, of the augmentation of an individual mode’s power to act and intensify its mode of existence: its autonomy is paradoxically increased to the extent that it enters into combination with other forces. Vittorio Morfino’s essay in Part I takes up Balibar’s account of the relation between substance and modes in Spinoza, arguing that Hegel’s misreading of Spinoza’s famous example of the two circles compels him to misunderstand this transindividual aspect of Spinoza’s thought. Analyzing the appearances of Spinoza in Hegel’s Science of Logic, specifically the 1812 edition and subsequent revisions, Morfino shows how Hegel appropriates certain aspects of Spinoza’s thought, in particular his concept of substance as the concrete articulation of essence and existence through the category of causa sui. He does this while concomitantly emphasizing the weakness of Spinoza’s concept of the individual mode, which, according to Hegel, is understood by Spinoza as an external limit to substance rather than as a point of inflection by which substance reflexively returns into itself as subject. As Morfino reads this passage, Hegel is in a certain sense correct in his reading of the finite mode, but not in the way that he thinks he is. For, if the mode is not a reflexive mediation of substance—that is, not a subject—it is not because substance is limited from without by these modes, these mere negations; it is because substance is, as Balibar underlined, nothing other than the weave (connexio, concatenatio) of causal relations between individual modes

Introduction

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that constantly deform and transform themselves in affecting and being affected by other modes. This conception of modal relations as what Balibar called a weave of “singular modulations” is—Morfino argues—misunderstood and even misrecognized by Hegel when, in his reading of the two circles, he omits Spinoza’s characterization of the parts of the line as dynamic passages or differential parts, rather than discrete parts and therefore external limits. Where Hegel sees a lack of any return into itself of substance through the mediation of the individual mode or part, Spinoza’s thought proposes instead a dynamic or differential mode understood to be a continuous variation of matter. Jason Read’s essay argues that the concept of transindividuality is particularly fruitful in allowing us to think the proximity of Hegel’s and Spinoza’s theories of individuation on the basis of what Read calls transindividual “conditions.” Paying specific attention to their political philosophies, Read argues that Hegel’s and Spinoza’s theories of individuation can be seen neither to correct nor to oppose one other but to enter into a relation of “supplementation.” Starting from the nature of desire in Spinoza and Hegel, Read demonstrates that while Hegel inscribes desire within a process of recognition—an intersubjective mediation of desire that will assume sociohistorical specificity in the institutions of the family, civil society, and the State—Spinoza thinks the question of desire as founded on a fundamental misrecognition of the causes of desire, and identifies the conditions for individuation (in the TTP) with a dialectic of superstition and knowledge. Where Morfino’s reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic identifies the manner in which, through a misunderstanding or even misrecognition, Hegel cannot account for the structure of transindividuality in Spinoza’s theory of finite modes, Read shows how both Hegel and Spinoza develop layers of this structure, starting out from the figure of desire in order to elaborate different aspects of the transindividual as the condition for individuation. Campos invokes the concept of transindividuality to consider the question of the individual and individuation in relation to the question of beginnings in each philosopher’s political philosophy. In Hegel’s thought, the beginning is always without presupposition, a completely abstract, indeterminate immediacy that, in reflecting itself, takes leave of itself and falls into its other. Turning, as Read does, to Hegel’s political philosophy, the “beginning” in Hegel takes the form of the individual will as absolutely without content, a purely immediate will that only becomes itself by externalizing itself in the form of property and becoming a juridical person. This movement of self-externalization should not, Campos argues, lead us to believe, as many readings of Hegel do, that he posits a

10


priority of the institution—family, civil society, or the State—over the individual. What each of these moments in the articulation of Sittlichkeit represents is a form of self-mediation of the individual; Hegel’s progressive method, in the field of philosophy, traces the path from the abstract individual in its absolute indeterminacy to what Campos calls a “socially complete individual,” the citizen in its self-mediation through the figure of the State. In this way, Campos argues that Hegel’s philosophy enters into a proximity with that of Spinoza, who also places the individual—or, rather, the process of individuation, on the basis of preindividual and transindividual structures—at the heart of both his ontology and his political philosophy. Like Morfino and Read, Campos takes care to underline the relational and composite nature of the individual in Spinoza, a point of inflexion between sub-individual parts and ambient individuals with whom it exchanges parts in a continuous process of regeneration. Campos argues that, even if the TP seems, through its introduction of the figure of the multitude and its abandoning of the contractual origins of the political, to no longer place the individual at the basis of Spinoza’s political thought, this would be to misunderstand the function of the multitude, which plays a certain mediating role between the individual in its isolation (which is not sufficient to found a political constitution) and the State. In Part II, Vance Maxwell, Warren Montag, and John McCumber address and displace canonical understandings of Hegel’s characterization of Spinoza’s place in the history of philosophy. Maxwell’s essay addresses Hegel’s repeated criticisms of Spinoza’s thought, with a specific emphasis on two of those critiques. First, the assertion that the geometric method deployed in the Ethics is an abstract form applied from without to the matter of thought and therefore incapable of seizing the immanent movement of the content. Second, the assertion that while Spinoza discovers, correctly, that all determination is negation, he is unable to conceive of this negation as a self-determination, that is, an immanent negation that negates itself in the production of the content of thought. Maxwell brings his own critiques of Hegel’s reading of Spinoza together by arguing that Hegel has not entered into the details of Spinoza’s reflections on mathematics and method, and, as a result, has mischaracterized Spinoza’s conception of method, which is in fact a “progressive” method—rather than a simply deductive one— that anticipates, in its unfolding, the movement of self-negation Hegel himself denies to Spinoza’s thought. This allows us to envision what Maxwell refers to as a “Spinozan teleology of deductive or mathematical method,” on the one hand, and a “mathematical dialectic” that “anticipates the Hegelian dialectic,” on the other.

Introduction

11

Where Maxwell challenges Hegel’s criticisms of Spinoza through a patient reconstruction of Spinoza’s theories of method and negation, Montag examines Hegel’s reading of Spinoza through the interventionist strategy developed by Louis Althusser in the 1960s and 1970s. Althusser found it necessary to make a “detour” through Spinoza in the mid-1960s to draw a line of demarcation between Marx’s and Hegel’s dialectical logics, only to later note that it would be possible, again via a detour through Spinoza, to draw a line of demarcation internal to Hegel himself. This would be accomplished, Althusser notes, by stripping away the “teleological” commitments in Hegel’s Logic, resulting not in a subjective process in which a self would develop its own internal potentialities through the logical transformation of categories, but in a “process without a subject.” Montag uses this initial forcing open of Hegel’s text on Althusser’s part in order to arrive at Hegel’s own reading of Spinoza and particularly the problem of “origins” (or “beginnings,” following Campos’s essay) in Spinoza. Montag is particularly sensitive to the manner in which Spinoza poses something like a “danger” for Hegel, for the reasons similar to those articulated by Morfino: namely, that Spinoza proposes a thought of causality without origin, a thought of substance that does not return into itself through the mediation of the modes in order to become subject. Hegel’s response to this danger, Montag argues, is a misunderstanding or misrecognition of Spinoza’s theory of modes, such that Hegel identifies the relation between substance and modes as a “squandering” of the vital unity of substance, that is, with a Plotinian logic of diminution and degradation. This misrecognition is, Montag suggests in following Althusser, part of a self-misrecognition on the part of Hegel, whose Logic itself harbors, when stripped of its teleological framing, a process without a subject that resembles, a little too closely for Hegel, the structure of immanent causality he cannot not deform in his criticisms of Spinoza’s thought. McCumber also takes up the historical relation between Hegel and Spinoza, no longer with reference to the themes of method and negation but rather to the question of freedom. McCumber’s essay measures the proximity and distance, the “between” that separates and brings together Spinoza, by focusing specifically on the question of freedom. Where Spinoza and Hegel remain closest, he argues, is on the relation between freedom and necessity. If, for Hegel, freedom is not opposed to necessity, but rather its very “manifestation”—its appearing to itself—for Spinoza, this reconciliation of freedom and necessity takes the form of the adequate knowledge of the causes that determine our actions. What these conceptions of freedom share, then, are a dissociation of the concept of freedom

12


from that of the will. For Spinoza, however, this takes the form of knowledge of our own existence as specific expressions of the infinite, productive power of nature. To the extent that we strive to persevere in our being, and to increase our own power to act, our freedom takes the form of a diminution of conflictual relations with other modes of divine power, and the construction of relations of agreement that increase our powers to think, feel, and act. Hegel too, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, McCumber argues, identifies freedom with a final reconciliation with the immanent dynamism of this world, a conclusion that takes the form of the announcement, at the end of the section on revealed religion, that “God is dead.” And yet, where Spinoza arrives at this “reconciliation” with the dynamism of nature through the knowledge of the causes of one’s own action and through, McCumber asserts, a certain control over the relation between knowledge and the passions, Hegel describes a trajectory in which consciousness repeatedly, in its arrival at this reconciliation, puts its own existence at stake and risks and even desires its own negation. Freedom is won not through the mastery of conflict, but through the following out of its consequences. In Part III, the authors challenge the current understanding of Spinoza as an exclusively “affirmative” philosopher. Contrary to current reception, they uncover the figures of negativity operating in important ways in Spinoza’s thought. A popular portrait of Spinoza takes his conatus doctrine—his view of the essence of individual things as the striving to persevere in being—to imply a commitment to a view of human desire as essentially affirmative, as, at base, a nonconflicted effort to be what it is (cf. E IIIP6). This notion of our essence is counterpoised both to Freud’s death drive and to Hegel’s understanding of self-consciousness motored by a concomitant urge to be and to annihilate. Whereas, for Hegel, our radical freedom implies that we are the animals who can will the annihilation of anything, including ourselves (EPR §x), Spinoza is taken to be the philosopher for whom human being is defined by unequivocal self-affirmation. Although the importance of negativity in Hegel’s dialectic cannot be overstated, Lauer claims that the dialectic operates in distinct ways in different domains. Thus, there is no “Hegelian dialectic” simpliciter, but rather different modalities of transformation and development depending upon the object under investigation. In the domain of anthropology, in particular, Lauer contends that Hegel does not always treat negation as the motor of development. Similarly, Hull points to confusions in Spinoza scholarship around the analysis of “essence” as opposed to “existence.” Whereas essences operate according to a logic of necessity, it is unhelpful to analyze “existence” in such terms.

Introduction

13

By calling attention to the distinct types of analysis performed by each philosopher in different domains of inquiry, the authors are able to show that, despite their metaphysical differences, the distance between Spinoza and Hegel is not so great when it comes to an account of human psychology. In particular, the first two essays in this section trouble the basis of the antagonism between Hegel and Spinoza by demonstrating the effective presence of negation in Spinoza’s thought. As we discuss above, this distinction is one that Hegel himself drew, and thus the authors call for a reassessment of Hegel’s own line of demarcation that abandons Spinoza on the “Oriental” shore of naïve affirmation. If dialectical negation works differently in Hegel’s account of human psychology than it does in his metaphysics, and if Spinoza has a meaningful account of negation in human experience, then this metaphysical difference might not be as consequential as either Hegel or Spinozists imagine. If the authors convince us that Spinoza and Hegel each have a varied treatment of negation and affirmation in psychic life, it may allow for a rapprochement on the question of self-transformation, and thus for more shared terrain in ethics and politics. This is not to reduce Spinoza to Hegel but to allow for both unsuspected alliances and more nuanced distinctions within their ethical and political thought. In the final essay in Part III, Williams forges just such an alliance between Spinoza and contemporary readings of Hegel that figure the subject as necessarily incomplete and in the process of becoming undone. Thus, each of these essays bridge the gap, albeit incompletely, between Spinoza and Hegel by reimagining their anthropologies and affirming and reinterpreting the role of the negative in both thinkers. Christopher Lauer’s major contribution in “Affirmative Pathology” is to show that nobody knows what dialectics can do. Attention to the peculiar character of individual striving and self-repair reveals a kind of dialectical transformation that does not depend upon the ability to absorb negativity in a triumphant movement toward total self-mastery. Lauer claims that, for both Hegel and Spinoza, personal growth involves resisting and transforming certain habitual modes of perceiving and relating to the world through exposure to new ways of organizing experience. Each philosopher seeks to show how the psyche can modify “painful and stultifying connections of the imagination” and thereby open itself to more enabling patterns of thought and action. Spinoza’s emphasis on joy and love notwithstanding, his Ethics frequently dwells on how we are compromised, sometimes even fatally, by our mental fixations and the intractability of our disabling habits (e.g. E IVP44S).

14


Without dismissing genuine differences between Hegel and Spinoza, Lauer draws out the distinctive character of individual striving through an examination of Hegel’s understudied remarks on the “Dreaming Soul” from Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. The Dreaming Soul is characterized by a “blockage,” or an unhealthy fixation that takes the psyche out of connection to place, time, and self. This dreamlike condition that threatens one’s ability to integrate herself with her body and her environment is not, according to Lauer, a “negative” moment in the “classic” dialectical sense whereby evolution depends upon resolving this obstacle in order to attain a higher form of self-unity. Rather, the dementia of the dreaming soul simply illustrates the positive character self-feeling that typically operates in psychic life. In other words, the demented character of dreaming consciousness is a persistent possibility that is never resolved, but, when one does not suffer from mental illness, its periodic eruptions incite us to reaffirm our connections to our bodies and worlds. According to Lauer, Spinoza and Hegel both present quotidian human experience as this kind of tarrying with negativity. The embodied mind must guard against certain debilitating fixations that sever it from the conditions of its general welfare and awareness of them. Yet, the threat of dementia that prompts individuals to self-repair is never overcome once and for all. Thus, he urges Spinozists not to overlook Hegel’s anthropology, since it provides a rich account of human development that supplements Spinoza’s bare outlines in the Ethics. Gordon Hull’s essay, “Of Suicide and Falling Stones,” puts Judith Butler’s heretical alliance of Spinoza and Hegel to work toward what could lead to a comprehensive reassessment of Spinoza. Hull establishes the lines of argument that yield Spinoza as a thinker for whom finitude and corporeal vulnerability are paramount. Rather than an ethics that follows from our striving to affirm ourselves, first and foremost, as parts of nature so as to glory in the intellectual love of God, Hull finds that the principles of Spinoza’s practical philosophy are “much more attentive to ‘negativity’ than is often surmised” (page). With Butler, he emphasizes the fragility of the capacity of finite beings to persist amidst infinitely many other finite causes. Yet, since finite beings cannot exist except by virtue of the enabling powers of other beings, we are prone as much to constituting a greater power as to being “deconstituted” by those forces without which we cannot live. Hull highlights what another commentator, Gabriel Albiac, has called “the tragic Spinoza,” the theorist of vigilance, anxiety, and threat without which we could not understand the widespread tendency among humanity that Spinoza so laments: the fact that we so often fight for our slavery as if it were salvation (TTP pref).

Introduction

15

Hull argues that Butler’s Spinozism supplements but does not displace her Hegelianism. Spinoza’s critique of teleology and refusal of theodicy serves as a bulwark against problematic aspects of Hegel’s idealism, but Hegel’s profound suspicion of any and all natural necessity when it comes to human existence puts healthy pressure on Spinoza’s naturalism. With Butler as inspiration, Hull uses an important distinction between Spinoza’s analysis of essence and his account of existence to show that his practical philosophy is not necessitarian in the way that his metaphysics famously is. In fact, Hull interprets one of the great naturalists as a committed denaturalist of universal categories. Thus, in a way that allies Spinoza with Hegel’s social philosophy, Hull reads Spinoza as a critic of the naturalization of socially imposed categories like gender and nation. Finally, although Hull’s reading does not seek to reinterpret Spinoza’s doctrine of conatus to allow for negation as an intrinsic feature of human striving (as Butler does), he shows that Spinoza’s practical philosophy absolutely demands attention to those very features of human life that are often seen as anathema to Spinozism: our universal mortality, vulnerability, and susceptibility to radical fear. In “Thinking the Space of the Subject between Hegel and Spinoza,” Caroline Williams seeks to bring out the affinities between late-twentieth century Continental interpretations of Spinoza and contemporary psychoanalytic readings of Hegel. She finds a productive figure of “subjectivity without a subject” operating in this constellation of thought. If the subject is conventionally understood as the condition of possibility for thought and moral action, in contrast, the Hegelianism of Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, for example, imagine a necessarily incomplete consciousness that is always unraveled by its fantasies, desires, and needs. Contemporary interpretations of Hegel inflected by psychoanalysis discover in his thought, rather than the figure of Spirit bounding toward the satisfaction of total self-understanding, the indefinitely “unhappy consciousness,” repeatedly unraveled by its lack of coincidence with itself. For these thinkers, consideration of the permanence of self-division rather than the aspiration toward subjective coherence opens greater possibilities for theorizing the ambivalence of social life, the agonies of attachment and resistance to the social order that typically characterize psychic life. Williams surmises that, when one foregrounds the strand of restlessness and insatiable yearning in Hegel’s thinking, it becomes less mysterious that Spinoza as a major thinker of affect and striving continues to appear in psychoanalytic discussions despite aspects of his thought that appear utterly alien to it. Like the other two authors in Part III, Williams underlines the tragic dimension of Spinozism in her account of his psychophysics. By emphasizing

16


the autonomy and impersonality of the affective field, she lays the groundwork for a Spinozan psychology of unwitting self-subordination. Because subjectivity is not anchored by a self-aware subject striving to affirm and enhance its being, subjectivity is comprised of an indifferent and fractured field of relational forces. Nevertheless, Williams resists seeing the tragic Spinoza as the end of the story. Just as his Ethics concludes with a joyous immersion within the infinite power of Nature, Williams points to the lens of eternity by which one can always find power within subjection, even for subjectless subjectivities. Part IV continues some of the themes of the earlier parts, but brings the Spinoza-Hegel relationship to bear on the status of Judaism in Spinoza and later Enlightenment thought. Dobbs-Weinstein treats Marx’s Spinoza-inspired critique of the young Hegelians as the natural starting place for thinking through Hegel and Spinoza. What better way to pass between whatever impasse may exist between Hegel and Spinoza than to follow Marx, the most radical of the young Hegelians? Dobbs-Weinstein offers a novel interpretation of the role of the Hebrew State for Spinoza and Marx, which potentially puts the Jewish question in an entirely new light. Bernstein analyzes the figure of Judaism in universal history through staging a dialog between Hegel, Spinoza, and Adorno. Thus, the final section of the collection goes beyond Hegel and Spinoza toward considerations of Marx and the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. In “The Paradox of a Perfect Democracy,” Idit Dobbs-Weinstein maintains that Marx’s particular intervention into the Hegelianism of his day was motivated by his study of Spinoza’s TTP. In an understudied notebook, Marx transcribed various passages of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise as well as some lines from a selection of letters. His transcriptions rearrange and excerpt certain key ideas that Dobbs-Weinstein finds in Marx’s well-known critique of Hegel and the Left Hegelians. The importance of Marx’s study of the TTP is suggested by the fact that many Left Hegelians took themselves to be Spinozists, and yet Marx seems to find in Spinoza the basis for a criticism of their teachings.26 Attention to these notebooks allows us to see how Spinoza’s critique of religious superstition and Marx’s famous effort to put Hegelian dialectics on its feet repudiates the standard Enlightenment idea of human liberation as an emancipation from religion, ignorance, and ideology. If both Spinoza and Marx seek something like universal freedom within a perfect democracy, Dobbs-Weinstein makes the provocative claim that the model for both thinkers is in fact the Hebrew State, and not the rational secularism often associated with Spinozism and Marxism. Dobbs-Weinstein lays the groundwork for this provocation with her discovery that the critiques performed by both Spinoza and Marx operate according to

Introduction

17

the principle Spinoza identifies in a letter (a principle, which, unsurprisingly, caught Hegel’s attention): “omnis determinatio est negatio” (Ep 50). This principle requires critique to begin with the ruling ideas of the day, understood as the forms of consciousness reflecting existing institutions and power structures (a social version of Spinoza’s thesis that “the mind is the idea of the body”). Spinoza and Marx, by virtue of their distinct historical circumstances, aim their criticism at different ruling ideas and their institutional correlates, but they both attack the basis for treating religion and ideology as features of embodied life that can be transcended through the establishment of a perfectly rational social order. According to the author, Marx excerpts every statement in which Spinoza problematizes the distinction between nature and culture and thereby cultivates an appreciation of how emancipation can never be, pace social contract theory, liberation from our natural condition (the “state of nature”). Rather, the negation of our natural determination occurs by virtue of a community with God or nature that is represented in the first Hebrew State. Spinoza, as many know, argues that the Hebrew State is no longer possible, since it emerged in a particular place and time, among a people with a peculiar disposition shaped by a long history of radical servitude. Yet, the first covenant by which each recognized God simultaneously as the condition of their selfpreservation remains a model of radical equality in which each member is both the author and the subject of law. Moreover, the perfection of the first democracy was not owed to the rationality of the decision to transfer one’s right to God, but by virtue of the community of feeling by which all—rational, foolish, and mad— were able to affirm what was in their genuine interest. Dobbs-Weinstein points to Marx’s transcription of Spinoza’s famous line “the end of the state, therefore, is truly freedom” (TTP 20.6), and gives it a Marxist interpretation that lends credence to the notion that Spinoza’s theological-politics may be an inspiration for Marx’s idea of a truly free community. As she notes, freedom as the end of the State implies not only that a State’s goal is essentially freedom, but that the actualization of such freedom is nothing other than the annihilation of the State. Omnis determinatio est negatio. Jeffrey Bernstein’s “Spinoza, Hegel, and Adorno on Judaism and History” foregrounds a different aspect of Spinoza’s analysis of the Hebrew State. Although Dobbs-Weinstein’s commentary is an important corrective to analyses that overlook the positive features of the Hebrew State, Spinoza also offers a rich analysis of its antagonistic relationship to other nations. Spinoza, on Bernstein’s interpretation, gives an alternative account of what Hegel will portray as the stubborn particularity of Judaism. Bernstein demonstrates that


18

the juxtaposition of Spinoza and Hegel on the question of Judaism in history reveals this particularity as a product of “external reification” rather than some kind of idiosyncratic stubbornness proper to Jewish character. Thus, the lack of reconciliation between universal history and the particular history of the Jewish people comes to appear as a political phenomenon that follows from the tensions between religious passions and the modern State’s universalizing form. Adorno mobilizes the figure of Jewish particularity as the refusal to be synthesized into the universal totality as a basic principle of historical inquiry. Bernstein argues that Adorno’s philosophy embodies a synthesis of the Spinozan emphasis on concrete analysis of historical singularity and the Hegelian narrativization of world-historical change. It is a synthesis because it both affirms the project of speculative history and insists on memorializing “natural particularity after its eclipse by spirit” (222). Judaism as what cannot be assimilated becomes a figure of the suppression of nature by civilization, which it is the task of critical theory to uncover. Nature, in its singularity, is the spectral presence of what cannot appear by virtue of its lack of susceptibility to the form of universality (a form demanded by language) and also that which the theorist must always hold in mind or risk the occlusion and annihilation of all that exceed the representation.

Notes 1 Cf. F. Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2 J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3 See G. di Giovanni, “Hegel’s Phenomenology and the Critique of the Enlightenment,” Laval théologique et philosophique 51.2 (1995): 251–70. 4 See the sections, the system of needs, in EPR, §§189–98. 5 See, for example, E IVP18. 6 Although antiindividualism is nearly synonymous with Hegelianism, whether Spinoza should be seen as a critic of individualism is a matter of debate. On this question, see Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power (London: Verso, 1999), and Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). 7 Hegel, PS, §§178–96. 8 See M. Mack, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (London: Continuum Books, 2010), pp. 1–47.

Introduction

19

9 G. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by R. Hurley (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1988), pp. 12–13. Hereafter SPP. 10 G. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Zone books, 1992), p. 60. 11 Deleuze, SPP, p. 13. 12 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans by. E. S. Haldane (New York: Humanities Press, 1996), p. 513. 13 Deleuze, SPP, p. 13. 14 One might find it misleading to put Hegel on the side of negativity since he does not value negation for its own sake. While it is true that, for Hegel, development only follows from the negation of the negation, he does insist that internal opposition is what raises spiritual beings above the dumb inertia that characterizes nature. It is the requirement of being self-opposed in essence, to which Deleuze and others object. 15 See, especially, his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, pp. 477–507. 16 A book whose translation into English should renew interest in the HegelSpinoza relationship. P. Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. by S. Ruddick (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 17 See Althusser, “On Spinoza,” Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. by G. Locke (London: New Left Books, 1976). It was not only in France, however, that Marxist thinkers were working through Spinoza in the face of frustrated mass movements and radical opposition to capitalism. Imprisoned the same year that Hegel ou Spinoza was published, Antonio Negri spent his incarceration writing The Savage Anomaly, trans. by M. Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 18 We can oppose this mode of “missing” Spinoza to Heidegger’s almost total lack of engagement with Spinoza’s thought and to Spinoza’s status as a dead letter in the sending or destiny of Being. 19 Pierre Macherey, “The Problem of the Attributes,” p. 93. 20 Pierre Macherey, “The Problem of the Attributes,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 77. 21 One exception, within the Althusserian milieu at least, is the work of Alain Badiou from 1969 to 1982; but the production of this materialist Hegel has no recourse to, and even manifests an aversion toward, Spinoza. 22 G. Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2005).

20


23 E. Balibar, “Individualité et transindividualité chez Spinoza,” in Architectures de la raison, ed. by P.-F. Moreau (Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS Editions, 1996). 24 E. Balibar, “ Individualité et transindividualité chez Spinoza,” p. 38. 25 Laurent Bove, La stratégie du conatus. 26 Dobbs-Weinstein implies that similar misappropriations of Spinoza endure today, whereby Spinoza’s name is invoked to support precisely those doctrines that he criticized so staunchly.

Part One

The Individual and Transindividuality between Ontology and Politics

1

The Misunderstanding of the Mode. Spinoza in Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812–16) Vittorio Morfino

Spinoza in late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century Germany In order to fully understand the meaning of the representation and function of Spinozism in Hegel’s Science of Logic, it is necessary to trace the modalities with which Spinozism became a part of German philosophical culture in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Such modalities constitute both the meaningful context and the Kampfplatz for Hegel’s position. In 1785, Jacobi—in his On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn—refers to a sentence by Lessing, in a private dialog, according to which “there is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.” In the context of the moderate German Enlightenment, this phrase rang out like a gunshot and gave rise to a debate on Spinozism involving figures like Mendelssohn and Herder, as well as Goethe and Kant. Whether Lessing really uttered such words or not, Jacobi’s aim was to identify Western reason entirely with Spinozism. Jacobi’s endeavor was to transpose onto the former the accusations of atheism, materialism, and nihilism that were generally reserved for the latter and thus to open the way for the deadly leap of faith. In his Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge of 1794, Fichte traces within philosophy itself an alternative between dogmatism (Spinozism) and criticism, in an attempt to subtract philosophy from the mortal embrace of Spinozism. However, precisely by means of the conceptual tools represented by criticism, Spinoza initially becomes a lens through which it is possible to interpret Fichte’s subjectivism and, soon, to overcome it. In 1795, in his “Of the I as Principle of Philosophy,” Schelling—albeit following Fichte’s idea of

24


Spinoza’s theory as the system of fulfilled dogmatism—expresses the opinion that Spinoza as if against his own will, . . . he elevated the not-I to the I, and demeaned the I to a not-I. For him, the world is no longer world, the absolute object no longer object.1

From this point onward, a play of identifications begins which will involve, albeit with different nuances, Schelling himself in his writings on the philosophy of nature, Schelling’s school, Hölderlin and the friends of the pantheistic circle in Frankfurt, Schleiermacher in his Discourses on Religion, the entire romantic circle, and finally, Hegel during the years he spent in Jena. This phase of identification reaches its climax in Schelling’s philosophy of the absolute as identity between Naturphilosophie and Transzendentalphilosophie, between the objective and the subjective. In the preface to his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, Schelling writes: “the parallelism of nature with intelligence . . . [can be represented] neither [by] transcendental philosophy nor [by] the philosophy of nature . . . though on that very account the two must forever be opposed to one another, and can never merge into one.”2 However, this phase ends in 1807 with Hegel’s famous attack on Schelling and Spinoza in his “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Schelling’s Absolute is defined as the “night in which . . . all cows are black.”3 Schelling replied to Hegel’s identification of his own thought with that of Spinoza with his famous anti-Spinozist position in the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom in 1809: And here then, once and for all, our definite opinion about Spinozism! This system is not fatalism because it allows things to be contained in God . . . . The error of his system lies by no means in [this] but in the fact that they are things— in the abstract concept of beings in the world, indeed of infinite substance itself, which for him is exactly also a thing. Hence his arguments against freedom are entirely deterministic, in no way pantheistic. He treats the will also as a thing and then proves very naturally that it would have to be determined in all its activity through another thing that is in turn determined by another, and so on ad infinitum.4

This anti-Spinozist stance forms part of the construction of a pantheism in which, contra Spinoza’s pantheism, it is possible to save not only God but also reason and freedom as well.

The Misunderstanding of the Mode

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With the Philosophical Investigations, we are close to the period when Hegel begins to write the Science of Logic. Therefore, let us begin to discuss the presence of Spinoza in the Logic. I should say at the outset that I will not take into consideration the revised version of 1831 (which concerns only the Doctrine of Being), because it belongs to another period of Hegel’s theoretical production.

The frequency of the name of Spinoza in the Science of Logic. Spinoza in the “Doctrine of Being” of 1812 The first occurrence of the name of Spinoza in Hegel’s Science of Logic can be found in the “Einleitung,” in a passage concerning method. Here, Spinoza is mentioned in a passage that is fundamental from a strategic viewpoint. It is the passage where Hegel proposes a complete renewal of logic and its method. Hegel argues that the logic of his time “has more or less the form of an experimental science” and that it should instead be elevated to “pure science.” Method is not external to its content. Already in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel refused the mathematical method in philosophy, when he affirmed that “the movement of mathematical proof does not belong to the object, but rather is an activity external to the matter in hand.”5 In the “Introduction” he repeats this same argument, making explicit reference to Spinoza and Wolff: “Spinoza, Wolff and others have let themselves be misled in applying it also to philosophy and in making the external course followed by Conceptless quantity, the course of the Concept, a procedure which is absolutely contradictory.”6 So philosophy shouldn’t borrow its method from mathematics, because the method is “the consciousness of the form of the inner self-movement of the content of logic.”7 The second occurrence of Spinoza’s name can be found in the second chapter (“Determinate Being”) of the first section (“Quality”) in the discussion on Bestimmtheit (Determinateness), in a note on the paragraph on negation: Determinateness is negation posited as affirmative and is the proposition of Spinoza: omnis determinatio est negatio. This proposition is infinitely important; only, negation as such is formless abstraction. However, speculative philosophy must not be charged with making negation or nothing an ultimate: negation is as little an ultimate for philosophy as reality is for it truth. Of this proposition that determinateness is negation, the unity of Spinoza’s substance — or that there is only one substance — is the necessary consequence. Thought and being or extension, the two attributes, namely, which Spinoza had before him, he had

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Between Hegel and Spinoza of necessity to posit as one in this unity; for as determinate realities they are negations whose infinity is their unity. He grasped them therefore as attributes, that is, as not having a separate existence, a self-subsistent being of their own, but only as sublated, as moments; or rather, since substance in its own self lacks any determination whatever, they are for him not even moments, and the attributes like the modes are distinctions made by an external intellect. Similarly, the substantiality of individuals cannot persist in the face of that proposition. The individual is a relation-to-self through its setting limits to everything else; but these limits are thereby also limits of itself, relations to an other, it does not possess its determinate being within itself. True, the individual is more than merely an entity bounded on all sides, but this more belongs to another sphere of the [Concept]; in the metaphysics of being, the individual is simply a determinate something, and in opposition to the independence and self-subsistence of such something, to the finite as such, determinateness effectively brings into play its essentially negative character, dragging what is finite into that same negative movement of the understanding which makes everything vanish in the abstract unity of substance.8

Hegel considers Spinoza’s proposition to be one of “universal importance,” because it shows the way in which Determinateness is “essentially the limit” and has “the being for other as its foundation.” Daseyn is what it is only by means of the limit: therefore, reality necessarily passes through negation and in so doing it openly shows its foundation and its essence. First, Hegel maintains that it is from this position that the unity and singularity of Spinoza’s substance is derived, since thought and being (Denken und Sein), as determined realities, are negations. They are attributes which do not have “a self-subsistent being of their own,” but exist only insofar as they are sublated (aufgehobene) as moments (Momente). Second, from this position the nonsubstantiality of individuals is derived in turn because individuals, inasmuch as they are limited (ein Beschränktes), do not have their own existence in themselves. The third occurrence of Spinoza’s name can be found at the beginning of the first chapter on “Quantity” (Die Quantität), in the second section on “Magnitude” (Grösse), in a note devoted to pure quantity. In this section, quantity is defined as the unity of the moments of continuity and discreteness, “but at first it is so in the form of one of them, continuity” (187). In this note, Hegel lingers over the point that in representation without concept (Die begrifflose Vorstellung), continuity is thought of as composition (Zusammensetzung), namely as a relation of unities or units between each other that is extrinsic, while actual continuity is not an extrinsic relation between unities, but essential. As an example of the latter, Hegel quotes the scholium of the proposition 15 of Ethics I.9


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In the second section of the second chapter (Quantum), Spinoza’s name returns in a note in the section on “The infinity of Quantum.” As Hegel puts it: It is primarily in this sense, in which it has been demonstrated that the so-called sum or finite expression of an infinite series is rather to be regarded as the infinite expression, that Spinoza opposes the concept of true infinity to that of the spurious and illustrates it by examples. It will shed most light on his concept if I follow up this exposition with what he says on the subject. He starts by defining the infinite as the absolute affirmation of any kind of natural existence, the finite on the contrary as a determinateness, as a negation. That is to say, the absolute affirmation of an existence is to be taken as its relation to itself, its not being dependent on an other; the finite, on the other hand, is negation, a ceasing-to-be in the form of a relation to an other which begins outside it. Now the absolute affirmation of an existence does not, it is true, exhaust the notion of infinity; this implies that infinity is an affirmation, not as immediate, but only as restored by the reflection of the other into itself, or as negation of the negative. But with Spinoza, substance and its absolute unity has the form of an inert unity, i.e. of a unity which is not self-mediated, of a fixity or rigidity in which the Notion of the negative unity of the self, i.e. subjectivity, is still lacking. The mathematical example with which he illustrates the true infinite is a space between two unequal circles which are not concentric, one of which lies inside the other without touching it. It seems that he thought highly of this figure and of the concept which it was used to illustrate, making it the motto of his Ethics. “Mathematicians conclude,” he says, “that the inequalities possible in such a space are infinite, not from the infinite amount of parts, for its size is fixed and limited and I can assume larger and smaller such spaces, but because the nature of the fact surpasses every determinateness.” It is evident that Spinoza rejects that conception of the infinite which represents it as an amount or as a series which is not completed, and he points out that here, in the space of his example, the infinite is not beyond, but actually present and complete; this space is bounded, but it is infinite “because the nature of the fact surpasses every determinateness,” because the determination of magnitude contained in it cannot at the same time be represented as a quantum . . . Spinoza calls the infinite of a series the infinite of the imagination; on the other hand, the infinite as self-relation he calls the infinite of thought, or infinitum actu.10

Hegel refers here to Spinoza by means of the famous example of the two nonconcentric circles. Spinoza’s example is referred to as evidence of the infinite in actu, which is present and complete, as opposed to the infinity of the imagination, the infinite of the series, namely bad infinity. We find Spinoza once again at the beginning of section three on “Measure.” Measure is the unity of quality and

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quantity; it is exteriority that does not possess determinateness in the other, like quantity, but rather in itself. In opposition to this triadic movement in which measure is the third that returns into itself, Hegel points out the insufficiency of Spinoza’s concept of mode: With Spinoza, the mode is likewise the third after substance and attribute; he explains it to be the affections of substance, or that element which is in an other through which it is comprehended. According to this concept, this third is only externality as such; as has already been mentioned . . . the rigid nature of substance lacks the return into itself.11

Hegel proposes to correct Spinoza’s concept of mode: “According to the preceding, mode acquires here its determinate meaning as measure. Measure is not yet the absolute turning back of being into itself, but rather its turning back into itself within its sphere.” The last occurrence of Spinoza’s name in the Doctrine of Being can be found in the third chapter (“The Becoming of Essence”) of the third section, in a note on the paragraph “Indifference as an Inverse Ratio of its Factor”: With respect to absolute indifference, which is the fundamental concept of the Spinozistic substance, it can further be noted that this concept is the final determination of being before the latter comes to be essence—that it does not, however, attains to essence. Absolute indifference entails the absolute unity of specifically self-subsisting [moments] in their highest determination as thought and being, and therein of all the other modifications of these attributes. However, only the absolute as existing in itself is thereby thought, not as existing for itself. Or it is external reflection that stops short at this: that the self-subsistent [moments] are the same and one in themselves or in the absolute; that their difference is only an indifferent one, not a difference in itself. What’s still missing here is that the reflection not be the external reflection of the thinking subject but that it be itself known to sublate, as indeed the self-subsistent [moments]’s own determination and movement, the latter’s difference and to be a one not merely in itself but in its qualitative difference, whereby the concept of essence then shows itself not to have the negative outside it but to have rather absolute negativity within itself, to be indifference as against itself just as much as against its other.12

Absolute indifference is the “last determination of being before it becomes essence.” Thus, it is on the very threshold of essence, on the edge of the supposition that behind being there is a bottom which constitutes its truth, that Spinoza’s philosophy seems to arrest itself.


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Spinoza in the “Doctrine of Essence” of 1813 In the “Doctrine of Essence,” however, Spinoza makes his return. Indeed, Hegel devotes a large amount of space to Spinoza’s philosophy in the third section on “Actuality [Wirklichkeit],” which is the “unity of Essence and Existence”; more specifically, it can be found in the note that concludes the first chapter on “the absolute.” Hegel’s analysis of Spinoza’s philosophy is developed as a comment on the concepts of substance, attribute, and mode. First, Hegel provides an analysis of the concept of substance, whose absoluteness, uniqueness, and indivisibility is the consequence of the principle determinatio est negatio, namely the fundamental principle of Spinozism. If this conception of substance has the merit of dissolving any independence of the finite in the totality, however, it has the limit of conceiving the thought of this totality as an extrinsic finiteness and not as a circle in which origin and end meet: Spinozism is a defective philosophy because in it reflection . . . is an external thinking. The substance of this system is one substance, one indivisible totality; there is no determinateness that is not contained and dissolved in this absolute; and . . . in this necessary notion, everything which . . . appears . . . as something self-subsistent, is completely reduced to a mere positedness. Determinateness is negation is the absolute principle of Spinoza’s philosophy; this true and simple insight establishes the absolute unity of substance. But Spinoza stops short at negation as determinateness or quality; he does not advance to a cognition of negation as absolute, that is, self-negating, negation; thus his substance does not itself contain the absolute form, and cognition of it is not an immanent cognition. . . . Two consequences follow from this: one is that substance lacks the principle of personality—a defect which has been the main cause of hostility to Spinoza’s system; the other is that cognition is external reflection which does not comprehend and derive from substance that which appears as finite, the determinateness of the attribute and the mode, and generally itself as well, but is active as an external understanding, taking up the determinations as given and tracing them back to the absolute but not taking its beginnings from the latter. The notions of substance given by Spinoza are the notions of “cause of itself,” and that substance is that whose essence includes existence—that the notion of the absolute does not require the notion of an other by which it must be formed. These notions, profound and correct as they are, are definitions, which are immediately assumed at the outset of the science. Mathematics and other subordinate sciences must begin with something presupposed which constitutes its element and positive foundation. But the absolute cannot be a first, an immediate; on the contrary, the absolute is essentially its result.13

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Second, Hegel analyses the concept of attribute. In this analysis, he underlines the extent to which Spinoza’s definition of the determination of the absolute— which is the attribute—is dependent on the intellect, namely on a mode, something which is subsequent to the attribute. Furthermore, the passage from the infiniteness of attributes to the oppositional duality of thought and extension is not deduced from the absolute, but only assumed from the empirical realm: Spinoza’s definition of the absolute is followed by his definition of the attribute, and this is determined as the manner in which intellect comprehends the essence of substance. Apart from the fact that intellect, in accordance with its nature, is postulated as posterior to attribute — for Spinoza defines it as mode — attribute, determination as determination of the absolute, is thus made dependent on an other, namely, intellect, which appears as external and immediate over against substance. Spinoza further determines attribute as infinite, and infinite, too, in the sense of an infinite plurality. However in what follows only two appear, thought and extension, and it is not shown by what necessity the infinite plurality reduces itself to opposition, that, namely, of thought and extension. These two attributes are therefore adopted empirically. Thought and being represent the absolute in a determination; the absolute itself is their absolute unity and they themselves are only unessential forms; the order of things is the same as that of figurate conceptions or thoughts, and the one absolute is contemplated only by external reflection, by a mode, under these two determinations, once as a totality of conceptions, and again as a totality of things and their mutations, just as it is this external reflection which makes that distinction, so too does it lead the difference back into absolute identity and therein submerges it. But this entire movement proceeds outside the absolute. True, the absolute is itself also thought, and so far this movement is only in the absolute; but as remarked, it is in the absolute only as unity with extension, and therefore not as this movement which is essentially also the moment of opposition. Spinoza makes the sublime demand of thought that it consider everything under the form of eternity, sub specie aeterni, that is, as it is in the absolute. But in the said absolute, which is only unmoved identity, the attribute, like the mode, is only as vanishing, not as becoming, so that here, too, the vanishing takes its positive beginning only from without.14

Finally on the concept of mode, Hegel points out once again the fact that in Spinoza the mode is a pure departure from the substance and not the return of the latter into itself: The Third, the mode, is with Spinoza affection of substance, specific determinateness, and this is in an other and is apprehended through this other. . . .


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It is in the mode, therefore, that the determination of the attribute is first really posited. Further, this mode remains mere mode; on the one hand, it is something immediately given, and on the other, its nullity is not recognized as reflectioninto-self. Consequently, the Spinozistic exposition of the absolute is complete in so far as it starts from the absolute, then follows with the attribute, and ends with the mode; but these three are only enumerated one after the other, without any inner sequence of development, and the third is not negation as negation, not the negatively self-related negation which would be in its own self the return into the first identity, so that this identity would then be veritable identity.15

To sum up, Spinoza has both the merit of thinking substance as the unity of essence and existence, as causa sui, but also commits the fault of objectifying it, of thinking of it from the outside, by starting from a mode and thus from a finite intellect. In Spinoza, the subject loses itself in substance because the latter is not ab origine logos and the attribute of thought within substance does not have any primacy with regard to extension. The subject is not a return into itself, but a vain dispersion. And substance without this movement of return is mere identity. In other words, Spinoza’s nature does not become spirit and does not become history as the final unveiled sense of the logical trace of the substance.

Spinoza in the “Doctrine of the Concept” of 1816 We encounter Spinoza once again in the “Doctrine of the Concept,” in the introduction which is entitled “The concept in general,” where Hegel explains that the concept “is to be regarded in the first instance simply as the third to being and essence, to the immediate and to reflection.”16 Being and essence are contained in the concept, but not as being and essence, because they have this determination only inasmuch as they are part of the unity of the concept. As Hegel writes: “Objective logic therefore, which treats of being and essence constitutes properly the genetic exposition of the Concept” (577). The concept has substance as its “immediate presupposition,” namely substance is in itself what the concept is as “manifested” and “the dialectical movement of substance through causality and reciprocity is the immediate genesis of the Concept, the exposition of the process of its becoming.”17 After a synthetic summary of the acquisitions of the last chapter of the third section of “The Doctrine of Essence,” entitled “The Absolute Relation,” Hegel

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deals with the question that is fundamental with regard to the philosophical Kampfplatz of his time, namely the refutation of Spinozism: I have already mentioned in the Second Book of the Objective Logic that the philosophy which adopts the standpoint of substance and stops there is the system of Spinoza. I also indicated there the defect of that system alike as to form and to matter. But the refutation of the system is another matter. With respect to the refutation of a philosophical system I have elsewhere also made the general observation that one must get rid of the erroneous idea of regarding the system as out and out false, as if the true system by contrast were only opposed to the false. The context itself in which Spinoza’s system here finds mention provides the true standpoint of the system and the question whether it is true or false. The relation of substance resulted from the nature of essence; this relation and its exposition as a developed totality in a system is, therefore, a necessary standpoint assumed by the absolute. Such a standpoint, therefore, is not to be regarded as an opinion, a subjective, arbitrary way of thinking of an individual, as an aberration of speculation; on the contrary, speculative thinking in the course of its progress finds itself necessarily occupying that standpoint and to that extent the system is perfectly true; but it is not the highest standpoint. Yet this does not mean that the system can be regarded as false, as requiring and being capable of refutation; on the contrary, the only thing about it to be considered false is its claim to be the highest standpoint. Consequently, the true system cannot have the relation to it of being merely opposed to it; for if this were so, the system, as this opposite, would itself be one-sided. On the contrary, the true system as the higher, must contain the subordinate system within itself. Further, the refutation must not come from outside, that is, it must not proceed from assumptions lying outside the system in question and inconsistent with it. The system need only refuse to recognize those assumptions; the defect is a defect only for him who starts from the requirements and demands based on those assumptions. Thus it has been said that for anyone who does not presuppose as an established fact the freedom and self-subsistence of the self-conscious subject there cannot be any refutation of Spinozism. Besides, a standpoint so lofty and so intrinsically rich as the relation of substance, far from ignoring those assumptions even contains them: one of the attributes of Spinoza’s substance is thinking. On the contrary, Spinozism knows how to resolve and assimilate the determinations in which these assumptions conflict with it, so that they appear in the system, but in the modifications appropriate to it. The nerve, therefore, of the external refutation consists solely in clinging stubbornly to the antitheses of these assumptions, for example, to the absolute self-subsistence of the thinking individual as against the form of thought posited in absolute substance as identical with extension. The genuine refutation must penetrate the opponent’s stronghold and meet him


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on his own ground; no advantage is gained by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not.18

On this page, Hegel enters into a debate with those refutations of Spinozism that oppose absolute substance with the independence and subsistence of the individual. Any refutation of Spinoza, for Hegel, cannot occur through an extrinsic contrast, but through the recognition of Spinoza’s position as a necessary one for thought, namely his concept of the substantial unity. Nonetheless, for Hegel, it should not be considered the highest one for thought. Here, Hegel states the principle of immanent critique. It is a matter of thinking the category of substance dialectically, in order to make freedom emerge from its womb, instead of contrasting substance and freedom in an extrinsic way: The only possible refutation of Spinozism must therefore consist, in the first place, in recognizing its standpoint as essential and necessary and then going on to raise that standpoint to the higher one through its own immanent dialectic. The relationship of substance considered simply and solely in its own intrinsic nature leads on to its opposite, to the [Concept]. The exposition of substance (contained in the last book) which leads on to the [Concept] is, therefore, the sole and genuine refutation of Spinozism. It is the unveiling of substance, and this is the genesis of the [Concept], the chief moments of which have been brought together above. The unity of substance is its relation of necessity; but this unity is only an inner necessity; in positing itself through the moment of absolute negativity it becomes a manifested or posited identity, and thereby the freedom which is the identity of the [Concept]. The [Concept], the totality resulting from the reciprocal relation, is the unity of the two substances standing in that relation; but in this unity they are now free, for they no longer possess their identity as something blind, that is to say, as something merely inner; on the contrary, the substances now have essentially the status of an illusory being, of being moments of reflection, whereby each is no less immediately united with its other or its positedness and each contains its positedness within itself, and consequently in its other is posited as simply and solely identical with itself.

With the Concept, therefore, we have entered the realm of freedom. Freedom belongs to the Concept because the identity which, as absolutely determined, constitutes the necessity of substance is now also sublated or is a positedness as self-related. The mutual opacity of substances standing in a causal relationship with one another has vanished and becomes a self-transparent clarity, for the originality of their self-subsistence has passed into a positedness. The original substance is original in that it is only the cause of itself, and this is substance

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raised to the freedom of the Concept.19 So, only by correcting Spinoza’s concept of substance and by showing how from its womb freedom, subjectivity, and the concept emerge is it possible to refute Spinozism. Then, we encounter Spinoza in the first chapter (“The Concept”) of the first section (“Subjectivity”) in the passage on the determinate concept. Here Hegel writes: When people talk of the determinate concept, what is usually meant is merely such an abstract universal. Even by Concept as such, what is generally understood is only this concept that is no Concept, and the understanding denotes the faculty of such concepts. Demonstration appertains to this understanding in so far as it progresses by concepts, that is to say, merely by determinations. Such a progression by concepts, therefore, does not get beyond finitude and necessity; for it, the highest is the negative infinite, the abstraction of the supreme being [des höchsten Wesen], which is itself the determinateness of indeterminateness. Absolute substance, too, though it is not this empty abstraction—from the point of view of its content it is rather the totality—is nevertheless abstract because it lacks the absolute form; its inmost truth is not constituted by the Concept; true, it is the identity of universality and particularity, or of thought and asunderness, yet this identity is not the determinateness of the Concept; on the contrary, outside substance there is an understanding—and just because it is outside it, a contingent understanding—in which and for which substance is present in various attributes and modes.20

Finally, the last time we read the name of Spinoza is in the second chapter (“The Idea of Cognition”) of the third section (“The Idea”) called “The Theorem.” Hegel repeats the judgment he expressed in the “Introduction” to the Phenomenology concerning the usage of the mathematical method in philosophy, but he adds an interesting detail: Nevertheless, this misuse could not detract from the belief in the aptness and essentiality of this method for attaining scientific rigor in philosophy; Spinoza’s example in the exposition of his philosophy has long been accepted as a model. . . . Jacobi has attacked it chiefly on the side of its method of demonstration, and has signaled most clearly and most profoundly the essential point, namely, that method of demonstration such as this is fast bound within the circle of the rigid necessity of the finite, and that freedom, that is the Concept, and with it everything that is true, lies beyond it and is unattainable by it.21

Here, in the final passage of the Science of Logic that is devoted to Spinoza, the circle closes. The two fundamental criticisms addressed to Spinoza, the criticism of mathematical method and the criticisms of the petrification of substance


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merge: it is indeed the mathematical method itself which prevents Spinoza from entering into the sphere of freedom which opens with the notion.

Spinozism’s faults At this point, we should try to summarize the interpretation of Spinozism that Hegel proposes. Let us begin with the criticisms he levels at Spinoza. These criticisms conclude by underlining the insufficiencies of Spinoza’s philosophy in comparison with his own philosophy: 1. Spinoza uses a mathematical method in philosophy, a method which comes to be external with respect to “the development of the notion,” and therefore is not able, like Hegel’s dialectical method, to grasp its living pulsation. 2. What is missing in Spinoza is subjectivity as negation of the negation, namely as the return of substance into itself, which therefore, precisely because of the absence of this return, ends up being rigid. 3. Furthermore, the mode is neither a subject nor a measure, or, like in Hegel, a “return into itself within its sphere.” Instead, the mode is pure and simple exteriority. 4. Spinoza’s reflection is extrinsic and accidental, although he poses the unity of thought and extension within the substance. 5. For this reason he cannot conceive of thought as the immanent movement which begins from itself and which goes back into itself. Precisely for this reason, Spinoza lacks the deduction of the finite from the infinite: the extrinsic intellect “takes determinations as given and traces them back to the absolute, in order to deduce from this their beginnings.” If we were to summarize Hegel’s position in a very concise way, we could say that what is missing in Spinoza is the movement from substance to subject as a transcendental structure of becoming. This lack produces supplementary effects: on method, which is indeed not dialectical; on the conception of substance, which is immobile and not a movement oriented by an immanent telos; on the conception of the intellect, which is extrinsic, a mere understanding of being, and not reason which constitutes the internal structure of being in order to recognize itself in it; on the conception of the mode, which is pure exteriority and not a return into itself of substance under the form of transparency and freedom. Finally, this lack is reflected in the movement of substance toward the mode, which in Spinoza’s thought is not a deduction but pure juxtaposition.

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Spinozism’s merits Let us consider at this point what Hegel takes as Spinozism’s acquisitions. They are indeed so important as to lead him to utter the famous phrase: entweder Spinozismus oder keine Philosophie. According to Hegel, then, the merits of Spinozism can be summarized as follows: 1. The proposition determinatio est negatio. Spinoza’s proposition is of universal importance because it shows that limits (Grenzen) are what constitute any determinate being, any Daseyn, as what it is. Thus, it demonstrates that the Other is the foundation of being. By affirming that determination in its essence is negation, the substantiality of determinate individuals is denied. These individuals cannot be thought in themselves but only through the relations they establish with the other-being, in such a way that any independent reality in Spinoza in reality is a being that is posited. 2. According to Hegel, this conception of the individual enables Spinoza to escape the representation without concept of continuity as composition, namely as an extrinsic relation of units or unities. The continuum Spinoza speaks of is pure quantity. Such quantity is not finite, divisible, and composed of parts as it is when represented in the imagination, but is infinite, unique, and indivisible. 3. From this latter point, it derives a correct conception of true infinity as counterpoised to bad infinity, though in Spinoza, as it has been said time and time again, infinity is affirmation. Yet, it is not affirmation that is reestablished through negation, and therefore as negation of that negation that constitutes the finite, reflection of the other in itself, subjectivity. By means of the mathematical example of the two nonconcentric circles, Spinoza distances himself from a conception of the infinite as a nonaccomplished series. According to Hegel, in Spinoza’s example a “present and complete” infinite is outlined. If one wishes to sum up, albeit in a schematic way, what Hegel considers to be Spinozism’s fundamental element, one could argue that it is precisely the concept of infinite substance. The latter relegates any form of substantiality of the finite to imaginative knowledge, while thought dissolves all independent reality into posited being, in an infinite relationality, but without this relationality being transparent to itself, discovering itself as the rational weaving together of the real guided by a telos.


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Substance and mode In short, what is true in Spinoza is the category of substance, but on the condition that this is thought in the direction of the notion, namely that it becomes spirit. On the other hand, what is false in Spinoza is the category of the mode, because it is exteriority and not a return. If we look at the passages in the Science of Logic that are dedicated to Spinoza, we discover that all the criticisms against Spinozism converge on Spinoza’s concept of mode: Spinoza’s mode is characterized by a verschwinden (disappearance) and not by an aufheben (sublation). It is an esse in alio (being in other) that does not return to itself, a vain dispersion. Both in the sphere of being and in the sphere of essence, Hegel corrects the concept of mode: in the sphere of being he does so through the concept of measure, which is the return into itself of being through its sphere; in the sphere of essence the mode is thought as “the reflexive movement of the absolute,” because the content of the absolute is “absolutes sich für sich selbst Manifestieren.” Only through the immanent critique of the mode does substance open to the concept, discover itself to be the concept, by giving rise to the transcendental structure which will force nature to become the spiritual force of presence. At this point, I would like to go back briefly to Hegel’s reading of Spinoza’s example of the two nonconcentric circles. According to Hegel, Spinoza by means of this example opposes the infinity of accomplished and present thought and the infinity of imagination, the bad infinity, namely an infinity of an incomplete series. On this point there is an extremely important misunderstanding: the example, which according to Hegel refers to an actual infinity has, in Spinoza’s text, the simply function of exemplifying the existence of things that “cannot be equaled or expressed by any number, though the greatest and least magnitude of the whole may be known.”22 As Mariana Gainza puts it, the example has the function “to think the very reality of the finite.”23 Hegel is blind on this point because, on the one hand, he transcribes Spinoza’s text incorrectly and, on the other hand, he leaves out a fundamental aspect of it. Here’s what we read in a passage from Letter 29: [Mathematicians] not only have they come across many things, which cannot be expressed by number . . . but also they have found many things, which cannot be equaled by any number, but surpass every possible number. But they infer hence, that such things surpass enumeration, not because of the multitude of their component parts, but because their nature cannot, without manifest

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Between Hegel and Spinoza contradiction, be expressed in terms of number. As, for instance, in the case of two circles, non-concentric, whereof one encloses the other, no number can express the inequalities of distance which exist between the two circles, nor all the variations which matter in motion in the intervening space may undergo.24

If we read again the passage from Hegel, it will become evident that what Hegel proposes as a citation is in reality a résumé: “Mathematicians conclude,” he says, “that the inequalities possible in such a space are infinite, not from the infinite amount of parts, for its size is fixed and limited and I can assume larger and smaller spaces, but because the nature of the fact surpasses every determinateness.” To summarize, Hegel transcribes the Spinozian “omnes inaequalitates spatii . . . omnesque variationes, quas materia, in eo mota, pati debeant” with “die Ungleichheiten, die in einem solchen Raume möglich sind.” In this transcription, a misunderstanding and a removal become evident. As for the misunderstanding, Hegel transcribes the inequalities of distances in Spinoza’s example into unequal distances that can be traced in space. This is not simply an oversight, but a misunderstanding that entirely changes the meaning of Spinoza’s example, whose precise function was to enable us to understand in an adequate way, as Mariana Gainza correctly notes, “the parts of the part, namely the fundamental constituents of that finite and limited reality that is illustrated by making reference to the space which is between two non-concentric circles.”25 Hegel’s Ungleichkeiten are the infinite segments that can be traced between the two circles, while Spinoza’s inaequalitates spatii are the differences between these infinite unequal segments: “In the first case the parts that are identified with the segments can be positively presented as discrete parts; in the second case, each part is a difference between two segments, namely the difference between the distance that each of these segments positively shows.”26 Therefore, if we correctly read Spinoza’s example, namely, if we read the parts of this finite space as differences between unequal distances, each part must be conceived as a passage. What Hegel misunderstands is precisely the necessarily dynamic nature of the combined existence of the infinite parts of this circumscribed reality, and this misunderstanding brings about the complete removal of Spinoza’s reference to the “variation of the movement of the matter which circulates in this space.” Indeed the disparities of the space between the two circles that constitute the uncountable composition of the differences between its unequal distances give rise to the endless variation of the movement of the matter under the form of an infinity of passages or transitions. Therefore, it is precisely through this mistaken transcription of the example and the removal


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of one of its fundamental aspects—that is, the reference to the movement of the matter and to its continuous variations—that Hegel can affirm that it describes an infinite which is not “jenseits, sondern gegenwärtig und vollständig [beyond, but actually present and complete],” an infinite in actu. Mariana Gainza concludes: What Hegel does not see, therefore, is the specificity of Spinoza’s example: he does not understand that the non-concentricity of the circles requires us to conceive what happens within this greatest and smallest magnitude in terms of movement; he does not understand that for this reason, the parts which constitute this determinate delimited interiority are not discrete parts, but differential parts; and finally he does not understand that what is at stake here is another notion of the limit, which is different from the one which was established by the fixed circumscription of a space, insofar as the greatest and least magnitude are themselves relations between unequal distances.27

The misunderstanding of the mode Hegel’s misunderstanding of Spinoza’s passage constitutes an extraordinary mise en abîme of his whole interpretation. What Hegel cannot understand in Spinoza’s thought is precisely the concept of mode, to such an extent that he misunderstands the geometrical example which exhibits the way in which, in a finite mode, existence coincides with its essence for an example that illustrates the presence and completeness of the actual infinity of substance. Spinoza’s example establishes a limit-concept that is much different from the static one expressed by the famous proposition determinatio est negatio. It is not a matter of a purely external limit with respect to an interiority, but a limit constituted by the “endless variation of an infinity of passages, or transitions” comprised within certain thresholds of the extension which define its nature (a greatest and least magnitude). However, it is possible to go even further. If it is true that the example represents the way in which in modal reality essence and existence coincide, it is still a representation sub specie geometrica, a representation which leads us to isolate that modal reality by imagining it as totality. Therefore, the variation itself between a given greatest and smallest magnitude can subsist only by isolating a part of nature, therefore by reducing the complexity of the relations that constitute it. If, together with Balibar, we call transindividual the complex weave

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of relations both horizontal and vertical that constitutes modal existence, we find ourselves in a position in which the variation between a greatest and least magnitude cannot be given once and for all in an essence that would precede existence. Rather, it will be the complexity itself of horizontal and vertical relations that will constitute an interior and an exterior, a greatest and a smallest magnitude, in an essence that is given only with existence itself, in its actuality. This point is fundamental for Hegel’s interpretation. By making the proposition determinatio est negatio the theoretical heart of Spinozism, Hegel puts himself in the position of reading substance as an indeterminate positive and the mode as pure negativity in which the limit which determines substance remains something external to it. In reality, the mode is not an exteriority that can be opposed to something positive, but is instead the after-effect of a complex weave of relations both horizontal and vertical. This transindividual weave constitutes, always in a provisional way, an interior and an exterior, the power to exist and to act among other powers. It is this misunderstanding of the concept of mode that leads Hegel to misunderstand in turn the concept of substance as presence. Spinoza’s substance is not present but rather absent, insofar as it exists only through the weave of relations that determines the modes. In this sense, Hegel is correct when he affirms that there is no return of the mode into substance, but he is not correct for the reason that he believes is, in the sense that in Spinoza negation is not negated so as to enrich an original identity. Rather, Hegel is correct precisely because there is no original identity, and therefore, there is no place to return to: beatitudo non est virtutis premium, sed ipsa virtus.28

Notes 1 F. W. J. Schelling, “Of the I as Principle of Philosophy,” in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge. For Early Essays (1794–1796), tr. F. Marti (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980), p. 78. 2 F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), tr. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978). 3 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 9. 4 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, tr. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 20. 5 G. W. F. Hegel, PS, p. 24.

The Misunderstanding of the Mode 6 G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), p. 53. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., pp. 113–14. 9 Ibid., pp. 188–9. 10 Ibid., pp. 249–50. 11 Ibid., pp. 327–8. 12 Warm thanks to George di Giovanni for translating passages from the 1812 version of Hegel’s Logic [editors]. 13 Ibid., pp. 536–7. 14 Ibid., pp. 537–8. 15 Ibid., p. 538. 16 Ibid., p. 577. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., pp. 580–1. 19 Ibid., pp. 581–2. 20 Ibid., p. 609. 21 Ibid., p. 816. 22 B. Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding/The Ethics/ Correspondence, vol. 2, (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 321. 23 M. Gainza, “El tiempo de las partes. Temporalidad y perspectiva en Spinoza,” in Temporalità e ontologia in Spinoza, ed. G. D’Anna and V. Morfino, (Milan: Mimesis, 2012). 24 B. Spinoza, Ibid. 25 M. Gainza, “El tiempo de las partes. Temporalidad y perspectiva en Spinoza.” 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 “Blessedness . . . is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself,” EVP62.

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2

“Desire is Man’s Very Essence”: Spinoza and Hegel as Philosophers of Transindividuality Jason Read

It is perhaps one of the effects of philosophy’s long cold war that the fundamental question of the relationship of individual to society is immediately split into two hostile camps. The first considers the individual to be immediately given; society, or the State, is then nothing other than the sum total of the effects of individual wills, actions, and decisions. Opposed to this idea is the conception of society, culture, or the State as an organic or functional totality, determining and constituting the individuals and subjects it requires. It is with respect to this division, but also against it, that Étienne Balibar has proposed that there is a group of thinkers (they cannot be called a tradition), namely, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and Freud, which constitute a transindividual perspective in thinking both the individual and social relations.1 Even before one arrives at an understanding of what Balibar means by transindividuality, it is possible to understand something of the stakes of his particular intervention. With the exception of Freud, all of the thinkers in the transindividual list, Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, have generally been considered to be organic or holistic thinkers, thinkers of totality; the only difference then is whether this totality is considered to be the all-encompassing substance, spirit, or capital. All three have been accused at one time or another of denying individuality, dissolving it into nature, history, or the economy. The conceptual field that Balibar intervenes in is thus as asymmetrical as it is dualistic: individualistic conceptions of society and social relations, from social contract theory to neoliberalism, are not only dominant but also absolutely hegemonic. Thus, even the “holistic” thinkers have been reborn as individualists. Marxists have produced their own methodological individualism and Spinoza has been interpreted to be a more metaphysical Hobbes and is even admired by readers of Ayn Rand. Moreover, the condemnation of various forms of holism

“Desire is Man’s Very Essence”

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or organicism, generally grouped under the category of totality, functions as the bête noire of various perspectives and disciplines: liberals, postmodernists, and conservatives agree about little else than the fact that the individual is preeminent and anyone who denies its hallowed place is a fascist or Stalinist. This is what it means to refer to “philosophy’s cold war,” the presence of the last century’s ideological debates beneath the various arguments and interpretations, but our concerns here are less with the cause of these interpretations than with its effects: what such interpretations eclipse, and what it might mean to evade them. The outline of the effects can be seen in Balibar’s particular intervention, his particular reorganization of the history of philosophy. Balibar’s intervention cuts a line of demarcation within this opposition: this line is necessarily tilted to one side, engaging with authors generally considered to be writers of the totality, and excavating what an individualistic conception of society necessarily effaces. Balibar’s intervention thus seeks to retrieve a thought of relation, of sociality, recasting it not as something opposed to the individual or the social but as its necessary condition. The term transindividuality is associated with Gilbert Simondon, who developed it in his posthumously published Individuation psychique et collective. In Simondon’s work the concept of transindividuality is defined through a critique of the centrality of the individual in the history of philosophy (as well as science). Against the long-standing belief that has defined the process of individuation from the already constituted individual, Simondon presents individuation as a process in which the individual is a phase rather than an absolute starting point (atomism) or ultimate end (hylomorphism). For Simondon, the individual is situated with respect to a preindividual milieu, a series of relations that are in a metastable state, not yet individuated but possible conditions for multiple individuations. Individuation is always a realization and transformation of these relations. Simondon examines different individuations, physical, biological, psychic, and collective in succession, and it is possible to say that each is problematic, posing problems that must be resolved through subsequent individuations; for example, the biological individuation of humanity, the collection of instincts and habits, makes necessary a psychic individuation, a character or habit that realizes these different potentials. The last of these series and the one that seems to be reserved for human life is collective individuation, transindividuality. Transindividuality is not some collective which subsumes individuals, but a collectivity that exists only in and through individuation and vice versa: one is individuated through collectivities, through various associations and relations that bring out different

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possibilities. Transindividuality is only possible through the always incomplete process of individuation, the preindividual milieu that we carry with us. It is because the conditions of our individuation, the affects, habits, and language, never cohere, never fully constitute an individual, that we enter into collectivities. Transindividuality entails a new thought of causality, a new ontology of relations, and a new logic, a new way of understanding definitions, placing Simondon’s system in close proximity to Spinoza’s immanent causality and Hegel’s dialectic. However, my concern here is less with an understanding of Simondon, or even Balibar, than with what Simondon’s thought proposes for an understanding of Spinoza and Hegel.2 In this case, Simondon’s work along with Balibar’s suggestive remarks function less as a philosophical text to be considered in its own right and more as a provocation, as something that breaks Spinoza and Hegel from the individualist and organicist readings that have subordinated them to the eternal battle between liberalism and its others, communitarianism, communism, and fascism. Thus, in what follows, I would like to examine three questions. First, what might it mean to consider both Hegel and Spinoza as transindividual thinkers? Second, what sort of distinctions might be made on this terrain of transindividuality? And, finally what this might mean for thinking about social relations and politics.

Desire: Between constitution and recognition The unavoidable starting place for any consideration of transindividuality in Hegel and Spinoza is desire. Spinoza writes, “Desire is the very essence of man in so far as his essence is conceived as determined to any action from any given affection of itself ” (E IIID1). While this statement is provocative in its own right, read along with the propositions and demonstrations that situate it, Spinoza’s formulation is less a basis for a philosophical anthropology than it is a specific modification of a general ontology. Desire is a particular situation of the general striving, the conatus, that defines everything (E IIIP6). Everything is a singular expression of striving, but as a finite thing, it is also always determined to act in a certain manner. Everything is an individual, but individuality is not understood as something radically separate from relations, but rather as something that is constituted through relations.3 To rephrase Spinoza’s formula about God as nature: individuality that is transindividuality. Transindividuality is an ontology prior to being a thought of social relations. Ontologically we could say that everything is an individual, but this is not an atomism, because individuality is defined as


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a relation, specifically, a ratio of motion and rest and a capacity to affect and be affected. These relations are themselves part of other individuals, collectivities, and are composed of other individuals, its parts. The limit case of this is of course nature, on the one hand, and the simplest bodies referred to in the Lemmas of Part Two, on the other, but what is truly at stake for Spinoza is everything that transpires in between, the constitution, transformation, and destruction of individuals.4 The ontological assertion that everything is an individual, defined by its particular striving, does not preclude an understanding of relations; in fact, it makes a thought of them possible, everything is individuated by its own particular history, by what has affected it, by relations. The human condition, the situation of desire, is not qualitatively distinct from this general condition; human bodies (and minds) are more complex than some bodies, due to the number of parts, thus capable of entering into more relations, but less complex than others for the same reason. Mankind is not a kingdom within a kingdom but is subject to the same rules that define all of modal existence. To understand the human condition, the situation of desire, it is necessary to understand how this particular striving that makes up human existence is determined by the affects, imagination, and reason. As Spinoza argues, what we desire is always determined by our history, by a particular determination of our affects and knowledge. Desire is a striving that defines all of humanity, but it does so not in terms of some transcendent goal, some good that everything aims at, but in terms of a multiplicity of aims and desires. As Gilles Deleuze writes, “fools and the weak, no less than reasonable men and the strong, strive to persevere in their being.”5 What defines this multiplicity is nothing other than the affects and their history: joy and sadness, the primary affects of the increase and decrease of our power to act and think, are extended onto the various things we take to be their causes into love and hate. Once we apprehend, through habit and repetition, a particular object or individual to be the cause of our joy or sadness, adequately or inadequately, it becomes something that we desire, seek out again, in our fundamental striving. Objects and individuals that we desire, that we love, become the conditions of other loves and hatreds, as we love the things that resemble them or are the causes of their joys and sorrows, in an increasing spiral of conjunctions and connections. We individuate ourselves and are individuated, forming particular tastes and desires, at the same time that we individuate the objects of our desire, our perception or recognition of an object, at least for the first kind of knowledge, cannot be separated from how it has affected us. Individuation in this context is not limited to what we putatively define as the individual, but includes the individuation of groups, the

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perception of collective belonging. History and habit defines and differentiates the particular desire, the particular striving, of any individual: individuation is constituted through relations, not in spite of them. What we have in common is not some generic essence, some transcendent faculty, but a particular striving and a complex history. This communality does not unite us, but radically individuates us into singular strivings: there are as many desires as objects, and as many objects as histories (E IIIP56). Desire is an essence that is singular and relational, rather than universal and foundational. Striving, conatus, is at once a common condition of existence, even a common notion, and in the case of desire, it is also subject to the specific situation of the human condition. This specificity includes, as we have seen, the complex proportion of motion and rest that defines the human body, a complexity that makes memory and habit possible, but it also includes the particular condition of the intellect (“man thinks”) and with this the particular problem of adequate and inadequate ideas of our desires. Human striving is situated between appetite and desire. Spinoza defines desire as “appetite together with consciousness of the appetite” (E IIIP9S). The order and connection of desire and appetite are the same, desire is simply the same appetite rendered conscious. It is possible to pose the question as to what kind of difference consciousness makes here: what does it mean to be conscious of our appetites? More to the point, what does it mean to suggest that we have appetites that we are not conscious of? Such questions return us to the heart of Spinoza’s philosophy, to the difference and identity of the order and connection of thought and things, it does not just at the level of ontology but as a general problem of human existence. If we work from the prior assertion regarding desire as always already constituted, organized by habits and past impressions, then it is possible to see subjectivity, for lack of a better word, as framed not only by active and passive affects but also between those appetites that exceed its consciousness, and those that are conscious, recognized as its desires. Spinoza’s central point is to reverse the order of consciousness and desire, to argue that we do not desire something because it is good, but call it good because we desire it. This is what Alexandre Matheron refers to as Spinoza’s antifinalism, which is summed up as follows: “we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (E IIIP9S).6 The telos, the final cause of our desires, has to be situated back into the network of efficient causes, the conditions which make it so the baby desires milk, and ultimately back into the immanent cause, to nature considered as the infinity of productive relations.7


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Far from being an assertion of some isolated, atomistic, individual, Spinoza’s assertion that desire is man’s very essence is an affirmation of the always singular, always relational, aspect of human existence: our desires, our essences, are thus distinct, and always produced by and productive of the series of encounters between different desires. However, the relation between these desires, in that it passes through the passions and appetite, is not always recognized as such: just as we freely think that we desire what we desire, we also think that we do so in isolation and separation. We see ourselves as a kingdom within a kingdom, not only separate, but autonomous. As Spinoza remarks in the Appendix to Part I, we are ignorant of the causes of things, but “conscious of our appetite,” to which we should add that one of the things that we are ignorant of, is the cause of our own appetite, the practices, and relations that constitute its ground.8 In Spinoza’s thought, there is a connection between the transindividual basis of desire and the opacity of the self. It is because we do not adequately grasp the transindividual conditions of our desire that we believe ourselves to be free, to truly desire what we desire, and it is because we believe ourselves to be free that we do not adequately grasp the transindividual conditions.9 It is here that we can perhaps turn to Hegel, knowing that the conflict between the two philosophers is not between the individual and the relational but between differences within the transindividual. For Hegel, as for Spinoza, there is a strong link between desire, consciousness, and the human condition. Hegel begins the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit on “Self-Consciousness” with the assertion that “Self-consciousness is desire in general.” There is a shift from the previous section, which dealt with the problem of consciousness, of the coming to know the world, figured alternately as sense-certainty, the thing, and force, to the self. These dialectical progressions each mark a process away from things taken in their immediacy and self-identity toward the constitutive dimension of relationality.10 These different figures of consciousness, as much as they reveal more of the world, moving beyond the immediacy of empiricism to an understanding of forces and relations, do not provide an awareness of self-consciousness, an understanding of self. The progression from consciousness to self-consciousness is not just a shift of object, it is a fundamental and progressive shift of orientation: with the movement from consciousness to self-consciousness, we enter into “the native realm of truth.”11 The object and subject of knowledge becomes the same. This is fundamentally different from Spinoza, for whom the problems of consciousness with respect to desire, of adequately grasping our mind and body, are not fundamentally different from the problem of the first kind of knowledge in general, of knowledge

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from the disorder of experience. This is because human desire is not radically different from the conatus, from the striving that defines everything: it is only different insofar as the human body and mind are capable of more relations, capable of memory and habit. It is this capacity which determines both the opacity of desire and its eventual comprehension. However, even this difference between Hegel and Spinoza, a difference which will have profound effects for each philosopher’s understanding of the human, of philosophical anthropology, is situated on a similar plane, that of the opacity of the immediate: in each case, the starting point of everyday consciousness is as much a source of illusion as knowledge. As with Spinoza, Hegel’s discussion of desire begins with a fundamental division that defines the relation between desire and consciousness. Only in this case, the primary difference is not between appetite and desire but among different kinds of desire. Desire for food and water, for those things that make up our necessary survival, constitutes a kind of self-consciousness, an awareness of living. This awareness is fleeting and tied up with an object that constantly posits its independence: thirst and hunger reassert themselves to be conquered again. Desire directed at such objects loses by wining: it negates the objects, but in doing so it fails to learn anything of itself other than as something living; or, as Hegel puts it, absolute immediacy is absolute mediation. With such objects, self-consciousness is aware of itself as something that desires, as something that lives, experiencing hunger and thirst, but these desires do not arrive at what would be called self-consciousness in and of itself, they do not express the indetermination and freedom that constitutes human existence. This leads to Hegel’s well-known formulation that desire must be a desire for another desire, for another self-consciousness. As Hegel writes, “self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.”12 This leads to the most well-known section of Hegel’s Phenomenology, the dialectic of mastery and slavery, a passage so layered in commentary, that it becomes difficult to read at all, let alone interpret anew. Nonetheless, it is from this passage that Hegel introduces the fundamental idea of recognition, which constitutes Hegel’s specific thought of transindividuality. One way to approach this problem of recognition is to wrest it from Hegel’s text, with its combination of necessary and contingent progressions, and to situate it on the larger terrain of philosophical problems. Recognition is in part a response to post-Kantian problem of self-knowledge: Kant decimated the assertion of the transparency of the Cartesian subject through the paralogisms of pure reason, which made it impossible to maintain a pure and rational transparency


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of the self. Recognition provides another way to self-knowledge, one that is immediately intertwined with a political problem: the trick is to square the circle, to reconcile autonomy with the opacity of the self.13 (It is worth noting, following the discussion of the opacity of desire in Spinoza above, how alien Spinoza’s thought is to this problem: Spinoza already arrived at what Fischbach calls “the secondarity of the conscience of self ” without the need of the Kantian critique of the paralogisms of pure reason.) At the root of Hegel’s reflection on recognition is the idea that self-consciousness is radically different from consciousness of objects, things in the world. As Kojève writes, “Contemplation reveals the object, not the subject.”14 This is in part the task that Hegel’s essay on “Mastery and Slavery” takes on, passing through a reflection on violence, work, death, and struggle in a dense passage that provides the matrix for nearly every possible philosophical anthropology. Hegel’s passage considers the various possibilities of recognition, its constitutive ambiguities, in which recognition always passes through misrecognition. Once we pass the initial condition, where the struggle for recognition manifests itself in mutual annihilation, these possibilities manifest themselves first as their extremes, as master and slave: “one being only recognized, the other only recognizing.” These positions do not just constitute two extremes on the pole of recognition but are immediately situated in the specific dialectic of the Phenomenology in which what appears to be true ultimately undoes itself. The master, who is recognized without recognizing in turn, ultimately is a slave: while the slave, who recognizes without being recognized, is ultimately a master. The ideal here is mutual recognition, but we do not arrive at this ideal without passing through the disruption of the fear of death and the formative activity of work. The slave overcomes the limit of his or her position, recognizing without being recognized. It is this tension between an idealist anthropology of recognition and a materialist anthropology of work that has made this passage the inspiration for both Fukuyama and Kojève, for an identity politics of recognition and a revolutionary politics of transformation.15 Without engaging all of those possible interpretations, it is possible to argue that the actual exposition of this passage undermines its humanist beginnings: at the outset, Hegel argued that there is a fundamental division between desire satisfied by objects and the desire for recognition, a division which underscores the intersubjective rather than transindividual conditions of subjectivity. However, in the dialectical reversal of this passage, the point where the master is revealed to be a slave, and vice versa, the reversal turns as much on the relation to the object as to the relation to the other: the master is a slave, not just because he is recognized by one who

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he cannot recognize but because his relation to the object is as a pure object of desire, absolute mediation in its immediacy, while the slave works on the object. As Hegel writes, “Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.”16 This work coupled with the fear of death proves to be another direction for recognition, at least in part: the slave is not recognized, but comes to recognize himself or herself through a world that is the product of labor. Labor constitutes another basis for recognition. What is more important to Hegel is less the sharp division between the desire for recognition, what we might want to call intersubjectivity, and the relation with things, than the fundamental negation of one’s determinate condition: to be recognized is to be seen as something more than this determinate existence, a point that can be arrived at through the instability of fear and the determination of work.17 What then is the difference between Hegel and Spinoza when it comes to the question of desire and transindividuality? It is not that Spinoza posits desire as a fundamental assertion of self, as a striving unaffected by others, and Hegel situates that desire within a general struggle for recognition. Such a division, which places Hegel and Spinoza on opposite sides of the holist/individualist split, would seem to miss their fundamental overlap. For both Spinoza and Hegel, subjectivity is always already relational, individuality cannot be separated from transindividuality. We might say that the difference is still framed by this term “recognition,” which is in some sense absent from Spinoza’s thought. Spinoza’s understanding of desire, of a desire that is always determined and situated, is in some sense predicated on a fundamental misrecognition. We do not recognize the conditions of our desire, taking it as original and given. This is not the same as the misrecognition that Hegel places as the basis of his dialectic of master and slave: a misrecognition of the other that is always capable of recognition and carries it as its imminent possibility. Thus, it would be wrong to consider Spinoza to be the philosopher of misrecognition that could be juxtaposed to the philosopher of recognition, even though Spinoza gives the former a much more constitutive role in experience. (One could say that the misrecognition is experience for Spinoza, if by experience we mean the first kind of knowledge.) If only because Spinoza does not present us with a telos from misrecognition to recognition, desire is radically indifferent from the affects that determine it: the passage from inadequate to adequate ideas is not a dialectic from the in itself to the for itself, but a much more conflictual and uncertain process.


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The question remains as how best to contrast Spinoza and Hegel with respect to transindividuality. Returning to Balibar’s use of Simondon’s terminology, we could say that the difference between Hegel and Spinoza is not just between an immanent and dialectical conception of transindividuality but between a conception of transindividuality in which the connection with the preindividual is emphasized and a conception in which the transindividual is dominated by intersubjectivity.18 In Spinoza’s conception of desire, desire is always relational, always framed by the affects and history, but this relation is less a relation between individuals, between individuals already constituted, than it is a relation between the affects that constitute individuals. When one individual loves what another loves, or hates something that appears to cause pain to an object of love, the relation is less one of recognition between individual and individual, than it is a relation between the transindividual conditions of individuation. The same is true of reason, which is constituted by the common notions. To grasp something adequately is to think in common, to have the same thoughts as others who comprehend.19 Spinoza’s relations are less between constituted individuals, than between the constitutive conditions of individuation, the affects and common notions that pass between individuals, making possible their different relations. For Hegel as much as recognition constitutes subjectivity, making possible the different subjective positions, it does so through individuals who are already constituted: it is an intersubjective relation between individuals who remain in some sense individuated even if they are not recognized as fully human. However, this is not unambiguously the case, as much as Hegel’s dialectic of recognition and misrecognition passes through individuals, who may or may not recognize each other, it is also framed by a series of relations, to objects, affects (primarily desire and fear), and practices that exceed the purely intersubjective, most notably work. Hegel’s dialectic is itself split between two versions of recognition, the first passes entirely through individuals, through intersubjectivity, while the second is framed by the relation between the subject and the material world. Recognition has become the watchword of not so much an interpretation of Hegel, but of an orientation in politics that takes Hegel as its starting point.20 However, the phrase “politics of recognition” eclipses as much as it clarifies, since it is not clear that we are dealing with only one form of recognition. With respect to the “master/slave” dialectic, it would already appear that one divides into two, the dialectic of recognition is split between an intersubjective recognition of subject by subject, master by slave, and the slaves recognition of self in the externalization of labor.21 These two dialectics, one of recognition and the other of

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externalization, continue through Hegel’s thought. Work remains a fundamentally transindividual relation for Hegel, constituting both individual subjects, through the labor of discipline, and social relations, through the interconnection of need. It almost goes without saying that recognition remains the fundamental theme of Hegel’s political philosophy. It is worth noting, however, that this is less and less the recognition of self by the other, a relation between individuals, as it is the recognition of the individual in the social institutions and structures that realize its freedom, and are its intimate conditions. Recognition in Hegel is not intersubjectivity, or at least it is not just intersubjectivity, it is also the recognition of self through practices, the individual recognizes its transformative conditions, and the recognition of individuality through and in its constitutive institutions. Thus, to recast the opposition between Spinoza and Hegel, which will be explored in the following section: for Spinoza, individuation is always framed in the intersection of the preindividual and transindividual, while for Hegel it is framed between the individual, or intersubjective and the transindividual.

The politics of transindividuality Hegel and Spinoza’s understanding of the relational constitution of subjectivity through desire situates them on the same terrain in terms of what could be referred to as their political ontology. This terrain is defined negatively by their distance from any individualist ontology that would reduce the political to a rational choice of isolated subjects, as in social contract theory. The criticism of social contract theory is quite explicit in Hegel, who not only critiques it as incomplete knowledge but accounts for its genesis in the practices of civil society. It is no less trenchant in Spinoza, who as much as he offers a contract in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus overdetermines it with the affective constitution of social relations. More important than this shared negative terrain is a shared positive terrain that can be defined as the following: for both Spinoza and Hegel the constitution of the State, of politics, cannot be separated from the constitution of subjectivity; a constitution that is, as we have trying to demonstrate here, transindividual: determining both individuality and collectivity. The State constitutes subjects, through its various institutions, but at the same time, these subjects, collective and individual constitute, through desire, through striving and struggle, these institutions. This constitution can just as easily take the form of destruction, of contradiction and conflict, which destroys institutions.


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The objective for both Spinoza and Hegel is to constitute a State, a political structure, that will not restrict individual freedom but realize it to overcome on the terrain of politics the antinomy of the individual and society. What I would like to explore in this section is how this political project resituates and reshuffles the different articulation of the transindividual in Hegel and Spinoza’s understanding of desire. The specific project of Spinoza and Hegel’s philosophy, which defines their points of contact and differences, is how they understand the interrelation of constitution of individualities, collective and individual, by the State and social relations, and the constitution of the State, of collectivity, by individualities. Which is to say the specific way in which they comprehend the politics of transindividuality. The locus of this constitution, transformation, and destruction are the various institutions that Hegel and Spinoza examine: Hegel in the wellknown breakdown of family, civil society, and the State in the Philosophy of Right; and Spinoza in the less well known, but equally important, examination of the institutions of the singular case of Hebrew theocracy in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. These institutions, for lack of a better word, constitute the transindividual relations, the site where desire is both constructed and undone, where reason intersects with imagination, recognition with misrecognition. What I have referred to above as the negative and affirmative dimensions, the critique of individuality as a starting point, and the development of another thought of social relations, intersect with respect to the autonomous self-willing individual. In a fundamentally different way, Spinoza and Hegel not only eschew the ontology of the individual, the spontaneous philosophy of social contract theory and civil society, but also account for the genesis of such an idea as a particular representation of social relations, a particular misrecognition of these conditions, in Hegel’s terminology, or, in Spinoza’s, an inadequate idea. Thus, Spinoza and Hegel could be considered critical transindividual thinkers. The model of criticism I am referring to here is less Kant’s transcendental critique than it is Marx’s critique of German Idealism in The German Ideology. In that text, Marx does not just denounce Idealism, declaring it to be false but demonstrates how, through the material process of history, it comes to appear that “consciousness determines life.”22 Thus, it is not enough to simply denounce the limitations of an individualistic understanding of social relations, and propose an alternate ontology of transindividuality, to resort to a sterile opposition of true to false, it is necessary to explain how the latter paradoxically constitutes the former. How, through transindividuality, people come to see themselves as a kingdom

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within a kingdom, and posit society as nothing other than the sum total of selfinterested competitive relations. In their respective critical engagements with the spontaneous philosophy of “possessive individualism,” with Hobbesian social contract theory and classical economics, we can begin to see the differences of their accounts of the politics of transindividuality. In something of reversal of the chronological order, I would like to begin with Hegel’s critique of the individualism of civil society. Hegel’s discussion of civil society in the Philosophy of Right is oriented toward two fundamental tasks: first, civil society is the negative moment, the moment of understanding, which breaks up the immediate identity of the family; second, it is also Hegel’s incorporation of the perspectives of political economy, which are seen as both valid, in their attempt to understand the systematic nature of individual actions, and limited, in constructing society from precisely those individual actions.23 The passage on civil society has the same starting point as the passage on “SelfConsciousness” in the Phenomenology, need, and it has the same ending point, recognition, but it passes through the institutions of the market rather than the narrative of struggle. As needs and their possibility of meeting them multiply through the work of civil society they necessarily become more conscious, intelligent, and free. “The social moment accordingly contains the aspect of liberation, because the strict natural necessity of need is concealed and man’s relation is to his own opinion, which is universal, and to a necessity imposed by himself alone, instead of simply to an external necessity, to inner contingency, and to arbitrariness.”24 Civil society, the system of market-based relations, is an education of desire, traversing the same terrain as the Phenomenology. The movement is from immediacy and particularity to universality. Except now recognition passes through the consumption of things. In choosing from the variety of goods available on the market, rather than what is given, determined by the contingency of place, one necessarily chooses according to social criteria, the recognition of others. Labor follows the same fundamental logic, moving from immediacy and particularity to mediation and universality through socialization and technology: as I am forced to work with others, and with the forces of machines, my work loses its one-sided and rough character to become universal. Both consumption and work overcome the immediate particularity of individuality, the isolated self-interest of civil society, but they do so in opposed ways. They are both transindividual individuations, the one pushed toward individuality, the other toward interchangeability: consumption is the moment of individuation, of differentiation, the particular in the universal,


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while labor is the moment of discipline, the universal in the particular. There is still a contradiction between consumption and production, but it is not the stark contradiction between the emptiness of the master’s desire and the realization of the slave through labor. It is no longer the difference of two different conceptual personae, of master and slave, but two different transindividual individuations in civil society.25 What remains the same, linking this passage with its predecessor in the Phenomenology, is that misrecognition is given only to pass necessarily into recognition. Here, misrecognition concerns individuality, the subject of civil society sees himself or herself as autonomous and others merely as means. The education of universality ultimately undoes this perspective. As much as work and consumption educate particularity, as institutions the market and labor remain all too subject to the contingencies of early capitalist existence. These contingencies manifest themselves in the contamination of commodities, the “buyer beware” attitude of the market, and in the uncertainty of the labor situation itself, as the perfection of the division of labor makes every form of work, every trade, unstable. The self-interested individual must ultimately recognize itself in the structures and institutions of the State. It must consciously will the universal, rather than simply see it as means to its particular end. Civil society passes into the State. Hegel presents civil society as both the genesis of the isolated individual, and its overcoming through the education of desire and the discipline of labor. Hegel recognizes the limited nature of this perspective of both social relations and the individual and argues that social contract theory is nothing other than an attempt to construct the State out of this limited perspective, presenting as a purely instrumental relation, as nothing more than the effect of individual wills. Despite this critical recognition, civil society remains merely a moment in the transition from family to the State. As with the dialectic of master and slave, misrecognition is only posited to be overcome: it exists only as the dim outline of an eventual recognition. We can call this teleology, and repeat this well-known criticism of Hegel, but following the investigation of transindividuality above, we could argue that this relates to a limited conception of the transindividual, dominated by intersubjectivity and the opposition between recognition and misrecognition, a point that will stand out in contrast with Spinoza. In contrast to Hegel’s engagement with individualism through the texts and practices of political economy, Spinoza engagement begins with the terrain of religion in the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics. The Appendix would appear to describe a general, even universal, condition of the limits of mankind’s

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knowledge regarding the world, and the unavoidable fictions of the free subject and anthropocentric God. However, commentators such as Matheron, Bove, and Balibar have focused on the overlooked distinction that Spinoza makes in that text between prejudice and superstition. Prejudice is the opacity of the immediate, the awareness of our desires without their conditions, that leads us to project the telos of desire unto the universe itself, to see some intentionality, even a mysterious one, behind the random events of the world. Superstition is an attempt to organize this spontaneous philosophy, assigning it a determinate and shared set of symbols and meanings, through a set of practices.26 As we have argued above, the history that constitutes desire is radically singular, shaped by the encounters that make up one’s life. Superstition is an attempt to organize these singular encounters into a collective memory, a collective desire, but restricting and regulating practices and symbols. It is an attempt to create habit, a character, at the collective level.27 As Spinoza writes, “ . . . nature creates individuals, not nations, and it is only difference of language, of laws, and of established customs that divides individuals into nations.”28 Superstition is the constitution of community on the grounds of the imagination. Thus, as much as the Appendix describes something of the general human condition, it does less so as a universal essence than a flexible schema, it provides the general conditions that different forms of superstition, different religions, and we can add ideologies, will realize; namely, the telos of individual striving, the search for a meaning in the complexity of the world. As Spinoza writes, “the multitude has no ruler more potent than superstition.”29 Tracing the distinction between prejudice and superstition, between the originary opacity of existence, the tendency to see oneself as a “kingdom with a kingdom” and the kingdoms that are constructed on such unstable grounds, makes it possible to extract a politics from Spinoza’s ontology. Or, more to the point, it connects the transindividual conception of individuality of the Ethics with the examination of political institutions in the TTP. However, this connection is framed through the rather singular case of the ancient Hebrew State. The State is perhaps the most powerful example of the constitution of national and individual identity through the practices and rituals of religion. The quotidian dimensions of the ancient Hebraic law, dictating meals, harvest times, and basic details of comportment, articulated together the nature and character of the individual with that of the nation. As Spinoza writes, “to men so habituated to it obedience must have appeared no longer as bondage, but as freedom.”30 As powerful as this reduction of the individual to the collective is,


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it remains a singular case, dependent on the sacred covenant between God and Moses. Theocracy remains a limit case in the assessment of political constitutions, not just because it is dependent upon a singular and unrepeatable event but also because the absolute identity of self and State, freedom and obedience, is difficult to maintain, given the singular nature of desire.31 An irreducible aspect of theocracy remains, however, through the various themes of selection and symbolic participation that define almost every nation as “one nation under God.”32 Hegel and Spinoza each offer a critical account of individualism, of the isolated autonomous subject that much political thought, not to mention contemporary common sense, takes to be a natural given. This account is critical in that it exposes the transindividual conditions of this perspective. For Hegel, it is rooted in the practices and relations of civil society, which isolate individuals while relating them behind their backs. For Spinoza, these practices are primarily religious, the rituals and practices that produce the imaginary of an autonomous individual, anthropocentric God, and chosen community. This difference is less one of philosophical and political position, a fundamental argument about the centrality of economy or religion, base or superstructure, than it is a difference of historical moment, the difference of over 150 years, from the dominance of religion to that of civil society and capital, which does not mean that there are not overlaps and points of contact. Matheron has suggested that Spinoza’s general remark about the communication of affects, the constitution of objects through desire, and the critique of finalism provides a basis for an understanding of economic alienation.33 What is money but the universal object of love, an object that imposes its finality over other particular strivings. This somewhat anachronistic and underdeveloped critique is useful in underscoring an important difference between Spinoza and Hegel. As critical as Hegel is of civil society, or its atomistic perspective, it remains for him a moment, a moment that will pass as individuality that recognizes the necessity of the State. Misrecognition necessarily passes to recognition. For Spinoza, however, there is no such progression. The imagination, whether it be of God or money, the universal object of desire, is as much a part of human existence as reason. There is no telos, no necessary progression from an inadequate conception of one’s connections and relations to an adequate one. Instead, there is a necessary ambivalence between the transindividual dimensions of desire and rationality.34 For both Hegel and Spinoza, the opposition is not between individual and community, with either one occupying the position of the true or correct political position, as in versions of individualism or communitarianism,

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but between two different regimes of the transindividual, one of which confronts the individual as a hostile condition and the other which is grasped adequately, or recognized, in Hegel’s terminology. Their difference lies in part in how they understand this transformation.

Conclusions Hegel’s transindividual critique provides an account of the structures and institutions that produce the isolated and individual perspective: civil society, which is to say capital, produces a world in which the individual sees himself or herself as isolated, relating to others only through competition. This production, like the slave’s status is no sooner given as it is overcome, as the conditions for its production, in this case the interconnected world of work and desire, prove to be the conditions of its dialectical overcoming. In contrast to this, Spinoza presents a critical perspective in which recognition and misrecognition, or, in more properly Spinozist terms, reason and imagination, are mutually constitutive, mutually intertwining. Despite Spinoza’s suggestive remarks regarding theocracy as a particular practice, a particular constitution of subjectivity, which could be extended to an understanding of the various institutions which produce the perspective of a kingdom within a kingdom. In general, however, Spinoza sees individuation as a natural given, a product of the necessary fragmentary and partial nature of initial knowledge. It is possible to say that each supplements the other; Hegel offers sociohistorical specificity, arguing that family, civil society, and the State must be seen as transindividual conditions, while Spinoza presents what could be called, following Macherey, a nonteleological dialectic in which superstition and knowledge, imagination and reason, are posited as mutually constitutive conditions of collectivity and individuality. However, as I have suggested their differences with respect to the basic problem of transindividuality, the emphasis on the preindividual as constitutive of the individuation of desire versus a transindividual constitution of self, more oriented around the central ideal of recognition, would make this difficult. Rather, it is possible to see a definite problem and a provocation emerge between their two perspectives of the transindividual: if transindividuality includes as one of its modalities a fundamental opacity of its very conditions, the perspective of the isolated individual, and if this inadequacy is seen as constitutive rather than a premise that will be necessarily


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overcome, as imagination, as something more than the vanishing presupposition of reason, then it can only be overcome politically, by a transformation of the transindividual conditions that constitute it.

Notes 1 Étienne Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality (Delft: Eburon, 1997), p. 9. 2 Simondon is rather dismissive of Spinoza’s understanding of the individual, repeating the rather familiar accusation that Spinoza dissolves the individual into a larger pantheistic whole (L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information [Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2005], p. 283). Despite this criticism, Balibar has argued that there is fundamental overlap between Spinoza and Simondon, arguing that the latter offers a “definition of individuality as transindividuality, or better yet, as a process of transindividual individua(lisa) tion.” (“Individualité et transindividualité chez Spinoza,” in Architectures de la raison. Mélanges offerts à Alexandre Matheron, ed. P.-F. Moreau [Fontenay-auxRoses: ENS Editions, 1996], pp. 35–46). 3 Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Minuit, 1969), p. 19. 4 Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality, p. 17. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone, 1990), p. 261. 6 Matheron, Individu et communaute chez Spinoza, p. 84. 7 Laurent Bove, La Stratégie du Conatus, p. 42. 8 Franck Fischbach, Les productions des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), p. 64. 9 Fischbach, Les productions, p. 96. 10 Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (London: Verso, 2010), p. 17. 11 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 104. 12 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 110. 13 Robert Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2000), p. 34. 14 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 3. 15 Jameson, The Hegel Variations, p. 89.


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16 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, §195. 17 Williams, Hegel’s Ethic of Recognition, p. 66. 18 For Simondon, intersubjectivity fundamentally occludes transindividuality: the relation between already constituted individuals conceals precisely what is at stake in transindividuality, which is the intersection between that which is prior to the individual, the preindividual relations, and that which exceeds it, the transindividual. Between these two relations, the individual is only a phase. (L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, p. 317.) 19 Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality, p. 23 20 The central text on recognition is Alex Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition, tr. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: MIT, 1996). 21 Jameson, The Hegel Variations, p. 57. 22 Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (New York: SUNY, 2003), p. 64. 23 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 227. 24 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 230. 25 Jameson, The Hegel Variations, p. 112. 26 Bove, La Stratégie du Conatus, p. 179. 27 Étienne Balibar has focused on the word “ingenium,” translated as nature or temperament, to argue for the link between individual and collective memory. “By ingenium, we should understand a memory whose form has been determined by the individual’s experience of life and by his or her various encounters, and which, as a result of the unique way in which it has been constituted, is inscribed both in the mind (or soul) and in the dispositions of the body” (Spinoza and Politics, tr. Peter Snowdon [London: Verso, 1998], p. 29). The task of politics, at least in theocracy, is to constitute an ingenium, a memory, for the collective body. 28 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, tr. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), p. 200. 29 Ibid., p. 2. 30 Ibid., p. 199. 31 Ibid., p. 3. 32 Étienne Balibar, “Jus-Pactum-Lex: On the Constitution of the Subject in the Theologico-Political Treatise,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 200. 33 Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, p. 122. 34 Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, p. 88.

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The Problem of the Beginning in Political Philosophy: Spinoza after Hegel Andre Santos Campos

Spinoza scholarship frequently addresses methodological problems in Spinoza’s philosophy, but only seldom with regard to his political philosophy. With Hegel’s philosophy, for which methodology is an essential aspect not only of philosophy’s formal presentation but also of its content, certain problems, like the nature of beginning and the need for progression in philosophizing, can be used to refocus Spinoza’s methodology. What is at issue here is whether Hegel’s criticisms of Spinoza’s method are indeed valid from the perspective of these two problems, and whether Hegel’s solution for them in his own political philosophy is that much different from what Spinoza says in his own political philosophy. Since Hegel qualified all philosophies as either philosophies of mediation or philosophies of beginning, are Spinoza’s and Hegel’s political philosophies really on opposite sides of this dual categorization? In order to clarify this, Hegel’s method in political philosophy will have to be analyzed first; then, Spinoza’s general method in his system and in his specific political philosophy will have to be reread from the perspective of Hegel’s methodological criticisms. Only at the end can a solution be found in a final comparison.

Hegel’s progressive political philosophy Hegel’s political philosophy, from a systematic viewpoint, cannot be excluded from his philosophy of spirit, of which it is a moment and from which it inherits a doctrine of action and freedom; nor can it be excluded from his science of logic, from which it receives a structural development, the forms and the categories for exposition; nor, finally, can it be excluded from his

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philosophy of history, which culminates his political considerations. Hegel’s political philosophy, especially in his Philosophy of Right, is forced to reflect all those methodological concerns present in his previous works precisely because it is part of a complete system of philosophy. One of those main concerns consists in the problem of the philosophical method’s beginning (Anfang). For Hegel, the primary impulse to philosophize consists in dissatisfaction with one’s present life.1 But this impulse is merely the underlying reason for engaging in philosophy’s process of thinking. This process requires a beginning—a first step out of dissatisfaction. The problem of the beginning is hence one of philosophy’s primary problems, especially because Hegel considers that it is not possible to adopt an expositive method in philosophy distinguished by itself from the philosophical contents to be exposed. Expositive philosophical progression depends upon the equivalence of form and matter, structure and contents—this connection represents a fundamental characteristic of Hegel’s dialectical method. In other words, it is not possible for Hegel to expose or interpret philosophy in such a way that disregards what is actually being exposed or interpreted—there is an intrinsic identity between the philosophical exposition and the philosophically exposed. The form is the very first step of the content. The problem of the beginning in philosophy’s method is not a mere formal discussion but rather the very first step of philosophy’s contents. Philosophy, in this sense, does not have the advantage proper to other sciences of being able to presuppose its own object. If it did, there would be no problem of the beginning at all. Instead, beginning involves not a search for something already given at the outset but rather the search for the actual object to be pursued throughout the philosophical process—the object is not there to be found but is supposed to be produced through the actual process of searching for its comprehension. Beginning has no presuppositions and is no presupposition—it is a mere position. Thus, philosophy’s scientific method involves what Hegel calls a presuppositionless [Voraussetzungslosigkeit] beginning.2 And if this presuppositionless beginning is set in his philosophy of spirit and in his science of logic, the systematic nature of Hegel’s philosophy entails that political philosophy can only be understood as having also a presuppositionless beginning. The problem of the beginning has as its central elements the where and the how, which are basically one and the same. According to Hegel,

The Problem of the Beginning in Political Philosophy

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[T]he beginning must be an absolute, or what is synonymous here, an abstract beginning; and so it may not presuppose anything, must not be mediated by anything nor have a ground; rather it is to be itself the ground of the entire science. . . . The beginning therefore is pure being.3

The problem of the beginning consists precisely in finding the absolutely determinable. Just as in Parmenides, the beginning lies always in being. This obviously posits the problem of whether or not there can be a beginning before the beginning in a reflective transition from nonbeing to being, much like God’s fiat. However, Hegel’s system of philosophy is effected in the moment where being is much like nonbeing. Hegel’s pure being, in this sense, is equivalent to absence, empty determinacy, and determinative improbability—it is immediacy in its purest form, that is, entirely nonrelational. Its absoluteness is revealed in its own abstract nature: this is the beginning of philosophizing. Nevertheless, a beginning regarded as pure abstract being without content provides at the outset a glimpse of the final goal in philosophy’s dialectical process: the Absolute Idea, which absorbs into itself all those ideas present in the dialectical process for the production of new concepts; the totally inclusive and integral category of spirit, “omnilateral” in nature, that is the final result of a procedural effectiveness in the description of reality. The discovery of the beginning as an empty supposition of being (or as a mere unilateral moment of the spirit) is definable as such only when facing the moment of arrival of this continuous process of effectiveness— the identification of the (abstract) beginning is inherently connected to the discovery of the (totally effective) result.4 Philosophy is not merely a progressive movement of thought but also a permanent reflection on its own beginning, or rather the active task of questioning its own groundwork. But this task does not constitute a self-annulment, as if each new step in the dialectical process were to substitute or to completely revoke its prior step—instead, each step constitutes a sine qua non condition for a superior synthesis. Political philosophy, insofar as it remains part of a complete system of philosophy, follows the exact same progressive dialectics, as objective spirit. In the Idea’s objectivity, politics appears as an extension of the concept of right, which in turn is the extension of a free will’s objectivity. That is why Hegel’s political philosophy is to be found mainly in his Philosophy of Right, and that is why its main subject matter is freedom—the basic elements of the concept of right emerge as determinations of a free will.5 The conception of a will that is free in itself and for itself is activated primarily in a purely abstract realm that is incapable of producing an unmediated thing: the concept in its immediacy has

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no effectiveness of itself; the will is merely being for itself without opposition or negation. In this abstract step of the spirit’s objective effectiveness (the moment in which spirit becomes an object to itself), the will fails to produce mediations and is hence pure being (formal being) or pure immediacy. This is the beginning for Hegel’s philosophizing on politics because it represents the most immediate moment in the progression of freedom, that is, the moment in which right is exhibited in its greatest indeterminacy. Right, in this context, is not synonymous with a legal system, but rather the effective system of freedom—it includes different aspects of ethical and social life, and even their extension toward universal History. It represents the free will’s existence inside a progressive process of self-effectiveness. Freedom is, then, Hegel’s major theme and purpose in his exposition of objective spirit. The presentation of objective spirit equals the presentation of freedom’s progression: freedom only exists when it is objectified, which means that true freedom cannot remain abstract, but must coincide with a progressive movement of selfactualization. In this sense, freedom is always progressively procedural—it is a positive liberation or the making of freedom. The concept of right involves the concept of liberation and is hence equivalent to the making of freedom. The concept in itself is only conceivable insofar as it reflects freedom’s effectiveness, that is, a world built by the spirit for itself in order to recognize itself there as spirit in itself. Spirit’s liberty for itself is, however, in its immediacy, nothing but singular: the will’s indeterminacy, opposed to determinacy, is something also determined, as abstract determination; the will, in such a determination, is singularized and becomes a person. The person conceives herself as a simple reference to herself in her own singularity: she understands her own personality as infinitely free and formally universal—it is this conception of herself that allows the consideration of personality as the overcoming of mere singularity. The abstractly free person understands herself through the negation performed by any given concrete limitation of herself. She understands herself to be infinite within, despite her finitude. Insofar as the person comprehends in herself any singular will in this abstract form, she contains simultaneously certain qualities (like arbitrariness, desire, impulse) that make her precisely something finite and determined, as this person.6 Man, when regarded inside the categories of the person’s abstract universality and of his own singular existence, represents the compatibility between apparently contradictory concepts. For Hegel, the will’s freedom is compatible with the determined being’s finitude, insofar as it is capable of overcoming the abstract by producing mediation.


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The fact that Hegel’s beginning in this branch of his system appears as a singular entity does not mean, however, that the person is an atomic unit from which society can be understood and necessarily constructed. The beginning lies in singularity simply because this represents the immediate moment in the progression of freedom: it is unilateral and hence needs to be overcome. Hegel’s dialectics operates the realization of truth through a systematic analysis of falsity—all unilateral moments and abstract principles given at the outset must be denounced, since to begin philosophical progression through the establishment of truths and axioms entails degrading the argument rather than producing it. Hegel’s reading of Spinoza’s geometrical method implies the opposite of philosophical progression: Spinoza, by beginning his arguments with definitions and axioms, is presenting at the outset what he should achieve only in the end, and hence starts with unfounded concepts and with empty contents. If these empty contents are to be deconstructed throughout the argument, then everything that follows is philosophically empty.7 Hence, the philosophical tradition that considers the problem of the individual as a starting point for all political systems is actually supporting the entire realm of objective spirit on the shoulders of a mere unilateral abstract moment of freedom. Any singular will enclosed in itself only has the possibility of determination from the moment that it finds a place for itself inside a wider structure and a larger process. This means that neither Hegel’s criticisms of modern individualisms in the context of political thought imply the death of individuality as a subject matter inside Hegel’s Philosophy or Right, nor he can be classified simply under the general category of hylomorphism. In fact, individuality for Hegel does not consist in a singularity enclosed in itself but rather in a process of selfactualization. In this sense, individuality appears on the center stage of Hegel’s entire political philosophy. Historically, it seems almost ironic that the most ferocious criticisms directed at Hegel’s political philosophy concern a supposed undervaluation of the individual, when in fact his Philosophy of Right speaks of nothing more than the individual. Throughout its triadic composition, the individual is always the main character in the scene, although with different clothing: either as a person (the abstract entity) in Abstract Right, as a subject in Morality, or as a socius in Ethical Life.8 Just as liberty is synonymous with positive liberation (or the making of freedom), the individual is synonymous with individualization (or the making of the individual) as positive individuation. Individuality unfolds always in a triadic progression following the sequence singular-particular-universal. And that is exactly how it appears in the Philosophy of Right. Consequently, the singular in itself has a double character: on the one

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hand, it is exclusive individuality as mere immediate and unmediated beginning, a negative unit enclosed in itself, whose identity only comes from difference; on the other hand, insofar as it is equal to individuality, it is inclusive of totality, the universal’s effectiveness and the synthesis between identity and difference. Especially in political philosophy, the movement through which the singular converts itself into the universal does not imply a self-suspension of the primary singular, but rather its self-preservation. In other words, the abstract singular is the beginning of a process of self-actualization within progressive individuation. The movement going from abstract to concrete in Hegel’s political philosophy is hence individuation and liberation—and the latter is a condition for the former. If Hegel’s Philosophy of Right intends to demonstrate something, it is the argument that only freedom is capable of individualizing—only through the production of effective freedom can the human individual overcome mere animal existence in which the universal is undifferentiated power. Only through freedom can the human individual become being for himself and conquer his own identity. Presuppositionless beginning in politics represents the immediate abstract step in the progressive production of both freedom and the individual. For Hegel, that moment turns the singular individual into a person. And personality is acquired only through property. The singular will, at its most immediate moment, transfers itself into an external thing—but the will does not simply hold possession of the external thing; it holds juridical possession, that is, ownership. This is not mere singular possession, but rather a person’s legitimate possession, which entails the importance of relations in the objective conception of the spirit and of personal recognition in the actualization of freedom. A right to an external thing (in a relation “person—external thing”) entails a general external duty to respect and recognize that right, thus involving an implicit relation of recognition, which in turn becomes a reciprocal recognition between different persons (in a relation “person—external thing—person”). The free will, therefore, begins to be a person only when it becomes a juridical entity.9 However, this freedom of the will is merely formal: property is indeed a necessary condition for the effectiveness of freedom, but freedom requires moral and political institutions that can only be understood beyond the legal notion of property rights. It is a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition for the activation of freedom—that is why Hegel calls it mere abstract right. The second moment in the effectiveness of freedom is what Hegel calls Morality (Moralität). It contrasts with the immediacy of the abstract person’s will, since it is now able to produce a mediated thing in the free will—freedom is no longer attributed to the will’s determination in an external thing, but rather


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in an internal thing, that is, in itself. The will becomes reflective of itself—a will that is free to itself. The free individual that was first a person is now fully a subject—a moral entity rather than just a juridical entity.10 Individuation evolves from juridical personality to moral subjectivity—the dialectical itinerary tends toward a more positive conscientious constitution of the subject. The will determines itself as free will, and thus is no longer formally singular, but rather a particular thing considered in itself. Morality, in this sense, is mediation, which means that it cannot be a beginning. It remains unilateral, though, like the person’s abstract right, although less formal. The reason is that the search for universal effectiveness of the will’s freedom simply inside itself represents nothing more than the will’s self-determination only in itself—a constitution of the will for itself rather than of itself to the world. Actions arising from this particular determination of the will are still to be considered abstract because they are still merely subjective. Freedom’s effectiveness thus requires one further progressive moment. That moment is what Hegel calls Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit), that is, a substantially free life. Ethical Life represents the unity between the will as it is reflected in the outside world and the will as it is reflected in its own core. The will’s substance (or rather freedom as substance) acquires effective reality both as subjective will and as necessity. Ethical Life thus describes the movement through which the universal is particularized and through which the particular presents itself in the universal: concrete freedom in effective reality constitutes the synthesis between the unilateral negations of the subjective and objective spirits, that is, the final moment in dialectics where abstractions are overcome. Subjective freedom appears in the universal in itself and for itself while simultaneously substantiating itself into a world that it creates for itself as a sort of self-extension—that is how freedom is presented as nature, as an institutional complex within which spirit becomes truly objective. This substance actualized into a world produced by a rational and free will gives rise to a new triad: the family; civil society; and the State. The latter represents the culmination of the freedom that is necessary for the spirit’s objective reality. Hegel’s State is freedom’s truth—effective freedom and realized reason. The State, insofar as it is an end in itself, equals the actual world produced by the free will as an extension of its freedom—a world that gathers institutions through which spirit gains objectivity, and of which the State is the supreme institution in freedom’s effective reality. In fact, an institution’s ethical dimension is accomplished in two steps: on the one hand, an institution must actually produce the rational will’s effective reality; on the other hand, an individual must be able to recognize in that institution the effectiveness

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of his own freedom, rather than its mere abstract presentation. In this sense, the individual’s relationship with the institution fulfilling these criteria makes him a social individual—a socius. The State represents the moment in which the singular overcomes mere abstract singularity and particularity in order to become an effective member of freedom’s social reality—it is, then, the rational and institutional culmination of an effective progressive liberation, while simultaneously guaranteeing the spirit’s progression toward the absolute. Overall, the movement animating Hegel’s political philosophy goes from the abstract toward the concrete, and in this movement the individual begins as abstract personality in order to end up as a social complete individual. Hegel’s political philosophy as a whole is a doctrine of social relations, which are able to organize themselves according to a gradual progression beginning with the mere acknowledgment of individuals in mutual coexistence (this is the network of Verhältnisse11 where individuals are isolated in their merely opposed singularity) in order to culminate in the structural realm of concord (this is the network of Beziehungen12 where individuality is no longer threatened with deprivation and dispossession). This transition instituting political life as a process begins with an undifferentiated identity (merely exterior, immediate, and abstract) and progresses until achieving a differentiated union that integrates (rather than dissolves) the differences that nature and history continuously produce among individuals. This movement has as its main characteristic certain dimensions of human reality, leading the singular toward full individuality as a concrete universal—in this sense, the individual’s progressive socialization reflects rationality’s progressive constitution. The problem of the beginning only makes sense when it is integrated into an expositive progressive movement of philosophy. It is not an isolated issue or a mere discernible point in Hegel’s dialectical method, but the main problem in the structuring of philosophical thought—the first step in the discovery of philosophy’s content. Only when opposed to universal reality can the beginning be a fully unmediated singular thing. The beginning as singular immediacy in itself, represented in political thought as a singular will formally acknowledging its own freedom through personality (or abstract individuality), can only be understood at the end of the dialectical process—in the moment in which abstract right and morality are revealed merely as necessary conditions for a superior synthesis embodied in ethical life, that is, the moment in which freedom is made by the institutional State in world History. These moments do not occur in a linear movement of subsequent substitutions, but form a common


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plan according to which the reality of abstract right and of morality is achieved in ethical and political concord—this is the meaning of the Aufhebung in Hegel’s political philosophy. The beginning never really disappears. On the contrary, it is continuously made effective in a process requiring a negation of itself in order to achieve a negation of its own negation. Hegel’s political dialectics is then a continuous reaffirmation of its own beginning.

Spinoza’s progressive political philosophy According to Hegel, Spinoza represents the beginning of all good philosophy insofar as his overwhelming naturalism mirrors pure being. Nonetheless, Spinoza is accused of inverting the proper method for philosophizing since he is said to have started out exposing definitions and God’s all-inclusive being in the Ethics, which entails considering as beginning what is actually a superior synthesis. For Hegel, any given reality positing itself as complete from the beginning, with no acknowledgment whatsoever of absences or negations, can only degrade itself from then on—philosophizing would then unfold merely in the subtraction of elements from the absolute. The particular thing, which is for Hegel the basic mark in the beginning of individuality, has no justification in the unfolding of Spinoza’s God; it has no activity whatsoever returning to the general; it is merely God’s deterioration into the realm of unities: a bad individuality.13 Hegel’s criticism is based on the assumption that Spinoza’s method begins with finished definitions of some universal from which something can be deduced. However, that is not necessarily so. It is true that Spinoza’s definitions open the arguments in his main texts. But these definitions have a specific function: they are simultaneously nominal and real, and it is precisely because they are nominal that they cannot be regarded as being complete, since that makes them functional with reference to subsequent arguments. There is reality in the definitions; however, they do not exhaust the reality of the thing defined. Instead, they are true basic instruments for the construction of truth. Hence, even though Spinoza claims that all philosophizing begins with an innate true idea,14 there is room in Spinoza’s philosophy for new knowledge insofar as it solidifies the initial definition’s truth by progressing rather than regressing. His geometrical method is more than simply deductive—its beginning lies in a true idea that is not a possibility of truth but the actual truth already unfolding. It is precisely because there is progression in Spinoza’s method that definitions also

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appear quite frequently during the demonstrative process and not just in the beginning. This is what occurs, for instance, with the Ethics’ definition of the individual.15 Spinoza defines the individual as a composite body, as communication between different component parts. This contradicts the more traditional sense of individuality, which is synonymous with simplicity and some sort of metaphysical indivisibility. Leibniz’s monads represent the modern apogee of individuality as absolute indivisibility. Instead, Spinoza seems to claim that individuals are ontological relations. That is exactly why Hegel calls this “bad individuality,” since relations in his dialectical thinking are always a result rather than a unit given at the outset—they are complex, and the beginning should always be simple. Spinoza certainly realized that his conception of simplicity was not taken to its metaphysical extreme—but his intention was not to develop simplicity as beginning; it was rather to localize the individual in God’s productive totality, not by exclusions or negations but by intensive inclusions in God’s continuous productive causality. The best way he could find to reify something that remained opened to the natural whole was precisely the attribution of ontological density to relations. Spinoza’s individual is not decomposition from a general species to a differentiated unit, but rather an ontological unit’s participation in its own production. This individual is more like a “becoming-individual”—it has nothing to do with a static singularity. On the contrary, the individual conquers its own individual identity by participating in the natural process through which infinite reality exists—individuation in Spinoza would thus involve a certain dynamics inherent to the making of oneself.16 The way he treats individuals in his political works is quite revealing of such a dynamic project. He generally introduces political productivity through his definitions of natural law, which he presents as “the rules determining the nature of each individual thing.” 17In other words, natural law, which basically connects his necessitarian metaphysics to his political theory, is entirely set at the outset in the realm of individuality. Nevertheless, he treats individuals differently throughout his works. In the TTP, there is still a very strong influence of Hobbes’ themes and language. There are obviously important differences between them: the preservation of the “state of nature” when a political society is already formed; the underestimation of the role of reason in the formation of the political contract; the importance attributed to the succession of affects in the production of the common; the preference for democracy as opposed to an absolute monarchy, etc. Nevertheless, the depiction of the beginning of the “state of nature,” the terminology, the text’s


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systematic structure, the contract’s persistence, all of this remains quite similar to Hobbes. However, Spinoza’s itinerary from the TTP to the TP regarding the constitution of political societies seems like a history of the search for the exact moment in which an individual’s (causal) power is realized. In the TTP, each man is conceived in a state of isolation with a minimum natural power (a minimum potentia corresponding to that man’s conatus) that is insufficient to guarantee his survival, and that is why he projects a reinforcement of that natural power through cooperation with others. Spinoza seems to mention three distinct reasons for the genesis of political societies in the TTP: in chapter five, society is justified by man’s physical insufficiency to develop the resources for his own survival; in chapter sixteen, society is justified by a need to guarantee security from others; and in chapter twenty, due to the fact that men are always subject to affects, society is justified as a constitutive assurance of the exercise of freedom of thought and expression.18 All these different reasons justify cooperation between human individuals. Cooperation occurs through what he calls a pact, which is nothing like the instantaneous Hobbesian fiat unifying rationally what was once a dispersion of multiplicities, but rather like a continuous renovation of a wholly affective side of man’s nature. This pact is a sort of affective cement of unity or a pattern of multiplicities forming a unity. The TTP still depicts a transition from the state of nature to the state of society, and the moment of transition is the actual formation of the pact through cooperative actions. And this occurs through a “transference” of individual powers.19 Spinoza does not say much about this transference in the TTP, but chapters sixteen and seventeen do state, first, that it occurs through images of usefulness, second, that it relies wholly on an operation of affects, and third, that it seems to result from a mutual interplay of fear and hope.20 The Ethics, on the other hand, does not really seem to develop the contractual mechanism explicitly, but it does elaborate much further how affects can eventually produce cooperation: through mimetic operations.21 Spinoza’s notion of individuality is now set primarily as a ratio of motion and rest between communicating components, appearing as the exact opposite of Leibniz’s enclosed and isolated monads. Spinoza’s individual is “open communication”— process and relation, acquiring ontological depth in the concept of conatus, thus forming a sort of “ontology of relation.” The idea of one isolated human individual in a primitive condition of a state of nature, from whose experience political societies are to be formed, is something now inconceivable for Spinoza. In fact, Spinoza begins by saying that man cannot preserve himself without

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engaging in relations with external objects,22 which seems quite similar to what he had stated in chapter five of the TTP, but with one relevant difference: Spinoza now recalls a physical individuality by reminding postulate 4 of Part II, where regeneration is mentioned as necessary for the conservation of a body. In turn, that postulate is grounded in Lemma 4, according to which this individual’s “open communication” involves necessarily a simultaneous entry and exit of components, which means that a man in act with a minimum natural power must already be in a relation with individuals of a similar nature. Man in the Ethics’ state of nature is different from man in the TTP’s state of nature, where he was an isolated man degrading himself in power without the assistance of others. Now, he is inconceivable as a degenerated man, and only conceivable as an already regenerative man. He is a sort of naked imitative being, whose body is always in a sort of equilibrium: and that is exactly how Spinoza defines children’s bodies23—this man is then like an infant adult (infans adultus). The experience of man in the Hobbesian state of nature is now an empty theory—an opinion, not a fact, as he says later in the TP.24 Individual men conceived as ontological open communications and as imitator-men can only be adequately conceived within existing relations between men. Even though the formation of society has the same justifications as in the TTP, a man in a state of nature is no longer a composition preceding his own environmental decomposition (also because if the conatus is man’s actual essence, in order for a man to be a composition, he must already be endeavoring to maintain composition). Consequently, Spinoza no longer abhors that man can be called a social animal:25 the resolutive-compositive method for analyzing the formation of society, present in the TTP and admitting a notion of transition from the state of nature to the state of society, is no longer present in the Ethics. Nevertheless, Spinoza still describes the state of nature under the same conditions as before—without sin, without property.26 The state of nature no longer holds any references to pacts or to transferences of rights, but rather to expressed agreements of conformity with reason, through an affective “common consensus.” Since man in the state of nature is now something in a sort of continuous equilibrium of simultaneous degeneration and regeneration in a context of environmental hostility (by natural elements and other men), his sociality arises from the interplay of his affects. The state of society no longer emerges in a transition from a state of nature but is rather the affective effectiveness of the actual state of nature. However, there seems to remain in the Ethics a certain methodological tension between Spinoza’s view on the correct method for philosophizing (beginning


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always with a true idea) and some vestiges of the resolutive-compositive method in politics, since Spinoza still explains the formation of society from the idea of an individual per se. The fact is that this idea of a man in a sort of equilibrium between degeneration and regeneration is not really a true idea in Spinoza’s sense, and hence cannot fulfill the actual beginning for the origin of sociality—it is the conception of a man regarding others, but not of a man with others. It is as if this man were like a simple body in Spinoza’s physics trying to compose a complex body—but since in Spinoza’s physics the simple seems to relate only with the simple, and the complex with the complex, there appears to be a gap between this man’s simplicity in an initial state of nature and his complexity in a state of society arising from social affects. It is probably because Spinoza acknowledges this methodological tension in his Ethics that he takes over Machiavelli’s influential notion of the multitude in order to overcome it. In the TP, like before, the experience of men conceived in isolation is something rather fictional and without natural effectiveness: this is why Spinoza also avoids criticizing the Aristotelian notion of man as a social animal. Nevertheless, he is also unable to accept simply the Aristotelian idea of man as a social animal, according to which society precedes man and is something given in nature—for Aristotle, man cannot be conceived before the society from which he arises, in the same manner that a hand cannot be conceived before the body within which it is integrated.27 This methodological precedence of society over man would remove the productive power of the imitation of affects (introduced in the Ethics, and implicitly accepted throughout the TP) from man’s political life. In other words, man cannot be conceived in precedence to or outside society, just as society cannot be conceived in precedence to or outside man’s productivity. In the TP’s political productivity, nothing can be explained in terms of antecedents and consequents: the state of nature is the state of political society. In order to achieve this, Spinoza requires a constitutive political concept that might bring simultaneity to human cooperative imitations of affects and to political society itself. It is probably due to this required simultaneity that the language of the social contract (always understood in a process from a “before-the-contract” to an “after-the-contract”) seems to fade away in the TP. Instead, Spinoza no longer conceives of the formation of society from individual dispersion to political unity, but rather introduces constitutive power to a concept in-between both which had been quite disregarded in his previous works—the concept of the multitude. The multitude is not a larger individual counterposed to lower-order human individuals. The multitude cannot have the ontological status of Spinoza’s

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individual. It is the concept in Spinoza’s philosophy performing the connection between his conceptions of man and of natural individual power: this is why it is mostly a constitutive element of man’s actual existence. This way, it brings spontaneity to the formation of society and to natural human rights while simultaneously mediating the stabilization of power into an imagined unitary whole (the State). The multitude is unable to be a political subject simply by itself, because it is inconceivable without human individuals and without a subsequent imaginary structure of power. The multitude is the moment in which men’s imitations of affects introduce cooperation and commonality, but because the same sequence of imitation of affects also brings about enmity and dissolution, the multitude is permanently unstable and always casts the shadow of its own dissolution. In order for it to be continuously reproduced in cooperative commonality, it requires an imagery of unity that helps reproduce in men’s minds the affective circumstances of its coming about—thus, its spontaneity is also compatible with its mediation. The multitude by itself originates individual natural power much like a flash of lightning: it shines intensely for brief moments, but because it is sustained by the same psychological laws that also bring about its disappearance, it is neither enduring nor self-sustaining. In order for its intense brightness of commonality to subsist, it requires the imagery of unity. It is not man who explains the making of the multitude’s power, but rather the multitude that explains the making of man’s power. And the same can ultimately be said of the State. This means that Spinoza’s political philosophy in the TP is a story of progressive human individuation—not one beginning with an empty individual toward a larger constituted political individual called “the multitude” or “the State,” but rather one beginning with an idea of a human individual simultaneous to a political society that needs to be further understood throughout the argument. Spinoza’s political philosophy is a story of individuation beginning with the human individual and ending with the human individual—in this sense, the final chapter of the TTP can be regarded as a sort of adapted final chapter to be conceived in the TP.

Spinoza in Hegel Hegel explicitly rejects that the beginning of philosophy may consist in a definition, since definitions affirm knowledgeable essences, and the knowledge to be achieved in philosophizing lies in the process’ result rather than in its


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presupposition. The proper method for philosophizing is the one according to which the concept to be known progresses immanently—Hegel’s dialectics rejects methodological a priori determinations and allows for the concept exposed to unfold by itself in its own gradual expositive process. In his reading of Spinoza’s geometrical method, the beginning is represented by a definition, that is, a complete and definite certainty from which formal deduction follows— there is no actual progression of the concept in itself, but rather degradation from the very first presentation of the concept. Truth in philosophy, for Hegel, must lie in a positing of the concept, which can only be obtained at the end of any given process developing through progression (otherwise, there would be no progression at all). If Spinoza is the beginning of all good philosophy, his method is considered a complete subversion of dialectics—in this sense, Hegel is quite sure that Spinoza has absolutely nothing to teach him about philosophy’s methodological unfolding. Nevertheless, Hegel fails to recognize that beginning with definitions does not necessarily entail the absence of scientific progression. And Spinoza’s method is, despite what Hegel thinks of it, a perfect example of this. Indeed, definitions are also for Spinoza affirmations of knowledgeable essences, which means that they are statements concerning a thing’s essential truth (like Hegel, Spinoza begins with being)—however, he says clearly that definitions are simultaneously also statements of a true idea functioning nominally throughout the remaining argument.28 In other words, definitions are indeed affirmations of true things, but they are not the intended knowledge to be achieved in the philosophical argument. Like Hegel, Spinoza’s philosophizing aims at a true result, and the initial definitions function as instrumental concepts for achieving that result—a result not given at the outset but toward which philosophy progresses. The true ideas’ initial definitions are merely a glimpse of the truth to be achieved as a result of philosophizing. In this sense, Hegel’s and Spinoza’s methods come closer at one point and they distance themselves at another point: on the one hand, they are both progressive in nature, each subsequent step is always a clarification of what was merely glimpsed at the prior step, but, on the other hand, their progression operates differently, through successive negations overcoming mere unilateral perspectives in Hegel, and through successive reaffirmations solidifying an initial affirmation in Spinoza. Thus, for Spinoza, methodological progression is fully a continuous accumulation of affirmations that consolidate the very first affirmation—negations are merely accidental and secondary. On the contrary, for Hegel, methodological progression is fully a continuous succession of negations that differentiate the very first affirmation—negations

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are therefore essential, they are the fuel for the dialectical motor. Still, they are both progressive methods. In their political philosophies, the adoption of a progressive method reveals that they also share basic themes—freedom as positive liberation, and the individual’s reality as positive individuation. But their differences with regard to their methods’ progressive nature also determine certain distances between them. First, their beginning is very similar, but not quite the same. Spinoza starts by accepting in his TTP an individualistic conception of human nature that is not that different from the Hobbesian one and that is probably why his progressive method is still quite similar to modern contractarianism. This means that what distinguishes Hegel’s method from Spinoza’s method in the TTP is approximately what distinguishes Hegel’s method from Hobbes’ methodological individualism. However, by setting the individual as the beginning for political philosophy, and by defining the individual as a real (meta)physical relation, Spinoza later realizes in his Ethics and in his TP that an isolated individual cannot be a fully real idea from which to begin in politics. The powerful individual’s natural right is indeed a true idea that supports political power, but when isolated it is nothing more than a fiction—it is an abstract individual lacking actuality, whose truth can only be initially glimpsed. Hence, it is much closer to Hegel’s juridical person than to Hobbes’ initial individual person. That is probably why Spinoza is said to progressively abandon contractarianism closer to his TP, much like Hegel’s rejections of the social contract theories.29 Nevertheless, the abstraction of their beginnings differs. Hegel seeks the beginning’s absolute immediacy— his singular person is universally enclosed in her own individuality. Prior to recognition through property, this person is indeterminacy by itself, the closest one can get to individual pure being, or rather to a completely empty singular thing. On the other hand, Spinoza begins with an individual being abstractly conceived, but not exactly enclosed in his own individuality, since it is already an individual composed of relations. Hegel’s immediate person is supposed to be an unmediated thing—Spinoza’s immediate individual is supposed to be a relation by itself at the outset. They are both abstract individual beginnings, but one is actually more immediate than the other. While Hegel follows the progressive path in the direction of “singular” to “particular” to “universal,” Spinoza seems to follow the progressive path in the direction of “singular being of relations” to “individual being in relations” to “citizen.” Hegel’s immediacy is supposed to reflect the juridical personality of a sort of human monad in Leibniz’s style. In this sense, Hegel’s beginning in political philosophy starts further away from Spinoza’s—Hegel does not abolish Spinoza’s beginning, but he does begin a few


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steps back in a bigger abstraction. Hegel’s step back seems to be a reshaping of the beginning’s immediacy stated in Spinoza—an attempt to improve Spinoza’s beginning. Second, also because their beginnings are not quite the same, the ends to which those beginnings aim at are also not quite the same. Spinoza’s political thought begins with the individual and ends with the individual—there is no intention to make the individual progress toward the knowledge of totality through politics. Political individuation, for Spinoza, does not culminate in a one-sided conception of Nature—individuation in politics does not absorb selfconsciousness into a natural whole. Regardless of whether Spinoza’s conception of the State can indeed be integrated fully or only metaphorically in his notion of individuality, the State is never quite an end in itself inside Spinoza’s political thought. In fact, even though effective citizenship guarantees the conditions required to a personal development through philosophizing (i.e. ethical salvation or liberation), neither does it entail necessarily a personal improvement of self-consciousness nor does it intervene in any given progressive process of selfconsciousness—Spinoza’s ideal of the wise man (the freest of all man, the homo liber), the one who understands things rationally or through intuitive science (and not merely reasonably), puts him living “above the law” (supra legem),30 that is, without the actual help of the State to achieve his own personal liberation. The end of Spinoza’s progressive political thought is not the most powerful State entering world History, from where absolute spirit can be sought out, but rather the most powerful man sui juris living in the most powerful democracy sui juris. Hegel, however, not only seems to begin one step back when compared to Spinoza but also seems to seek his end a step forward. The entire political dialectics culminates in the individuation of the universal, that is, in the State as an end in itself and extended into world History. World History, actually, is never really a determinant element in Spinoza’s politics, but rather the realm of exemplification. Hegel, on the contrary, insists upon History’s determinacy not only in politics but also in philosophy itself—it is a necessary condition for the absolute spirit. Hegel’s dialects of political liberation is, then, when compared to Spinoza’s progressive political thought, a journey beginning one step back in the bigger abstraction of the unmediated singular and ending one step forward in the complete consciousness of the socius acting in world History. This means that, with regard to their methods in political philosophy, when Hegel says that Spinoza is the beginning of all good philosophy, he is not saying that Spinoza’s end is similar to Hegel’s beginning, since Spinoza’s end has nothing to do with


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the abstract indeterminacy of Hegel’s beginning. On the contrary, the individual’s progressive dynamics of liberation seems to be shared by both—simply that Hegel begins further away and ends up further away, when compared to Spinoza. Hegel assimilates (probably unconsciously) Spinoza’s political dialectics in order to perfect it, by placing the spirit into an objective condition. With regard to political philosophy’s method, Hegel seems to be much more indebted to Spinoza than he is prepared to acknowledge—at least in progressive political thought, Spinoza is indeed Hegel’s beginning.

Notes 1 See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825–26, vol. I, trans. Robert F. Brown and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 247–8. 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, in The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), §78, p. 124. 3 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), pp. 70–1. 4 See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 12. 5 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §§486–7, pp. 242–3. 6 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§34–5, pp. 67–9. 7 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825–26, vol. III, trans. Robert F. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), pp. 121–9. 8 Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, §§514–16, pp. 253–5. 9 Hegel, EPR, §§41–6, pp. 51–2, 73–7, 81–3. 10 Hegel, EPR, §105, p. 135. 11 Hegel, EPR, §150, p. 193. 12 Hegel, EPR, §192, p. 229; §301, p. 341. 13 Hegel, LPH, pp. 119–30. 14 TIE 39/11. All quotations from the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus are from taken from Jonathan Israel and Michael Silverthorne’s translation (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007). All references to the Tractatus Politicus, the


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Correspondence, and the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect are taken from Samuel Shirley’s translation in Complete Works (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998). Citations of the TTP refer to the chapter, followed by page number (e.g. IV/426 refers to chapter four, p. 426), citations of the TP refer to the chapters and sections (e.g. II/4 refers to chapter two, section 4), citations of the Ep refer to the letter’s number, followed by page number (e.g. 19/810 refers to letter 19, p. 810), and citations of the TIE refer to the paragraphs/page numbers. All references to the Ethics are from The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I, ed. and trans. E. M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 15 E IIP13Dem. 16 For further developments on Spinoza’s method and on his revolutionary conception of individuality, see my Spinoza’s Revolutions in Natural Law (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ch. 1. 17 TTP, Pref/11. 18 See TTP V/438; TTP XVI/528–32; and TTP XX/566–72. See also PierreFrançois Moreau, “Les deux genèses de l’État dans le Traité théologico-politique,” in Travaux et Documents 8 (1999): 191–99. 19 TTP, XVI/528–9. 20 TTP, XVI/528–32; XVII/536. 21 E IIIP27. 22 E IVP18S. 23 E IIIP32S. 24 TP II/15. 25 E IVP35S. 26 E IVP37SII. 27 Aristotle, Politics, I, 1253a9–29. 28 See Ep 9/781–2. 29 See, for instance, A. Matheron, “Le problème de l’évolution de Spinoza du Traité théologico-politique au Traité politique,” in Spinoza. Issues and Directions, edited by Edwin Curley and P.-F. Moreau (Leiden: Brill 1990), pp. 258–70. With regard to Hegel’s rejection of contractualism, see EPR, §75, pp. 105–6. 30 Ep. 19/810.

Part Two

Hegel’s Spinoza

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Hegel, sive Spinoza: Hegel as His Own True Other Warren Montag

If, as Althusser said, a philosophy “only exists though the position that it occupies and it occupies this position only by conquering it on the field of an already occupied world,”1 thus demarcating itself from its adversaries, we can say that a significant number of the great texts produced in the extraordinary moment that was French philosophy in the 1960s sought above all to take their place in the world by demarcating themselves from Hegel. Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) for example insists on establishing the specific difference of Nietzsche’s philosophy by opposing it to the Hegelian dialectic as he understands it: “Nietzsche’s yes is opposed to the dialectical ‘no’; affirmation to dialectical negation; difference to dialectical contradiction; joy, enjoyment, to dialectical labor; lightness, dance to dialectical responsibilities.”2 Even more damningly, “Nietzsche insists on the fundamentally Christian character of the dialectic and of German philosophy,”3 according to which history is a movement from worse to better through a process of negation and reconciliation that leads inescapably toward an end already posited in the origin. As if in continuation of Deleuze’s argument, Levinas maintains in “The Trace of the Other” (1963) that “Hegel’s philosophy represents the logical conclusion of philosophy’s fundamental allergy”4 to the other that remains other. From Levinas’ perspective, the Phenomenology would be the perfect rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey in the idiom of philosophy: a journey that always takes the form of a return, a movement of thought for which a comprehension of the other can only take the form of its reduction to the same. In a similar way, according to Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967), Hegel’s Logic is “a theology of the absolute concept as logos”5 and his philosophy in general is a “résumé of the totality of the philosophy of the logos.”6 In the Phenomenology, the apparent absence of Spirit to itself at each of the stages of its

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Bildung was nothing more than presence as eschatology or as parousia in which presence is what was, what is, and what will be. It is thus clear not only that these three philosophers, whose proximity in a single paragraph is admittedly jarring, felt it necessary to demarcate themselves from Hegel, as if, to follow Althusser’s metaphor, he occupied or dominated the territory they sought to claim, but even more that Hegel was not just one philosophical adversary among others, but the summary, to use Derrida’s phrase, of all the philosophical forces that had to be opposed. We cannot fail to recognize the paradox of this polemical reading of Hegel in which all the conflicts internal to the “history of metaphysics,” or “Western philosophy” are sublated in a positively “Hegelian” manner that overcomes and interiorizes what might appear to be an irreducible difference. Further, we might say that this very Hegelian denunciation of Hegel marked the perpetuation not of Hegel, but of a certain reading of Hegel, as if Hegel were reducible to a few formulas like the negation of the negation or the truth is the whole, allowing this reading to persist and inevitably to be “rediscovered,” that is, salvaged intact from the wreckage left behind by philosophy’s perpetual war. I have of course omitted from this account perhaps the most notorious of Hegel’s French critics: Althusser himself. What sets Althusser apart from his contemporaries is neither the acuity of his critique nor the fact, as we only learned definitively after his death, that he had produced at the beginning of his career a very comprehensive and textually informed account of Hegel’s philosophy, which not only supplied the context of his critique but also gave it a certain authority or at least credibility. Rather, it was the fact that his understanding of philosophy as a practice compelled him after the fact to reexamine both the conditions and results of his critique of Hegel. Thus, in a certain sense, almost immediately after appearing to reject “Hegelianism” in the texts of 1965, For Marx and Reading Capital, Althusser was forced by the character of a theoretical conjuncture that his own works had helped shape to return to Hegel and begin the arduous task of his rehabilitation. Even more important were his reflections on the necessary conditions of his critique of Hegel, or rather, his critique of the Hegel internal to Marx, a Hegel internalized and transformed by the very operation of internalization itself. Philosophy, as Althusser would write, always makes a void, fait le vide, but it does not begin in or from a void in which it would be free to state its propositions or theses unhampered. It intervenes in a field of forces, an already existing conflict, by taking sides, by supporting or even exploiting one against another. In the oral version of his Soutenance in 1975, he makes this explicit “I have turned the weapon of Spinoza against Hegel.”7

Hegel, sive Spinoza: Hegel as His Own True Other

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This phrase signals that history, or at least a long episode of that history, in which Spinoza, once that to which Hegel’s philosophy provided the alternative and even more insofar as it appeared to complete and correct rather than simply reject Spinoza’s thought, now emerged as the alternative to the alternative, the correction of what falsely announced itself as a correction: Spinoza after Hegel, as Macherey put it, Spinoza the refutation of Hegel. In 1974, Althusser concluded chapter three (entitled simply “Structuralism”) of the Elements of Self-Criticism, with the assertion that he and his colleagues “never were structuralists.”8 Chapter four (On Spinoza) begins by repeating the phrase in the form of a question to be answered: “If we never were structuralists, we can now explain (avouer) why, why we seemed to be even though we were not.”9 The answer, and I begin with this passage precisely because the “we” invoked does not refer exclusively to Althusser and his colleagues, irrespective of Althusser’s immediate objectives in this enormously complicated act of selfcriticism, but extends beyond the limits of the Althusserian circle, beyond a Marxist world in which alone the very act or ritual of self-criticism would have a meaning or function, to include other members of his philosophical generation: “we were Spinozists.” A singular misunderstanding (“ce singulier malentendu”) led readers to take for structuralism what was in fact Spinozism. And how could it have been otherwise when “to recognize Spinoza it is at least necessary to have heard of him.”10 But Althusser is not content to explain his “passion” for Spinoza on the basis of Spinoza’s greatness, the greatness or grandeur of a “lesson in heresy” the likes of which had been seldom seen in history. Instead, he admits that seeking “simply to be Marxists (d’être simplement marxistes),” he and his colleagues had made a “detour” through Spinoza, a detour that was also necessarily a deviation and a retreat (recul), although, as he will soon argue, a necessary deviation and retreat.11 He begins his justification by citing Marx’s own detour through Hegel, a theoretically necessary detour that nevertheless came at a certain theoretical cost. Further, the work of philosophy in a general sense “itself requires retreats (reculs) and detours.”12 But Althusser’s self-criticism is not devoted to an exposition on the nature of philosophical practice in general but on philosophy as he practiced it in “the existing ideological and theoretical conjuncture.” In the conjuncture (he identifies it as the period between 1960 and 1965) “this detour was imposed as a necessity.” Why was this the case? “Because Marx’s materialism obliged us to think his necessary detour through Hegel, we had to make a detour through Spinoza to see a bit more clearly in Marx’s detour through Hegel.”13

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Althusser’s critique of the Hegelian dialectic beginning with “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962) in which he sought to differentiate the simple contradiction of Hegel from the overdetermined and irreducibly complex contradiction proper to Marxism is well known: it rests on the postulate of the homogeneity and simplicity of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic, a simplicity that can be demonstrated despite and against the appearance of an ever-increasing and thus cumulative complexity that accompanies its movement toward the end in which it is fulfilled and completed. Despite appearances its “complexity is not the complexity of an effective overdetermination, but the complexity of a cumulative internalization which is only apparently an overdetermination.”14 This apparent complexity is thus reducible to an essence, to an essential and thus “beautiful” contradiction that its diversity expresses. This essay, too short and very dense, aroused enormous opposition, especially among self-declared Marxists, above all, members of the French Communist Party, the most discerning of whom did not accuse him of “structuralism,” as would later be the case, but of “hyper-empiricism.”15 Almost immediately, Althusser wrote his response: “On the Materialist Dialectic: On the Uneveness of Origins,” (1963) returning to the question of the Hegelian dialectic in order even more clearly to demarcate it from the materialist dialectic. Here, Althusser moves beyond the critique of the Hegelian contradiction as the principle of the simplicity of its phenomena that are only ever this contradiction in externalized form, to identify the concept of origin (which guarantees the arrival of the end and is thus necessary condition of the Hegelian system). Hegel postulates “an original unity that constitutes the fragmented unity of the two contraries in which it is alienated, becoming other by remaining itself: these two contraries are the same entity but in duality, the same interiority, but in exteriority.”16 The materialist dialectic whose exposition Marx did not have time to write except in a “practical state” emerges precisely in the gesture by which it refuses an original, simple unity which would reduce historical development to the mere phenomena of an essence originally present only to be deferred, delayed, and finally restored to what it had always been even if the consciousness of it was lacking. A materialist dialectic rejects at the outset the intelligibility that the notion of a progressive and cumulative movement toward an end already present in the beginning offers. It thus begins only to the extent that it can articulate a critique of “the concept of the beginning” or of the arché that, as Negri has recently reminded us, suggests both the beginning of a chronology and the command that insures its unfolding according to the necessity proper to it.17 For Hegel, and Althusser refers here to the opening of the Science of Logic, the beginning is “immediately


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identical with nothingness; the simplicity that, for Hegel once again, is the starting point—and restarting point, indefinitely—for every process, that which restores it to its origin.”18 If Hegel’s philosophy is “a philosophy of origins,” it is, despite its philosophical finery, not fundamentally different in form from “the state of Nature” as Hobbes uses it, an original condition that can function as a beginning only to the extent that it is negated by the presence of a sovereign and simultaneously preserved as that which makes the fact of sovereignty, necessarily external to any founding covenant and hence to civil society, possible. To the notion of an “original essence,” even one which begins in its own negation, as the guarantee of “a simple unity,” Althusser counterposes “le toujours–déjà-donnée d’une unité complexe stucturée.”19 Not only is there an irreducible diversity, whose distinction from an original chaos is underscored by Althusser’s description of this complexity as a structured unity, but this diversity or complexity cannot function as a concept of origin at all. More than simply a pluralization of origin into distinct origins, it is neither starting point nor beginning. On the contrary: it is always already given, a concept that serves to deflect a search for an origin, for any prior simplicity of which this unity of the diverse or structure of the conjuncture would be the expression. With these admittedly provisional observations, Althusser draws a line of demarcation between the Hegelian and materialist dialectics. But where is Spinoza in all this and his name appears only three times in the entirety of For Marx? Interestingly, not only is Spinoza’s presence nearly undetectable in the critique of Hegel sketched out in these essays, but it would appear that Spinoza is, if anything, the detour that allows Althusser to separate Hegel less from Marx than from Hegel himself: Hegel beyond Hegel. Three years after the publication of For Marx and Reading Capital, Althusser would return to these questions in his presentation to Jean Hyppolite’s seminar “Marx’s Relation to Hegel.”20 A significant part of this text was extracted from an unfinished document written in 1967 but patched together by François Matheron and published only posthumously under the title “The Humanist Controversy (La querelle de l’humanisme),” in which Althusser declares that many of his critics, even those who claimed and sincerely believed themselves to be defending Hegel and the Hegelian legacy within Marxism were in fact, following Marx himself, closer to Feuerbach than to Hegel, even reading Hegel’s texts, especially the most notorious characters in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the master, the slave, and the unhappy consciousness, through Feuerbach. According to Althusser, the Feuerbachian inversion of Hegel which meant granting primacy to matter over spirit, the concrete over the abstract and the practical over the theoretical,

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produced “an enormous contraction” and diminution of philosophy, “sacrificing” what was essential in Hegel in favor of an assemblage of disparate eighteenthcentury theories, empiricism, mechanical materialism, etc. Feuerbach’s theory of history as the multiplicity of forms in which human essence is alienated was, in an important sense, not a history at all. Of course, this was no more than what both Engels and Lenin themselves recognized. But Althusser will go further: he announces to Hyppolite’s seminar that he must confront the contraction of Hegel that took place in his own writings: “everything we have published on Hegel in fact leaves out the positive heritage Marx, by his own confession, owed to Hegel. Marx transformed the Hegelian dialectic, but he owed Hegel a crucial gift: the idea of the dialectic. We have not discussed this. I should like to say a little about it.”21 This is a surprising statement to say the least: Are not “Contradiction and Overdetermination” and “On the Materialist Dialectic” devoted precisely to the concepts that would distinguish Hegel’s dialectic from a materialist dialectic? Did not Althusser identify the very notions that cannot be taken over from Hegel without doing damage to Marxism: origin/ end, negation of the negation, supersession, etc.? Indeed, he summarizes the arguments first offered in For Marx: “what irremediably disfigures the Hegelian conception of history as a dialectical process is its teleological conception of the dialectic, inscribed in the very structures of the Hegelian dialectic at an extremely precise point: the Aufhebung (transcendence-preserving-the-transcended-asthe-internalized-transcended), directly expressed in the Hegelian category of the negation of the negation (or negativity).”22 It is at this very moment, the moment at which Althusser would appear to offer nothing new not only on the topic of Marx’s relation to Hegel but also, more crucially, on the topic of Hegel’s relation to himself, a topic in which the dialectical character of the, of any, notion of the dialectic is at stake, that is, the rigorously Hegelian notion of the contradiction proper to Hegel’s philosophy itself, the specification of which alone would make Hegel intelligible, that Althusser makes philosophy, his philosophy, speak otherwise. It now appears that a long detour had been necessary not only to speak of Marx but also to speak of Hegel, to set Hegel against himself, against that part of his work to which Althusser had reduced him at the cost of a sacrifice of the other Hegel who is inescapable if we understand the movement of his philosophy, like every philosophy, to be a process of Sichanderswerden and Verdopplung, or a process by which it constantly becomes other than itself. It is a symptomatic moment in Althusser’s sense: he returns to the very theme that in “On the Materialist Dialectic” demonstrated Hegel’s allegiance to what Althusser will call in “Marx’s


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Relation to Hegel” the “basic system of classical philosophical categories,”23 a system founded in every sense on the concept of origin, the concept of the beginning, without acknowledging his earlier discussion of the opening of Hegel’s Science of Logic and more importantly the fact that he will reverse the judgment he had earlier passed, and attribute to this passage in Hegel an entirely different and opposed meaning. What had been four or five years earlier for Althusser the foundation of Hegel’s idealist system has become that idealism’s other, a subversion of the very classical system of philosophy which it would appear to uphold. Althusser begins his discussion by taking the side of Hyppolite against Kojéve: “Now, as M. Hyppolite has very well noted, nothing is more foreign to Hegel’s thought than this anthropological conception of history. For Hegel, history is a process of alienation, but this process does not have Man as its subject.”24 In fact, Althusser will go further: to restore Hegel to what he says and does in his philosophical work against the contraction or restriction imposed upon him by modern philosophers is to recognize a concept necessary to Marxist thought, the idea that history is a process of alienation without a subject. Here, Althusser privileges the Science of Logic which he summarizes as the “science of the Idea, i.e., the exposition of its concept, the concept of the process of alienation without a subject, in other words, the concept of the process of selfalienation which, considered in its totality, is nothing but the idea.”25 But there exists an “extraordinary paradox” in Hegel, according to Althusser. The process itself does not have a subject because it is a subject “insofar as it does not have a subject.” In its place, the place of a self-moving center of initiatives, there is the teleology that is realized through the negation of the negation that progresses toward an end of which the origin was merely the initially alienated form. Here, Althusser repeats what he had already said in “On the Materialist Dialectic”: the Idea begins with the negation of itself that it must overcome or negate in order finally to realize itself. The suspension of the beginning is necessary to the achievement of the End. Thus far, Althusser’s discussion of Hegel confines or contracts him to the teleology to which Althusser has reduced him. At this precise point, however, Althusser announces that it is possible to “take away the teleology” from Hegel in order to distill from his texts the concept of a process without either subject or telos. This is Hegel beyond Hegel, the application to Hegel, as Pierre Macherey suggested, of his own principle that a truth is undone by the very movement by which it is made. Althusser returns to the theme of origin to say against his earlier statements that “there is in Hegel no Origin nor (which is never anything

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but its phenomenon) any beginning”26 and not only or even primarily because the origin is merely a transitory moment of the end. Instead,“ Hegel’s Logic is the Origin affirmed denied; the first form of a concept that Derrida had introduced into philosophical reflection: erasure (rature).”27 Althusser will immediately qualify this assertion: “but the Hegelian erasure constituted by the Logic from its first words, is the negation of the negation, dialectical and hence teleological.”28 Thus, Hegelian erasure would be the “first form” and thus an origin of a concept that comes into being only through the negation of this origin, as if the concept of erasure is originally erased in order to become that of which it can only be the anticipation. While Althusser thus falls back into a teleological reading of Hegel’s place in the history of philosophy, something has nevertheless broken free from Hegel as a consequence of Althusser’s intervention, a concept of the beginning that refuses to be confined to Hegel’s system as constructed by Althusser. It is only in the Elements of Self-Criticism (and specifically in the context of his discussion of Spinoza) that Althusser can acknowledge that both Spinoza and Hegel “rejected every thesis of Origin, of Transcendence, of Another World, even disguised in the absolute interiority of essence.”29 Although Hegel begins: “In the void (dans la vide),” Spinoza “begins with God and not with empty being (être vide),” a fact which protects the latter from “any notion of the End, even one which makes its way in immanence.”30 It would appear then that the proximity of Spinoza brings the fractures within Hegel’s work ever more clearly into relief, thereby making visible a Hegel systematically overlooked by critics and partisans alike, a thinker of immanence to whom no one in the history of philosophy is closer than Spinoza. And if their trajectories are finally asymptotic, the point at which they appear nearly to converge even as they persist in their divergence is, as Althusser’s texts allow us to see, the “concept of the beginning.” Pierre Macherey has noted that “Hegel is never so close to Spinoza as at the moments when he distances himself from him, because this refusal has the value of a symptom and indicates the obstinate presence of a common object, if not a common project, that links these philosophers inseparably without conflating them.”31 And there is no conceptual point from which Hegel sought more frequently to distance himself from Spinoza than the question of “the beginning.” In fact, one could say that his entire reading or misreading of Spinoza is organized around this theme. Macherey finds “astonishing” the fact that while Hegel’s Logic begins with the postulation of “the impossibility of grounding the infinite process of knowledge” in a foundation that would function as its beginning or origin, he is not only able but also compelled persistently to “ignore” the fact that this is above all what distances Spinoza from Descartes.32 In no text


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of Hegel’s is the “ignoring” of Spinoza more obvious and striking than in the first chapter of the Doctrine of Being, Part I of the Logic, “Womit muss der Anfang der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?” or “With What Must the Science begin, “ a “celebrated text” in which there is “not a single reference to Spinozism!”33 While I have so far followed Macherey’s analysis very closely and faithfully, I must here depart from or at least complicate the letter of the Hegel ou Spinoza, if not the spirit, by cautioning that Hegel’s reading of Spinoza, and to be more precise, of Part I of the Ethics, is not reducible simply to a misreading, that is, a projection of something foreign to Spinoza which would originate in and properly belong to Hegel himself in order not to see the fundamental commonality that binds together the two philosophies so intimately. On the contrary, what Hegel finds in Ethics I is as important as what he overlooks: his reading releases Spinoza from himself, identifying the tendency in Spinoza’s thought against which what brings him closest to Hegel develops. What is this tendency? Althusser captures it in his admittedly schematic way with his phrase “Spinoza begins with God,” a phrase we could more accurately render without changing Althusser’s meaning, as “Spinoza begins with God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes,” a beginning that, according to Althusser permits him to escape the nonbeginning that is a beginning in nothingness, the negation of a beginning that must itself be negated, a negativity that is the motor of the teleological development of Absolute Knowledge. This is to adopt Hegel’s reading of Spinoza while reversing his judgment: Hegel correctly read Spinoza as a thinker of beginning, and rejected “beginning with God,” at least in the Spinozist, manner because such a beginning did not permit the long return to itself of substance as origin and end, as if a primary unity suffers a secondary dispersion from which there can be no recovery. But does Spinoza begin with God, that is, with substance considered as the immediate absolute, a beginning, as Hegel says, that “does not presuppose anything, must not be mediated by anything nor have a ground,” but which “is to be itself the entire ground?”34 Such an absolute is not the “absolutely absolute,” the self-determining absolute whose every action is a making of itself in its own reflection. Let us recall that Spinoza, “as a Jew,” is above the thinker of the sublime, or at least of the Jewish sublime, that “absolute monotheism,” that rejects the mediated unity of the conception of God as Three Persons in One in favor of the primitive undifferentiated unity of an inert and immobile Absolute.35 That which emanates from the Absolute is mere negation that cannot itself be negated, substance squandering itself in a movement of diminution and degradation, a “loss of itself in the mutability and contingency of being.”36 The linear movement

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from substance to attributes to modes is thus substance’s externalization of itself as a progressively insubstantial other doomed to decomposition and dissolution. There can be no return to substance of its expressions: in their absolute otherness, they remain unworthy of their creator. For Hegel, those who regard Spinoza as an atheist are completely mistaken: it is not God who disappears into Nature, but rather Nature which disappears, not so much into God, as Hegel seems to suggest, as into insubstantiality and unreality, leaving the absolute, subtracted from the forms in which it loses itself, and therefore from any actuality, nothing more than a void whose infinity and eternality guarantee the perpetual reign of nothingness. The violence of this reading which not only dismembers Spinoza in the attempt to force him into an undifferentiated unity with the Oriental philosophy of undifferentiated unity, but simultaneously attacks the dominant view of Spinoza as atheist and materialist, insisting that he denies the world rather than God. This should not obscure the fact that it is extraordinarily precise in its excision of that mass of material, words, phrases, statements, and propositions, a mass that significantly outweighs what Hegel has extracted from Spinoza, that calls into question the notion of substance as beginning. The effect of Hegel’s operation is paradoxically to make visible what he cannot see by separating it from everything in the Ethics that could possibly authorize the notion of Spinoza as thinker of the sublime. Macherey is undoubtedly right: Hegel’s violence to the text increases the more closely his thought brings him into theoretical proximity to Spinoza. But this coming into proximity is not a linear or progressive rapprochement: on the contrary, the movement toward Spinoza in the first chapter of the Logic begins with a retreat from Spinoza, or at least from Spinoza as Hegel reads him. To the thought of an absolute beginning, of the absolute as beginning from which all further development can only be a degradation and loss of this absolute itself, Hegel opposes an “Absolute ground” that serves simultaneously as beginning and end, such that every movement from it must also be a movement toward it, every progression (Vorwartsgehen) regression, or retrogression (Ruckgang). This ground is that which loses itself in immediacy in order that it may be recovered as the innermost truth of consciousness itself. At this point, Hegel tells us that such a movement is comparable to and “even more true of Absolute spirit, which reveals itself as the concrete and highest final truth of all being (als die Konkrete und lezte hochste Wahrheit alles Seins sich ergibt),” “which at the end of the development is known as freely externalizing itself, abandoning (entlassend) itself to the form (Gestalt) of an immediate being.”37 Thus, Absolute Spirit


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appears or rather makes its first appearance by having already disappeared into immediacy. Hegel’s verb here is entlassen, which Miller translates as “abandon,” but which might also be translated as “letting go,” with its meanings both of ceasing to hold on to something and also “firing or dismissing” someone. Hegel runs the risk of appearing to be too close to Spinoza by arguing that absolute ground develops by abandoning or letting go of itself and attempts to foreclose that risk by emphasizing that substance has become spirit or subject: it acts and remains both the subject and object of its action, in this case the action by which it externalizes itself in order to return to itself as ground, but as a ground known as such, no longer immediate but mediated. The nothing from which it proceeds is not “a pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed (Der Anfang ist nicht das reine Nichts, sondern ein Nichts, von dem Etwas ausgehen soll).”38 The line of scientific development is thus a circle. Hegel continues the analogy between the development of the Logic and the movement by which Absolute Spirit lets go of itself to externalize itself as immediacy, by relating it to the creation of a world, the world, and therefore to a Genesis whose unfolding is a return to itself as result. The themes of Genesis and creation, of course, serve to remind us here of Spinoza, the absent or immanent cause, as Macherey suggests of the opening of the Logic, as if only the postulation of substance as Spirit can save the absolute from an “unclosing” (Hegel uses the verb entschliessen), unlocking, or opening up of itself that is also a squandering and a loss, a movement from determinate self-production to a decline into indeterminacy and transience. So far Spinoza appears in Hegel as both the beginning of philosophy, as he says in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy and as a, or the, philosophy of the beginning, of the Absolute as beginning, as absolute beginning. Spinoza is not only the interlocutor and adversary in reaction to which Hegel’s philosophy develops, confronting, interiorizing, and sublating it at every turn. He also represents, beyond the direct and indirect references to the Ethics, an absolute danger, the danger of the absolute whose development cannot be understood according to the two poles Hegel explicitly acknowledges: an origin whose development can only appear as loss and degradation, or an absolute which avoids such a fate by deferring itself to an end which was already contained in the beginning. But this danger does not appear as such on the scene: the attribution to Spinoza of a theory of emanation is not merely an error but has a strategic function. It serves to divert our attention from what threatens Hegel not from the outside in the form of the inassimilable Oriental Spinoza, but from within, the results of Hegel’s philosophical practice whose results are never its proper ends and whose unruliness must constantly be corrected and

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compensated by the prefaces and introductions that as often as not tell us what Hegel wanted to say rather than what he did say. If then, as I have argued, it is possible to read Hegel’s theory of the becoming itself of the Absolute as a polemic not simply against the notion, which he claims to find in Part I of the Ethics, of an immobile absolute whose development can only be a destruction of itself, but against a notion or notions also found but not acknowledged in the same text, what is this other disavowed notion and what is its relation to the problem of beginnings? Here again, Althusser has left us the phrase we have already noted and little more. Isolated from what proceeds and follows it, invoking concepts that it does not explain, it is little more than handwriting on the wall for us to decipher, but which allows us against all the denials on Hegel’s part to see that disavowed kinship that ties him inescapably to Spinoza, but precisely the Spinoza from which Hegel’s work diverts our attention: “Hegel’s Logic is the Origin affirmed-denied: the first form of a concept that Derrida has introduced into philosophical reflection: rature.” In a certain sense, Althusser’s summary corresponds to what we have seen in Hegel: at the origin Absolute spirit abandons itself, lets itself go, expels itself into the Gestalt of immediate being. However, this self-abandonment which as a form of self-determination is a way of thinking what Spinoza formulates as the causa sui of substance must be preserved from the very danger that Spinoza’s system illustrates according to Hegel: Spirit’s abandonment of itself to loss and decay. In fact, it is not enough that Spirit will recover itself as result, as end; the danger which inheres in the system thus described, the danger that the end will elude itself, effacing itself at the moment of its arrival, perpetually deferred, unmaking and incompleting itself in its very movement, is less the danger of diminution and disappearance than that of dissemination and divergence. In a word, the danger of becoming other without return. Thus, Hegel in a defense against this possibility must return in the very same sentence in which he postulates the beginning as Spirit’s abandonment of itself to the notion of creation as Spirit’s opening itself, unlocking (entschliessen), and releasing that which was therein “contained.” Hegel explicitly identifies this danger when he makes the following curious argument: first, in its progress, Spirit can never become other, that is, “a true other” (ein wahrhaft Anderes) as opposed to a false or apparent other (although it’s important to note that Hegel doesn’t use these words and does not specify what the contrary or other of the true other would be), but second, “insofar as this transition (the verb is “übergehen” to pass into, to merge into)” into real otherness “does occur, it is to that extent sublated again.”39 The danger


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here, marked by the qualifying phrase “to the extent that this übergehen does occur—or even seems to occur (vorkommen)—” is precisely the danger of Spirit becoming a true other without reduction or sublation, the danger that Spirit would have no existence apart from the other into which it had always already passed. To escape this danger, a danger in a sense perpetually realized but, so far, successfully thwarted, that is, to render the thwarting of this danger necessary and permanent rather than contingent and abandoned to fortune, even if fortune has so far favored Spirit, Spirit cannot defer itself to the end of the process by which it realizes itself without risking its disappearance into the true other, but “must be present and preserved throughout the subsequent development, remaining completely immanent in its further determinations.”40 Of course, this guarantee of Spirit’s presence only displaces the problem and its risks: here Spirit’s presence threatens to become “true,” that is, absolute, immanence. It is at this precise point, a point at which both the stakes and the risks of the Hegelian dialectic are as clear as they will ever be, that reading Hegel après et d’après Spinoza, to use Macherey’s phrase, allows us to draw a line of demarcation which will make visible the threshold at which Hegel’s Logic abandoned itself to true otherness, from which there could be no return to the same. There is no need to rehearse Macherey’s exhaustive refutation of Hegel’s reading of the Substanceattributes-modes relation in Spinoza as a “hierarchical and chronological relation.”41 The attributes cannot be understood as exterior to substance but rather as “the elements by which it is constituted (or constitutes itself).” In the same way, Substance cannot exist before the attributes that are, according to Macherey’s reading, the “condition of its self-production.”42 In returning to the theme of Creation, of Genesis, Hegel is simultaneously returning to Spinoza and to the reading of Genesis advanced in Part I of the Ethics. I refer to Ethics IP33S where, abandoning the emanationist language of substance, attributes, and modes even in its subversive form, Spinoza will say simply that “God could not have been prior to his decrees, nor could he have been without them (Deum ante sua decreta non suisse, nec sine ipsis esse posse).” Without origin there is no end and no unity into which the diversity and multiplicity of decrees or utterances could be resolved. In fact, to follow the Hebrew of Genesis as Spinoza did is to see that God exists, creates, speaks, calls, sees, and blesses in one and the same movement, a movement necessarily without beginning or end: and this movement is one of differentiation and proliferation whose actualized power is without limit or end; God or substance produces itself eternally as the infinitely diverse.


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This process without subject or ends, to return to Althusser’s phrase, this dialectic, is at work in Hegel’s texts and is that which his formal categories of negation, sublation, and mediation arise to contain. If Hegel is so profoundly incapable of comprehending Spinoza, it is certainly because Spinoza’s philosophy is already realized in Hegel as the true other which he has already become.

Notes 1 Louis Althusser, “Is It Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?” in Essays in SelfCriticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 165. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), p. 9. 3 Deleuze, Nietzsche, p. 11. 4 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986). 5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 71. 6 Derrida, Grammatology, translation modified. 7 Anonymous, “Dr. Althusser,” Radical Philosophy 1975, 12:44. 8 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, p. 131. 9 Ibid., p. 132. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 133. 13 Ibid., p. 137. 14 Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1969), p. 101. 15 Gilbert Mury, “Matérialisme et hyperempirisme,” La Pensée (April 1963). 16 Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic: of the Unevenness of Origins,” in For Marx, p. 197. 17 Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: a Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 18 Althusser, “Materialist Dialectic,” p. 190. 19 Althusser, “Materialist Dialectic,” p. 190. 20 Louis Althusser, “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” in Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx (London: Verso, 1972).


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21 Ibid., p. 174. 22 Ibid., p. 181. 23 Ibid. 24 Althusser, “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” p. 182. 25 Ibid., p. 182. 26 Ibid., p. 182. 27 Ibid., p. 184. 28 Ibid., p. 184. 29 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, p. 135. 30 Ibid. 31 Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: Maspero, 1979), p. 17. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1929). 35 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy. 3 vols, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances S. Simpson (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1974), vol. III, p. 288. 36 Hegel, Logic, p. 535. 37 Hegel, Logic, p. 71; Logik, pp. 55–6. 38 Hegel, Logic, p. 73; Logik, p. 58. 39 Hegel, Logic, p. 71; Logik, p. 56. 40 Hegel, Logic, pp. 71 and 56. 41 Macherey, “The Problem of the Attributes,” p. 92. 42 Ibid., p. 78.

5

Hegel’s Treatment of Spinoza: Its Scope and its Limits Vance Maxwell

Introduction As is well known, Hegel brings three serious criticisms against the philosophy of Spinoza. Hegel systematically presents these criticisms in the last portion of his Spinoza section in the three-volume Lectures on the History of Philosophy1: (i) Hegel charges Spinoza with atheism not as ordinarily thought, but in another crucial way: “Spinoza’s system is absolute pantheism and monotheism elevated into thought. Spinozism is therefore very far removed from being atheism in the ordinary sense; but in the sense that God is not conceived as Spirit, it is atheism.”2 That is, Spinoza is, for Hegel, not atheistic in the sense that he denies the existence of God, while exalting particulars in nature as ultimately real. Indeed, “with him there is too much God.”3 Rather, Spinoza is atheistic in that his divine principle is Substance but not self-conscious Subject. (ii) Hegel’s second charge concerns “the method adopted by Spinoza for setting forth his philosophy; it is the demonstrative method of geometry as employed by Euclid, in which we find definitions, explanations, axioms, and theorems.”4 All of these last are “solely and simply accepted and assumed, not deduced, nor proven to be necessary; for Spinoza is not aware of how he arrives at these individual determinations.”5 Accordingly, “[t]he mathematical method is ill-adapted for speculative content, and finds its proper place only in the finite sciences of the understanding.”6 The crux of Hegel’s second charge lies, then, in the abstract externality whereby Spinoza imposes an alien Euclidean method on philosophical content truly conceived only by Hegel’s dialectical method. (iii) Hegel’s third criticism involves the famous problem of negation: “Because negation was conceived by Spinoza in one-sided fashion merely, there is, in the third place, in his system, an utter blotting out of the principle of subjectivity, individuality, personality, the

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moment of self-consciousness in Being. Thought has only the significance of the universal, not of self-consciousness.”7 By “conceived in one-sided fashion merely,” Hegel means that Spinoza arrived at “the great principle” that “all determination is negation . . . ,” but did not advance to the truly dialectical speculative principle that negation is itself absolutely negated in a process constituting at once an absolute negation and absolute affirmation yielding, in human time and in divine telos, Absolute Spirit. In this chapter, I shall focus critically and speculatively on Hegel’s second and third charges concerning the geometrical method and negation, respectively. Thus, I argue, from the scope of Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza, there follow its limits in two major ways: (i) In treating Spinoza’s geometrical method summarily and severely as he does, Hegel relies exclusively on the Ethics, and mainly on Part I concerning God. He ignores both Spinoza’s crucial treatise on method, the Tractatus de Intellectualis Emendatione, his earliest work, and the intermediate Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being.8 These works he does not even mention. In his historical treatment of Spinoza, then, Hegel shows himself very selective. He restricts himself to the Ethics (and to Letter 12 on the infinite) as the philosophical result of Spinoza’s thought, and follows his claim in the Science of Logic that “. . . the absolute cannot be a first, an immediate; on the contrary the absolute is essentially its result.”9 Moreover, this claim methodologically or dialectically grounds Hegel’s criticisms of the abstract immediacy of Spinoza’s geometrical method. (ii) In restricting Spinoza on negation to his achieving the principle that “all determination is negation,” but failing to achieve the dialectical principle of the negation of negation in an absolute positive, Hegel relies mainly on Spinoza’s claim in Letter 50 to Jelles, this latter applying determination as negation to figure as negation only.10 Furthermore, Hegel generalizes Spinoza’s principle metaphysically in his charge of Spinozan “acosmism,” namely that all modes of substance simply vanish into it: “As all differences and determinations of things and of consciousness simply go back into the One substance, one may say that in the system of Spinoza all things are merely cast down into this abyss of annihilation.”11 It is surely this restricted view of modes and hence of man, that leads Hegel virtually to neglect Spinoza’s moral theory, and especially Spinoza’s complex doctrine of the overcoming and reordering of the passions within the eternally arising amor intellectualis Dei. Only one commentator of those considered here notes this neglect. Kenneth Schmitz remarks that Hegel “places Spinoza’s ethics at the periphery of the latter’s thought,” but Schmitz does not explain himself or pursue this quintessential matter.12 Now, clearly, if modes have no real existence in substance, Hegel claiming throughout that

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they do not, no moral theory or practice is possible, to say nothing of eternal salvation. Accordingly, it is not open to Hegel to find in Spinoza something other than determination as negation period, that is, to find a significant negation of negation simpliciter or in the first instance. In what follows, and having established the scope of Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza, I shall argue its limits or deficiencies in terms of two critical and speculative theses concerning Hegel’s second and third charges against Spinoza: (i) Regarding Hegel’s charge that Spinoza externally applies an abstractly immediate geometrical method to his philosophical content (in sum: substanceattribute-mode), I shall argue that Spinoza’s relation to mathematics is richer and more philosophically promising than Hegel and the important scholars noted here realize or grant. More specifically, I shall contend that resources in the TIE especially prove that, in the final analysis, Spinoza’s philosophy governs his use of the geometrical method and of various figures, ratios, and proportions. They do not govern his philosophy. In particular, I shall argue for a teleology of philosophico-mathematical method in Spinoza, and also, as a logico-causal consequence, for the emendation of mathematics itself, this proceeding as the adequation of quantity and of the epistemology and ontology of mathematical entities. Here, in a chapter intended for a collection of such on Hegel-Spinoza, strict limits must be set to this undertaking. Hence I shall argue sufficiently to correct both Hegel’s peremptory dismissal of Spinoza’s geometrical method as external, useless, and irrelevant to his philosophy, and that dismissal as it reverberates through the works of scholars cited here. (ii) Regarding Hegel’s charge that, although Spinoza establishes the principle that “all determination is negation,” he does not arrive at the dialectical principle of the absolute negation of negation in an ultimate affirmation of Absolute Spirit, I shall argue this: Hegel is quite right to claim, as he repeatedly does, that Spinoza establishes determination as negation only, if we add the qualifier “explicitly.” Thus, as noted above, in Letter 50, Spinoza applies the principle to mathematical figure as the mere negation of “finite and determinate bodies.”13 And in Ethics IIIP3S, he applies it to human minds as passive within the whole of nature, and hence as containing inadequate ideas: “We therefore see that passive states are related to the mind only insofar as the mind has something involving negation: that is, insofar as the mind is considered as part of nature, which cannot be clearly and distinctly perceived through itself independently of other parts.”14 Herewith, Spinoza applies the principle to human passions, and hence to the ethical domain, and hence to the conative transition from inadequate to adequate ideas (VP1-P10) and (IIP7DSC, VP1) bodily modifications or images.


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Now, I contend, this transition implicitly constitutes a negation of determination as passional negation, a movement from passivity to activity and from external determination to internal self-determination in self-reflective activity of mind and body. For several reasons, this movement or transition generating the amor intellectualis Dei remains implicit in Spinoza, and Hegel misses it altogether, along with Spinoza’s moral theory as a purification of the passions in detail. Nor do the Hegel-Spinoza scholars invoked here pay any attention to this matter. I shall argue sufficiently to make explicit this transition and double negation as ethico-mathematical, with a focus both necessary and sufficient for my restricted purposes here. No Spinoza scholar or Spinozist could agree with the arrogant Hegel writing this: “As regards the philosophy of Spinoza, it is very simple and on the whole easy to comprehend . . . .” But agreement variously arises as he continues: “the difficulty which it presents is due partly to the limitations of the method in which Spinoza presents his thoughts, and partly to his narrow range of ideas, which causes him in an unsatisfactory way to pass over important points of view and cardinal questions.”15 Here, then, I shall briefly offer “a new Spinoza” and “a new Hegel,”16 a Spinoza closer, by anticipation, to Hegel than, to my senses, is realized in scholarship, and a Hegel closer to Spinoza than the scope and limits of his treatment allow him to see or to grant.

The scope of Hegel’s treatment In this Section, we shall pay heed to the scope of Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza, proceeding under two rubrics, Texts and Themes. My intention is not to be exhaustive here, but to set up an adequate background against which to undertake critical and speculative work. Texts: Having begun with a short biographical sketch of Spinoza’s life, Hegel notes “the first of Spinoza’s works entitled ‘An Exposition according to the geometrical method of the Principles of the Cartesian philosophy’ .” He then notes that Spinoza later “wrote his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and by it gained considerable reputation.”17 To my knowledge, Hegel does not mention these works again; and he certainly doesn’t use them. Instead, he goes directly to the Ethics. After commenting generally, Hegel turns to the definitions of EI, paying special attention to ID5 (mode) and ID6 (“the infinite”). Curiously, instead of treating ID7 (freedom-constraint), Hegel extends ID6 into “the seventh place,” noting Spinoza’s defining God as “a Being absolutely infinite, i.e. a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite

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essence.”18 Again, curiously, Hegel neglects ID8 (eternity), thus excluding two important definitions from his claim that “The whole of Spinoza’s philosophy is contained in these definitions.” Hegel mentions the axioms and propositions of the Ethics generally, citing several from E1, E2, E3, and E5 but shows an ambivalence, verging on the cavalier, toward them and their proofs.19 Discussing the true infinite in Spinoza, he cites Letter 12.20 Likewise, in The Encyclopedia of Logic, Hegel refers severally to Spinoza, but with no documentation.21 In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel quotes Spinoza once, citing 1D1.22 We turn now to the three-volume Hodgson edition of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.23 In Vol. I, Hegel makes a number of references to Spinoza, but, again, with no documentation: the editor refers his quoting omnes determination est negatio to Letter 50 to “Jareg Jellis [sic],”24 and Hodgson refers Hegel’s “the law is the love of God” to 5P36 on the amor intellectualis Dei.25 In Vol. II, Hegel again refers severally to Spinoza, but without documentation: Hodgson, remarking on Hegel’s connecting the Oriental principle of unity with Spinozan substance, refers to 1P15;26 he also refers Hegel’s “Nature exists, is intuited, represented, as God: Spinozism” to 4Pref.27 In Vol. III, Hegel refers to Spinoza on the ontological argument, with Hodgson citing 1D6 with 2P.s 1,228 and later 1P11 for him.29 It is now clear that Hegel is no Spinoza scholar, that he selectively cites relatively few of Spinoza’s texts, and that he focuses mainly on Part I of the Ethics as the definitive result of Spinoza’s thought. Let us then turn to the themes which Hegel pursues in Spinoza, and to those which, for our own purposes, he does not pursue. Themes: It is evident that Hegel’s three major criticisms of Spinoza, those involving atheism, method, and negation, recur throughout his works as cited above. They constitute his main themes. But, on the positive side, Hegel reveals a steady fascination with Spinoza’s conception of substance as causa sui. Indeed, Hegel virtually identifies substance as causa sui in Spinoza with the true infinite of thought as distinguished from the false infinite of imagination. He claims that “Spinoza’s earlier definitions have also the infinite already implied in them, for instance in the case of the cause of itself, in as much as he defines it as that whose essence involves existence . . . .”30 Hence, substance, causa sui as the true infinite, constitutes the great positive theme in Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza. Within its restrictions to the Ethics and a few of Spinoza’s letters, Hegel’s LHP covers a variety of themes several of which we note here: Having dealt with the definitions of EI, Hegel remarks that Spinoza “descends from the universal of substance through the particular, thought and extension, to the individual”


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(LHP, 264), but also that the mode qua individual “he does not recognize as essential . . . for it disappears in existence, or it is not raised into the [Concept].”31 There follows a discussion of substance-attribute (LHP, 265–6) concerning which “proof and others like them not much is to be gained” (LHP, 266). Next, Hegel discusses freedom/necessity in God, remarking that “God acts in accordance with no final causes (sub ratione boni)” (LHP, 267).32 Hegel follows with a short discussion of the attributes Thought and Extension, their relation and the parallelism of modes under them. He criticizes the immediacy of the attributes and the externality of the “understanding” which posits them (LHP, 268–9). Hegel next considers individual things in Spinoza, concluding that “Individuation, the one, is a mere synthesis; . . . since Spinoza has only universality, thought, and not self-consciousness” (LHP, 273).33 Hegel’s penultimate theme is the mind-body relation which is such that “the excellence of the soul can never be anything else that the excellence of the body” (LHP, 275). Finally, and before bringing his three main charges, summed as “a general criticism,” Hegel briefly invokes Spinoza’s “system of morals and that is a matter of importance” (LHP, 275–80). Notwithstanding, Hegel’s discussion is slight and inconsistent, and soon gives way to a treatment of Evil, as found mainly in Spinoza’s “thirty-sixth Letter” (i.e. Letter 23 to Blyenbergh). Hegel’s remaining works largely repeat his three main charges. In the SL (Remark: The Philosophy of Spinoza and Leibniz), Hegel immediately focuses on Spinoza’s omnis determinatio est negatio again denying that his great principle involves “self-negating negation” (SL, 536). From this, Hegel draws the two conclusions that: (i) substance lacks the principle of personality and (ii) that “cognition is external reflection” (SL, 537). He then reviews Spinoza’s definitions of substance, attribute, and mode (SL, 537–8) before moving to Leibniz. In his EL, Hegel again remarks that Spinoza’s “God is determined only as substance, and not as subject and Spirit” (EL, 8). He then claims significantly (but also inconsistently with the acosmism charge) that “if we have only the substance in mind then there is . . . no distinction between good and evil in it,” but that “[i]t is here in [finite] man, where distinction exists . . . essentially as the distinction between good and evil too” (EL, 9–10). Indeed, only by reading Parts III,IV, and V of the Ethics can we “convince ourselves beyond question regarding the high purity of this moral theory whose principle is the unalloyed love of God, just as readily as we can convince ourselves that the purity is the moral consequence of the system” (EL, 10). In his PR, Hegel shows fascination for the causa sui but again inconsistently with his charge of acosmism. He refers to a finite mind taken as “a person, . . . capable of holding property” and quotes Spinoza once: “As causa sui, i.e., as free causality,

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mind is that cuius natura non potest concipi existens [ID1]” (PR, 53). Importing the divine causa sui into the human mind, Hegel adumbrates Spinoza’s doctrine of adequation, but he never addresses it. And, finally, we refer briefly to Spinozan themes in Hegel’s LPR. In Vol. I, and characterizing the “patience” of philosophy, Hegel states that “it is only satisfying the internal impulse of its concept when it cognizes both itself and what is opposed to it . . . truth is the touchstone of itself and of the false: Spinoza . . .” (LPR: Vol. I, 172, n. 59).34 Later, Hegel remarks that “ ‘Reflection’ does not posit the finitude, the determinacy of content, with which it starts, as negative, [and thus] it necessarily extends finitude as such into the absolute: Spinozism” (LPR: Vol. I, 254).35 Still later, discussing good and evil in Spinoza, Hegel defends Spinoza against the charge that he annuls the distinction between them: “It is said that in Spinozism the distinction of good and evil has no intrinsic validity, that morality is annulled, and so it is a matter of indifference whether one is good or evil. That is no less superficial a consequence [than ‘If everything is one . . . then . . . good is one with evil . . .’].” In acosmically inconsistent defense, Hegel writes: “With regard to the distinction of God and humanity, the basic determination in Spinozism is that human beings must have God alone as their goal . . . But we can also deem our distinction null and void, and can posit our essential being solely in God and in our orientation toward God. In so doing we are good” (LPR, Vol. I, 378–9). Hegel returns to Spinozan acosmism at LPR, Vol. I, 432, claiming that “So strictly is there only God, that there is no world at all; . . . the finite has no genuine actuality.” And finally here, Hegel compares Spinoza with Anselm on the ontological argument: Spinoza “says that substance is that which cannot be thought without existence . . . that is what Anselm said and what is said in the faith of the present day” (LPR, Vol. I, 440). In the LPR, Vol. II, 104, Hegel asserts that “nature exists, is intuited, represented as God: Spinozism.” This remark contradicts the accusation of acosmism, just above, that “So strictly is there only God, that there is no world at all; . . . .” Next, Hegel calls Spinoza’s nature “a natural totality, which in its actual, intuited existence . . . is just this infinite multiplicity of changing things . . .” (LPR, Vol. II, 106).36 Later, Hegel again invokes acosmism: “with Spinoza determinate being, distinguished from being, is only nonbeing and ‘is’ in such a way that this nonbeing has no being at all: (LPR, Vol. II, 261,n. 79).37 And finally, comparing Spinozan substance with substance in Oriental thought, Hegel writes: “The deficiency in regard to substance in Eastern religions, as in regard to substance as viewed by Spinoza, resides in the categories of coming to be and passing away. Substance is not grasped as what is inwardly active, as subject and as purposeful activity, is


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not grasped as wisdom but solely as . . . reeling . . . empty power” (LPR, Vol. II, 266, n.90). Volume III of LPR contains Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza on the ontological proof of God’s existence, a matter not raised or considered by any of our noted scholars: Comparing Anselm with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, Hegel writes: “In the thought of Anselm, the definition of perfection also has . . . the sense that it is the unity of concept and reality. Later on, in Descartes and in Spinoza too, God is the first reality; in God we find the absolute unity of thought with space, . . . it is the same in Leibniz too” (LPR, 1–83).38 Later, Hegel avers that “Spinoza defines the concept of God as that which cannot be conceived without being. The finite [i.e. ‘nature’] is that whose existence does not correspond to its concept” (LPR, Vol. III, 353 with Hodgson citing for Hegel 1P11 in n.9). Finally, Hegel conflates Descartes and Spinoza in criticism: “Descartes and Spinoza define God as self-caused, causa sui. His concept and determinate being are identical . . . God cannot be grasped as concept apart from being. What is unsatisfactory is that this is a presupposition, so that when measured against it the concept must of necessity be something subjective” (LPR, Vol. III, 355).39 We now have a comprehensively articulated sense of the various Spinozan themes treated by Hegel. It will stand as background over against what lies ahead in Sections II and III of this chapter. For us, the two major themes not pursued by Hegel in the array presented above concern: (i) the teleology of mathematical method and (ii) the prospect of double negation in Spinoza. I shall pursue these, critically and speculatively, on behalf of Spinoza and the Spinoza-Hegel relation in Sections II and III, respectively. Hence, the limits of Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza will manifest themselves so as to enlarge, I hope, the domain of scholarship concerning this complex matter. Regarding Spinoza’s mathematical method, Hegel clearly maintains that its problem lies in Spinoza’s externally applying mathematics as geometry to philosophical content wholly unsuited for it and intractably against it. Thus resulting is a God presented as “rigid, unyielding substance,” and lacking subjectivity, personhood, and spirituality. For Hegel, that putative fact of external formalism exhausts Spinoza’s methodological insight and achievement, or lack thereof. Regarding double negation, Hegel peremptorily concludes its total absence in Spinoza, who achieves only determination as negation, due to his alleged acosmism. Speaking of acosmism, in concluding this first section, I note that Hegel’s charge of Spinozan acosmism cuts two ways: it both annuls Spinoza’s philosophy as a dynamic ethical system and undermines Hegel’s appreciative validation (not to say exaltation) of that system.

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The limits of Hegel’s treatment (method) We start this section with an overview of my argument showing the limits of Hegel’s critical treatment of Spinoza’s geometrical method. The argument will proceed through four stages. First, I shall specify Hegel’s criticisms of the geometrical method, emphasizing those aspects bearing directly on my own critical and speculative response to them. Second, we shall attend to the various reverberations of these criticisms occurring in quite recent scholarship. Third comes my twofold argument for (i) the teleology of philosophical method in Spinoza and (ii) the adequation of mathematics in Spinoza, this adequation showing that, despite a fundamentum in re to his criticisms, Hegel indeed errs in thinking that they exhaust Spinoza’s philosophical relation to mathematics generally, and to his geometrical method in particular. (1) Our primary source for Hegel’s criticism of Spinoza’s geometrical method is certainly the LHP (263–4; 266; 274 and especially 282–7), although Hegel makes important but brief remarks on method in the SL (537). To my knowledge, he does not raise method in the other works surveyed above. For succinctness, I shall combine paraphrase with quotation here. Remarking that Spinoza’s entire philosophy is contained in his definitions (E I) Hegel continues: “it is really a weak point in Spinoza that he begins thus with definitions. In mathematics this method is permitted because at the outset we there make assumptions such as . . . point and line; but in Philosophy the content should be known as the absolutely true” (LHP, 263). Hegel grants a certain “correctness” to Spinoza’s “name-definition[s] as a correspondence of name with conception. But is the content true absolutely?” Geometers don’t ask this question but “in philosophical investigation it is the very thing to be first considered, and this Spinoza has not done” (LHP, 264). Accordingly, Spinoza explains or designates words in definition “but the content of the words is held to be established.” Here, “held to be established” equals “is presupposed” and Hegel is significantly right, but not in the sense of sheer or stark presupposition, as I shall so argue. In his major discussion of Spinoza’s method (LHP, 282–7), having identified it to be geometry as employed by Euclid, Hegel notes the attraction of the mathematical method for both Spinoza and Descartes, claiming that “it is natural that independent knowledge in its re-awakening lighted first upon this form, of which it saw so brilliant an example” (LHP, 282), then concluding that, as a finite science of the understanding it is “ill-adapted for speculative content.” Since Hegel doesn’t here explain “independent knowledge,” I shall assume that he means absolute knowledge taken as the ultimately Spiritual


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causa sui within human reason thus raised above the “understanding,” and thus attaining philosophical adequacy and truth. Next, paying tribute to Spinoza as “a testing point in modern philosophy” such that one is a Spinozist or not a philosopher, Hegel nonetheless radicalizes his criticism of the geometrical method by judging it as not merely “a defect in the external form” but indeed “the fundamental defect of the whole position” (LHP, 283). Specifically Hegel means the formal nature of geometrical proof as it externalizes the relation of mathematical thinking to its object: “Mathematical knowledge exhibits its proof on the existent object as such, not on the object as conceived; the Concept is lacking throughout; the content of Philosophy, however, is simply the Concept and that which is comprehended by the Concept” Importantly, Hegel continues: “Therefore this Concept as the knowledge of the essence is simply one assumed, which falls [externally] within the philosophical subject, and this is the method peculiar to Spinoza’s philosophy” (LHP, 283, italics added).40 Returning to the charge of mere presupposition, Hegel again focuses on the definitions, which as geometrical, he finds “simply accepted and assumed, not deduced, nor proved to be necessary; for Spinoza is not aware of how he arrives at these individual determinations.”41 It is likewise for axioms. Regarding the propositions, Hegel claims that, in each case “the proof is brought in from outside merely, as in mathematics from a preceding proposition, and . . . the proposition is not therefore conceived through itself.” And, crucially for us, Hegel leads us to a question: “The essential moments of the system are really already completely contained in the presuppositions of the definitions, from which all further proofs have merely to be deduced. But whence have we these categories which here appear as definitions?” (LHP, 285). Since none of these is “developed from infinite substance . . . of a truth there exists [only] the One into which everything enters, in order to be absorbed therein, but out of which nothing comes,” acosmism is now invoked. In conclusion here, and before noting a final point, I draw deliberate attention to Hegel’s greatly emphasizing the problems: (i) of the definitions of EI as such and (ii) of “the pre-suppositions of the definitions”: of EI, and by extension those of E II–V. Spinoza treats methodological definition only in the TIE, which Hegel neither cites nor uses, and presumably didn’t read. Our final methodological point arises as Hegel moves from acosmism to Spinozan determination as negation, through “absolute determinateness or negativity . . . [wherein] negation is the negation of negation, and therefore true affirmation” (LHP, 286) to this criticism: “This negative self-conscious moment, the movement of knowledge . . . is however certainly lacking to the content of Spinoza’s philosophy, or at least it is only externally associated with it since it

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falls within [external] self-consciousness.” Hegel specifies that Spinoza’s content “signifies thought, as pure abstract self-consciousness, but an unreasoning knowledge, into which the individual does not enter; the content has not the signification of ‘I’. ” Indeed, “[t]here is a rigid necessity in the proof, to which the moment of self-consciousness is lacking; the ‘I’ disappears, gives itself altogether up, merely withers away.” Hence, to a metaphysical acosmism, Hegel adds a noetic acosmism regarding Spinoza. But then Hegel claims, without explanation, that “Spinoza’s procedure is therefore [?] quite correct; yet the individual proposition is false, seeing that it expresses only one side of the negation,” that is, presumably determination as simple and external negation alone, or un-negated negation. Now the methodological issue here is really proof conceived as reflective or deductive knowledge, and, again, Spinoza treats this knowledge as such only in the TIE, unused by Hegel.42 Stage (i) of Section II is now complete, and we have at hand a sufficiently specified account of Hegel’s essential criticisms of Spinoza’s geometrical method. Let us then consider briefly the works of several scholars as Hegel’s criticisms variously resound through them. (2) We shall start here by noting the works of three scholars in whom Hegel’s criticisms of Spinoza’s geometrical method resound strongly, but in different ways. Errol Harris43 and Yirmiyahu Yovel44 tend to discount or diminish Spinoza’s use of this method as such, Harris to defend Spinoza critically against Hegel, and Yovel to bring Spinoza and Hegel closer together than Hegel allows. By contrast, Stanley Rosen45 takes both Spinoza’s use of the geometrical method and Hegel’s criticisms thereof seriously indeed, amplifying those criticisms in Part II of his paper. Harris claims that “Spinoza is seduced by the geometrical method into a different form of presentation. But the method is . . . not really geometrical, nor really essential to the development of Spinoza’s theory, in which all the traces of dialectical structure are implicitly present: e.g. in the process of the ‘improvement of the intellect . . .’ .”46 Yovel externalizes the geometrical method after Hegel by referring to Spinoza’s method as “a ‘deductive mantle.’ ”47 Rosen holds that “the [“geometrical”] defects of the Spinozist system are . . . immediately visible.”48

The limits of Hegel’s treatment (negation) In this final section, I shall oppose, in the mathematico-ethical context, Hegel’s charge that Spinoza achieves determination as negation, but not determination as the negation of negation. With that charge there comes the


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related charge that Spinoza consequently never arrives at the principle of subjectivity or “personhood” in the divine substance. In the sense and to the degree that I argue against Hegel on negation in Spinoza, I shall accordingly argue implicitly against this related charge, and hence against the charge of atheism arising with the related charge. The crux of my argument will focus on an interpretation of Spinoza’s doctrine of human freedom as generated by the transvaluing of the passions insofar (quatenus) as they are overcome and reordered intellectually and corporeally. As deployed in 5P.s1–10, Spinoza’s doctrine of the transvaluing of the passions is too abstract; I intend to concretize it mathematically through the TIE and in ways resonating directly with the teleological method of emending intellect (and, implicitly, body) set forth in Section II above. The argument will unfold in three stages following Hegel’s texts. In stage (1), we shall follow and focus on Hegel’s treatment of negation in Spinoza as deployed in the LHP, other works essentially repeating his critique. Stage (2) will follow an expanding summation of Hegel’s treatment in the LHP. Stage (3), following critically the LHP and SL texts, will present the main argument for a mathematico- ethical negation of negation in Spinoza, that prospect not appearing in any cited scholar. It will involve emendation of mathematical passions into mathematical actions, with the adequation of mathematics itself. Hence, this methodological emendation of mathematics constitutes the first and crucial instance of Spinoza’s comprehensive doctrine of the overcoming and causal reordering of the passions in EV. Hegel’s critique of Spinoza on negation involves two main foci: (i) his accusation of acosmism, that Spinoza achieves determination as negation but not the negation of negation; (ii) his resulting charge that subjectivity, personhood, or Spirituality is therefore not to be found in Spinoza. Hegel lays both charges without qualification. I shall quote directly from Hegel’s LHP and SL, numbering excerpts for consolidating, critical reference: I. Simple determination or negation belongs only to form, but is quite another thing from absolute determinateness or negativity, which is absolute form; in this way of looking at it, [true] negation is the negation of negation, and therefore true affirmation. This negative self-conscious moment, the movement of knowledge . . . is, however, certainly lacking to the content of Spinoza’s philosophy, or at least it is only externally associated with it, since it falls within [external, mathematical] self-consciousness. That is to say, thoughts form the content, but they are not self-conscious thoughts or Concepts: the content signifies thought, as pure abstract self-consciousness, but an unreasoning

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knowledge into which the individual does not enter: the content has not the significance of ‘I’. (LHP 286, italics added)

Hegel completes his critique in the LHP with this summation: II. If, in conclusion, we sum up this criticism that we have offered, we should say that on the one hand with Spinoza negation or privation is [modally] distinct from substance; for he merely assumes individual determinations, and does not deduce them from substance; On the other hand the Negation is present only as Nothing, for in the absolute there is no mode; the negative is not there, but only its dissolution, its return: we do not find its movement, its Becoming and Being. The negative is conceived altogether as a vanishing moment-not in itself, but only as individual [external] self-consciousness; . . . Self-consciousness is born from this [acosmic] ocean, dripping with the water thereof, i.e. never coming to absolute Self-hood; the heart- the vital fire is wanting. This lack has to be supplied, the moment of self-consciousness has to be added. (LHP 289)

From the SL, I shall take just one comprehensive excerpt: III. Determinateness is negation—is the absolute principle of Spinoza’s philosophy; this true and simple insight establishes the absolute unity of substance. But Spinoza stops short at negation as determinateness or quality; he does not advance to a cognition of negation as absolute, that is selfnegating negation, thus his substance does not contain the absolute form and cognition of it is not an immanent cognition. True, substance is the absolute unity of thought and being or extension; therefore it contains thought itself, but only in its unity with extension, that is not as separating itself from extension, hence in general not as a determinative and formative activity, nor as a movement which returns into and begins from itself. Two consequences follow from this: one is that substance lacks the principle of personality—. . . ; the other is that cognition is external reflection which does not comprehend and derive from substance that which appears as finite, the determinateness of the attribute and the mode, and generally itself as well, but is active as external understanding, taking up the determinations as given and tracing them back to the absolute but not taking its beginnings from the latter. (SL 536–7)

From these three texts denying both double negation and subjectivity in Spinoza, it follows that, for Hegel, no dialectic whatsoever exists in Spinoza’s philosophy. Harris denies an actual, but sees an implicit dialectic in Spinoza, whereas Yovel with Hegel absolutely denies any dialectic in Spinoza. Presently, I shall indicate


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an actual dialectic in Spinoza, which, though not Hegelian, variously anticipates the Hegelian dialectic. (1) Against Hegel, here, who denies any negation of negation as a “negative self-conscious moment,” we do have this double negation in adequation as such, and in the adequation of mathematics, for example, of the geometrical circle in TIE 95–6. The first negation as determination is, for example, the Euclidean and inadequate definition of the circle through its property of equal radii. The negation of this negation or inadequate definition occurs with one’s adequating the definition of the circle by conceiving the circle to arise through its proximate cause, a rotating line/compass. As the agent, one sustains a “negative selfconscious moment” in this very adequation. Hence, one does have “self-conscious thoughts or Concepts” as Hegel himself virtually (though inconsistently) grants, when, presenting Spinoza on reason at LHP 277, he writes: “The nature of reason is . . . to think of all things under a certain form of eternity (sub quadam specie aeternitatis); i.e., in absolutely adequate Concepts, i.e. in God.” Hence, “abstract self-consciousness” is concretized and internalized in the adequation as such. And thus Hegel errs in characterizing reason here as “an unreasoning knowledge into which the [‘I’ or] individual does not enter”. (2). Accordingly, here, the Spinozan emendation or adequation of mathematics renders false the Hegel’s claim that “. . . as in mathematics . . . a proof is certainly given, conviction must follow, but yet the matter fails to be understood”. Indeed, mind and body move, in adequation, from the “proof ” or “conviction” of the first negation (e.g. the inadequate Euclidean definition of the circle by the property of equal radii) to the adequating second negation with its true “understanding” of the circle now defined through its essence or proximate cause. And the mathematical “I” reflectively articulates itself in mind and body with its very action here. It does not disappear, give itself up or wither away. Moreover, the merely “correct” procedure of Spinoza in proving individual propositions, emends into concrete truth, expressing now not one, but both “side[s] of the negation,” this taken as the internalizing of previously external reflection. This precise sense of mathematical negation  negation-of-negation involves a teleological advance toward our reflective knowledge of the highest good (TIE, 13). (3) Once more against Hegel, while in Spinoza the first “negation or privation is [modally] distinct from substance” and Spinoza “merely assumes individual determinations” as in passive experience, in the second adequating negation Spinoza does “deduce them from [within] substance” in conceiving

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them definitionally to follow from their proximate causes in God. Again, the first negation is not “present only as Nothing” or as its “dissolution,” but present rather as emendable definiendum, as, for example, the Euclidean circle awaiting adequate definition in a negation of that first inadequately defining negation. Hence, now adequated self-consciousness, as achieving “absolutely adequate Concepts” (LHP, 277), does come to “absolute self-hood,” its “vital fire” being definitionally adequated conatus. Significantly, Spinoza himself thus adds the “moment of self-consciousness.” It follows that Hegel mistakenly claims, in his SL text, that Spinoza “stops short at negation as determinateness” and “does not advance to a cognition of negation as absolute, that is self-negating negation.” In adequation, mind and body, each as causa sui in God, generate their respective adequate ideas and images, as, for example, in emending the Euclidean definition of the circle, they define it through its proximate cause. In this sense, though not in the Hegelian Christian sense (which involves Hegel’s use of Boehme’s “Separator”), substance does contain the “absolute form,” and cognition of it is “an immanent cognition.” Again, Hegel shows himself constructively inconsistent as he claims here that, in Spinoza, thought is given only in its “unity with extension, that is not as separating itself from extension”: contrariwise at LHP 257, and distinguishing Spinoza from Plato, Hegel writes: “The pure thought of Spinoza is therefore not the simple universal of Plato, for it has likewise come to know the absolute opposition of Concept [reflective thought] and Being [extension]” (italics added). This inconsistency is constructive in that Hegel finds both unity and opposition in the relation of thought and extension, as attributes of substance, which finding he does not explain. Continuing here, I note two final points: (i) The argument in stage (1), following that in Section II, mitigates the two “consequences” (namely the absence of divine “personality,” and the presence of cognition as merely “external reflection”), which Hegel draws in this text. The unity of God’s absolutely infinite self-love and the theory of adequation (VP35 with IIIDefs1–2, P1, P3) ground this claim against Hegel. (ii) Spinoza accordingly moves beyond “taking up the determinations [modes] as given and tracing them back to the absolute.” In methodological adequation, he defines them and traces them ahead teleologico-dialectically to the absolute, and then cognition “take[s] its beginnings from the latter” in the Ethics. Our critical consolidation now suffices. Surprisingly, but without explanation, Hegel in a sense grants a dialectical double negation in Spinoza. Seemingly mixing interpretation with criticism, and


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granting the true infinite to Spinoza, Hegel writes at LHP 262: “Philosophical infinity, that which is infinite actu Spinoza therefore calls the absolute affirmation of itself. This is quite correct, only it might have been better expressed as: ‘It is the negation of negation.’ ” I conclude by noting that this chapter is a greatly shortened version of a long paper dealing also with Hegel’s inconsistent charge of Spinozan acosmism, his slight and inconsistent treatment of Spinoza’s moral theory, and his mistaken presentation of Spinoza’s version of the ontological argument. I hope to publish that comprehensive paper in the future.

Notes 1 Hegel, G. W. F., LHP. 2 LHP, p. 282. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 283. 6 Ibid., p. 282. 7 Ibid., p. 287. 8 In using Spinoza’s works (here, the ST, TIE, Ethics, and Letters), I shall rely mainly on the translations, and especially Samuel Shirley’s, assembled in the recent Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett publishing Company, Inc., 2002; hereafter SCW). 9 Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd; New York: Humanities Press, 1976). 10 SCW, p. 892. 11 Hegel, LHP, p. 288. 12 Schmitz, Kenneth L., “Hegel’s Assessment of Spinoza” in The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, ed. R. Kennington (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989). 13 SCW, p. 892. 14 Ibid., p. 282. 15 Hegel, LHP, p. 256. 16 These phrases reflect the title and interest of a book, The New Spinoza, eds Warren Montag and Ted Stoltz (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).


114 17 Hegel, LHP, p. 255.

18 Hegel, LHP, p. 263. I note here that Hegel mistakenly denies the absolute infinitude of God as consisting in an infinite plurality of attributes (ID5): “Does substance, one might here ask, possess an infinite number of attributes? But . . . with Spinoza there are only two attributes, thought and extension, with which he invests God . . . .” 19 Accordingly, we compare these two claims: (i) “These definitions are followed by axioms and propositions in which Spinoza proves a great variety of points” (LHP, p. 264) and (ii) “I might quote many other such particular propositions from Spinoza, but they are very formal, and a continual repetition of one and the same thing” (LHP, p. 274). Hegel doesn’t tell us what “same thing” he means. 20 SL, p. 259. 21 G. W. F. Hegel: The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusatze, trans. T. F. Gerates, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1991) (afterwards, EL). See pp. 8–10, 226–7. 22 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. with notes T. M. Knox (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 53. 23 Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California press, 1995). 24 Hodgson, Vol. I: Introduction and The Concept of Religion, p. 377, n.25. Hodgson misspells the correspondent’s name, Jarig Jelles. 25 Ibid., p. 378, n.33. 26 Hodgson, Vol. II: Determinate Religion, p. 95, n.8. 27 Ibid., p. 104, n.34. 28 Hodgson, Vol. III: The Consummate Religion, p. 183, n.61. 29 Ibid., p. 353, n.9. 30 Hegel, LHP p. 263. Importantly, Hegel invokes the Concept here: “Concept and existence are each the Beyond of the other; but cause of itself, as thus including them, is really the carrying back of this ‘beyond’ into unity. Or . . . substance is that which is in itself and is conceived from itself; that is the same unity of Concept and existence. The infinite is in the same way in itself and has also its Concept in itself, its Concept is its being and its Being is its Concept; true infinity is therefore to be found in Spinoza”. Critically, Hegel continues: “But he has no consciousness of this; he has not recognized this Concept as absolute Concept, and therefore has not expressed it as a moment of true existence; for with him the Concept falls outside of [modal] existence, into the thought of [external modal]


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existence.” In arguments lying ahead, I shall mitigate Hegel’s criticism, which involves the charge that Spinoza’s geometrical method of reflection remains external to his philosophical content. 31 Presently, in mitigation, I shall argue that Spinoza’s theory of adequation promotes this Conceptual rise of the mode. Neither Hegel nor any scholar cited here considers adequation at all. 32 In this remark, Hegel reads Spinoza as denying teleology, when in fact Spinoza emends or adequates it in God and in the human amor dei (5P.s 33, 35, 36). But Hegel arrives at Spinoza’s emendation of teleology with this later profound claim: “For God can have only Himself as aim and cause; and the end of the subjective mind is to be directed on him” (LHP, p. 278). Hence, concerning the above remark, we must emend Hegel: “no [external] final causes.” 33 It is true that Spinoza has no self-consciousness in the sense of Boehme’s radically evil “ ‘Ichts or self-hood,” that is, “II, the Being-for-self, the true negativity” (LHP, p. 206). But it is indeed false that Spinoza has no ethically developed doctrine of self-consciousness such as Hegel himself inconsistently implies. This matter arises later in the mathematico-ethical context. 34 Hegel refers here to 2P43Sch, where Spinoza remarks that “Indeed, just as light makes manifest both itself and darkness, so truth is the standard both if itself and falsity” (SCW, p. 269). 35 This remark seems ambivalent and even at odds with Hegel’s charge of acosmism. 36 Now strictly “totality” as whole-part pertains only to the differentiating unity of infinite and finite modes constituting natura naturata under the attributes of substance. Hence, nature is an infinite individual for Spinoza (IP29S with 2Lem7S after P13). Accordingly, the attributes are not parts of substance or the modes parts of their attributes. Hegel occasionally refers to nature in Spinoza as “finite,” and in this is mistaken. He has in mind determination as negation, but that proceeds “to infinity” (IP28Dem) among finite modes in mutual and ordered causality. 37 Hegel essentially ignores Spinoza’s crucial doctrine of conatus applied to finite modes which thereby essentially strive to preserve or to affirm their being in God (3P.s 6,7). To my knowledge, Hegel refers to conatus only once, quoting from 3P.s 6–8 by paraphrase (LPH, pp. 275–6), but is not moved thereby to moderate his charge of complete acosmism at all. 38 Inasmuch as Spinoza denies the existence of space in IP15S, Hodgson properly uses other Hegelian texts to render “space” here as “the sensible” or “being,” n.62.


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39 In the longer version of this paper, I argue, against Hegel, that Spinoza clearly anticipates Hegel’s own version of the ontological argument (ST). In both versions, God proves his own existence in the adequated human mind. 40 I italicize here to get a useable definition and focus for the Concept, and to discern its arguable anticipation in Spinoza’s doctrine of adequation as applied to the conceived essences of mathematical entities and operations. Relevantly, and on “The Concept in General,” Hegel writes: “From this aspect the Concept is to be regarded . . . simply as the third to being and essence, to the immediate and to reflection. Being and essence are . . . the moments of its becoming; but it is their foundation and truth as the identity in which they are submerged and contained” (SL, p. 577). 41 So important does Hegel judge his criticism of mere presupposition to be, that it stands at the heart of his only reference to Spinoza’s method in the SL (537): “These notions [IDefs 1, 3], profound and correct as they are, are definitions, which are immediately assumed at the outset of the science.” By “concepts” Hegel means, significantly for us, “self-conscious thoughts” (LHP, p. 286) or, in Spinoza’s terms, reflective ideas (idea ideae, in the singular). 42 The reader is invited to consult my “The Philosophical Method of Spinoza,” Dialogue XVII (1988), 89–110. This present chapter involves a limited application of that article’s argument to Hegel’s treatment of Spinoza, and in criticism and mitigation of it. 43 Harris, Errol E., The Substance of Spinoza (New Jersey: The Humanities Press, 1995), ch. 13: “The Concept of Substance in Spinoza and Hegel,” pp. 200–14. 44 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), ch. 2: “Spinoza and Hegel: Substance or Spirit?”, pp. 27–50. 45 Rosen, Stanley, “Hegel, Descartes and Spinoza” in Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Essays in Critical Appreciation, ed. James B. Wilber (Amsterdam, NY: Van Gorcum, Assen, 1976), pp. 114–32. 46 Harris (1995), 212. So often right about Spinoza, Harris is mistaken in denying Spinoza’s use of the geometrical method “really,” confirming his error is not just the seriously used apparatus of definitions, axioms, propositions etc. In deduction, Spinoza’s claims that (i) “all things follow from God’s eternal decree by the same necessity as it follows from the essence of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles” (IIApp, SCW, p. 276) and (ii) “. . . I know that what I understand is the true [philosophy] . . . in the same way that you [Albert Burgh] know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles” (Letter 76, SCW, p. 949).


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47 Yovel (1989), p. 48. He writes: “Moreover, if we consider that Spinoza preceded Hegel in rejecting an a priori method in philosophy, that his true method, under the ‘deductive’ mantle, is the inner explication of a basic idea vera and that his analysis of the infinity of God as qualitative and not quantitative and open-ended preceded (and clearly inspired) Hegel’s own, we can see that in the deep structure of his system, Spinoza had already come a great deal closer to Hegel than that latter recognized or admitted.” By “mantle,” Yovel presumably means a cloak or covering. Briefly treating the TIE as Hegel’s “major forerunner in rejecting an a priori method” (35), Yovel writes too little, but seems to mean a developmental and empirical method. See Maxwell (1988), the long n.36 on “the emending empirical” (106–8). Yovel briefly raises the method as reflective knowledge and I shall consider this in stage (3) here. On “the infinity of God,” and following Hegel, Yovel repeatedly errs in calling natura naturans infinite and natura naturata finite (32,48). Natura naturata, as the system of divine modes under each attribute is infinite also (IP 16, P21, P22, P28, P29S) as modal individual (Lem7, IIP13S). 48 Rosen (1976), p. 125. He continues: “First, there is no deduction for Hegel in the geometric or axiomatic sense, but rather development (which includes history) toward the completeness of what is initially an abstract Whole. Spinoza follows entirely the quasi-mathematical rationalism of Descartes: he lacks any sense of history or dialectic. The second defect follows at once from the first. Despite the initial identification between God and nature (and so between man and God) there is no alienation of God from man, and so from himself, because of the absence of self-consciousness. The thinking of Spinoza’s God is indistinguishable from the manifestation of eternal order.” Here, Rosen is mistaken to hold (i) that Spinoza “follows entirely” Descartes’ “quasi-mathematical method,” and that in God is “the absence of self-consciousness.” Spinoza’s relation to mathematics is indeed more complex and promising than Rosen sees; and, after Hegel, Rosen ignores the reflectivity of idea ideae, restricting reflection to the correspondence of mind- and body-modifications alone, which he considers inadequate for selfconsciousness (127).

6

Hegel’s Reconciliation with Spinoza John McCumber

Entre Hegel et Spinoza, il se passe quelque chose d’ essentiel.1 This quote from Pierre Macherey’s discussion of Hegel and Spinoza is, as I have given it, brief to the point of cryptic and decontextualized to the point of emptiness. It nonetheless introduces us at once to the depth of the problematic between Hegel and Spinoza. For what “happens between” them is not merely a number of agreements and disagreements, criticisms and rejoinders; it is nothing less than an establishment and exploration of the very notion of a philosophical “between.” Spinoza and Hegel show us, in other words, what it is for one philosopher to be related to another. Among the major lessons will be that the intellectual space between them is highly plastic. In some respects it almost disappears, so that they stand shoulder to shoulder. On other occasions, they are perhaps as widely separated as it is possible for two philosophers to be. One thing Macherey establishes is that this “between” of Hegel and Spinoza is not well understood by Hegel himself, who not only misreads Spinoza on many points but also rejects the very notion of a philosophical “between,” in that he undertakes to incorporate Spinoza into his system. For Hegel, there is nothing “between” him and Spinoza, any more than there is anything “between” me and the sandwich I had for lunch. I will not, then, direct my attention here to the merits and demerits of Hegel’s criticisms of Spinoza. Rather, I will try to lay out just one specific area of agreement and disagreement and examine its plasticity. How, in this restricted field, does Hegel take up proximity to Spinoza? How does he lose it? If so, does he try to get it back?

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Proximity One area in which Hegel and Spinoza stand together, against deep and powerful currents in much contemporary thought, is on the nature of freedom. There is a view that we humans can act in ways which are not determined by previous events: that our actions, unlike those of other animals, are not the outcomes of causes bumping along mechanically along through time like billiard balls, but result from the free decisions of our will. To reject this view, its proponents urge, is to deny human freedom and so to absolve us of all responsibility for our actions, from which it follows that human life has no moral worth at all. Spinoza and Hegel both reject this view, and so are generally viewed as outand-out determinists. They do not deny moral worth in general, however, and in particular they place extremely high value on human freedom. It is the key concept in the final part of Spinoza’s Ethics, which after all is entitled “Of Human Freedom.” And freedom, Hegel says often, is the goal of history, and so of that intervention into history which is his own philosophy. What they do deny is freedom of the will in its plenary sense, the idea I mentioned above that humans have a capacity for unconstrained choice. Spinoza believes, he tells us in a letter, not in free decision but in “free necessity”: “a thing is free, which exists and acts solely by the necessity of its own nature” (Ep 62/G II 390, also cf. Ethics ID7).2 To be sure, we feel that we have free choice—but that feeling is an illusion, due to the fact that we are conscious of our actions but not of their causes (E IIIP2). Thus, Spinoza goes on, if a rock thrown in the air could think, it would upon reaching the top of its trajectory believe that its motion came from its own volition. The stone would therefore conclude that it was free either to continue upward or fall to earth as it wished; but in reality, its fall back to earth is predetermined and inevitable (Ep 62). For Hegel in his Science of Logic, freedom is necessity made manifest (VI 239).3 What “necessitates” me is something whose connection with me is opaque, and which therefore seems to act on me from a distance. Once that something’s causal connections with me are understood, I know why and how it is necessitating my action. My cause and I are now understood as parts of a single larger whole, consisting of us and the causal links that connect us. As parts of a single whole, my cause and I are mutually identified, and in recognizing this, I am “free.”

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The model here is almost Freudian: if a childhood trauma has caused my current neurotic symptom, coming to understand that “liberates” me from the symptom. It does not, for Hegel, ipso facto make the symptom go away (though presumably that might happen). My “liberation” from the symptom consists, not in its disappearance, but in the fact that I can work on it; though the original trauma continues to affect my behavior, I can now affect its action as well, and what was a one-way causal relation becomes a bidirectional reciprocity (Wechselwirkung; VI 237). Thus, Hegel would agree with Spinoza that the stone has no choice about falling back to earth; but for Hegel, it would become free only if it could recognize this—only if the necessity of its fall back to earth could become manifest to it. We can already see here what I have called the “plasticity of the between,” for Hegel and Spinoza stand at once together—both deny freedom of the will—and far apart, because Spinoza is quite happy to talk about the freedom of a stone, while Hegel confines freedom to sentient beings. Before exploring this, however, I would like to dwell a bit more on their rejection of freedom of choice. Their motives for this are many, but one of them is that freedom of choice, or of the will, is unnatural. Nature, for them, as for the science of their day, is basically a law-governed realm of causal determinacy; freedom of the will implies that some events, namely human actions, are uncaused, and are therefore nonnatural. The idea that we have a capacity, in Kant’s words, to begin something truly new,4 to make uncaused decisions for which we are morally responsible, is thus at bottom a view that we are supernatural beings. The idea that we are ethically supernatural in this way originated in Christian metaphysics; it is not found in ancient philosophy. For St Augustine, free will is God’s direct gift to us and so of supreme value.5 Augustine then uses this concept of freedom to explain why evil things happen. The argument is complex, but its gist is that God’s gift of free will to us is a good which outweighs our repeated use of our freedom to do evil. Such a view easily becomes not merely tendentious but offensive. It seems to imply, for example, that it was better for 20 terrorists to have freedom of the will on 9/11 than that 3000 other people should live. Because of its supernatural origins and offensive consequences, this view of the freedom of the will has often been rejected by philosophers, who usually attempt to render the action of the will compatible with causal necessity (as Hume did),6 or to deny its freedom altogether. This does not mean that freedom of the will in its plenary form cannot be philosophically salvaged, but I think it explains two other things: why Spinoza and Hegel are not interested in salvaging it, and why we should be interested in them.


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Their rejection of freedom of the will leads Hegel and Spinoza back, unsurprisingly, to the pre-Christian notions of freedom found in the Greek philosophers, and particularly in Aristotle. For Aristotle, too, freedom is not a matter of choice. Indeed, in his Metaphysics Aristotle remarks that the free person is one who makes the fewest choices: It is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random but all things are ordained for them. (Metaphysics 1075a 19f; Ross trans.)

For Aristotle, we are responsible for our acts not because we have chosen them over alternatives, but because their cause lies “in” us—in the form either of a desire or of a train of reasoning which shows us that the action will lead to flourishing (eudaimonia; cf. Nicomachean Ethics III.1–2). A truly “free” act for Aristotle is, we may say, one that both our desire and our reason have sanctioned: one whose cause not merely lies in us, but encompasses our entire nature as acting beings (cf. Nicomachean Ethics I.13). Once reason has come together with desire to tell us what we should do, no alternative course of action is available; the only question is whether the strength of other, irrational desires will keep us from doing what reason commands. To act freely for Aristotle is thus to act according to what he thinks is your basic nature as a rational being. Though his philosophical account of that nature is specific to him, Aristotle’s overall view does not depart greatly from Greek tradition, which began by viewing freedom as simply the ability to continue as we were.7 Spinoza’s claim that to be free is to act from the necessity of your own nature, and Hegel’s that to be free is to recognize the necessity of your actions, are visible descendants of this Aristotelian notion.

Conatus and freedom in Spinoza Hegel and Spinoza’s philosophical proximity as regards the freedom thus reside in their status as philosophical descendants of Aristotle, rather than of Augustine. But they are at deep odds within this family, because, as we have seen, Spinoza allows that natural beings, even stones, can be free, while Hegel restricts freedom to sentient beings—to us. This mutual distance expresses a basic divergence of their philosophies. Hegel’s restriction of freedom to us is part of his view that the cosmos is hierarchically structured, with us—in virtue of our status as Geist, or spirit—on top; mere natural objects are beneath us.

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Spinoza, much more ontologically democratic, sees our minds as merely one aspect of the underlying unity of all things. But, I will argue (being a sort of Hegelian myself), things are a little more complex. We can see how this is the case by turning first to Spinoza’s concept of “acting by necessity of our nature.” This cannot mean being pushed around by your desires, which from Plato on has been a, even the, leading nightmare of philosophical ethics; but why not? It is, after all, our nature to have desires; why should freedom for Spinoza not be simply the ability to act on them? The reasons lie deep in his metaphysics, but the underlying ideas can (I hope) be made fairly clear. Individual things for Spinoza are not ontological bedrock, the basic building blocks of reality, but are “modes” or (as he calls them at E IIIP6) “expressions” of something else, namely of the power by which God himself “is and acts.” To understand a human being as she truly is “in herself ” (in se) is therefore to understand her as a specific expression of divine power, and what she is as such an expression is an activity. This gives us two crucial components in Spinoza’s view of the human individual: first, a human being (like anything else) is most basically an activity, not an object, and second, this activity, as a manifestation of the divine, possesses what I will call “pure being,” in that nonexistence does not enter into it at all: “no thing has anything in itself (in se) by which it can be destroyed” (E IIIP6). This second feature seems obvious enough, given the premises; but it is not trivial. For Plato in the Sophist, for example, sensory beings do not possess pure being but are (so to speak) hybrids compounded out of being and nonbeing; they are not onta but gignomena—which means that it is intrinsic to their nature to be temporary (Sophist 256a–57a). For Spinoza, by contrast, individual things have an innate tendency to persist, or as he puts it to “persevere” in their being (E IIIP6)—a tendency which he calls their conatus, their “striving” to preserve themselves. Since what they most basically are is an activity, this conatus is a tendency to maintain that activity—and not merely to maintain it, but to increase it. Thus, though the human mind and body “can undergo great changes” (E IIIP11), those changes are merely the increase or decrease of the specific activity that constitutes that human being as a manifestation of divine power. To understand the human individual as an expression of divine power is to understand that his or her efforts to preserve and enhance his or her power of acting will also aim to preserve and enhance the powers of other individuals, who are equally expressions of divine power. Thus, I can think and act more powerfully when conjoined to others than I can alone:


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To man, then, there is nothing more useful than man. Man, I say, can wish for nothing more powerful to the preservation of his being than that all should so agree in all things that the minds and bodies of all would compose as it were, one mind and one body, that all should strive (conentur) together (simul) to preserve their being (suum esse conservare); and that all, together, should seek for themselves the common advantage of all. From which it follows that men who are governed by reason . . . want nothing for themselves that they do not desire for the rest of men. (E IVP19)

How, then, are things like disagreement, conflict, and strife even possible? Precisely because a human being is a singular expression of divine power, one among many. As such, it is not only located among other such finite beings, but is affected by them: The idea of a singular being which actually exists has God for a cause . . .  insofar as he is considered to be affected by another idea of a singular being which actually exists, and of this God is also the cause insofar as he is affected by another third [idea]and so on to infinity. (E IIIP9)

Any change in an individual, including an individual human being, is produced by God—but by God working through other singular things: my body is surrounded by other bodies which affect it in certain ways. Since the bodies among which I find myself are not exactly the same as those among which any other human being finds himself or herself, the contents of our minds differ; and because we think differently, we find ourselves in disagreement and conflict. God thinks all thoughts at once, but our finite minds cannot do this. If we could understand ourselves and other things perfectly, we would approach a God’s-eye view and see that all are expressions of divine power, but our understanding is limited—that is, it can always be increased—and the effects on us of those other things are to some degree inadequately understood, which makes them what Spinoza calls “passions.” Human disagreement thus comes not from our true being but from outside, from the fact that we are affected by other bodies, and do not understand fully just how (E IVPP33 and 34). The remedy is, as much as possible, to know ourselves and other human beings for what we truly are: expressions of divine power. To the extent that we do that, we are able to act according to our true nature, rather than as driven by our passions. And to that extent we see that beneath it all, humans are in perfect agreement. To the extent that we see things correctly, we are wise; because we act according to our true nature, we are free; and because we agree with all human

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beings, we are good. With this, Spinoza expresses what makes him a great philosopher: a moral vision of the world. Perhaps the greatest, for his vision unites wisdom, happiness, and goodness with true human nature in a way that is unique in its rational grounding and persuasive power. Hegel, however, was not persuaded.

Hegel’s reverse conatus Why not? For Spinoza as for Hegel, a human being becomes free by understanding the contexts which necessitate his or her actions; the philosophical distance between the two shrinks away. But it suddenly widens again when we see that freedom as self-awareness for Spinoza is not fundamentally different from the kind of freedom he accords to beings of nature; stones and people are “free” when they act in accordance with their natures, which in the case of humans means rationally. For Hegel, freedom as self-awareness expresses a rupture with nature so deep that nature cannot be called “free.” Nor is this the only kind of rupture valorized by Hegel. When we look at the nature of conatus in his philosophy, we find that it has changed drastically, coming to embrace nothing less than a striving for self-destruction. This turnabout is evident from the very beginning of Hegel’s account of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Sprit, the “Battle for Life and Death” in which consciousness seeks first of all to demonstrate that It is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. (PhS §187)8

Consciousness here does not seek to persevere, quite the opposite: it seeks its own destruction. And not only here: in the course of the Phenomenology’s rise from self-consciousness to Absolute Spirit, Hegel repeatedly characterizes consciousness as not merely wishing, but striving to die: it has what I will call a death-conatus. To give a further few of the more famous examples in the Phenomenology: ●●

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Ascetic consciousness, the highest point of the “Unhappy Consciousness” section, is bent upon its own destruction and has to be saved by “the Mediator,” which moves the Phenomenology from self-consciousness into Reason (PhS §225–6). The “ethical order” (inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone) is a virtual celebration of death, which it calls “pure being,” and of the dead (PhS §452).

Hegel’s Reconciliation with Spinoza ●●

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The tensions of Kantian morality lead, in the “Beautiful Souls,” to a spirit which, like Goethe’s Werther, is “pining away in consumption” before achieving the all-important transfiguration into Absolute Spirit (PhS §668).

Some of these transitions are quite important in the design of the book (though showing just how would take us afar afield). In none of them, to be sure, does consciousness actually die; that would put an end to the whole process. But in each case it strives to die, and if this striving were not in deadly earnest (so to speak), the important transformations that follow would not be achieved. This move of Hegel’s stands in stark and even frightening contrast to the sublime moral vision of the man he called the “central point” (Hauptpunkt) of modern philosophy and of whom he said “when one begins to philosophize, one must first be a Spinozist” (LHP 163, 165). It raises then, a number of questions, which I will discuss under two headings. First, Why does this happen? Why would Hegel locate the death drive at the core of self-consciousness, and so at the core of humanity? And second: what, in Hegel’s philosophy, does that lead to? These questions do not have simple or easy answers. I will begin with the second family, by pointing out that one thing which results from the deathconatus in Hegel’s philosophy is a strong emphasis on antagonism in human relations. In the spirit of Spinoza’s statement that good people “want nothing for themselves that they do not desire for the rest of men,” the death-conatus leads not merely to seeking one’s own death, as with Antigone, but to an attempt to kill others, as with the “Battle for Life and Death.” Turning against one’s own life recurrently means turning against life in general, and this leads directly to conflict. In contrast for Spinoza, for whom human conflict contravenes human nature and is best eliminated from it, for Hegel conflict thus seems to be essential to our becoming what we are. This leads, as we would expect, to global differences between Hegel’s social philosophy and Spinoza’s. Tracing them would take me into every page either man ever wrote on the topic. I will, however, mention one basic principle: for Hegel only beings who have a death-conatus can be free: It is only through staking one’s life that freedom can be won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness its freedom is not . . . its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather than there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment. (PhS §187)

Hegel’s restriction of freedom to human beings, the contrast with Spinoza with which we began, is thus grounded in his concept of the death-conatus. It is

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because our basic human activity can be the seeking of our own death that we are so radically unlike beings of nature that only we can be called “free.” A second set of consequences has to do with the nature of history. Although Hegel sees conflict as extremely important for human life, unlike Nietzsche he does not value it for its own sake. He fully recognizes, then, that violence is evil; since violence is necessary for us to be what we are, it is a necessary evil. As such, it is something that must be overcome and its overcoming must stand somewhere in its future—as the telos of the world. To put the matter in plain (i.e. non-Hegelian) language: if the present is rent with conflict and violence, and if the absence of these is desirable, then either we give up on that desire entirely, and simply see humanity as condemned to endless violence, or we posit the absence of violence as a future state toward which we are moving. Hegel expresses this motivation very clearly in the “Preface” to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: When we look at this drama of human passions, and observe the consequences of their violence and of the unreason that is linked not only to them but also (and especially) to good intentions and rightful aims; when we see something funky here wickedness, the decline of the most flourishing nations mankind has produced we can only be filled with grief for all that has come to nothing. And since this decline and fall is not merely the work of nature but of the will of men, we might well end with moral outrage over such a drama and with a revolt of our good spirit (if there is a spirit of goodness in us). . . .  But as we contemplate history as this slaughter bench, upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals were sacrificed, the question necessarily comes to mind: what was the ultimate goal for which these monstrous sacrifices were made? . . . And in this perspective the events that present such a grim picture for our troubled feeling and thoughtful reflection have to be seen as the field in which we want to see only the means for what we claim is the substantial determination, the absolute end-goal of, equally, the true result of world history. (XII.33–5)

Instating peace as a goal is what Hegel does on the level of the State when, in the Philosophy of Right, he makes public authority grow from vendetta (EPR §104). Hegel’s teleological history, which so distinguishes him from Spinoza, thus springs—I am suggesting—from his view that conflict is intrinsic to human life, and thus from his view of the death-conatus. But where does the death-conatus come from? It has its ground in a split within the self, which we see most clearly in the “Battle for Life and Death.” The reason consciousness wants to show that it is “not attached to life” there is that it wants to identify with its own ego, or mind,


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which it holds to be completely distinct from its body: the basic message that it sends by risking its life is “I am not my body.” If I am not my body, you are not yours either, and we both should die to show this. This, alas, just pushes the mystery back one step, for the question now is: why is the ego defined here as wholly distinct from the body? Hegel knew perfectly well that Spinoza had provided a rationale for viewing mind and body as the same. Why are they so separate here? We can answer this third question by noting that there are in fact for Hegel two different distinctions between mind and body, one of which is known to consciousness in the “Battle for Life and Death” and the other not. Consciousness’s mind, at this stage, is wholly empty: it has no concrete thoughts to think and is merely, Hegel says, the “motionless tautology of II.” As motionless, it cannot change: there is nothing in it to change. The body, by contrast, is constantly changing. This mutability is what consciousness seeks to escape by identifying wholly and solely with its mind; it seeks death to escape from the changes in its body. The same is true in the other examples I have given, on down the line: in each case, consciousness seeks death because it wants to identify itself with something that never changes and hence is noncorporeal—with the Unchangeable whom the ascetic seeks, with the eternal and divine laws of the ethical order, with the Kantian moral law. Mind and body are distinct because the one changes continually, while the other aspires not to change at all. This brings us to a still deeper contrast between Hegel and Spinoza. For Spinoza, there are many things about us that change; but our basic conatus persists in both mind and body. For Hegel, the body is entirely plastic. There is nothing underlying our physical being which can remain the same, and the only stable identity must be posited in a completely different realm: [The pathway of the Phenomenology] has a negative significance for [consciousness], and  . . . counts for it rather as the loss of itself; for it does lose its truth on this path. The road can therefore be regarded  . . . more precisely as the way of despair. Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this becoming uprooted is its death. (PhS §§78 and 80)

The pathway of the Phenomenology is a series of fundamental transitions in which consciousness recurrently loses all its “truth,” or all the content which it has developed so far. “Death” for Hegel is the discovery of the instability in the human spirit which is brought about by its necessary embodiment.

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To sum up Hegel’s views: Violence is intrinsic to human life because we are divided between a body which changes continually and a mind (or soul) that seeks not to change at all. But why is there no stability in the corporeal world for Hegel? Why are fundamental transformations necessary? Why do bodies not have enduring identities? We may, I fear, be getting beyond the realm of philosophical argumentation altogether here into matters of feeling, culture, and temperament. For Plato, there was no stability to the sensory world; Aristotle provided arguments that Plato was wrong, but reading chapter nine of Book One of Aristotle’s Metaphysics cannot help but suggest that there is also a matter of how existence feels to the two men. Similarly, perhaps, for Hegel. Certainly German culture, largely through its Protestant heritage, is unusually receptive to the idea of human life as capable of radical transformation. Who can deny that Hegel’s Christian upbringing, with its account of mankind as fallen, is at play in his view of the omnipresence of violence? I will leave this for a moment and turn to the other difference between mind and body for Hegel—the one of which consciousness is not aware. This is that while bodies, in all their protean changeability, actually exist, mind as consciousness conceives it—as belonging to an unchanging, supernatural realm of the spirit—does not. All of consciousness’s efforts, throughout the Phenomenology, to identify with nonphysical being, to claim that it can dispense with its own body, ultimately fail. In every stage of the Phenomenology, consciousness starts with what it believes to be an ultimate and so unchanging, truth; and every time consciousness is then driven out of that “certainty.” At the book’s end, consciousness finishes its quest for unchanging truth—by abandoning it. And so, in Absolute Spirit, Hegel is “reconciled” with Spinoza: there is no domain over and above this one, God is not other than we: The reconciling Yea . . . is the existence of the “I” which . . . in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge. (PhS §671)

At the end of the Phenomenology’s section on revealed religion—just before the book’s final transition into absolute knowing, and so at another crucial transition—we find this establishment of the God within presented as the death of the God without: . . . the death of the abstraction of the divine being which is not posited as Self. This is the painful feeling of the Unhappy Consciousness that God himself


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is dead. This hard saying is the expression of the innermost simple selfknowledge, the return of consciousness into the depths of the night in which II. (PhS §785)

The references to the earlier transitions I have mentioned make clear that this death of God is the end of all unchanging realms. It is the final unmasking of the deepest illusion. But if this insight can only be reached by a pathway of violence and despair, the illusion of an eternal world must be constitutive for humanity for Hegel. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel talks about why people are so vehemently opposed to Spinoza (and, as often when he talks about Spinoza, he is also talking about himself—though he may not know it): The Spinozistic universal substance is an outrage to the representation of the freedom of the subject; for that I am subject, spirit, and so forth—all this determinacy is for Spinoza only modification [i.e. modes of substance]. This is the outrageous side which the Spinozistic system has within it and what produces the resistance to it; for the human being has the consciousness of freedom, of the spiritual, which is the negative of the corporeal, and [the consciousness that] spirit is first [erst] what it is in what is opposed to the bodily. (LHP 193–4)

Now we see that violence, grounded in the death-conatus, is not the only thing that separates Hegel from Spinoza. There is also the fact that no less essential to humanity than violence, for Hegel, is the tenacious embrace of a falsehood. This gives us a different, and here my final, way to think of the difference between Hegel and Spinoza. In his letter to Kästner of 5 August l790, Kant puts his attitude toward metaphysics thus: My efforts . . . in no way aim to work against the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff . . . . I aim to achieve the same end, but by a detour which in my opinion those great men held to be superfluous.9

Similarly, then, for Hegel, the final reconciliation with our bodily nature which he advocates places him close to Spinoza, but for him, it cannot be attained in the peaceful Spinozistic way. It requires not merely disagreement but violence, not merely truth but falsehood. Who is right? I can hardly presume to decide that here, but Spinoza’s view is certainly the more beguiling. There is a final corollary of this. If the unchanging realm of spirit is an illusion, the same must be true for the teleological structure of history, for as structuring all of history that structure would have to be transhistorical, a general, and so ahistorical scheme into which everything can be placed. If that is the case, it also

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holds, I suggest, for the overall hierarchical structure of the Hegelian cosmos, which is also grounded in the need for that historical telos. The telos of history is certainly not to be found from the horrible facts of history, which Hegel does not deny; it comes, as we saw, from our need to see history as having been useful for something. True, the progress of human freedom is not for Hegel a mere fantasy; it is there in the facts, as one golden thread in a tapestry of blood. But it is we who select it out and tell it as a story, and it is the goal of our story, not of the facts. The teleological structure of Hegel’s philosophy, which to Macherey differentiates him definitively from Spinoza, is thus a conceptual ladder, which we must throw away once we have climbed it—but only then. Can we say that Hegel has come out at the same place as Spinoza? Certainly they are closer than they often seem to be, but the space between them is plastic, and opens up again at various places. When we look at where Hegel ends, it is hard to see basic differences: both come out with the dynamism of nature equated to the dynamism of thought, and with human freedom lying in the appreciation of this. When we turn to the conatus, however, and to Hegel’s restriction of freedom to those who have such a conatus, the space between yawns wide indeed—exactly as wide, in fact, as that between spirit and nature in Hegel’s system.

Notes 1 Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: Maspero, 1970), p. 12. 2 Spinoza is cited after Benedict de Spinoza, Opera, 4 volumes, ed. Carl Gebhard (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925) (henceforth, G, volume number, page number). 3 Hegel is cited after G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, 20 volumes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–71). 4 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Akademie-Ausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Predecessors, 1902) “B” edn, III. pp. 476–8. 5 Cf. Saint Augustine De libero arbitrio, ed. W. M. Green (Vienna: Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, 1956), II. pp. 1–7. 6 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), pp. 397–413. 7 See Max Pohlenz, Freedom in Greek Life and Thought, trans. Carl Lofmark (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1966). 8 The Phenomenology of Spirit is cited after the paragraph numbers in G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 9 Kant, Werke, XIII p. 278; cf. also Gerard Lebrun, Kant et la fin de la métaphysique (Paris: Armand Colin 1970), p. 290f.

Part Three

The Psychic Life of Negation

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Affirmative Pathology: Spinoza and Hegel on Illness and Self-Repair Christopher Lauer

In a puzzling and often cited passage in Part IV of the Ethics, Spinoza gives the example of a “certain Spanish poet” who, overcome by illness, was so profoundly changed that he no longer believed his previous works were his own (E IVP39S).1 This passage is often cited as posing a significant challenge to Spinoza’s theory of personal identity,2 particularly since Spinoza dismisses this case and others like it, “so as not to afford material for the superstitious to raise new problems” (E IVP39S). If all individuals strive to persevere in their being, and if among complex bodies this means striving to maintain a constant proportion of motion and rest among their constituent parts, then why, a common objection runs, would a complex body overcome with sickness not strive to maintain itself in its very sickness? Deleuze3 offers the most persuasive answer I have seen, pointing out that for Spinoza, since no body is ever the adequate cause of its own demise (E IIIP4), every such instance of sickness involves the influence of an external body (Deleuze SPP, 42). If, say, the Spanish poet had ingested a poison that caused him to lose his memory, then the way we would test whether or not he remained the same person would be to determine whether the introduction of the poison had so disturbed the proportions of motion and rest4 among his various body parts that he could no longer perform the same actions. It would be a mistake here to place overly rigid conditions on the maintenance of self-identity. As Spinoza notes following the Lemmas in Part II of the Ethics, the human body is sufficiently complex that it can undergo a great amount of change and still remain capable of the same actions and affections (E IIP14). Since a body’s striving to persist (conatus) does not derive from any idea of it, it will not be annulled by reflections

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on its changes from moment to moment, but will continue until the body is no longer able to maintain a stable proportion of motion and rest. Thus, if the poet’s change in activity is sufficiently great, we might indeed say that he no longer strives to be the man he was. If, on the other hand, he regained his memory after a time and once again took up writing, then we might say that the amnesia had severely weakened him, but that his body eventually regained its former strength.5 In either case, the change was not a result of a striving either to grow sick or to recuperate, but simply of a striving to persist that was inhibited by an external body. In observing that we still have very little idea of what the human body is capable of (E IIIP2S), Spinoza seems to hold out hope that physiology might one day be able to give a more definite explanation of the poet’s breakdown and similar phenomena, but for the time being he suggests that these riddles are more trouble than they are worth and thus asks us to remain content that they will not require any special metaphysical insights, but merely greater knowledge of human physiology. Given the tremendous wealth of practical insights that Spinoza develops in the Ethics and elsewhere, he may certainly be forgiven for leaving the matter there and leaving it to other theorists to determine in greater detail what sorts of striving to overcome sickness the human body is capable of. But for Deleuze, this reluctance to go farther is a sign not just of Spinoza’s exhaustion with the details of philosophical psychology, but of his resistance to the totalizing strain of modern philosophy which reaches its pinnacle in Hegel. In Deleuze’s account, what is most significant about Spinoza’s treatment of illness and death is his insistence that sickness and evil are nothing positive. While a poison or a virus will generally be composed of its own internal combination of bodies in a particular proportion of motion and rest and thus strive to persist in its own being, the sickness that either causes is itself nothing (Deleuze EPS, 249). That is, the sickness does not express any law of composition, but is merely a name for the breakdown in composition that occurs when two contrary bodies meet each other. Spinoza thus manages to avoid ambitious claims about the necessity of negativity in personal development, which, for Deleuze, marks perhaps his most important difference from Hegel. Inverting Hegel’s own judgment of Spinoza,6 Deleuze argues that to the extent that it replaces talk of God’s development with considerations of his perfection as expressed through his attributes, “Spinoza’s philosophy is a philosophy of pure affirmation” (Deleuze EPS, 60). Whereas Hegel traces the development of spirit in response to various obstacles that are put in its way, Spinoza shows how the human being can develop solely through the affirmation of God in his totality (Deleuze SPP, 13; Deleuze EPS, 60).

Affirmative Pathology: Spinoza and Hegel on Illness and Self-Repair

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Because the mind strives to think only of those things that affirm its power of acting and not of those that negate it (E IIIP54), Spinozan thought does not concern itself with death and defect (E III Pref.); it seeks only to grasp God as a free, immanent cause of all things. Yet, it is my contention here that Spinoza and Hegel are far closer than Deleuze implies. While there is much more to be said in adjudicating Deleuze’s allegations of the stifling negativity of Hegelian thought and Hegel’s attacks on the unmotivated transitions of Spinozism, we should not let this opposition obscure the fact that Hegel does not assume that individual psyches grow dialectically any more than Spinoza assumes that individual persons grow happier and more powerful by following the geometric method. Indeed, I will show that Spinoza’s psychology is not as purely affirmative and Hegel’s not as purely negative as Deleuze suggests and that Hegel actually develops a more complete model of the kind of self-repair that Spinoza outlines in the Ethics. For each, personal growth entails the overcoming of repetitive associations through exposure to new ways of organizing the world. The difference is that Hegel—at least in the realm of mental illness—provides concrete explanations of how this can happen. Hegel, that is, offers an explanation of how to embrace health without prioritizing sickness in precisely the manner that Deleuze thinks a good Spinozist ought.

Spinoza on self-repair As affirmative and life-embracing as Spinoza’s approach to philosophy is, death, decay, and sickness are never completely absent. Indeed, throughout his writings, Spinoza takes a broadly negative approach to human bondage, always emphasizing that liberation primarily requires overpowering negative passions with stronger, positive ones, for we will never become the adequate causes of anywhere near all of our affections (E IVP4). In the Theological-Political Treatise, for instance, he notes that “the mind is very often so preoccupied with greed, glory, jealousy, anger, etc., that there is no room for reason.”7 And in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, he is even more insistent that the philosopher’s task consists in “abandoning certain evils for the sake of a certain good” (TIE §7). The task of philosophy is thus not simply to create ever new and more adequate concepts, but to release the mind from such negative patterns of thought and free it to make general connections. It involves both preparation for the future bodies one might encounter and self-repair against those bodies that have already brought damage.

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To this end, one of the primary tasks of Spinoza’s psychology is to show how minds can be released from the painful or stultifying connections of the imagination. In the Ethics, he first notes that every thought corresponds to a particular combination of affections of the body. And since bodies tend to become habituated to repeatedly encountering successions of other bodies, minds tend to imagine connections between other ideas that they repeatedly encounter in succession. Thus, if I am in the habit of seeing Peter in the morning, Paul at noon, and Simon in the evening, I will begin to associate Paul with the warmth of the day even if it is pure happenstance that our paths have crossed at that time (E IIP44S). While the imagination of such patterns is an important first step in forming notions of what is common among all the bodies one encounters, it is prone to fixate on such connections without looking beyond them to determine what is actually common among these bodies and what is merely a matter of serendipitous conjunction. The way to avoid the stifling regularity and arbitrariness of such associations is to allow oneself to form as many common notions of the world as possible. By observing commonalities among bodies and sets of bodies, I can actively cultivate relationships with bodies that agree with mine and thus become more able to accommodate sudden changes in my world without changing my nature (E IIP38). The more types of bodies I come in contact with, the more I will be able both to affect other bodies and to be affected by them and thus the more powerful and secure I will be (E IVP38). A happy or powerful person is one who ceases to see external bodies as threats and is able to be affected by a great number of objects. But of course, the world contains many bodies that are not only different from me but also pose actual threats to my bodily integrity. There are environmental toxins, heavy falling bodies, and malicious people that I know from experience pose dangers to human bodies like mine and, given the vast unknown complexities of the body, likely many others that will cause me harm in ways I do not comprehend. If the injury they cause me is not itself anything, then how can I explain the new kinds of motions my body undertakes to overcome it? Since no object ever brings about its own destruction (E IIIP4), Spinoza must find a way to explain how disease afflicts the body without positing an active capacity for decay. What is missing in Spinoza’s account is an explanation of how the conatus of a body can be severely compromised or even put out of action without compromising the essence of the body. What is clearly not Spinoza’s answer is the Brownian opposition of sensibility and irritability that Hegel criticizes in the Phenomenology of Spirit.8 Spinoza recognizes as well as Hegel that even though a poison can turn a body’s resources against it, positing


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anything like a faculty of being poisoned would have as little explanatory power as the positing of a dormative power has to explain opium’s effects. Instead, the power to be affected is nothing but a body’s ability to maintain a constant proportion of motion and rest among its constituent parts even as it encounters foreign bodies. Such an account requires an explanation of the positive striving to overcome sickness that does not make sickness itself a condition of health. It needs an explanation of why it is unhealthy for parts of the mind to remain isolated and self-obsessed. It needs to trace the mind’s emergence from blockage into free self-determination. What such an account needs, in short, is Hegelian anthropology.

The “Dreaming Soul” in Hegel’s Anthropology In Hegel’s mature system, Anthropology is the first moment of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. As a theoretical presupposition of phenomenology’s study of conscious subjectivity, anthropology studies what Hegel (following Aristotle) calls the soul, the set of natural preconditions for human consciousness. In this context, anthropology investigates the vast recesses of the soul that underlie consciousness but are not yet determined by conscious self-constitution. In particular, it is the second moment of the Anthropology that is most relevant to Spinoza’s project of overcoming the limitations of the imagination. Unlike the Natural Soul, which constitutes the soul’s presentient sexual and sleep-wake cycles, and the Actual Soul, which has already begun to orient itself in relation to its world, the Dreaming Soul is consumed by self-division. It is “dreaming” because its moments are isolated.9 Just as we lose track of our integrity in our nightly dreams, the sleepwalker, the fool, and the maniac experience a “blockage (Knoten)” in their striving for self-unity. The Dreaming Soul is itself divided into three sections, of which (following the typical Hegelian pattern) the second traces its self-alienation. Whereas the merely sentient soul has a baseline access to the world around it and thus can be found in such self-consciously privative states as hypnosis and somnambulism, in dementia (Verrücktheit)10 “the concrete human being comes to a standstill in the one form of feeling and remains in self-feeling in opposition to his rational actuality” (LPS, 109).11 The demented soul, that is, is trapped in a single feeling that overwhelms all others. Since it is characteristic of dementia that the physicality of the sick body is inseparable from the spiritual illness (LPS, 110), the soul only escapes this self-absorption by habituating itself to new possibilities.

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However, it is crucial both for Hegel’s own dialectical aims and for our application of this movement to Spinoza’s psychology that Hegel does not define this position by the negativity of dementia, but by the positivity of self-feeling (Selbstgefühl). Contrary to Deleuze’s complaints, the Hegelian soul does not seek to incorporate the negativity of madness into some higher neurotic selfawareness,12 but finds merely the consequences of a diminishment of its powers. To understand how the embodied spirit “works through” trauma and other forms of blockage, Hegelian anthropology holds that we must first understand what precisely is being blocked—that is, how to identify a healthy immersion in one’s feelings.

Self-feeling as a positive phenomenon When he lectured on the philosophy of spirit, Hegel liked to begin each course by noting that his task was not merely to give a catalog of different forms of thought, but to show the process by which spirit grows into its own freedom.13 And since the meaning of this freedom can be summed up by the Delphic directive to know oneself, Hegel would emphasize that it must be guided by “empirical human knowledge [Menschenkenntnis]” (LPS, 7), and in particular by an empirical study of the deficiency [Mangelhaftigkeit] of human inclinations. Freedom, that is, entails knowledge both of one’s own striving and of those external things that may impede it. The story of spirit’s development is not a story of hardship and limitation molding its indomitable desire into noble wisdom, but neither is it a wistful tale of the fleeting beauty of moments of spiritual weakness. Rather, it is a series of case studies in which each moment is judged on its adequacy to a fully realized concept of freedom and valued primarily for its ability to express this freedom. Moments of spiritual weakness are studied not for prudential considerations of how they might best be navigated and manipulated, but in order to bring about the freedom of Delphic self-knowledge, so anything that absolute spirit preserves from dementia must be constitutive of this freedom. Yet, although dementia is judged according to the same standard as every other moment of subjective spirit, this does not mean that every one of these moments plays the same role in the dialectic. While there are moments of the dialectic that serve as uncircumventable way stations on the path to absolute spirit, the most famous of which is perhaps the eventual slave’s trembling before death,14 there are also moments like the genius of the mother’s womb (LPS, 89–90), or even the master himself, that dissolve or atrophy in their opposition to a more powerful


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moment. While the splitting of the soul into autonomous and heteronomous sides and of self-consciousness into ruling and slavish sides is necessary for spirit to return to itself, absolute spirit can only be said to be a genius or a master in the most limited of senses. And then there are pseudo-moments like those that would be described by astrology and panpsychism (LPS, 34–5), if only such studies had anything positive to contribute to spirit’s self-knowledge—moments for which Hegel takes pains to carve out a space but which leave only the barest precipitate in the dialectic. A comprehensive dialectical account of spirit must acknowledge that spirit has a preconscious relation to the cosmos and to earthbound nature, but neither astrology nor facile panpsychism has anything to contribute to philosophical knowledge of this relation. While it is clear that Hegel believes that the sick soul is more primitive than the self-determining soul of habit and that spirit is dependent on the natural organism, it is less clear whether or not this sickness is necessary for spirit’s progress toward healthy self-actualization. Thus, in order to determine how dementia is preserved in absolute spirit, we need to ask whether its Aufhebung is most like that of the slave (an essential moment in the dialectic), the master (an inessential moment), or the astrological relation of soul and cosmos (a mere placeholder with little or no explanatory power). One possible reading would have dementia dissolve mostly, but not entirely, into healthy habits. While self-conscious spirit has passed beyond dementia, this reading would have it, there is always present in consciousness an irreducible reserve of madness that threatens to break out at any time. Kirk Pillow has made a convincing case that the sleep-wake cycle plays this sort of role in Hegel’s anthropology. While the conscious spirit of phenomenology no longer experiences its feelings as something contingent, as the waking soul does in trying to identify with its sleeping counterpart, it remains subject to sleep’s periodic eruptions of the imagination so that “the primordial soup of contingent association in its sleeping substance will not cease to nourish it.”15 More generally, Pillow concludes, “Each moment of the soul’s natural subjectivity may, in its arbitrary ‘willfulness,’ threaten the project of self-fashioning on which mind has embarked.”16 But it is not at all obvious that Hegel identifies a similar role for dementia in spirit’s development. Indeed, Hegel’s language often suggests that dementia is an entirely negative phenomenon that is most striking for its distance from the exercise of healthy reason. In Hegel’s summary at the beginning of the Anthropology section, it initially sounds as if the negativity of illness constitutes the entirety of the dreaming soul’s second moment. “The second part of the Anthropology,” Hegel writes,

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is the dreaming soul, the difference of the sentient soul from itself. The first element here is the sentient soul as totality relating to itself, a separation without any separation, or a separationless separation. The second element is that the sentient soul no longer senses itself in its universality, but is immersed in its particularity. This immersion in particularity is a pathological condition. (LPS 32)

This would seem to indicate that in contrast to such phenomena as animal magnetism and clairvoyance, dementia is something entirely negative, a diremption of the sentient soul from itself that does not make any higher unity manifest. At most, dementia would seem to be spiritually instructive for its extremity, and thus spirit would have to back away from a preconscious immersion into particularity just as it backs away from phrenology’s hopeless effort to find itself as an observable natural being in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (PhS, 189, §340). Yet, we should not forget that the discussion of dementia appears not under its own heading, but under the Encyclopedia subheading of self-feeling. In the 1827–8 lecture course, Hegel first introduces this term in relation to the sense of touch, which, unlike the ideal senses of sight and hearing and the inwardly directed senses of taste and smell, is a sensing of one’s independence from one’s environment (LPS, 76). As a moment of the dreaming soul, Selbstgefühl is the preconscious movement of determining the boundaries of the self. When this movement succeeds, the person is self-possessed (besonnen), and where it fails, the result is dementia. But according to the student notes recorded in Boumann’s Zusätze, Hegel was careful to clarify that tracing the possibility of dementia inherent in self-feeling does not imply that every soul must pass through dementia. Just as the Philosophy of Right takes crime as a necessary possibility of human freedom without assuming that every human being is a criminal, anthropology takes dementia as a necessary possibility of the soul’s self-feeling without assuming that every soul must be or have been insane. Rather, “Crime and insanity are extremes which the human spirit in general has to overcome in the course of its development, but which do not appear as extremes in every individual but only in the form of limitations, errors, follies, and non-criminal guilt.”17 If this analogy held completely, then dementia would introduce an everpresent challenge to sound reason that simultaneously threatens its integrity and reminds it of the self-correctives that have become second-nature for it. But this reading still does not tell us how dementia is present in sanity. While the notion that crime stands alongside order in a developed state is an intuitively appealing one, it is less obvious how dementia is preserved in the everyday exercise of reason. If dementia is the “blockage (Knoten)” of self-feeling (LPS,


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121), then how can self-feeling be interpreted as a positive phenomenon? In arguing that spirit is distinct from nature for its ability to bear anguish (Schmerz), Hegel notes that “self-feeling is affirmative in the sense that, when it is negated, it does not disappear—which is not the case in nature . . . . In injury, the negation of my self-feeling is itself still my self-feeling. What negates spirit is subordinate to spirit’s affirmation, its unity with itself. This is the determination of freedom itself ” (LPS, 14). According to Ferdinand Walter’s transcription, Hegel elaborates on this affirmativity by observing that “ ‘I am simple’ is an affirmative, and ‘I am hungry’ a negative” (LPS, 19n) because pain of any sort brings the soul into opposition with itself and drives it to overcome this opposition. Anguish, then, is a sign of a being-for-self that does not disappear in the face of negation, but always refers the human being back to his or her simplicity. While the possibility of such anguish is inherent to human life itself, the dreaming soul’s drive to separate itself from its merely animal existence makes it especially acute at this stage. Yet, Hegel explains what is unique about sentient anguish by pointing to the comparatively light pain of forgetting: “When we have forgotten something, we are divided: the one which we are in ourselves; the other, the consciousness, the power over us” (LPS, 88). Forgetting, considered not as an act of the theoretical spirit studied by psychology, but as a disturbance of the sentient soul studied by anthropology, throws the human being into a preconscious self-division in which the soul feels itself to be torn away from its content. There is a uniquely helpless tinge to this anguish, which highlights the soul’s inability even to grasp itself by latching on to what Donald Rumsfeld once called a “known unknown.” Forgetting is paradigmatic for the anguish of the dreaming soul because, in a certain sense, all its unknowns are unknown. If phenomenology studies spirit’s division of itself from its object, anthropology studies the soul’s separation from a content that does not even have enough determinacy to be called an object (LPS, 88). Such a self-divided soul can be said to be dreaming in the sense that it is not alienated from an external world, but is full of internal fissures and discontinuities. Or as Hegel puts it, “In this diseased condition, the human being is in a rational dream—he is still outwardly directed, but in such a way that an obstruction [Hemmung] has arisen” (LPS, 94). The same might be said of Spinoza’s Spanish poet. Though he continues to interact with external bodies in a manner that would for a stranger be indistinguishable from the actions of someone with a fully intact memory, to the extent that parts of his body linked to his old life as a poet remain, they have been severed from his general conatus. It would thus be disingenuous to suggest that this is simply a case of an old body dying and a new one being created. It may indeed be useful

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to think of the poet and nonpoet as distinct because of their radical differences in patterns of acting (just as we distinguish the pack-horse from the racehorse),18 but if the goal of an ethics is to increase our power of acting, then it should also help us understand and to a limited extent embrace those objects that inhibit our conatus. To understand the full range of relations among the various parts that compose the poet’s body, we need an account of the striving to be whole that unites them even as they are blocked or restricted in their interaction. What Hegel’s concept of self-feeling offers this project is an organic conception of overcoming trauma that accounts for the impulse toward health in its very structure. For Hegel, the positivity of self-feeling consists in opening the possibility of a new form of pain, an obstruction of the soul’s preconscious feeling of its own self-unity. Dementia first becomes possible at this stage because illness in general can only appear on the basis of an intensification of the division between body and spirit. Thus, Hegel explains that dementia’s deep wounds are sometimes avoidable by remaining within the natural soul’s simple unity of feelings and their embodiment. In contrast to Spinoza, who elects to ignore “trembling, pallor, sobbing, laughter, and so on, because they are related to the body without any relation to the mind” (E IIIP59S), Hegel thinks this very externality helps restore the soul’s sense of continuity with the body. For instance, in times of distress, pain can be so internalized as to seem inseparable from the soul. “But through tears the pain is turned outwards and relieved” (LPS, 85). So long as the soul’s self-division can be immediately expressed in the body, it poses no lasting threat. As a blockage of self-feeling, dementia can only appear once the soul has taken possession of its feelings as belonging not to the body, but to itself (LPS, 108). Feeling, then, is an odd sort of unity that only appears as the body is no longer taken to be the soul’s true self-expression. But to avoid prioritizing dementia as a condition for healthy habituation, Hegel is careful to clarify that what ultimately matters about self-feeling is not the negative moment of the pain of self-forgetting, but the unity of self-feeling. According to Walter’s transcription, Hegel reminded his audience at this point that “Physical illness is merely the struggle of the health of the body against disease. Without health there would be only death. Health, the harmonious condition, must exist as the basic condition. The same is true of the psychological dimension” (LPS, 106n). Like sickness, dementia is nothing positive, but a mere privation of the unity of self-feeling. Sickness can be so obtrusive in its appearance that it is easy to forget that it is nothing at all without healthy organic life. Despite psychology’s general emphasis on the particularities of various pathologies, Hegel concludes, the systematic study of self-feeling should


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concern its positive contributions to spirit’s return to itself and thus emphasize what is actually felt in the disruption of self-feeling. Seen in this positive sense, self-feeling appears in its fullest form when “the individual feels himself entirely in this abstraction of the self ” (LPS, 107). In the nonpathological forms of self-feeling, “the individual senses himself, and to this feeling belongs the exclusion of particularity. He takes the feeling back into himself ” (LPS, 108). All concrete determination of the soul is taken to be merely negative and hence superfluous. Hegel’s word for this state is Besonnenheit, which Williams translates as “self-possession,” but we might also render as “composure.” Since it flees all determinations, it is as difficult to identify a positive example of such composed self-identity as it is to express affirmatively what it feels like to be healthy, but I find John Travolta’s sidewalk strut from Saturday Night Fever a particularly expressive artistic rendering of it. For Travolta’s Toby Manero at this moment, there is no question that his body belongs to him or that any corporeal limitation that appeared would be purely contingent and external. Moreover, the fact that all threats to his sentient unity are mere abstractions appears not as a determinate, negative thought, but as a purely affirmative feeling. And if a preconscious forgetting is the paradigmatic case of a threat to selffeeling, composure should also entail a feeling that is antithetical to forgetting. As Hegel describes it, this feeling appears most saliently as the feeling of youthfulness. Whereas old age carries with it a corporeal weakness and declining memory, youth’s resistance to these maladies allows for a “greater power of self-feeling” (LPS, 109). With fewer gaps and inconsistencies in memory, the young adult is better able to unite the soul’s disparate moments and thus take possession of the soul as totality. In this affirmation of the self as a feeling soul, the possibility of forgetting is not taken to be anything real, but is felt as a mere contingency of self-possession.

Hegel on dementia and recovery When, however, this power of memory is weakened, whether by the normal passage of time, a physical illness, or a blow to the head, memories can become erased and nevertheless effective in the soul of the afflicted. The result is a state of restrictedness (Beschränktheit) in which the soul becomes fixated on certain feelings at the expense of other, forgotten ones (LPS, 110). When this restricted fixation becomes permanent, the result is dementia (Verrücktheit). Since self-possessed self-feeling is the denial of the separation

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of body and soul, dementia as its negation is not a return to self-division, but an intensification of the soul’s assertion of its independence from every particular corporeal affection. But in this assertion of independence, selffeeling’s dependence on the body again becomes manifest, since the soul can only be self-possessed by finding itself in complete unity with the body (LPS, 112). Precisely by forgetting its corporeality, dementia shows itself to be that much more intimately bound up with the body.19 The various forms of dementia thus do not differ in their forgetting of the body, but in the feelings of self-unity they take to be absolute. In imbecility, the lowest form of dementia, the soul gets lost in its self-feeling without any content at all, separating itself from any interaction with the outside world. The individual appears completely vegetative because any particular relation is a matter of complete indifference to the weakened soul. In folly (Narrheit), as in Spinoza’s accounts of pride (superbia) and disparagement (despectus) (E IIIP26S),20 the soul seizes on a single feeling and gives it a disproportionate role in the totality of the soul. This fixation tends to happen most commonly, Hegel wryly observes, with pleasurable feelings, such as pride, love, and anger, which exaggerate the importance of the individual (LPS, 116). Even anxiety tends to take on an egotistical form in folly, with the individual becoming fixated on the paranoid fantasy that the whole world regards her with malevolent intentions. In the folly of pride, the totality underlying normal oscillations between meekness and self-regard is forgotten, and the individual reinterprets the world to conform to this self-aggrandizing feeling. This fixation cannot even be called perverse, since it operates before there is even a mature self-consciousness to redirect. The self-possessed feeling of the soul as an actual totality is replaced with a particular feeling that is taken to encompass the entire self. In mania (Tollheit), the final form of dementia, the individual is sometimes able to step outside of the feelings on which folly fixates, but these feelings still retain a powerful allure, so that the soul oscillates between complete fixation and a self-possessed realization of the folly of such fixation. Thus, it is not uncommon for the maniac to oscillate between violent fits of rage and deep feelings of love for the very person targeted by the rage (LPS, 118). Of course, even healthy people are sometimes overtaken by rage. The maniac is different, however, in experiencing a radical disconnect between his manic and ethical sides, so that the descent into frenzy (Wut) is uncontrollable and alienating. While both joyful and immoderate passions periodically take over almost everyone, the manic personality is unique in that reason exercises no control at all during the manic periods but only returns when the mania has died down.


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To translate this contention into Spinoza’s language, mania inspires passions so great that the intellect is unable to find positive affects to counteract them and is thus an extreme example of his general principle that there will always be something stronger than reason (E IVP4). While the intellect may ultimately be able to form clear and distinct conceptions of its manic passions and even work to forestall later manic states (cf. E VP4), it is nonetheless powerless for the duration of the state. The soul is divided against itself, with neither side holding sway over the other. For Hegel, this means that spirit cannot simply rely on spirit’s priority over nature to overcome sickness, but must seek out physiological interventions even before it attempts a psychological cure (LPS, 119). While self-feeling’s hybrid status as both physical and spiritual resists any reduction of the spiritual to the physical, in severe cases of dementia the physical can so overpower the spiritual that a purely psychological intervention would be futile. In confronting the demented, we must not forget that we are treating an embodied illness, which gains its strength by denying its unity with the body. In such cases, exposing the patient to many different types of things would clearly not offer the same potential for personal growth as it would in a healthy person. Physicians would have to restore the unity of the patient’s conatus before the patient even began to formulate new common notions. These descriptions of the various forms of dementia and their cures are therefore not merely examples of the interesting curiosities with which Hegel loved to fill his lectures. In their very hybridity of the anthropological and the psychological, they fill in the range of spirit’s possibilities. By carving out a space for therapy in the dialectic, Hegel cannot help but recognize that spirit’s progress through the dialectic is not a grand march toward some mythic freedom but the play of a spirit already free to move among its various dialectical moments. Here, we are finally in a position to say how dementia is retained in selfconscious reason. Rather than reverse course and step back from the excesses of dementia as observing reason steps back from the excesses of phrenology or simply move on to developing healthy habits as the slave moves on to stoicism’s work of actualizing freedom, spirit instead lingers on the treatment of dementia. If the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is the story of spirit’s increasing knowledge of itself as free, then dementia is neither a step along the way to becoming free (like the slave) nor an initially promising dead end on the path to freedom (like phrenology). Instead, it is the opposite of self-possession, which must be restored before habits can be developed and the soul can bring itself to consciousness. Its position is thus most closely analogous to that of the master, who stands

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opposed to the moment of spirit that can come to know itself as free. Dementia is not a step on the path to self-knowledge, but a misstep that can and ought to be avoided. While Hegel, like most psychologists of his day, seems to have been most intrigued by the demented side of self-feeling, he also recognizes that it is its self-possessed side that carries out the real spiritual work. From this perspective, Spinoza was right to find the case of the Spanish poet intriguing, but not ultimately threatening to his analysis of the human being as governed by the conatus to maintain itself. The poet does show that individual striving for unity can be severely disrupted, even to the point of dissolving the very identity of the individual, but the disruption itself is nothing real, but only an indication of the identity that has been lost.

Negativity and loss For anyone familiar with Deleuze’s Hegel, this is a surprising result. How could the same Hegel who once dismissed historical periods without pain and loss as “blank pages” in the book of history21 treat disruption and loss in an individual soul so blithely? Must the soul not be able to make something of the everoutstanding possibility of its dissolution into madness? Hegel does not, to be sure, maintain that episodes of dementia are irrelevant to spirit. The possibility of dementia does, he thinks, help us to understand the dependence of spirit on a vulnerable and physiologically complex body. Indeed, because it holds together the contradiction that its objects are both separate from it and belong to it, the waking soul itself is pain, and even in the best of the circumstances, thought is never just a concord of various ideas with one another (EPS, 282z). The opposite of this general pain of existence is not a Spinozan concord of bodies, but a sleep in which the division of consciousness vanishes into a plane of immanent nondifferentiation (LPS, 67). Deleuze is thus right to find a sharp difference between Hegel’s division of spirit from nature and Spinoza’s insistence that every object of thought is a body more or less compatible with the thinker’s. The positivity of self-feeling is for Hegel a part of spirit’s broader, essentially negative relationship to its objects in which consciousness really does find itself to be a theater22 for the interplay of concepts (LPS, 14). But this does not imply that individuals grow and advance solely by placing themselves in opposition to their environments. The soul’s composure is not a rejection of dementia, is not a weak “yes” that grows out of a “no,”23 but a solid, unequivocal affirmation of embodiment. Though Hegel tends to emphasize the power of negativity in his


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systematic summaries of his approach,24 he maintains that mental health can only be analyzed positively. Spirit’s integrity depends in large part on its refusal to treat everything it encounters as an obstacle. What, then, are we to make of Deleuze’s opposition of Spinoza, the affirmative thinker, and Hegel, the negative thinker? Negativity can of course mean many things, and I have tried to show that the Hegelian dialectic works quite differently in different spheres. Indeed, we might even say that philosophers still have very little idea of what kind of movements dialectics are capable of. On the question of self-repair, we have seen that far from advancing a psychology built on each individual’s efforts to overcome obstacles, Hegel begins with the same kind of self-seeking material being that Spinoza posits in the Ethics. In at least this limited sense, Hegel, that great thinker of destruction and decay, would second Spinoza’s maxim that a free man thinks of death least of all things (E IVP67). While freedom for Hegel also entails complex social, political, and religious institutions that lie outside the scope of Subjective Spirit—to say nothing of the dialectic of Self-Consciousness and its mordant fixation on death and domination—a free person must at least be self-possessed (besonnen), which involves a suspension of negativity after the model of Travolta’s Manero. Such a state implicitly rejects the Cartesian separation of body and mind and grasps its necessary unity with the body. A free person is thus one who understands the causes of his or her emotions as much as possible and strives to reduce the influence of controlling passions. To this extent, Spinoza’s doctrine of human conatus is negative in the same way Hegel’s account of self-feeling is. Both hold that while the embodied mind is vulnerable to all sorts of maladies that need to be protected against, these maladies do not serve any essential function in the education of the mind. Instead, they remain always as outstanding possibilities that help illuminate the essentially positive striving of self-feeling. While sickness is for Spinoza nothing real, this does not imply that it can be ignored or dismissed as a source of metaphysical prejudice. Because a free person strives not only to be affected by many things but also to avoid interactions with things that will decrease his or her power, rational self-preservation entails seeking to understand those things that can kill, harm, or weaken us. And because we are freer to the extent that others around us are also guided by reason, we ought to strive to understand potential sources of irrationality both in ourselves and in others. For this, I have argued, Hegel’s Anthropology is a valuable resource that Spinozists should not overlook. Spinoza understood perhaps as well as anyone that true philosophical friendships are rare and well worth protecting.


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Notes 1 For the most part, I have followed the translations of Samuel Shirley in Spinoza: Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and Selected Letters (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992). 2 Martin Lin, “Memory and Personal Identity in Spinoza,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35:2 (2005): 243–68; Michael Della Rocca, “Spinoza’s Metaphysical Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996): pp. 193–215; Wallace Matson, “Death and Destruction in Spinoza’s Ethics,” Inquiry 20:4 (Winter 1977): 403–15. 3 My reading of Deleuze’s reception of Spinoza is based primarily on his 1968 thèse complémentaire, Spinoza and the Problem of Expression, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), though it also incorporates references to Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988). 4 What precisely Spinoza means by “proportion [ratio] of motion and rest” is famously elusive. In the Short Treatise, he suggests that it can be comprehended by whole number proportions (e.g. one part motion to three parts rest), and that the composition of a given human body could be comprehended through a vast array of such proportions (The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. Edwin Curley [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985], v. 2, p. 96). It is unclear, however, how such a model could account for the multiple levels of interaction among the various organic systems in the human body. For further discussion, see Lin, “Memory,” pp. 248–50. 5 I also see no metaphysical problem with concluding that what had happened in the interim was that the Spanish poet had in fact died with a beating heart and was later brought back to life through a chance interaction of various bodies or judicious medical intervention. The determining factor, it would seem, would be the physiological question of whether the restoration of memory was caused by the conatus of his body or some external factor. Since Spinoza grants no special metaphysical status to life, reanimation would seem to be no more philosophically problematic than conception or budding. 6 In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume III, trans. Haldane and Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), Hegel argues that Spinoza begins to grasp the negativity of thought, but does not fully follow through on this line of thinking (288). For a critique of this reading, see


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Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Acosmism or Weak Individuals? Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Finite,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48.1 (2010): 77–92. 7 Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007), XVI, §7, p. 199. 8 G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke Bd. 9: Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1980), pp. 150–60; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§265–86. See also David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 92–9. 9 Here Hegel’s conception of dreaming is quite close to Spinoza’s. For Spinoza, as for Hegel, dreaming is the form of thought in which thought’s own opacity to itself becomes most manifest. In both waking life and dreaming, it is only our imaginations that form ideas about willful control over ourselves, and “those who believe that they speak, or keep silent, or do anything from free mental decision are dreaming with their eyes open” (E IIIP2S). 10 Here I follow Williams’s translation mainly for lack of a better alternative. Other commentators (e.g. Daniel Berthold-Bond, Hegel’s Theory of Madness [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995]) have used the more general “madness,” which also seems as good as any. For Hegel, “Verrücktheit” is a technical term that does not correspond neatly to the common terms of folk psychology. What he aims to emphasize most with this term is the disruption of the soul’s striving for unity. 11 Hegel, Vorlesungen Bd. 13: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes Berlin 1827/1828 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1994). While pagination refers to the German edition, I have for the most part relied on Robert Williams’s excellent translation (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827–8, trans. Williams [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007]). 12 Thus, Jean-Luc Nancy writes of the preceding section on hypnotism that since “this stage is the darkness of spirit,” it is “scarcely a stage” (The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. [Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993], p. 18). That is, the Dreaming Soul is not a moment in the autobiography of spirit, but an indication of the depths of spirit’s origins. 13 For instance, in his introductory comments to the 1827–8 Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel states that the task of the Philosophy of Spirit as a whole is “to watch spirit achieving by itself its vocation and its destiny, namely, freedom” (LPS, p. 7). 14 Hegel PhS, p. 114, §194.


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15 Kirk Pillow, “Habituating Madness and Phantasying Art in Hegel’s Encyclopedia.” The Owl of Minerva 28 (1997): 188. 16 Ibid., p. 189. 17 Hegel, Werke Bd. 10: Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), p. 163, §408z. 18 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 257. 19 See Ferrarin, Hegel and Aristotle, 263n, for a discussion of the novelty of this claim. 20 Here the connection between Spinoza and Hegel is especially close, since Spinoza notes that pride “is a kind of madness, in that a man dreams with his eyes open that he can do all those things that his imagination encompasses, which he therefore regards as real, exulting in them, as long as he is incapable of thinking of those things that exclude their existence and limit his power of activity” (E IIIP26S). For Hegel as for Spinoza, instances of folly arise through the intensification of one part of the mind at the expense of the individual as a whole. 21 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 26–7. 22 For a critique of this Hegelian theatre as a “false” theater, see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 10. 23 Difference and Repetition, pp. 53–5. 24 See, for example, Hegel’s famous reflection on the “monstrous power of the negative” (PhS, p. 27, §32).

8

Of Suicide and Falling Stones: Finitude, Contingency, and Corporeal Vulnerability in (Judith Butler’s) Spinoza Gordon Hull

Everyone knows that Judith Butler is a “Hegelian.” As she says, “in a sense, all of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions: What is the relation between desire and recognition, and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity?” (SD xiv).1 Butler also claims to be a Spinozist: her recent writing makes numerous references to conatus, which she underscores “remains at the core of my own work” (UG, 198).2 There would appear to be an incoherence in this juxtaposition, as received wisdom suggests that Spinoza and Hegel do not mix: one chooses Spinoza or Hegel. For his part, Hegel tells us that Spinoza is naively affirmative; Deleuze, whose reading lies at the base of many contemporary reassessments, sees in this affirmation a joyous rejection of transcendence.3 The incompatibility is now taken to be axiomatic; as Pierre Macherey puts it, “it is Spinoza who constitutes the true alternative to Hegelian philosophy” (HS, 13). In this chapter, I argue that Butler’s idiosyncratic reading of Hegel forces us to confront the possibility that a Spinoza liberated from the need to appear as Hegel’s alternative is actually much more attentive to “negativity” than is often surmised. In particular, one should resist the tendency to couple transcendence and the negative and instead consider the necessary finitude of all existing things. As I will illustrate by way of Butler, Spinoza is deeply attuned to human corporeal vulnerability. Since attention to finitude and corporeal vulnerability are at the core of Spinoza’s work, and since, as Butler herself persuasively argues, such attention to finitude and vulnerability are necessary components of any theory adequate to the political present, I offer a Spinoza read by way of Butler’s Hegel as an alternative and corrective to a purely affirmative Spinoza

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read in opposition to Hegel. To put the point too schematically, readings of the affirmative Spinoza tend to develop the importance of conatus as resistance, at the expense of developing an understanding of the importance of limitations imposed by our own finitude.4 It seems to me that much of Butler’s thought can be read as bringing those elements together. How do we understand conatus, and marshal it as resistance, given the inevitability of finitude and constraint as factors that structure the desires through which we actually live? The chapter proceeds as follows. In the first section, I outline the basic parameters of Butler’s readings of Hegel and Spinoza. In the following section, guided by Butler, I pursue a reading of Spinoza on desire and vulnerability that emphasizes our constitutive vulnerability as finite beings. I then draw two consequences of this emphasis. First, Spinoza needs not just to be regarded as a thinker of necessity but also of contingency. Second, Spinoza is engaged in a systematic project of denaturalizing political and other norms. In the final section, I apply this discussion to the problem of the constitution of the multitude, as it has been taken up by contemporary readers of Spinoza.

The politics of reading Let me begin where Butler does, with grief in the face of loss. Both Undoing Gender and Precarious Lives begin by approaching the question of our finitude, as experienced in the loss of someone we love. In Undoing Gender, she presents mourning as an acceptance of being “undone” by loss, that is, of “the transformative effect of loss,” which “cannot be charted or planned” (UG, 18). How might one understand this response as Spinozist? As an initial orientation to the problem, consider the difference between Hegel and Spinoza on the experience of loss. Hegel’s understanding, as he emphasizes early in the lectures on the Philosophy of History, needs to be understood as a theodicy, a point he announces in the introduction (Werke XII, 29) and to which he returns in the final paragraph of the lectures, concluding that “what has happened and happens every day, is not only not without God, but essentially the work of God himself ” (Werke XII, 540).5 As texts like this indicate, Hegel is deeply troubled by the suffering of those on the “slaughter bench” that is history, by the problem of how to understand the losses that this suffering entails, and by the problem of how loss and suffering change the meaning of and become incorporated into the totality of world history. The question

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is explicitly one of allowing oneself to be affected by this suffering without being undone: how can an honest cataloging of these misfortunes not cause us to retreat into private life, “and from there enjoy the distant sight of the mass ruins [Trümmermasse]” (Werke XII, 35)? The question of history is thus essentially one of mourning and memorial, of making sense and coherence of an aggregation of loss.6 The reference to theodicial politics immediately brings to mind Spinoza’s critique of teleology in the Ethics, where he uses as an example God-based explanations of the event of a stone falling on someone’s head and killing him (E1Appx). As Macherey emphasizes, teleology allows Hegel to set aside two possibilities from the start. One is that the dialectical process will turn out to have “no sense” and lack any unity in itself, that is, that the death of our friend is ultimately without genuine explanation. The second is that the process will encounter contradictions and antagonisms that cannot be resolved within the unity of the system, that is, that we can explain our friend’s death with the interplay of physical forces, but that this explanation is not one to which we can attach any unifying narrative coherence (HS, 252). By pursuing what Macherey calls an antiteleological dialectic “without guarantee,” Spinoza approaches the study of historically situated individuals differently. One sees this approach as well in Butler’s discussion of mourning: we might have to accept that we have lost, and that we cannot assign this loss to a larger purpose without effacing it as loss. To ask how to confront loss without guarantee is to abandon the comforts of teleology and instead pursue the uncertain social processes surrounding the loss. Reappropriating Hegel’s “tarrying with the negative,” she proposes that there is a benefit to “tarrying with grief,” which is “one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way” (UG, 23). Such tarrying discloses that the precariousness instanced by grief “has to be grasped not simply as a feature of this or that life, but as a generalized condition” (FW, 22). These Spinozist commitments are intended to supplement, not replace, Hegel. The dialectic between desire and recognition is Butler’s central emphasis in Hegel (UG, 240), and it is there that she brings Hegel and Spinoza together. Theodicy comforts because it guarantees recognition. Precariousness accordingly emerges when one abandons theodicy and views desire as both operating in and overdetermined by a social context that may or may not be receptive to it. That is, “the possibility of being sustained relies fundamentally on social and political conditions, and not only on a postulated internal drive to live”

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(FW, 21). As a result, conatus and recognition are deeply entwined, and Hegel was “in a way, extrapolating” on Spinoza here (UG, 31; cf. PLP, 62). At one level, this means that an account of recognition will have to take into account “the desire for recognition,” and that “a certain desire to persist, we might say, following Spinoza, underwrites recognition” (GA, 44). At the same time, the desire for recognition will complicate what it means to speak of desire. Since the desire to live becomes a desire for the conditions necessary to sustain life, and since recognition is necessary for such sustenance, desire can no longer be thought as the outward or expressive striving of an atomic individual. To strive is already to strive in a context and to desire in a way that reflects the realities of that context.7 Butler’s essay on Spinoza’s Ethics exemplifies this reading of conatus. Her primary interpretive move is to deny that Spinoza establishes any logical priority between his statement of conatus (E3P6) and the desire to live well. He writes, “nobody can desire to be happy, to do well and to live well without at the same time [simul] desiring to be, to do and to live; that is, actually to exist” (E4P21). One might suppose that Spinoza means that the desire to live well presupposes the desire to live. As Butler points out, however, what Spinoza actually says is that “both desires are engaged simultaneously . . . it is as if in desiring to live well one finds that that one has engaged the desire to live” (DL, 114). Butler illustrates the point with Spinoza’s remarks on suicide in the immediately preceding Scholium (E4P20S). There, Spinoza notes a logical consequence of his presentation of conatus that it is impossible that someone should commit suicide from “the necessity of his own nature,” which in turn entails that “those who do such things are compelled by external causes.” Spinoza’s third example is the one that interests Butler; in it, someone’s suicide happens “because hidden external causes so dispose his imagination, and so affect his Body, that it takes on another nature, contrary to the former, a nature of which there cannot be an idea in the Mind” (E4P20S). Given that, for Spinoza, we are creatures of affects and imaginations, and given that someone’s imagination can thus be hijacked by external causes of which she cannot form an idea, Butler sees an instance of a larger Spinozist point, that “there is already . . . a manner in which externality works upon desire that modulates its relation to life” (DL, 116). In other words, “the ‘I’ is already responsive to alterity in ways that it cannot always control” (DL, 121). We thus find in Spinoza’s conatus a “principle of deconstitution that is held in check and that, only in check, can function to keep the future open” (DL, 126).


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Fragile desires Is this a plausible reading of Spinoza? Macherey convincingly shows that, for Spinoza, one essential mistake that generates teleology is confusion between understanding the essence of something and its existence. Eliminating this confusion is accordingly of great consequence. As Macherey explains: One needs to renounce the ambition of an exhaustive knowledge of singular things, that is to say, of their global connection, which is by definition inaccessible: the infinite cannot be apprehended starting from the finite, in a movement of totalization, where indeed it loses its intrinsic necessity to become a pure possibility, that is to say, a formal fiction. One needs therefore to be limited to knowledge of ‘fixed and eternal things’ and their laws, insofar as they ‘govern the existence and ordering of singular things:’ starting from these laws, singular things are intelligible, sufficiently at least that one is able to set aside the temptation of interpreting them starting from an imaginary end. (HS, 188–9; internal citations to TdIE §101)

In other words, giving up on teleology entails admitting a necessary epistemic loss; we will never fully understand the existence of finite things since we cannot derive this existence from their essence. This limitation is due to the fact that we would need to understand the infinite causal series that produced each existing thing, but such knowledge is in principle inaccessible to us. This is not to say that we should give up and regress to the confusion of the passive affects. Indeed, our understanding of the laws of motion and rest are enough to make singular things sufficiently intelligible that we no longer need to rely upon teleology. But “sufficient” intelligibility of something does not mean its “complete” intelligibility and confusing those terms is precisely the confusion of teleology. One knows that all of us, insofar as we are understood as singular things, are essentially defined by the effort to continue in our existence. However, this knowledge of our essence is of only limited value in negotiating our spatiotemporal existence. This is the fundamental lesson of the discussion of suicide. Suicides happen, but it is conceptually impossible for someone’s suicide to be explicable in terms of her essence. Therefore, to understand suicide, we need to understand the person in terms of her existence. That means we need to understand her in terms of the affects and emotional physics outlined in Ethics III. As Spinoza points out, this state of affairs is going to generate substantial limitations in our understanding. This is because “the individual components of the human body, and consequently the human body itself, are affected by external bodies in a

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great many ways” (E2P13Post3). Thus, “different men can be affected in different ways by one and the same object, and one and the same man can be affected by one and the same object in different ways at different times” (E3P51). Not only is each of us differently constituted internally and therefore differently disposed to react to external events, each of which is differently located spatiotemporally, so the events that affect us will be different. Since our emotional responses tend to be habitual, this process is iterative, and the prospect of understanding the full causal structure that generates a particular person’s response to a particular stimulus at a particular time becomes impossible. As part of the sufficient understanding enabled by attention to physical laws, however, Spinoza takes it as axiomatic that all finite things can be destroyed and that we, as finite things, are accordingly quite fragile. His discussion centers on the axiom and opening propositions of Ethics IV. The axiom reads: “there is in nature no singular thing such that there is not something else stronger and more powerful. Indeed, whatever thing there is, there is another more powerful by which that thing can be destroyed” (E4Ax). The propositions then apply the point to human existence and our ideas. Thus, “external causes” (E4P3) cause an individual to undergo changes “other than those which can be understood through his own nature and of which he is the adequate cause” (E4P4). In short, we are constitutively vulnerable and precarious; in Butler’s terms, “to live is always to live a life that is at risk from the outset and can be put at risk or expunged quite suddenly from the outside” (FW, 30).8 Gabriel Albiac writes of Spinoza’s axiom: The constant possibility, the continuous risk of annihilation, permanently revolves around the essential conatus, characteristic of all beings: there is no life without risk, no being without wagering. Such is the space that I would qualify— despite conventions—as the tragic Spinoza: the one who, in all lucidity, notes the impossibility of resting on what, in fact, is unthinkable: a static substantiality. Life as threat, as despairing lookout and expectation, is the only metaphysical incentive of Spinoza’s morals. Because one must live, be, remain in one way or another, at any cost.9

In terms that Butler will echo, he adds that “not only does the exterior undo us; it literally forms us” (139). The external causes which structure or even derail our endeavor to survive occur whether or not we have adequate knowledge of their causal structure, and therein lies a further problem: our strivings could be unwittingly selfdestructive. Spinoza writes that, “the mind, both insofar as it has clear and


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distinct ideas and in so far as it has confused ideas, endeavors to persevere in its own being over an indefinite period of time” (E3P9). That conatus occurs by nature, in other words, does not indicate that it cannot be misdirected; this is precisely one of the ways it is vulnerable to external causes. Because ideas are imaginative representations, they have their own force as such (E4P1). To confront a false idea with a true one is to set in conflict two different ideas, and it is their relative psychic strengths that determines which will prevail. Confused or false ideas to which we have a deep psychic attachment can thus be very difficult to overcome.10 The presence and persistence of confused ideas adds further to the fragility of existence, as individuals represent techniques for survival which are based on a false understanding of the cause of a threat and a false estimation of how to overcome it. For Spinoza, religious superstition is a paradigmatic instance of the problem. An ignorant search for causes makes us vulnerable to political manipulation, and he proposes that monarchy functions by keeping “men in a state of deception,” using religion “to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation” (TTP Pfc. 7). Spinoza’s discussion of superstition can be aligned with Butler’s of grief in the face of loss. Butler takes it to be the case that the cause of this affect is our constitutive vulnerability. We are unable to hold onto those we love. As Spinoza suggests, “when the mind thinks of its own impotence, by that very fact it feels pain” (E3P55). How we respond to this pain is of decisive normative importance, as “an ethical quandary arises about how to live the violence of one’s formative history, how to effect shifts and reversals in its iteration” (FW, 170). One response, as exemplified by US policy after 11 September 2001, is a violent effort to repulse the pain, to respond to a felt passivity with a program of militarized security. In such a program, the sovereign State, in its role as the figurative embodiment of the socius, presents itself as intrinsically invulnerable, projecting its own actual vulnerability outward onto others. The result is a “country that systematically idealizes its own capacity for murder” (FW, 46) by the representation of its “own destructiveness [as] righteous and its own destructibility unthinkable” (FW, 47; emphasis original). This “epistemic inegalitarianism” (FW, 181) is exemplified, inter alia, by torture (FW, 54–62, 63–100), the indefinite detention of those deemed terrorists (PL, 50–100), the framing of all criticisms of Israeli military policy as “anti-Semitic” (PL, 101–27), and the refusal to publicly mourn Palestinians or those killed by the US war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan (PL, 32–8). These responses, however unfortunate, can never be eradicated a priori, and “the struggle against violence accepts that violence is one’s own possibility”

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(FW, 171). We must therefore understand what triggers them and guard against that. As with superstition in Spinoza, the central problem is that the violent response presents a confused idea about the cause of the affect, treating purely as a matter of external forces a vulnerability which is primarily enabled by the finitude of the subject itself. From a Spinozist point of view, one might suggest that recognition of our finitude thereby becomes the paradoxical precondition for liberation.

The necessity of contingency Embodied and fragile, human agents are always situated in the context of other finite things. This much, at least, we know from the physical laws governing the existence of all finite things and from their corollaries that explain the human affects. What does this mean for our efforts to understand? Most centrally, it means that we will have to be very careful with the move to universals in thought. The problem is not our initial move to common notions—indeed, as Spinoza makes extremely clear, they are a necessary condition for living well. The problem is overreliance on them, which is most often manifest in a tendency to naturalize and/or ontologize them, to treat constructs of thought as parts of nature and therefore as necessary. It is indeed correct to describe natural events as necessary in the metaphysical sense, but that does not entail that it is always correct for us to apply necessity to our understanding of those events. Instead, our own contingency as knowers and as agents generates a necessary contingency to our accounts of things in the world, and suggests that we must be careful to avoid unwittingly effacing this contingency. For example, consider Butler’s discussion of gay marriage, which centers on the question of whether finding legitimation in State-sanctioned definitions of familial roles is the best way to advance the cause of kinship relations that have been previously cast outside of those roles. At one level, the strategy seems promising, insofar as recognition guarantees that “desire and sexuality are ratified, justified, known, publicly instated, imagined as permanent and durable” (UG, 111). Unfortunately, such a strategy for legitimation creates its own problems, in that “the enstatement of these questionable rights and obligations for some lesbians and gays establishes norms of legitimation that work to remarginalize others and foreclose possibilities for sexual freedom which have also been long-standing goals of the movement” (CHU, 160). Butler’s concern is that the turn to marriage


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law unwittingly legitimates the naturalization or ontologization of normative heterosexuality, which produces sexual difference as the metaphysical basis of what it means to be human. Homosexual kinship relations are ratified only on the condition that they follow the established normative structure of heterosexual kinship; validation of gay marriage then perversely becomes a validation of heteronormativity and an unwitting fight for servitude. The underlying problem is that the universal to which one appeals is always already social, and therefore “functions actively and normatively to constrain what will and will not count as an intelligible alternative within culture” (CHU, 148). Failing to notice this invisibly ontologizes categories and makes them almost irresistible, magnifying the problems of ideology. As Spinoza puts it, “an affect toward a thing which we imagine to be necessary, other things being equal, is more intense, than to something possible or contingent” (E4P11). In Butler’s terms, the notion that norms subsist transcendentally and do not require constant reiteration “is one of the most effective actions of such norms” (“Reply,” 182). Of course, the interpretation I have just announced appears to fly in the face of Spinoza’s well-known defense of necessity.11 In the face of this, how can a Spinozist not treat all things as necessary? One should start with an application of the Aristotelian distinction between knowing that something is the case and having causal knowledge on account of which it is. Specifically, we need to avoid conflating the claim that something is necessary with a further claim that articulates an account of what causal series is necessary. That is, we can speak of necessity in general terms, or we can speak of the causal order through which each thing is necessary. However, to speak of the causal order through which each thing is necessary is to speak in terms of the causality of God/nature. It is not to begin with the actions of the thing in question, because its actions are reactions to things which affect it; those reactions are themselves reactions, and so forth, “ad infinitum” (E1P28). Of course, it is axiomatic that “the knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of the cause” (E1Ax4), so the closing “ad infinitum” renders complete causal knowledge starting with an effect impossible.12 This is why Spinoza is able to clarify his remarks on necessity by noting that, when we refer to objects in the world, “contingency” is appropriate: “all particular things are contingent and corruptible. For we can have no adequate knowledge of their duration . . . and that is what is to be understood by the contingency of things and the possibility of their corruption.” He concludes by underscoring that this is an epistemic, not metaphysical, point: “beyond this, there is no other contingency” (E2P31Cor).

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The practical importance of this distinction emerges in the TTP, in the chapter on laws. There, Spinoza criticizes the use of fate as an explanatory mechanism: We ought to define and explain things through their proximate causes, and consideration of the universals of fate and the concatenation of causes is unable to serve our cognition at all concerning the formation and ordering of particular things . . . . For use of improving our life, it is instead necessary to consider things as possible. (TTP, 4.1/G 44; cf. E4P62Sch)

In this context, fate follows the same logic as necessity. From the major premise that all things are determined by fate, and the minor that a particular is a thing, we conclude that the particular is determined by fate. This is true, but only of abstract relevance to practical reason. If I confront an angry mob, it makes no difference to my response if I regard the mob’s arrival as metaphysically necessary or metaphysically contingent, fated or not. I still have to do something, and it would help to be able to say something plausible (if metaphysically uncertain and incomplete) about how the mob got there. In other words, general metaphysical pronouncements about necessity do not help us improve our lives; indeed, they might get in the way since they obscure the more accessible structures through which we can act upon the ways that “man, insofar as he is part of nature, constitutes part of the power of nature” (TTP, 4.2/G 44). This is to say that “universal necessity” is, of itself, an almost empty claim, no better than saying that things happen teleologically, “for a reason.” In such a context, to say that something is “fated” or “necessary” is disempowering. What is important to understand—particularly if one wants to improve one’s life by acting as a part of nature, rather than by being passive with respect to it—is the particular series of causes that can most be said to be proper to a thing. Of course, we will never fully understand the entire causal structure through which we could meaningfully indicate the necessity of that thing. We will therefore have to, in an honest admission of ignorance, acknowledge that we are treating the thing as “contingent.”

Denaturing society A second move enabled by attention to the fragility of our desire to understand is a denaturalization of social bodies. In other words, the tendency to ontologize norms also needs to be viewed as endemic to social bodies, where it functions as what Foucault would call a dispositive of power. Both Spinoza and Butler


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recognize the need to apply “this model of agency and intelligibility” (PL, 45) at a transindividual level.13 At such a level, and in Spinozistic terms, naturalized social norms can be viewed as the conatus of the social order acting through various normalizing processes to persevere over time. Like individual bodies, social bodies are finite and precarious. Norms serve as the stabilizing lexicon through which the social order constitutes itself as a unity and through which it can be considered as such a unity. This is why violent demands for unity emerge so stridently when the norms of the socius are threatened or otherwise shown to be contingent and precarious. For Butler, of course, the failure of the United States to reconsider the terms of its national identity after 9/11 needs to be understood in these terms (PL, 39–41). There are other examples in Butler and Spinoza, however, and all are marked by the sheer violence with which the social body in question attempts to assert its invulnerability by presenting its ordering principles as transcendentally, rather than immanently, generated. Spinoza offers an account of the mechanisms through which this process occurs. Because we as individuals tend toward naturalized social categories, we also tend to direct our energies not against the categories, but against those who transgress them (cf. E3P49). Treating immanent norms as transcendental is a species of superstition, and “it is fear that engenders, preserves, and fosters superstition” (TTP Pfc./G 2). Exposing superstition as ideology is disruptive; as Butler puts the point, “the articulation of foreclosure is the first moment of its potential undoing, for the articulation can become re-articulated and countered once it is launched into a discursive trajectory, unmoored from the intentions by which it is animated” (CHU, 158). The expression which causes the most violent response is accordingly the one that would denaturalize the superstitions that constitute the state form itself (UG, 180). In this respect, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, which argues that the Biblical text is the product of human labor, error, and accumulation, can be read as a critique of the reduction of religion to a transcendental unity legitimating the State; the backlash following its publication was entirely predictable. People fought for their servitude, becoming agents of the conatus of a repressive social apparatus, because of the fantasy structure that desires universal recognition for the particularity of one’s own religious feelings. The TTP is then a critique of the cathected site of this fantasy/anxiety, the Biblical text itself. To demonstrate that this text is the product of human composition is essentially to dress it in drag. The superstitious want nothing of this: God and gender have natural meanings, not constructed ones. Guided purely by their imaginations, they “are eager not to guide men by reason but to restrain them by fear so that they may shun

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evil rather than love virtue, [and] have no other object than to make others as wretched as themselves” (E4P63Sch1). In her discussion of gay marriage, Butler reveals another such cathected site in the child and the production of State norms to control the “natural” kinship relations of heterosexual marriage. Here, “the figure of the child is one eroticized site in the reproduction of culture, one that implicitly raises the question of whether there will be a sure transmission of culture through heterosexual procreation . . . whether culture will be defined, in part, as the prerogative of heterosexuality itself ” (UG, 124). Put differently, the TTP was subjected to violent criticism because it violates the miscegenation taboo: the site of cultural reproduction is shown to be impure. Nonheterosexual, nonmatrimonial kinship relations are attacked in the same way, and for the same reason. A body confronted with transcendental social norms that deny its very possibility is at risk of death, because in order to comport with the social norms, it has to cease to be what it is. Spinoza writes, “that which constitutes the form of the human body consists in this, that its parts communicate their motions to one another in a certain fixed proportion” (E4P39Pr). To lose this proportion is to die; the destruction of the physical body is only accidental, as the example of the amnesiac Spanish poet indicates (E4P39Sch).14 By dividing individuals into those who are recognized by prevailing social norms and those who must cease to be in order to obtain recognition, and by casting the norms as natural and necessary, such a situation establishes a politically induced precarity on the base of our shared precariousness. How, then, does one proceed in the face of the apparently unavoidable violence of the State and its transcendental categories? The initial point is to deny the move to transcendence, and claim that the socius is itself malleable, because we ourselves constitute it, and because we ourselves can change. Recent Spinoza scholarship accordingly points to “immanence,” and Butler points both to immanence and to iterability as the way in which immanence is lived. Such an approach would allow norms to be revised, providing for the survival of those previously excluded, and in this precise sense would be “nonviolent.” Such nonviolence would simultaneously pose a direct threat to the survival of any socius that was premised on the eternal fixity of its norms. The sine qua non of this new ethics is the recognition of one’s own finitude, and resisting the urge to seek refuge in transcendental categories. As Butler puts it, we need “to be willing, in the name of the human, to allow the human to become something other than what it is traditionally assumed to be” (UG, 35). Even the bedrock category of the “human” is revisable: conatus as a principle of deconstitution.


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The tragic Spinoza To Butler’s idiosyncratic Hegelianism, then, one must add an idiosyncratic Spinozism. Butler’s references to Spinoza are more than citations to conatus; they point us, by way of Hegel, to a subaltern Spinoza defined by a recognition of our finitude and corporeal vulnerability, a (following Albiac) “tragic” Spinoza who takes as axiomatic our ability to be destroyed by the indefinitely many forces larger and more powerful than ourselves. This tragic Spinoza reasons rigorously from our vulnerability, by way of our affects, to a series of theses about the fragility of the concepts and social institutions we must create in order to sustain ourselves. The tragic Spinoza is not productively framed by a simple opposition to Hegel, one that accepts Hegel’s attachment of meaningful negativity to transcendence; indeed, the tragic Spinoza can perhaps best be located in the space opened by rejecting Hegel’s false dichotomy between his own emphasis on the labor of the negative and Spinoza’s supposedly flat, abstract being. The tragic Spinoza matters now because so much of contemporary democratic theory is defined, one way or another, by its opposition to Hegel. Butler’s intervention in this regard is crucial, because it points in two directions at once: both to a Hegel not defined by radical teleological closure and to a Spinoza whose recuperation is able to proceed not just from an affirmation of the multitude and of joy, but from a recognition of the very real difficulties in constituting that multitude. What Butler sees, and what the tragic Spinoza shows clearly, is that the politics of democracy is, at the end of the day, a politics, which is to say that it involves a willingness to admit that democracy is, at best, a project whose fulfillment is in no way guaranteed, not even as a tendency. Spinoza focuses on a democracy in which “everyone absolutely” maintains political rights, so long as they “live honestly,” have their own right, and maintain the laws of the commonwealth (TP, 11.3). In commenting on this passage, Hardt and Negri propose the following: When Spinoza calls democracy absolute he assumes that democracy is really the basis of every society. The vast majority of our political, economic, affective, linguistic, and productive interactions are always based on democratic relations. At times we call these practices of social life spontaneous and at others think of them as fixed by tradition and custom, but really these are the civil processes of democratic exchange, communication, and cooperation that we develop and transform every day. If such democratic interactions were not the basis of our living in common, then society itself would be impossible. That is why for Spinoza other forms of government are distortions or limitations of human society whereas democracy is its natural fulfillment.15

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In this gloss, it seems to me, one sees quite clearly both the power of the anti-Hegelian Spinoza, and its limitation. The power should be apparent. Against any top-down teleological closure, one opposes a democracy that is fundamental, open, and thereby affirming of the power of the multitude.16 The tragic Spinoza offers two sorts of qualification to that line of thought. First, insofar as a democratic socius is lived, the formal definition of democracy becomes constitutive: one is speaking of existence, not essence. Spinoza’s exclusion of those guilty of crime and infamy, as well as his stipulation of the need to live “honestly,” bear witness to continuous efforts to restrict democracy by branding those who do not commit to prevailing social norms as deviant, immoral, or otherwise as refusing to live by the “laws.” The tragic Spinoza offers an account by way of which those efforts can be brought into question, even if his own text sometimes repeats them.17 Too many lives are forced into precarity, a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (FW, 25). To live well, to remove the fixation on death created by politically induced precarity, requires livable social norms that respond to human precariousness, not with a program of securitization and differential suffering, but with an ethical recognition of our common fragility. It is impossible to be free in the relevant sense without livable, revisable social norms. Second, as is often noted, Spinoza’s thought is marked by a fluctuating regard for the masses.18 I would like to conclude by suggesting that the tragic Spinoza offers us a way of thinking through this ambivalence. The problem with the multitude for Spinoza is clear enough: the “vulgar” are defined entirely by their passive affects and thus constantly subject to manipulation by political elites. Superstitious and buffeted about by the machinations of others, the multitude constantly risk devolution into a Hobbesian mob, desiring nothing more than that others be as miserable as themselves. The problem is constitutive; because of our vulnerable finitude, we are all susceptible to ignorance of causes and manipulation by others. This implies that the project of democracy faces ineliminable problems generated by inappropriate responses to human finitude, that is, responses that attempt to deny it or project it onto others. Butler’s work tirelessly not only provides examples of those inappropriate responses but also attempts to theorize a sense of political agency that provides resources to combat them. Hence, she only offers a commitment to a democracy of resistance that simultaneously emphasizes apprehension of our equality as finite beings, and the


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need to articulate the specific, local ways that norms and social institutions are themselves inherently vulnerable due to their dependence on iteration. In other words, Butler’s understanding of politics is radically antiteleological; that this account can be traced to Spinoza suggests that the affirmative Spinoza needs nuance. It is true that our essence, qua rational being, always agrees with that of others. But understanding how to manage our existence introduces a host of problems for which the axiom in E4 offers an organizing principle. If one forgets the gap between essence and existence, and tries to apply our essential nature as striving beings directly to our spatiotemporal existence as finite, vulnerable beings, one gets an abstract account of resistance, a subtle reinscription of teleology, or both. In particular, one needs to avoid a lapse into the transcendental subjectivity of the multitude.19 In different terms, although it is certainly true that Spinoza’s problem here cannot be read as a repetition of the Hobbesian problem of how to constitute a “people” out of the multitude, it remains that Spinoza’s problem also should not be read as an outright rejection of the Hobbesian problem either.20 Hobbes put the problem transcendentally; for Spinoza, one needs to think the constitution of the multitude immanently. Butler’s work on iterability and the ways in which we simultaneously embody and transgress norms seems designed, in part, to do exactly this. When Hegel reflected on the example of a devolved multitude that was closest to him, the Terror of the French Revolution, he had very little to offer those whose lives were extinguished on the “slaughter bench” of history. All he could provide was the theological assurance that their deaths had been meaningful in the larger sense of the development of world history. Today, we are no longer confident that such a redemptive teleology is at work, either retrospectively or as a realizable project. To affirm the “constitutive process” of democracy without lapsing into theology is to affirm the “monstrosity” of the multitude, as “that excess as remainder that is irreducible to the antinomies of legal and political thought . . . that permanent excess of force over law” (Montag, “Who’s Afraid,” 663). As Negri proposes, the multitude needs to be thought as “a common subject, a collective force, a being other . . . just like those carnivalesque masses [of before] . . . who . . . never became ‘people,’ but only multitude of desires, subverting any manipulation and any mystification.”21 At the same time, Butler’s tragic Spinoza serves as a stark reminder of Balibar’s warning that “the constitutive role of the multitudo very much risks . . . appearing as purely theoretical, in the bad sense of the term, in the sense of a theory which

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remains permanently inadequate to practice” (“Anti-Orwell,” 17). Perversely, one obstacle to the proper appreciation of this constitutive role is the need to view Spinoza as the philosopher of positivity who allows no place for treating things as externally caused and thus as contingent and vulnerable. Accordingly, when Negri suggests of Butler that “no matter how powerful and effective her attack on patriarchal Power is, its continual assertion of Hegelian dialectics limits its critical impact” (Praise, 281n15), we need to proceed with caution: at issue in her “assertion of Hegelian dialectics” is precisely a materialist reconfiguration of Hegelian terms in an effort to discover in them “only that which best agrees with practice, certainly and indubitably demonstrated by reason and rigorously deduced from the condition of human nature itself ” (TP, 1.4). It turns out that this condition is finite, vulnerable, and fearful and that we ignore this at our peril.

Notes 1 See also UG 195 on the “labor of the negative.” Spinoza references per convention; I generally follow the translation in Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992). Original text: Benedictus de Spinoza, Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelburg: Carl Winters Universitaetsbuchhandlung, 1925), with modifications to the translation my own. Butler references are as follows: CHU: Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000). DL: “The Desire to Live: Spinoza’s Ethics under Pressure,” in Politics and the Passions 1500–1850, ed. Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano and Daniela Coli (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 111–30. FW: Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). GA: Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). PLP: The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). PL: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). SD: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). UG: Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).


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2 See also the references at FW p. 30; GA pp. 43–4, 49; PLP pp. 27–8, 62; and UG p. 31, 235. I am not aware of any secondary work that goes much beyond pointing to the conatus references in Butler. The best work on her recent “ethics,” for example, Annika Thiem, Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), is almost silent on the topic. My sense is that, among the prominent French interpretations, Butler’s Spinoza is closest to Macherey’s. In addition to Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: François Maspero, 1979) [HS], see “Spinoza, the End of History,” in In a Materialist Way, ed. Warren Montag and trans. Ted Stolze (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 136–58. 3 Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 333 et passim. 4 This development is explicit in, for example, Laurent Bove, La Stratégie du conatus: Affirmation et Résistance chez Spinoza (Paris: J. Vrin, 1997) and Filippo del Lucchese, Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation (New York: Continuum, 2009). My treatment of the Spinoza literature will be somewhat synecdochal, as my point is to engage a strategy of reading Spinoza and not to produce a full engagement with the scholarship implicated, to varying degrees, in that strategy. It seems to me that the strategy originates in Deleuze’s Expressionism book, and finds a central moment of expression in Negri’s Savage Anomaly. Both Deleuze’s and Negri’s later work make their own overall position harder to assess. 5 For the divergences on this point between Hegel and the Spinoza of the Political Treatise, see especially Macherey, “Spinoza, the end of History” and Antonio Negri, “Spinoza’s Anti-Modernity,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18 (1995), 1–15. 6 To mourn someone—to include his or her in history—is to recognize his or hers as a human life, connected somehow to one’s own. This is why textual practices like Hegel’s exclusion of the nomads of Central Asia and Siberia as “unhistorical” (Werke XII, p. 143), and the San Francisco Chronicle’s refusal to print Palestinian obituaries, are political acts: “we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation building” (PL, p. 35). That is, “the prohibition on certain forms of public grieving itself constitutes the public sphere on the basis of such a prohibition” (PL, p. 37). The nomads, Hegel reminds us, have “themselves not stepped forward to historical territory [Boden]” (Werke XII, p. 143; my emphasis). 7 Warren Montag proposes that this “transindividualization of desire and affect” is what constitutes “the danger of the multitude in Spinoza’s philosophy” (“Who’s Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State,” South Atlantic


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Quarterly 104 (2005), 655–73: 670). Cf. Macherey: conatus is “an effort to persevere in its being which . . . attaches [finite things], through the mediation of their mutual relations, to all of nature, of which these things are precisely only ‘parts’ ” (“Spinoza and the End of History,” p. 144). 8 For more on this point in Butler, see Thiem, Unbecoming, pp. 51–91, and the literature cited there. 9 Gabriel Albiac, “The Empty Synagogue,” in The New Spinoza, eds Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: University Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 109–44: 139. 10 These points are emphasized in Pierre Macherey, Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza: La quatrième partie, la condition humaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 59–63. See also Hasana Sharp, “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza,” Political Theory 35 (2007), 732–55; and Caroline Williams, “Thinking the Political in the Wake of Spinoza: Power, Affect and Imagination in the Ethics,” Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007), 349–69. 11 See, for example, E1P29, E1P33, E2P44, and E1P33Sch1. 12 Hobbes had a similar view: see my Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 51–69; some of what follows draws upon the discussion there. 13 In Spinoza, see E2D7; for Butler, see PL pp. 41–5. I am aware that I am glossing a substantial interpretive debate about some very difficult Spinozist texts; for its contours, see Étienne Balibar, “Potentia multitudinis, quae una veluti mente ducitur: Spinoza on the Body Politic,” in Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy, ed. Stephen H. Daniel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 70–99; and Montag, “Who’s Afraid.” 14 That one’s identity is found in a specific proportion of forces is emphasized in Jeffrey Bernstein, “The Ethics of Spinoza’s Physics,” North American Spinoza Society Monograph 10 (2002), 3–19. For the scholium’s reference to the Spanish poet as it pertains to “death,” see especially Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 32–6. 15 Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 311. 16 Del Lucchese notes that the power of democracy relative to other forms of government follows from the fragility axiom: the much larger multitude ipso facto has more power than the patricians or the king (Conflict, p. 135). 17 This tension—the extent to which “Spinoza’s work from beginning to end remains haunted by figures of the inassimilable, the exceptions to the


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democracy without exceptions, and simultaneously by the impossibility of their exclusion”—is explored in Montag, Bodies, pp. 86–9. 18 See, especially, Montag, Bodies; Montag, “Who’s Afraid;” and Balibar, “Spinoza: The Anti-Orwell,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 3–37. 19 I raise this line of objection to Hardt and Negri’s Empire, relying on The Savage Anomaly for Negri’s Spinoza, in “Capital sive natura: Spinoza and the Immanence of Empire,” International Studies in Philosophy 37:2 (2005), 29–48; see also the related complaints about Empire’s strangely nonlocal sense of the body of the multitude in Margret Grebowicz, “Relocating the Non-Place: Reading Negri With/Against Haraway,” International Studies in Philosophy 38:2 (2006), 39–54. On the other hand, in a later text, Negri points directly to the problem and proposes that “Spinozan democracy . . . must be conceived as a social practice of singularities that intersect in a mass process” (“Reliqua desideratur. A Conjecture for a Definition of the Concept of Democracy in the Final Spinoza,” in The New Spinoza, 218–46: 237). This formulation seems to me to be better, but Negri’s retention of language about democracy as a “tendency” (see, e.g. 240) still contains the remnants of a teleology that Spinoza rejects out of hand. I will not pursue the point here, but it seems to me that Hardt and Negri’s Multitude is considerably less prone to the problem than Empire. 20 For a brief and forceful statement of Spinoza’s rejection of transcendence, see Negri, “Reliqua Desideratur.” For Hobbes’s constitution of the people from the multitude, see my Hobbes and the Making, pp. 119–26. 21 Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 216. Hardt and Negri make similar points about the “constitutive process” in Multitude (see 289–312 and 336–40).

9

Thinking the Space of the Subject between Hegel and Spinoza Caroline Williams

Introduction While it is certainly possible to locate a series of common themes within the philosophical perspectives of Hegel and Spinoza, this chapter will not seek a rapprochement of the two philosophers. Neither will it interrogate the nature of Hegel’s dispute with Spinoza. Instead my aim is to reflect upon some of the theoretical effects of this dispute within contemporary continental philosophy, specifically in relation to the concept of the subject. Certainly, these two thinkers share a preoccupation with the form of relation between being and thought seeking, through a philosophy of immanence, to gather up this relation as a knowledge that may become the power of the infinite, or the Absolute. There is, therefore, a certain proximity of philosophical direction to be noted. Indeed, as several commentators have pointed out, Hegel’s philosophy follows in the shadow of Spinoza, borne out by the former’s well-known observation that “thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all philosophy.”1 We might further speculate that in sharing Spinoza’s problematic, and by tracing out, once again, the elements of his thinking, Hegel also returns us to Spinoza and to the power of an infinite thought. It is also apparent, however, that a relation of tension marks the intersection of these two philosophies, played out in so many contemporary appropriations of the two, as well as within the confrontation of Hegel’s philosophy with that of Spinoza. It is the contemporary framing of this tension between the two that is the central focus here. My interest, then, is primarily not with an interrogation of the nature of Hegel’s dispute with Spinoza, or with an assessment of its ultimate status or utility,

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but rather with the form taken by this opposition in a range of contemporary positions. However, there is a sense in which an aspect of Hegel’s critique is central to my problematic here, namely to think the space of the subject (rather than the presuppositions of the subject itself) between Hegel and Spinoza, since it is clear that the idealist reading of Spinoza presented by Hegel continues to hold weight, finding various echoes, repetitions, and reversals in contemporary thought. Insofar as Hegel locates in Spinoza’s philosophy an inert, passive, a priori conception of Substance, which lacks a dialectical logic of exposition and manifestation, he portrays him as unable to account for substance as subject, as that doubling which sets up opposition, self-moving negativity, the spontaneous becoming of itself. Thus, in the historical journey of consciousness toward knowledge presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, self-consciousness “. . . in its own restless process of superseding itself, or negativity”2 “. . . enriches itself till it has wrested from consciousness the entire substance and has absorbed into itself the entire structure of the essentialities of substance” (PhS §801), a movement that “is the circle that returns into itself, the circle that presupposes its beginnings and reaches it only at the end” (PhS §802). Furthermore, and as Alexandre Kojève echoes, it appears that Spinoza’s philosophy offers no concrete temporalization or historicization of substance but only the latter’s abstract eternity; he is unable to give expression to the particularity and differentiation of the world, as well as to the real existence and emergence of concrete forms of individuality, personality, or subjectivity.3 Spinoza, as Hegel famously notes, “divests all things of their determination and particularity and casts them back into the one absolute substance, wherein they are simply swallowed up, and all life in itself is utterly destroyed” (LHP, Vol. III, 288). We may nonetheless agree with a range of important commentaries upon this Hegel-Spinoza matrix that Hegel misses the essential structure of Spinoza’s philosophy in making these claims, particularly the relation between substance and attribute, which should be viewed, as Pierre Macherey powerfully argues, not in accordance with a relation of hierarchy but rather one of reciprocity and interdependence.4 Absolute substance has this multiplicity and infinity of attributes within itself as the product of its activity and causality, just as it likewise requires the instantiation of the modes. Perhaps, Spinoza’s purely spatial logic of actuality and multiplicity requires no temporal logic of beginning or manifestation, a dialectic, because this ontology of production already has its outside on the inside. Indeed, it may be against Hegel’s claim of Spinoza’s acosmism that Jean-Luc Nancy will describe Spinoza as “the first thinker of the world.”5

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If we point, therefore, to some well-known—if still sometimes controversial— aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy, it is not in order to advance the Hegelian critique briefly described above nor to suggest there is now space for a thinking of “the subject.” While it might be argued that the philosophical motif of subjectivity is central to Hegel’s philosophy and to the Hegelian-inspired tradition of philosophical discourse, to think the space of the subject from the perspective of Spinoza’s philosophy arguably leads to a philosophical cul-de-sac or dead-end, or at best, a paradox: namely, that of the subject, or thought, trying to think its own conditions, its own beginnings. If Spinoza, like Hegel, finds the true path of philosophy to be freedom and knowledge of causality, for him this journey is not the movement and genesis of a subject overcoming the inner-most contradictions of self and world. We need then to consider precisely how and why the space of subjectivity might be important in Spinoza’s philosophy. My chapter will be divided into three parts. After identifying some of the philosophical risks inherent within the Hegel-Spinoza matrix explored here, the chapter will assemble the space of subjectless subjectivity, or subjectivity without the subject, in Spinoza’s philosophy.6 Here, I will explore the figures of imagination and conatus as processes without a subject before turning to investigate the terms of a possible dialog between psychoanalysis, Spinoza’s thought, and contemporary Hegelian perspectives.

Unraveling the subject with Spinoza Significantly, we find only two direct references to the subject as subjectum in Spinoza’s Ethics, both of which occur in relation to the first kind of knowledge, where an imaginative, self-consistent subject finds its freedom in ignorance of the nature of things, and the realm of causality (see E IIIP5; E VAx1). On the one hand, the absence of the concept of subject is clearly because the empiricotranscendental doublet had yet to crystallize in thought, had yet to master (if it ever could) the elements governing its formation and hence find its way—and its voice—in philosophical discourse (there is no grammatical “I”). As Foucault tells us in The Order of Things, there must be an analytic of finitude in order to make appear the subject, Man, and establish a contract between an object or totality and a philosophical subject caught up in interminable reflexivity with itself.7 On the other hand, there is little discussion of the subject simply because both Spinoza’s conception of the world as “the spatial totality of the sense of existence” to use Nancy’s beautiful formulation (1988, 54), coupled


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with what I will call here, drawing upon the rich and adventurous formulations of contemporary scholarship,8 his ontology of encounter, require no theory or faculty of consciousness as interiority since the very starting point of this ontology precludes the kind of containment or identity that generally accompanies such a position. There remains, it might be argued, a residual idealism—an implicit Hegelianism—in contemporary positions such as Alain Badiou’s location of a subjective modality in the intellect as the only way Spinoza can link being to the infinite, because arguably Spinoza’s philosophy has no requirement for intellect to act as a subjective agency.9 Indeed, Étienne Balibar has suggested that one of the central reasons for the allegiance to Spinoza by many currents of modern philosophy, from vitalism to structuralism—despite their many theoretical divergences—is precisely because together they viewed him “as an adversary of subjectivity” and as a profound critic of the “primacy of consciousness.”10 Indeed, Balibar goes so far as to suggest (rewriting Althusser’s well-known—and rather unHegelian—formula of “history as a process without a subject or goal”) that we find in Spinoza something rather odd in classic modern philosophy, a process (or anthropology) of consciousness without a subject. In the discussion here, I want to explore further this fascinating formulation and to think what its fleshing out might entail for a thinking of the paradoxical space of subjectless subjectivity in Spinoza’s thought. The kind of approach I suggest here might appear to mark a clear departure from Hegelian philosophy. This is far from a complete philosophical break, however, since there are several interesting Hegelian-inflected configurations of the subject within contemporary thought that also seek to subvert the subject and develop what we may describe cautiously as antihumanist perspectives. If we trace, with Giorgio Agamben, the etymological roots of the concept of absolute, we might find the rationale for these readings of Hegel.11 The root comes from the Latin verb “solvo,” which indicates the work of loosening, freeing, unbinding that leads something back to itself. Thus, we find the Hegelianism of Judith Butler’s performative subject, always in the process of “undoing,” and Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian subject forever plagued by the specter of negativity and incompletion, where negativity and desire become part of an ontological rift that constitutes a subject forever in search of itself, for it is always other in order to be itself; where the subject is always caught at the outset in a relation of an inside (alienation) and an outside (failure of signification) that constitutes and limits it only by dividing it from itself. If we can agree that such positions have their antecedents in Hegel’s thought, and specifically the dialectic between master and slave, we

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must also note that it is not to those reductive philosophical tropes of teleology, rationality, foundation, and metaphysics that historically have been understood to ground the theoretical—albeit dialectical—contact between subjectivity and totality. Such thinkers have taken their point of departure not from Kojève’s humanist—and gloomy political portrayal of the end of history, but instead from Hyppolite’s continuous interrogation of the Hegelian theme of the completion of self-consciousness, his attention to “the disquiet of the self,”12 as well as his bringing together of Hegelian negativity and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Unlike Hegel’s absolute knowledge, synthetically developed in the long dialectical journey through its various historical forms, Lacan’s object of desire (objet petit a) will forever deceive the subject—its meaning will always dissipate in the light of the subject’s experience of it. Hence, Lacan describes his own strategic use of Hegelian philosophy in terms of its strange lure: “Our use of Hegel’s phenomenology does not imply any allegiance to his system . . . It is our own Aufhebung that transforms Hegel’s, his own lure, in a moment that reveals, not the steps of an ideal process but the avatars of a lack” (cited in Macherey, 1998, 55).13 Butler similarly claims that the “dystopic resolution” of Hegel’s discussion of Mastery and Slavery and his portrayal of the “Unhappy Consciousness” is one of the least interrogated parts of his historical narrative.14 She proposes to “arrest the text prior to its resolution in Spirit . . .  to pursue the path that Hegel introduces only to foreclose” (1997, 34). If there is a dialectic of the subject at work in these positions, it is one deprived of genesis and resolution. Perhaps, it is also a position that may share the space of subjectivity identified above with Spinoza’s thought. Before turning to map out and analyze such a conceptual space, let us first highlight two significant risks or tensions marking this place between Hegel and Spinoza. A first difficulty, at least in my view, is the risky implications endemic to Hegelian readings of finitude (e.g. Hyppolite’s attention to the “disquiet of the self,” Nancy’s focus upon the “restlessness of the negative”). I wish only to highlight this problem, a full discussion of which is outside the scope of the present chapter. The logic of such an analytics of finitude, if I may continue to utilize Foucault’s formulation (or what Bruno Bosteels has recently referred to as the jargon of finitude15), is the kind of ethical turn prescribed within philosophicopolitical critique. This turn is, simultaneously, a turn away from the problem of the Infinite (as the existence of an infinity of other worlds and ways of being). That philosophy must begin with the Infinite and conceive the finite through the infinite is arguably one of the central tenets of Spinoza’s philosophy.


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Classical thought, Deleuze reminds us, continually loses itself in infinity, in its attempts to place the finite within its order, and to trace a relation that may raise life to the infinite itself (Deleuze, 1988). This is a problem persistently traversing Spinoza’s thought. Indeed, we cannot think with Spinoza without reference to this aspect of the infinite. A second risk, which nicely illustrates the productive tension between Hegel and Spinoza that I wish to locate and develop here, concerns the way in which this tension is also played out in some of the contemporary Hegelian positions noted here. For example, in The Psychic Life of Power and, more recently, with an attention to the ethical relation to the other, Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler has sought to flesh out her ontological commitments to the (now unraveled) subject. Here, she has drawn attention to a “passionate attachment to existence,” a “desire to be,” or “a striving to persist in being,” a potentia or possibility that governs the subject and has its source not in a Hegelian/Lacanianinspired idea of a desiring subject but rather in Spinoza’s concept of conatus.16 Indeed, in the essay on Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness to which I refer above, Butler argues that the body, presented by Hegel as an ever-changing inchoate mass disavowed or renounced but never finally suppressed by consciousness, itself proliferates and exceeds the domains of power that inscribe and fabricate it. She thus speculates whether the body as desire might have as its final aim, “the continuation of itself . . . linking Hegel, Freud and Foucault all back to Spinoza’s conatus,” where the dynamic of withdrawal and capture of desire (the doubling of desire) signals “the vulnerability of every strategy of subjection” (Butler, 1997, 62). Likewise, Lacan’s Hegelianism is perhaps supplemented by a latent Spinozism, where the latter’s pantheism is understood as “the reduction of the field of God to the universality of the signifier.”17 We have already noted an aspect of Badiou’s reading of Spinoza, which in Hegelian fashion finds in the tensions of the Ethics a “surging forth of a subject” or subject effect, identifying the disjuncture of infinite and finite as the root of this, and instead infusing Spinoza’s conception of substance with a mathematical infinite (Badiou, 2006). I thus merely draw attention to Badiou’s latent, inescapable Spinozism everywhere present in Logics of World and perhaps deserving of a research paper in itself.18 Thus, it is within this dynamic and complex space, between Hegel and Spinoza, that I will reconfigure a conception of subjectivity without the subject. I seek also to respond to the Hegelian-inspired critique of Spinoza argued most forcefully by Žižek, namely that Spinoza’s concept of conatus as a generative potentia and positivity is unable to conceive the “elementary ‘twist’ of dialectical inversion

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characterising negativity” and associated with Lacan’s own theorization of lack.19 Against this Hegelian critique, and embracing the idea of subjectless subjectivity introduced above, it may be argued that Spinoza’s philosophy offers—and perhaps in ways compatible with contemporary Hegelianism—the conceptual resources to reconfigure the subject. To construct such an argument I will draw upon the recent trend or “affective turn” within contemporary theory that develops in the wake of Spinoza.20 This permits a reconsideration of the threshold or boundaries of subjectivity as well as offering some resources to think about affect as an always constructed, mediated, and culturalized intensity or force that exceeds the subject. Affect also brings into play two additional key concepts from Spinoza. First, a notion of conatus both as a generative force or potentia that pulsates through all forms, driving their preservation and persistence and also significantly as a fractural, conflict-ridden site through which affects must pass. This fractural aspect of conative striving is important since it permits one to emphasize the ambivalent structure of the affects described by Spinoza in Ethics Part III. Second, a concept of imagination conceived not as a subjective faculty of the subject but as an impersonal conductor of affects. In my view, these two concepts present in the Ethics provide the conceptual foundation for my argument here since as processes without a subject they carry the logic of affect’s autonomy still further. They are also ones with great psychoanalytic resonance. I propose, therefore, to establish their role and function in Spinoza’s philosophy, before investigating the terms of a possible dialog between psychoanalysis, Spinoza’s thought, and contemporary Hegelian perspectives.

Spinoza’s psychophysics How, then, might we theorize subjectivity as an impersonal process without a subject, which is itself relational and affective, extensive and intensive, and which precludes the ideas of boundary and containment? We have seen already that Spinoza’s point of reference is certainly not the subject as subjectum (which is deconstructed in the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics). It is crucial, therefore, to underscore the classical conception of “individual” embraced in his approach. An individuum is a composite of differential relations between bodies/things, and it can refer to human and nonhuman forms alike. Indeed, an important aspect of Spinoza’s ontology has to be the constitutive relationality established


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in his approach, which calls into question the existence of boundaries between individual things. Relation, here, must not simply be thought as a link, connection, or association between two or more discrete objects; relation is literally a “taking in hand,” a production of something that did not exist before and which, through the process of relation, becomes an aspect of that thing’s existence. Furthermore, when a body is in motion—and we might agree with this dynamic ontology that there is always the potential for variation, then the body will exceed or overflow its current state. To be an individual is always to be composed of other bodies. The more complex a body then the more relations it will have with other bodies and the more its identity will be compatible with a great many different entities. An individual can be a rock, an animal, a poem, a musical score, a virus, a storm, and, of course, all individuals are subject to infinite variability and possibility.21 To be an individual, then, is to be a (shared) center of relations of motion and rest; it is also to participate in a kind of virtual reality of possibility, that which Brian Massumi calls (after Foucault) an incorporeal materialism. Individuals can be simple and more complex: the greater the order of complexity, we might say, the greater the power to interact with the rest of nature. There is, then, a dynamic reciprocity between the unity of substance and the multiplicity of “individuals” which is always more than the dialectical exchange between two parts. If we wish now to place Spinoza’s theory of affect into this reading of Spinoza’s ontological system, we may do so only by extricating affect from any essentialist position that seeks its naturalization as an emotion or feeling attributable to a conscious subject. Affect cannot simply be housed by either body or mind and is often viewed as overflowing the body. Affect passes through, between and beyond the subjects who remain to all intents and purposes its effects. Affect anchors identity through its normative displays and often compels or moves the subject toward a certain course of action. Spinoza defines affect as “the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections” (E IIID3). In this way, and to the extent that affects communicate ideas and images as well as forces and powers, they are, in an important sense semiotic as well as material. Spinoza describes them as images and corporeal traces, eventually materialized in signs, norms, social and political practices, modes of living, and ethical relations. Ethics thus becomes a kind of psychophysics, for Spinoza, who proceeds in a materialist way by recognizing the irreducible complexity of the affects, which cannot be attributed to either an agentic capacity or an intention of the will. In this way, affects are best understood as transitive states through which bodies pass, they meander through and between bodies, resting like “foreign objects,”

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or excessive impersonal forces. It is this force field, which is explored through Spinoza’s concepts of conatus, as the fractural site through which affects have to pass, and imagination, as the impersonal conductor of affects. These are the twin concepts, developed in the Ethics, which are able to account for the unfolding of affective life. They are also, I argue, the ones with greatest psychoanalytic resonance. However, it must be underscored that I am not seeking to reduce the conatus to the Freudian drive or libido. This would be to distort the antihumanist direction of Spinoza’s argument. Yet, it is apparent from the preceding discussion that affect has a certain metabolic or energetic structure that passes between bodies conceived in an extremely broad way. As the essence of a thing, conatus denotes the striving to persist and persevere in itself (E IVP22Dem). This quantum of vital force or power in its human shape is a form of desire, an energetic force that pulsates through bodies and is not wholly contained or controlled by them. But it entails no internal (ontological drawn) limitation or Spaltung, no deathly force, no negativity and no lack. It thus appears, at the very least, incompatible with Freud’s mature reflections emphasizing the co-presence of life and death drives in the psyche. Likewise, the Lacanian account of desire arises as a presence only from a background of absence or lack, indicating the impossibility of sublating desire and reconciling identity with recognition, also appears at odds with Spinoza’s perspective. Hence, Žižek’s emphatic Hegelian rejection of Spinoza: What is missing in Spinoza is the elementary “twist” of dialectical inversion characterizing negativity, the inversion by means of which the very renunciation of desire turns into desire of renunciation, and so on. What is unthinkable for him is what Freud terms “death-drive”: the idea that conatus is based on a fundamental act of self-sabotaging. (Žižek, 2003, 34)

Leaving aside at this point the broader question concerning the status of the conatus of nonhuman individuals (what might be the agency of these objects/ things, and how might they conduct or channel affects?) it is necessary to scrutinize still further the terms of debate opened up by Žižek. If we can agree that that the conatus is a striving for perseverance or indefinite existence beyond the present, then any striving thing will seek to maintain an equilibrium among its parts/relations while being in a state of continuous regeneration and becoming. In order to promote its persistence, the conatus of any complex individual body (be it an eco-system, or a political collective, such as the multitude) will tend toward greater interaction and communication with its wider environment. Furthermore, and as we shall develop below, insofar as the conatus unfolds


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affective intensities within a social field, it becomes a fractural site upon which the affective density of the political unfolds, introducing what Laurent Bove has called a dynamic of affirmation and resistance.22 It is for this reason, I think, that the name of Spinoza persists in psychoanalytic discussions (e.g. in the writings of Lacan and Butler) regarding the production of the subject. His name persists precisely because the dynamic account of affectivity and affective relations offered in the Ethics elicits a framework for theorizing the sites of ambivalent identity, latent antagonism, and resistance in ways that exceed/challenge the Hegelianism of Žižek’s position. However, I have argued that it is not enough to describe affect simply as an unconscious process immanent to experience. Affect is not an originary experience of a body upon which a world is constructed. Thus, in a Spinozist way, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write, “For the affect, if it is, is only that: the affection of an inside by an outside, therefore the division of the two and their reciprocal penetration.”23 There can be no psychology of affects but only a necessary study of the mechanisms and forces contributing to the shaping of political bodies, subjects, and collectivities. It is likely for this reason that Judith Butler, following psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, proposes to consider the drives (e.g. eros and thanatos), not as primary sources but following instead from “an interiorisation of the enigmatic drives of others and carry[ing] the residues of those originally external desires. As a result, every drive is beset by a foreignness (étrangèreté), and the ‘I’ finds itself to be foreign to itself in its most elemental impulses” (Butler, 2005, 71). Adrian Johnston, also drawing upon Lacan has theorized the continuous process of reciprocal modification linking natural and symbolic registers, and emphasizing the plasticity of affect as it morphs into signifiers which can never become its own stable referents. It is for this reason that I propose to examine the interactive aspect of the conatus as giving rise to a fractured field of affective relations rather than merely a primary drive toward persistence and preservation. The basis for such a suggestion is abundantly present in the Ethics where Spinoza considers affects according to the field of relational forces that shape and nurture them. Placed within the context of his theory of affective life, Spinoza shows us the way in which the conatus (desire) mobilizes joy or sadness to sculpt and shape the intensity or potentia of the body. As transitive states through which bodies pass, the primary affects may involve increases or decreases in our power to act, depending upon the kind of affection or passion they engender, and the form of encounter produced, and they will vary in intensity according to particular political field within which they emerge. It is perhaps at this point

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in the genesis of subjectivity that Lacan will refer to the wandering and erring of desire, as the subject searches endlessly for the imaginary objet petit a as the lost Cause of desire, and at this point too, that Spinoza will note the way that individuals are often conscious of their appetites but ignorant of the causes that determine them to act. The knot here tied (for both thinkers, perhaps) between the figures and forms of imaginary life and knowledge, passion and turbulence, the dependence on others, objects, relations without which no persistence is possible, “implicates desire in a matrix of life that may well, at least partially, deconstitute the ‘I’ who endeavours to live.”24 In this way, the power of the affects, while appearing to originate in the power of life or conatus, nonetheless fold back upon this being and contribute to its very subjection. This further indicates the autonomy of affect, which is only retroactively part of the “inner-world of the subject” (through the imaginary figures through which day-to-day life persists). Instead, affect circulates ambivalently throughout the social body within and outside the moorings of power, and it is thus part of the dynamic of composition and decomposition. Anticipating, in various ways, Butler’s own discussions of ambivalence, Spinoza also argues that the affects are subject to vacillation or ambivalence (fluctuatio animi) and that the object or image of the other can be the cause of many conflicting passions (see E IIIP17S). Significantly, conflicting passions may persist simultaneously. Thus, the mind can be drawn, at one and the same time, toward passive and active affects. “From this it is clear,” Spinoza writes, “that we are in many respects at the mercy of external causes and are tossed about like the waves of the sea when driven by contrary winds, unsure of the outcome and of our fate” (E IIIP59S). This perpetual push-pull of the affects is of vital importance within a socio-political milieu, suggesting the malleability of the affects. It follows that affects such as love may be built upon hatred, fears upon nascent hopes, and sadness upon hidden joys; as Spinoza tells us in Part IV, Proposition 6, the force and increase of any passive affect can surpass all other activities and powers should it remain firmly fixed there. Such ambivalent and autonomous networks of affective relations can be extremely powerful and contagious, disrupting relations of agreement and disagreement and finding their (temporary) coherence, to varying degrees, in the imagination. In the Ethics, imagination becomes a powerful albeit impersonal conductor of affects. It is inextricably and dynamically (dialectically) bound up with the power of the conatus: the conatus works upon and mobilizes the imagination; in turn, the always already social and collective imagination is weighed down by imaginary significations, habits, and norms that often open—and delimit—the


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field of affective forces along of given plane of action-reaction. Given the body retains traces of the changes brought about through interactions with other bodies and things, imagination will reflect the diverse ways in which bodies are affected by particular experiences, such that one is effectively many. We strive to imagine that which will aid the body’s power of acting, but the ambivalent structure of affective life (manifested in images, objects, signs) may unravel this power of desire. Pierre Macherey has argued that Spinoza’s entire theory of the affects “turns on this idea of the affective ambivalence that taints all our joys with sadness insofar as, through an imaginary fixation, they assume the form of a love for external things” (Macherey, 1996, 155).25 Is imagination an aporetic structure, at once positive and negative, which dislocates as well as transforms? Might the desubjectifying and impersonal logic of affect and conatus nonetheless introduce a tragic element into Spinoza’s Ethics? Spinoza’s theory of affect and conatus arguably takes us much further than the concept of the subject shaping Hegel’s thought but it also, as we have observed, runs productively alongside several contemporary Hegelian positions. In identifying this tragic element of his thought, in particular the logic of ambivalence, might we have turned full circle back to the analytic of finitude presented earlier in my paper as the risk endemic in aspects of contemporary Hegelianism?26

Infinite thought In conclusion, it is important to make an argument against such a position. We have already drawn attention to the importance of the infinite in Spinoza’s thought. It is in the transition to Part V of the Ethics that a response to this question must commence, where finite life is folded into the order of the infinite through the eternity of thought. Indeed, against Badiou’s attempt to introduce a gap (wherein the event can emerge) between the infinite and finite modes, Spinoza establishes a relation between eternity and existence itself.27 In other words, nature is eternal in and through the (finite) modes, and this implies that eternity is nothing other than nature’s occurrence in and as the modes. Thus, Spinoza writes: “the modes intrinsic infinitude is the power to bring about that which can be understood solely through the laws of its own nature” (EIVD8, Ax1). Since substance is therefore without beginning or end (it is always already there), without transcendence and without telos or origin, it follows that we should not think of eternity as we might with Hegel alongside the model of totality and absolute knowledge. Nature’s eternity is its infinite variability and

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generativity, its conatus, we must add; it is itself an open series and has no simple identity. When Spinoza writes, “It is of the nature of Reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity” (E IIP44), he later marks out the different ways in which we can encounter the same object or idea. Thus, it is with different degrees of capacity/intensity, and different degrees of cognition (reason, imagination, intellect), each of which may sometimes overlap and disturb the degree of activity and complexity of a given body. To understand an object or an idea sub specie aeternitatis, or to understand an imminent, singular essence as finite and determinate, is also to see a form of connection that does not collapse either into a division between part and whole, or into a logic of identity. In other words, the perspective of eternity preserves the reciprocity between singular essence of things and the infinite. It is perhaps in this light that we should view Badiou’s recent Spinozist quest in Logics of Worlds.28 In response to the question: What is it to Live? Badiou draws upon the Scholium to Proposition 23 of Book V of the Ethics. He suggests that to live for and experience an idea is “to experience in the present the eternity that authorizes the creation of this present” (2009, 510). Indeed, for Badiou, “The infinite of worlds is what saves us from every finite dis-grace” (2009, 514). If Hegel returns in Spinoza, and returns us to Spinoza, and if contemporary Hegelianism is likewise inflected with Spinoza, might this be because Spinozism opens up so many singular paths of thinking? Thus, Nancy’s restless negative is given a Spinozist twist: its affirmativity and its movement toward truth is “its insistence in itself, without renunciation or evasion, its praxis, and the conatus of its being.”29 The conatus of thought, indeed the conatus of any thing can certainly be viewed through the refracted lens of Hegelian philosophy. But that it can also be something more, that it can find its (ambivalent) shape not only in the desire and negativity and the vulnerability of every strategy of power but also in virtue, power as potentia, and the infinite itself, may offer an opportunity to explore another terrain in Spinoza’s thought, or to read Spinoza’s philosophy in excess of a Hegelian problematic.

Notes 1 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume III, trans E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 257. 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press Hegel, 1977), §803.


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3 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. J. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). 4 Pierre Macherey, “The Hegelian Lure: Lacan as Reader of Hegel,” in In a Materialist Way, trans. Ted Stolze (London: Verso, 1998). 5 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. by J. S. Librett (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 54. 6 Paul Bains develops a notion of subjectless subjectivity in his chapter on Raymond Ruyer and Gilles Deleuze in B. Massumi, ed. A Shock Thought (London: Routledge, 2002). I use it in a quite different way here. 7 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, trans. by A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970). 8 It is not possible to reference the range of continentally inspired readings of Spinoza that have influenced my thoughts here—some of which appear to draw silently upon Spinoza. Of particular influence upon my own interpretations have been: Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990) and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988); Pierre Macherey, “The Encounter with Spinoza,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. P. Patton (Oxford: Blackwells, 1996) and “The Problem of the Attributes,” in New Spinoza, ed. W. Montag and T. Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1997); Étienne Balibar, “Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality,” Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahauis (Delft: Eburon, 1997) and Spinoza and Politics, trans. P. Snowdon (London: Verso Books, 1998); Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1991); Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (London: Verso Books, 1999); and Vittorio Morfino, “Spinoza: An Ontology of Relation?” in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27 (2006): 103–27. 9 See Alain Badiou, “Spinoza’s Closed Ontology,” in Theoretical Writings, trans. by R. Brassier and A. Toscano (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 83–96; and “Spinoza,” in Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 112–20. 10 Étienne Balibar, “A Note on ‘Consciousness/Conscience’ in the Ethics,” Spinoza Spinozana 8 (1992): 37–53. 11 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. D. HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 116. 12 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure in Hegel’s Phenomenology, trans. by S. Cherniak and J. Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 149.


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13 This also gives philosophical sense to a comment posed by one of Lacan’s students at the close of a seminar discussion: “It was fortunate that Oedipus did not know too soon what he knew only at the end, for he still had to fill out his life” (Jacques Lacan, “Desire, Life, and Death,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller [Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988], p. 218). 14 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 31. 15 Bruno Bosteels, “Hegel in America,” in Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics and the Dialectic (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2011). 16 Judith Butler, Giving An Account of Onself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 44. 17 See, for example, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Oxford: Polity, 1997), pp. 52–60. Lacan’s Spinozism is explored most recently by A. K. Kordela ($urplus: Spinoza, Lacan [New York: SUNY, 2007]), for whom Spinoza’s Nature (or secular causality) as a “system of signifiers,” is a profoundly differential system which produces and utilizes a surplus to sustain certain forms of disciplined subjectivity. Kordela does not explore the conative or imaginary aspects of this surplus as I do here. This also Ueno’s thoughtful reading “Desire and the Double in Spinoza” (O. Ueno, “ ‘Res Nobis Similis’: Desire and the Double in Spinoza,” in Desire and Affect: Spinoza as Psychologist, ed. Y. Yovel (New York: Little Room Press, 1999). 18 I begin this project in “Subject and Event between Althusser and Badiou” (unpublished paper). We also take this opportunity to note—but leave to one side—Macherey’s observations regarding the style of argumentation present in the Spinoza scholarship of Deleuze and Negri, which similarly embrace a dialectical logic (see Macherey, “The Encounter with Spinoza”). 19 Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 33–41. Heidi Ravven has also responded to this Hegelian critique suggesting contra Žižek that negativity as a motor of unfolding resistance has its place in Spinoza’s philosophy. See H. Ravven, “Hegel’s Epistemic Turn—Or Spinoza’s?” in Idealistic Studies 33 (2003): 195–202. 20 See, for example, Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Sense, Affect (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002); J. Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2009).


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21 I don’t have the space to do justice to this aspect of Spinoza’s thought, which certainly challenges anthropocentric conceptions of agency. Spinoza recognizes the forcefield constituting individual things in Letter 58. For a fascinating account of its implications see Jane Bennett’s discussion of “thing-power” (Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” in Political Theory 32.3 (2004): 347–72; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010)); Y. Melamed, “Acosmism or Weak Individuals? Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Infinite,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2010): 77–92; Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011). 22 Laurent Bove, “Hilaritas and Acquiescentia in se ipso,” in Spinoza on Reason and the “Free Man,” ed. Y. Yovel and G. Segal (New York: Little Room Press, 2004). 23 P. Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Unconscious is Destructured like an Affect,” in Stanford Literature Review 6.2 (1989): 191–209. 24 Judith Butler, “The Desire to Live: Spinoza’s Ethics Under Pressure,” in Politics and the Passions 1500–1850, ed. V. Cahn, N. Saccamano, and D. Coli (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 121. 25 In a penetrative review essay on Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, Macherey explores this logic of ambivalence. He seems also by implication to draw closer Butler’s Hegel toward Spinoza. See Pierre Macherey, “Out of Melancholia: Notes on Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection,” in Rethinking Marxism 16 (2004): 7–17. 26 I have explored some of the ethico-political resources present in Spinoza that may accommodate this “logic of ambivalence” (see Caroline Williams, “Thinking the Political in the Wake of Spinoza: Power, Affect and Imagination in the Ethics,” in Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007): 349–69). 27 Julie Klein has embarked on a close textual analysis of this relation in “ ‘By Eternity I Understand:’ Eternity According to Spinoza,” in Iyyun The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 51 (2002): 295–324. 28 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds (London: Continuum, 2009). Badiou’s book is also Spinozist in terms of its structure of argument, which is partly organized in terms of propositions, proofs, and scholiums. 29 Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. by J. Smith and S. Miller (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2002).

Part Four

Judaism beyond Hegel and Spinoza

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The Paradox of a Perfect Democracy: From Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise to Marx’s Critique of Ideology Idit Dobbs-Weinstein

Apologos The immediate thought arising from the suggestion to me “Hegel after Spinoza,” was “but, of course, that is Marx.” This chapter will be the unfolding mediation of this immediate thought or idea in its properly political aspect, that is, as a historical materialist dialectics. The unifying premise of this chapter is that Marx’s attentive engagement with Spinoza, his reading of Spinoza’s political writings as significant to current debates, motivate his critique of Hegel and the Left Hegelians and constitutes the unifying thread of his thought, beginning with the critique of religion, through the critique of ideology, to the critique of political economy. The concrete way in which Hegel’s specter will hover over the chapter is already anticipated in the first part of the chapter’s title; for, the paradox of the perfect democracy exemplified historically and materially in the Hebrew Commonwealth does not enter into Hegel’s political philosophy, not only insofar as the Hebrew Commonwealth is excluded from world history, whether it is understood nonmaterially as the unfolding of Spirit in time or concretely as the unfolding of the Idea in space as Nature or God.1 This absence is especially glaring when it is found in a philosopher whose philosophical career began with a reading of Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza in conversation with Schelling and Hölderlin but who then relegated Spinoza’s thought to the prehistorical, prephilosophical Orient in one regally a-historical stroke.

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Prologos Among Marx’s early notebooks which are “published” in the first volume of the MEGA, there is a text entitled Spinoza Theologische-Politische Traktat von Karl Heinrich Marx. Berlin 1841.2 These notebooks are composed of rearranged and fragmented chapters of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise together with a rather idiosyncratic selection of Spinoza’s letters. That this strange work has remained almost entirely hidden (or even occult) may well be a reflection of a deep dis-ease with its form as well as its content. Even when this text’s existence is recognized, it is nonetheless almost entirely ignored, with the exception of a very brief discussion in one chapter of Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, volume 2, and volume one of Cahiers Spinoza, published in 1977 which, in addition to Marx’s “text,” contains six articles, only three of which are devoted to it. Even more striking is the fact that in the Anglo-American philosophical world these early writings remain almost entirely unknown or unacknowledged.3 The differences between the European and Anglo-American academies notwithstanding, studies that address Marx’s critique of religion, that is, On the Jewish Question, The Holy Family, and “Theses on Feuerbach,” fail to ask an obvious question, namely, what, if any, is the relation between Spinoza’s radical critique of religion and Marx’s critique of ideology and the oppressive institution whose expression it is. Following a brief preface on the politics of Marx’s scholarship, especially in relation to history and politics, the first part of the chapter briefly frames the occlusion of the relation between Spinoza and Marx in the context of the history of Spinoza misappropriations so as to make intelligible the argument that Marx’s rearrangement of Spinoza’s TTP is the source of his radical critique of Hegel and the Left Hegelians, who claim to be Spinoza’s legitimate modern heirs, and whose respective critiques of religion are said to be influenced by Spinoza. Against Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, in particular, whose critiques of religion and materialism remain strictly metaphysical, Marx deploys another Spinoza, whose critique of religion is simultaneously a critique of Hegelian metaphysics, the concrete overcoming of which renders possible a radical democratic politics. In the second part of the chapter, I shall first explore the paradox at the heart of the uncanny claim in Spinoza’s TTP, chapter seventeen that in the Hebrew Commonwealth the perfect theocracy was a perfect democracy both with respect to freedom and with respect to equality. Second, I shall argue that this paradox is the model for Marx’s political philosophy in subsequent writings

The Paradox of a Perfect Democracy

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precisely because it provides the blueprint to a freedom from human rule that is concurrent with a radical economic equality.

Provisos Just as Marx’s thought has generated a rich variety of zealous disciples, so has Spinoza’s, so that in any attempt to retrieve either thinker from polemical battles, one is compelled first to clear some of the most common, often violent misappropriations that their respective works have generated. Hence, I must frame this chapter with three preliminary provisos which will be supplemented at crucial moments of the discussion. First, if a historical materialist dialectic is to be critical, it must simultaneously be a reflection of concrete material institutions and practices and of the ideology or forms of consciousness to which they give rise. For both Marx and Spinoza, this is as true of the philosophers’ lofty ideas/ideals as it is of the “vulgar masses.” Briefly and explicitly stated, throughout his writings, Marx’s dialectical articulations of the relations between specific oppressive material conditions, be they religious, political, or economic and the alienated forms of consciousness reflecting them can, without exaggeration, be said to be nothing other than the nineteenth century expression of Spinoza’s repeated claim in the Ethics that “mind is nothing but an idea of body,” stated explicitly in historical terms. Now, in anticipation of an objection, I want to state categorically what I have argued at length elsewhere, namely, that the Ethics is not a metaphysical text, with a brief physical digression, but rather an ethics/politics, heir to a materialist Aristotelian tradition, in which tradition the physis of the human psyche, whose motion and action originate in appetition or desire, lives in the polis, for only gods and beasts live outside the city. Consequently and second, Spinoza’s TTP and TP are thoroughly historical, pace Hegel and others, in at least two ways, provided that by history we do not mean a philosophy of history or any other future-oriented historical narrative, or for that matter an account of time, a metaphysical “being” par excellence for Spinoza. Thus, in exploring the theological-political origin of the state, the TTP first engages the current dogmata that sustain and legitimize oppressive institutions and then turns to the historical origin of the nation-state in the Hebrew Commonwealth as well as to its transformation or deformation from an absolute democracy, through aristocracy, to monarchy (as distinct

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from theocracy). Furthermore, the TP, as a materialist dialectical inquiry begins from concrete, existing political forms of government, rather than posits abstract, let alone ideal ones, in order to explore the democratic possibilities that they may harbor. That is why, inter alia, Spinoza explores at length two different forms of aristocracy whose material possibility is found in concrete recent Dutch history. Third, insofar as Spinoza’s TTP and TP were written in mercantilist Holland, and insofar as he was no ogre, although he was certainly avant-garde, perhaps, still is, the masses whom he was the first to theorize carefully,4 could not possibly be Marx’s proletariat. Likewise, Marx’s proletariat can no longer be said to exist now and, hence, do not appear in the thought of other historical materialists committed to demystification, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, for which they are criticized as defectors from Marxism in the grandiose fashion of all a-historical dogmatic criticism.5

Homage to a dead dog6: The Notebooks It is no exaggeration to claim that the same methodological, or more precisely if awkwardly named epistemico-methodological, principle constitutes the continuity of Spinoza’s and Marx’s works as well as motivates their rigorously materialist dialectic, namely, “omnis determinatio est negatio,” whether it is explicitly expressed in these term or in less obvious but equally rigorous ones, for example, all definitions in Spinoza’s Ethics. I want to further claim that it is indeed this principle, which Hegel repeats, deploys, and explicitly refers back to Spinoza, which Marx appropriates against Hegel and the Left Hegelians in a manner more subtle and truer to Spinoza than his proclaimed followers. This is also the principle that constitutes the continuity between Marx’s critique of religion and his critique of political economy. Now, although this claim in an embryonic form has been acknowledged several times, and is even found in Robert Tucker in a note on the Grundrisse in the Marx-Engels Reader,7 it has remained merely that, and was pursued only briefly in one essay in the Cahiers Spinoza by Maximilian Rubel, entitled “Marx à la rencontre de Spinoza.”8 More important, left to this benign neglect and owing to it, the acknowledgment of the provenance of this principle also covers over the fact that it is ubiquitous in Spinoza’s writings beginning with the TIE and accounts for the epistemic status of the definitions first in the exposition of Descartes’ Principles, but is still more


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important in the Ethics. It is key to the difference between Cartesian analytic, that is, tautological definitions, and Spinoza’s Euclidian, that is, generative ones,9 which were clearly of great interest to Marx as is evident by his selections of the correspondence with Simon de Vries on definitions, that is, determinations. It is from this perspective that we may be able to shed some light on the relation between what at first glance may appear unrelated, while also accounting for the selection of both passages and letters. Now, it is not my intention here to either repeat or take issue at great length with Alexandre Matheron’s painstaking study of the first Cahier on the TTP which carefully compares Spinoza’s and Marx’s TTP texts. Taking issue with it in any way, which I will do briefly, feels petty in comparison to Matheron’s careful scholarship both here and elsewhere. I shall, therefore, focus only on one set of claims and the conclusion drawn from them in Matheron’s discussion of the first chapter of Marx’s TTP on “miracles.” While I share Matheron’s surprise about the absence of reference to Spinoza’s Ethics, especially to Appendix 1, in the discussion of miracles and other prejudices in the Notebooks, as well as at the glaring absence of the Preface of the TTP, I disagree with his conclusion that Marx had no interest in the genesis of illusion in self-interest, a purported disinterest which is also, according to Matheron, evident in Marx’s disinterest in the Jewish projection of election, the form of worship consequent upon it, let alone relation to “others.” First, Marx’s selection of Letter 17 to Peter Balling would be inexplicable, at best mere curiosity, were it not for the fact that it concerns the relation between illusion, imagination, and confused awareness of self-interest. Second, and more important, at the core of Marx’s critique of religion and polemic with theologians is the origin of false consciousness, which false consciousness is nothing other than mistaken or misplaced selfinterest. It is important to note, even if prematurely, that the question of selfconsciousness, true as well as false, is simultaneously a question of religious and class identification, that is, of politics and economics. Based upon Spinoza’s logical syntax, connecting disparate fragments by terms such as scilicet, itaque, quia, Matheron argues that Marx’s elimination of the problem of self-interest as well as Jewish election makes possible a logical conclusion about human stupidity in general, a conclusion which precisely owing to its general form, “effaces all aspects of Spinoza’s thought.”10 This is a remarkable claim. Now, admittedly, the syntax of Marx’s TTP, especially Marx’s use of conjunctions to connect different fragments, is very clever. But, one may as easily argue that it proceeds more geometrico as more logico. In fact, were it the

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case that Marx’s method here was logical, it would resemble a Cartesian rather than a Spinozist form of argumentation. This claim about Marx’s method cannot be supported for at least two reasons, one material, the other philosophical. First, the selection of the correspondence with de Vries as well as Meyer makes evident that Marx’s interest in Spinoza’s method is not incidental and in fact provides him with the tools for a materialist dialectical critique. And, insofar as Matheron emphasizes the advantage of this methodological procedure and locates its effects in the generality of the conclusion, even if by logic he means dialectics, it is certainly not a materialist, let alone historical dialectic but rather an abstract Hegelian one. Second, philosophically, the problem of Jewish election, let alone the Jewish question remained a focus of Marx’s critique not only of religion but also, and more important, of the modern State, the Christian nature of which he emphasizes and critiques in his exchange with Bauer. Furthermore, Jewish specificity is not absent from the chapter on miracles. Further on in the chapter, Marx refers to “Jews and others like them,”11 a likeness constituted by shared ignorance and the illusion that they were God’s beloved elect.12 Finally, it is precisely the particularity of the Hebrew Commonwealth that is of central importance to Marx in several subsequent chapters, for it is that concrete, material historical particularity that makes manifest the paradox of the perfect democracy, a paradox whose dialectical implications were of great significance to Marx. Before I turn to the Hebrew Commonwealth in Spinoza and Marx, I wish to provide a brief justification of my claim that the principle “omnia determination est negatio” underlies the peculiar unity of the selections of fragments and letters in the Notebooks as well as hazard a preliminary explanation of the absence of the Ethics. Taken materially and historically (and following Aristotle and his materialist Jewish heirs), the principle would demand that any dialectical inquiry will begin from the most important and prevalent, contemporaneous philosophical opinions precisely because they are the theoretical expressions or forms of consciousness reflecting existing, oppressive institutions, religious, legal, and economic. Just as Cartesian philosophy and Calvinist as well as Mennonite theology are expressions of the economic and political institutions of seventeenth century Holland, so also Hegelian philosophy and theology are the expressions of nineteenth century German institutions. That is why Spinoza’s interlocutors are Cartesians, Calvinist, and Mennonite scientists, philosophers, and theologians, and Marx’s are Hegelian, Christian theologians, and metaphysicians. And here, ironically, Marx’s concern may appear to be narrower and more academic than Spinoza’s, whose concern with prejudice is extended to the vulgar as well as to theologians and metaphysicians, precisely


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because the affective unification of the masses as masses, their constitution by the same passions, especially the hope and fear generated by religious authorities and dogmatic theologians, turn them into the most extensive force.13 Whereas the narrower focus of the Notebooks may partly account for the strange absence of the Appendix to Ethics Part I as well as of the preface to the TTP, as will become evident in the conclusion, Spinoza’s conception of the masses will play an important role in Marx’s theorizing of the proletariat in the “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” What is astonishing about both Spinoza and Marx, and is rarely remarked upon, is the fact that both undertook radical and rigorous critiques of religion and/or metaphysics which were often addressed to the theologians and metaphysicians. That in many of these contexts neither Spinoza nor Marx distinguishes between theology and metaphysics is not surprising, especially since in the context of a theologico-political critique, the place of religion in the commonwealth is of the utmost importance, precisely because, materially and historically understood, it is not merely a passive expression of alienated consciousness but also, and more important, it is a material political force.14 Moreover, for both Spinoza and Marx, the critiques seek to liberate politics from religion by appeal both to critical theologians and, in Spinoza’s case, to openminded Christian politicians. Oldenberg, Meyer, and de Vries are to Spinoza what Ruge, Bauer, and Feuerbach are to Marx. Now, I have argued at length elsewhere that Spinoza did not believe that the critique of religion can eliminate the need for religion, precisely because it is a human institution arising out of very powerful affects and will not repeat the argument here.15 In the light of the prevalent scholarship on Marx, exemplified by the separation between the young and old Marx in lieu of a lengthy argument for the relative impotence of theory, allow me to cite two proof texts and briefly comment on them. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects.16 Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” itself is a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society.17

Insofar as Marx repeatedly argues that the forms of consciousness, be they religious or ideological, are reflections of economic and other social institutions, it should be clear that no amount of philosophical critique can suffice to overcome

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them, unless and until the real material, that is, historical conditions obtain; that is, until the social and economic institutions can be changed. More precisely stated, understood in relations to institutions of power, whose maintenance depends upon the control of beliefs and opinions, the question of the overcoming of religion/ideology will depend upon the existence of concrete material, that is, objective conditions which will render such overcoming really possible. Further, it cannot be overemphasized that to the extent that the institutions of power in question are the “secular” face of deeply entrenched theologico-political prejudices or Weltanschauungen, the difference between religion and ideology is nominal.

The Commonwealth But Nature? Surely, she creates individuals, not nations, which are distinguished [into nations] only through a diversity of languages, of laws, and of accepted customs; and only the last two, namely, laws and customs, can be the origin of the singular character (ingenium), mode of life (conditionem), and prejudices (praejudicia) of any singular nation whatsoever.18

As alluded to in my critical engagement with Matheron, the question of the uniqueness of the Hebrew Commonwealth in its particularity is inseparable, for Marx, from the “Jewish question” as it is manifest in its historical specificity, that is, in its specifically German, Christian form. Spinoza was the first thinker to theorize the modern State, the purportedly secular State, freed not only from the oppressive authority of the Roman Catholic, universal, church, and the feudal institutions concomitant with it but also from Christianity. And, it is in this state that the “Jewish question” is transformed from a “religious” into a political, legal, and economic question precisely through the occlusion of its origins as religious and of its history as persecution.19 This is why the critical engagement with Bauer immediately succeeded the reconstructed TTP and was immediately succeeded by the Critique of the Philosophy of Right. Insofar as Spinoza has been understood even by some of his most attentive readers as a metaphysician, before proceeding, I must provide a gloss to a few fundamental terms deployed in the TTP which are mistranslated and misunderstood insofar as they are read from the perspective that they seek to undermine; (1) the Latin term “status naturalis,” that is, natural state, is translated as if it were identical to “status naturae,” that is, state of nature. However, insofar


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as Spinoza dismisses as absurd all those who understand human association, let alone freedom, as freedom from nature, all those who view the human as a dominion within a dominion, that is, all those who understand the state of society to be an overcoming of a state of nature, this little mistranslation renders Spinoza’s critique literally incoherent. In contrast, for Spinoza, the natural state is coextensive with the civil State; properly understood, they are two aspects of the same thing. Hence, however we interpret the term “pactum,” the term typically translated as “covenant” or “contract,” it cannot possibly be understood as the abstract “social contract” of political philosophy from the seventeenth century on. Finally, for the present purpose, the most telling and violent mistranslation is that of the Latin term “salus” by salvation, an a-historical and a-political Christian theological concept.20 Given that one of the purposes of the State is safety/security, that is, some form of salus, the other being freedom, given that Spinoza radically dissociates religious and political concerns, and given that he does not admit anything extra-natural, even were individual “salus” distinct from salus publica, it cannot be extra publica, since to the same extent that there exists nothing extra-natural, so also there exists nothing extra-political. Hence, Spinoza’s critical analysis of the Hebrew State, an analysis that also provides a genealogy of the transformation of ethics/politics into religion/ metaphysics or, more precisely, the usurpation of the former by the latter, exposes the prejudice specific to the abstract religious, metaphysical, or ontotheological view of the Jew. The Jew embodies specific, essential national characteristics by nature, whether it is the stubborn Jew, specifically named in the TTP or, by extension, the suffering servant, the carnal lover of money, etc. In the theological/metaphysical fiction of the material mode of existence of the generic Jew, Jewish election becomes an unredeemed and unredeemable existence, one incapable and unworthy of freedom. By detaching the history of the Hebrew State from the dominant theological narrative or the history of salvation, Spinoza simultaneously makes evident both the falseness of accounts that “explain” differences among nations as natural manifestation of purportedly historical necessity and their insidious political consequences. His emphatic claim that nature creates individuals not nations is in fact a response to the Christo-platonic view of the Jew in both its religious and the so-called secular garb. Responding to the question why, despite its original unity, a unity constituted by Mosaic Law, the Hebrew State suffered the vicissitudes that it did or “why the Hebrews forsook the Law, and why they were so many times conquered, and

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why it came about that their state was utterly destroyed,” Spinoza presents the commonly prejudice that suggests that the fate of the Hebrew State “resulted from the stubbornness of the race.” Explaining the destruction of the State to be a consequence of a disobedience originating in the nature of the Jews qua Jews, the suggestion indicates that the fate of the Jew is an expression of divine justice. In response, Spinoza summarily dismisses this suggestion as childish, that is, unworthy of philosophical consideration. For, the naturalistic form of this suggestion, that is, the reference to the Hebrew community as a genos, turns nature upside down, reifying nature (and simultaneously personifying GodNature), and thereby establishing a real and radical distinction between Nature and the specific historical conditions and conventions in which it is expressed. But, were this the case, religion/politics would constitute a dominion within a dominion which Spinoza emphatically and repeatedly denies. Dismissing this suggestion as foolish, in lieu of a response Spinoza asks: “for, why was this nation more stubborn than others?”21 God as Nature does not elect, nor redeem a people, nor for that matter does it distinguish between human and other natural individuals, God as elected is the concrete historical response to fear and hope, the primary passions that are the origin of both politics and religion.22 The more an individual understands God as Nature, the less she is a passive subject of hope and fear, and the freer she is. But, to the same extent that she is free, to that extent she would “overcome” or repress the fears and concomitant prejudices that define her “national,” which is to say, religious belonging, were it ever the case that the natural state was ever really distinct from the civil one.23 And, were such an overcoming or transcendence of national belonging really possible, so would it be possible for the individual to overcome her nation’s law, customs, and prejudices even if she does not transgress them; that is, she will become morally “autonomous” by becoming “heteronomous” to her nation’s laws and customs and, thereby, overcome history and “jewishness.” But, this is precisely what Spinoza denies, pace Stoic readings of the Ethics.24 For, not only does reason not have power over the primary passions but also, were it not for the power of the primary passions, the passions necessary for self-preservation, there would be no need for religion or politics, that is, there would be nothing but the natural state. The only difference acknowledged by Spinoza between the natural state and civil State is that in the former, individual fears arise from indefinitely many individual circumstances and hence differ, whereas in the latter, “all men fear the same things, and all have the same ground for security, the same way of life,”25 as determined by laws


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and customs. Understood in this way, the natural/civil State,26 were it to come into being, would be the overcoming of religion and of the civil (covertly religious) nation state. Indeed, for Spinoza, the fundamental difference between religion and politics is that concretely, that is, historically understood, to the same extent that religion seeks to legislate “true” and “false” beliefs, as distinct from permissible and impermissible actions, to that extent has it been and continues to be the source of the political discord that undermines the possibility of sovereignty and hence the concrete liberty necessary for the security and “commonwealth” (salus publica) that are the raison d’etre of politics or the commonwealth, let alone the freedom at which it aims. Differently stated, it is Spinoza’s claim that religion as an institution always seeks to legislate belief rather than action. For, the control of belief is ipso facto also the control of action. Properly understood, then, the relation between religion and the natural/civil State is thoroughly antagonistic, whereas the raison d’etre of religion is obedience, that of the natural/civil State is freedom. And as Spinoza points out “nobody knows by nature that he has any duty to obey God . . . .”27 Stating that the natural state “is prior to religion in nature and time,” Spinoza repeatedly emphasizes that prior to religion and law there is no sin, wrong, or duty. That is, obedience and disobedience arise from human convention or projections of what is and is not beneficial to selfpreservation, let alone, (salus) health and commonwealth (salus publica).

The Hebrew Commonwealth Since the Hebrews did not transfer their right to any other man, but, as in a democracy, they all surrendered their rights on equal terms, crying with one voice “Whatever God shall speak, we shall do.” . . . it follows that this covenant left them all completely equal . . . they all shared equally in the government of the state.28

What is most remarkable about Spinoza’s genealogy of the original Hebrew Commonwealth, of its uniqueness and reasons for its stability and longevity, is his argument that the God of the Hebrew Commonwealth was democratically elected by the people. Mosaic law is the divine law of the people. “For it was through this very belief that God’s power alone could save them that they transferred to God all their natural power of self preservation.”29 In short, for Spinoza, the first and only true, that is, legitimate theocracy was also the most comprehensive democracy. It is in this state, where there was no difference

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between civil law and religion that piety equaled justice, impiety injustice, which injustice was an infraction against all other citizens, and hence, deprived the offender of her citizenship, that is, membership in the community. As an exemplary democracy, where there is no mediator between equal citizens and the elected God, the original Hebrew Commonwealth is politically originary in a more important way, namely that “it seems the most natural form of the state , approaching most clearly to that freedom which nature grants to every man.”30 This is also the moment where electing and being elected are identical. To transgress the law at this moment entails that there is no other law. She who transgresses the covenant which is her own does not yet belong to an other community; she is not a member of some prepolitical moral community, nor does she inhabit a solitary natural place because to be bound by law is to be bound to the laws of this nation whose existence was brought into being by her own election. It cannot be overemphasized that, for Spinoza, especially when we seek to understand his influence on Marx, the original/originary covenant is not based upon reason; originating, as it does, out of fear, its primary motivation for the alienation of one’s power is self-preservation as it is perceived individually by the fool, the mad, or the sane alike.31 For, even when some of the individuals who seek self-preservation may do so on the basis of understanding, nonetheless, what is understood is what is to be feared. More precisely, for Spinoza, properly understood, a true and enduring democracy cannot be based upon reason but only upon what is common to all natural, living entities, that is, the a-rational desire for self-preservation and flourishing. For even were it the case that rational deliberation is the domain of the few—the conceit of many philosophers who persist in the illusion of reason’s power—nonetheless, fear is common to all living entities, qua living, including those capable of rational deliberation. Once again, for Spinoza, reason has no power over the affects nor can it effect democracy; for reason, is, at best, the mediation of the few about what ought to be feared by all members of a commonwealth, that is, reason may, at best, make possible the substitution of a single, common fearful or hopeful image for indefinitely many individual ones. I want to suggest that this is, in fact, what Marx has in mind when he argues that “a class must be formed . . . ” to which I shall turn in the conclusion. Before proceeding to a brief consideration of Spinoza’s impact on Marx’s critique of religion and the State, two central aspects of Spinoza’s political philosophy must be reconsidered in relation to Marx. First, I cannot overemphasize the centrality of the psychology of the affects to Spinoza’s elaboration


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of democracy as is evident from my brief treatment of fear above and which I insist, against Matheron, is inseparable from his concern with self-interest. Second, I must remark upon the place of political economy in Spinoza’s consideration of democracy, which is ignored. In light of the brevity of his remarks on economic equality, this is not surprising. Whereas in the discussion of the origin of the Hebrew democratic commonwealth, Spinoza seeks to uncover the common element, fear, unifying the indefinitely many subjective experiences of the natural state that gives rise to the election of God, in his discussion of the endurance of the original Hebrew State, after he addresses the patriotism consequent upon the legal daily ritual that constituted the particularity or uniqueness of the Hebrews, Spinoza seeks to uncover the objective element that “proved to be most effective in deterring citizens from contemplating defection and from ever wanting to desert their country, to wit, the motive of self-interest, the strength and life of all human action. This, I say, was a feature peculiar to this state.”32 As he notes, the peculiar attention to self-interest in the original legal institution of the State took the form of absolute equality of ownership, a form which recognizes self-interest as a primary and objective dimension of the legitimacy of the commonwealth in which citizen and subject are identical. “Nowhere else did citizens have stronger right to their possessions than did the subjects of this state, who had an equal share with the captains in lands and fields and were each the owner of their share in perpetuity.”33 Moreover, even when individuals were compelled by need to sell (alienate) their property, the law required that it be restored to them during the jubilee, and “there were other similar enactments to prevent the alienation of real estate.”34 Spinoza concludes this brief reflection on the economic basis of the exceptional stability and duration of the Hebrew Commonwealth, a basis which he presents as materially objective, with a remarkable observation that sheds light not only on the specificity of the Hebrew Commonwealth but also, more important, on this election: “Thus the Hebrew citizens could enjoy a good life only in their own country; abroad they could expect only hurt and humiliation.”35 Viewed in this light, the homeless “Jew,” whose commonwealth is no longer possible, is a specter, a despised specter in the Christian commonwealth whose rejection, as Christian, she embodies or legally personifies. So long as the State remains a Christian State, overtly or covertly, so long as its institutions and rituals remain rooted in religious Christian symbols, the Jew could not be its citizen, even if she is its subject. In anticipation of the objection that Spinoza’s understanding of equality as property ownership is radically at odds with Marx’s view of property as exemplary of the alienated existence in bourgeois civil society, the subject of

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his sustained ongoing critique, I can only reply: “of course, if we ignore history.” For, it cannot be overemphasized that the democratic equality of which Spinoza speaks in the TTP refers to the original Hebrew Commonwealth, which, he insists, has not existed since its demise nor can it exist again. The interruption of the TP by Spinoza’s death is all the more poignant because it occurs at the beginning of his discussion of democracy, the form of commonwealth he describes as “the completely absolute state.”36 Moreover, it is important to note that the TTP is addressed, first and foremost (even if covetly), to the educated Calvinist authorities, whom he sought to convince that the imposition of religious rules on the nascent Dutch republic would undermine its chances for peace and prosperity. And, although there is no doubt that equality in the nascent republic was based upon property ownership, what is striking about Spinoza’s argument is his insistence that ownership should not be a matter of station or other privilege, that is, class. Instead, he argues for the objective, nonreligious, conditions of peace and stability, an argument that implicitly intends to appeal to the self-interest of the sovereign power. And, again, as stated earlier, Spinoza’s and Marx’s idioms necessarily differ precisely insofar as they respond to different concrete material conditions, economic as well as religious/ideological ones. In contradistinction, the appeal to self-interest, to need as the basis of civil society, on the one hand, and to alienation as source of social ill, on the other, is common to both thinkers.

From Marx’s TTP to Spinoza on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [I]t goes without saying that all forms of the state have democracy for their truth and that they are therefore untrue insofar as they are not democracy.37

If the Notebooks represent the true, concrete historical form that Spinoza’s TTP as a critique of religion could assume in the nineteenth century, in general, then the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is the first form which Spinoza’s TP, as a critique of political institutions, must assume in Germany, in particular. Marx’s claim that “all forms of the state have democracy for their truth,” is but a concrete historical encapsulation of Spinoza’s uncovering of the democratic possibilities in all forms of the nonabsolute, that is, democratic State. Returning to my general claim that Marx’s TTP provides the critical tools for his engagement with Hegel and the young Hegelians, I want to narrow it to the claim that the selections from chapters on the commonwealth and the


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Hebrew Commonwealth are the core of Marx’s critique of those who violently incorporated Spinoza’s thought into a Christo-Platonic speculative philosophy, precisely because, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the purportedly modern secular State of Hegel, Bauer, and Feuerbach, is only formally secular, even in its most “liberated,” French form. Viewed in light of the principle “omnis determinatio est negatio,” the significant determination adopted from Spinoza is the distinction between nature, abstractly or metaphysically conceived, and specific laws, customs, and prejudices; the former creates individuals, the latter, nations. In the light of the abbreviated nature of Marx’s TTP, it is especially striking that he selected all of Spinoza’s formulations of this distinction, including the following one on Jewish particularity: Through this alone, then, nations differ from one another, namely by reason of the society and laws under which they live and are governed. Thus, the Hebrew nation was chosen by God before all others not by reason of its understanding not of its spiritual qualities, but by reason of its social organization and good fortune whereby it achieved supremacy and retained it for a many years.38

It cannot be overstated that Marx’s selected fragments concerning the particularity of the Hebrew Commonwealth are gathered in a manner such as to emphasize the distinction between spiritual/intellectual superiority and the material, that is, practical, prosperity that constituted the “election” of the Hebrews, an emphasis that simultaneously literally repeats the explanation of election in the TTP and, through extensive ellipses, intensifies its claims. The former excellence is theoretical and hence may be said to be a-historical and a-political, whereas the latter is material, historical, and political.39 Moreover, by isolating some sentences and paragraphs from their surrounding discussion, Marx succeeds in rendering more visible, more exoteric, what in Spinoza’s TTP is semihidden by prolonged historical discussions as well as seventeenth century theologico-political idiom. Thus, for example, Marx isolates the following sentence: “the end (finis) of the state, therefore, is truly (revera) freedom.”40 That is, Marx highlights the emancipation that is the end of the State, in its double sense of purpose and overcoming. Elsewhere, by isolating a part of a long paragraph, and thereby creating a new “thesis,” Marx brings to light a dimension of Spinoza’s discussion of the Hebrew Commonwealth that may be obscured not only by the abundant discussion but also, more importantly, he highlights the key difference between Judaism and Christianity. “Clearly, religious doctrines were not teachings (dogmata) but laws and commands; piety was judged to be justice, impiety a crime and injustice.”41 That is, Marx

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highlights precisely what is extraordinary about the identity of civil law and religion in the Hebrew Commonwealth, namely, the absence of dogmata. For, to recall, Christianity is the repudiation of Mosaic law, qua law, or its “overcoming” by dogmata. Whereas in the Hebrew Commonwealth freedom is the concrete freedom to enact laws, for Christianity, freedom is a metaphysical freedom from laws. Insofar as the former is concerned with action, unlike the latter, it does not legislate what is true and false but only what is good and bad. Thus understood, the freedom to legislate is simultaneously the freedom to philosophize or freedom of belief. Since both Spinoza and Marx view the aim of the State as freedom, that is, since they examine the Hebrew Commonwealth as a practical, political matter about the precise form of the State, its laws and institutions, the “election” of the Jews, that is, concrete, material, or institutional particularity becomes a moment of contestation about human liberation/emancipation, religious or political, transcendental/spiritual or historical. Or, yet again, the question of the human freedom which is the singular concern of both Spinoza and Marx becomes a question of the relation and distinction, sameness and difference, determination and negation, between the natural and civil state. If the natural state (status naturalis) is not really distinct from the civil State (status civilis) whose separation is at the core of the modern conception of civil society as the overcoming of the state of nature (status naturae) critiqued by both Spinoza and Marx, then the question becomes how does “nature” appear in different forms of political association and whether there can be a civil society, or human community, whose institutions do not require alienation, especially the alienation of purportedly natural rights, the rights that do not differ between madmen, fools, and philosophers, in short the rights that do not differ between madmen, fools, and philosophers, in short, the rights that approximate the perfect democracy. Insofar as religion/ideology, for both Spinoza and Marx, is the alienated form of consciousness reflecting material needs and institutions, economic and political, for both Spinoza and Marx, then the critique of religion/ideology and that of political economy cannot be really separate. And, although it may seem strange that both turn to the critique of religion/ideology before they turn to the critique of political economy, both Spinoza and Marx are painfully aware that no thought can bring about institutional change and hence try to discover modes in which a unified form of consciousness, masses for Spinoza, classes for Marx, may be forged so as to desire change/liberty and be able to bring it about when the material conditions obtain.


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In lieu of a lengthy conclusion, I wish to focus on what I view as one of the most remarkable and neglected moments in Marx concerning the real, that is, materially concrete possibility of emancipation in Germany or the coming to be of “socialized humanity.” Toward the end of the “Introduction” to the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in response to the question of the reality of such possibility, Marx claims: A class must be formed, which has radical chains, a class in civil society, a class which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general.42

Before proceeding, I want to recall the fact that “recht” means law, that is, that real political emancipation is an emancipation of the law rather than of the abstract subject consciousness. Insofar as Marx claims that the German State has committed a general wrong, he is claiming that it is an absolutely illegitimate State, or the State whose negation is the determination of the absolute, that is, democratic State, or the State whose citizens are subject to no human ruler. But what is most remarkable about Marx’s first discussion of the proletariat is that its most important aspect is generally ignored with few exceptions (most noted of which is Balibar), namely that the proletariat never exists, nor has ever existed as a class—it is certainly not the working class. It is a “class” whose unity as a single suffering, that is, passion, can only come into being through critical/ intellectual intervention, whose unity is nothing other than the formation of a single fear and single hope. And as Marx makes clear in a language remarkably similar to Spinoza, the proletariat does not result from “naturally existing poverty, but poverty artifically produced, [it] is not the mass of the people mechanically oppressed by the weight of society, but the mass resulting from the disintegration of society and above all from the disintegration of the middle class.”43 To paraphrase Spinoza, by nature there is no poverty and no class, these exist only by convention, custom, prejudice, in short, artifice. The only weapon against prejudice is critique. Lest I be misunderstood about the role of the philosopher and the power of reason, allow me to quote Marx: “It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by material force; but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.”44 From the preceding, it should be clear that in my view for neither Spinoza nor Marx is the liberation of politics from religion the emancipation of individual


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minds from ideology. For, even if individuals are motivated by self-interest and a single “class” consciousness, this does not entail that the form of consciousness is rational or that, once humanized, the human animal, including the philosopher, ceases to be animal.

Notes 1 A substantive engagement with the absence of Spinoza’s political writings from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as well as Philosophy of History is as much a desideratum as it is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to indicate that, given Hegel’s view of the State, the Hebrew Commonwealth was not a State, perhaps it was even an anti-State, insofar as, despite its elaborate laws, the identity of its laws with religion, its prohibition on graven images, that is, its “rejection” of art, as well as its radically particularistic claims, would not even qualify it to belong to the kind pre-History to which the Orient is consigned. 2 Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972), vol. 1. 3 Steven B. Smith is the exception, although he does not discuss this “text,” or Marx’s relation to Spinoza. See, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). 4 Étienne Balibar, a careful reader of Spinoza and Marx, explores and emphasizes this in Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (New York: Verso, 1998). 5 See “Editor’s Afterwards,” in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially pp. 243–7. 6 In the Afterward to the Second German Edition of Capital Marx summarily dismisses Hegel’s and Spinoza’s critics saying: “But, just as I was working at the first volume of ‘Das Kapital’ it was the good pleasure of peevish, arrogant, mediocre, epigonoi, who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a ‘dead dog,’ I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker . . .  .” In so doing Marx clearly also pays tribute to Spinoza and Hegel as philosophical beacons. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1. ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 19–20. 7 The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton & Co., 1978), p. 228, n. 8. Henceforth, MER.


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8 See, respectively, Marx-Engels Reader, 228n, in which Tucker also immediately limits its appearance in Spinoza to a letter to Jelles, and thus also minimizes its centrality in his thought; See also, Cahiers Spinoza, 1 (1977), 7–28. 9 See Meyer’s preface to Spinoza, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, p. 227, and Spinoza, Ep 9 to de Vries. 10 Cahiers Spinoza, Matheron, p. 162. Henceforth, CS. 11 Marx, TTP, CS, 36, {15}. 12 The numerous references to the prophets are also direct references to the Prophets of Hebrew Scripture whose form of speech is “ad captum vulgi.” 13 Whereas the psychology of the affects, especially primary political ones, fear and hope, is central to Spinoza’s political philosophy, it appears to be of little interest to Marx with the exception of forms of consciousness as they constitute a class. Although this is a central problem in thinking the making of the proletariat in Marx, it is clearly beyond the confines of this chapter. 14 Cf. Hegel’s Philosophy of History, passim. 15 See, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, “The Power of Prejudice and the Force of Law: Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs,” Epoche, A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7:1 (Fall, 2002): 51–70. 16 MER, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” p. 85. 17 MER, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 145. 18 TTP, XVII/207. 19 Insofar as Scripture remains an extensive force in Hobbes’ commonwealth, even if its interpretive authority now rests with the sovereign, it is a modern State in name only, just as Hegel’s and Bauer’s Germany is, according to Marx. 20 See “The Power of Prejudice and the Force of Law,” op. cit. 21 TTP XVII/207. 22 See E I App. 23 Properly understood, Spinoza’s radical critique of religion and demand for a stringent restriction of religion in the State, its radical separation from power, never assumes that the psychological need for religion can ever be overcome. On the contrary, to overcome the need for religion would amount to an overcoming of hope and fear, that is, nature, which, for Spinoza, is absurd. Instead, by instituting customs and formulating laws, the “secular” State redirects the affects, especially fear and hope. Thus understood, the “secular” civil State is never the overcoming of religion but its usurpation. 24 Cf. E V Pref.: “Nevertheless, the Stoics thought that they [the affects] depend entirely on our will, and that we can command them absolutely. But experience cries out against this. . . . ”


208 25 TP III/49.

26 Awkward as the term “natural/civil state” may appear, I use it deliberately to draw a distinction between a form of the State that is secular in form only as were all European States in the seventh century and arguably still are all nation states. 27 TTP XVI/188. 28 Spinoza, TTP XVII/196. My emphasis. 29 TTP XVII/195 (Gebhardt, 192). My emphasis. 30 TTP XVI/185. 31 TTP XVI/179–80. 32 TTP XVII/205. My emphasis. 33 Ibid. My emphasis. 34 Ibid. My emphasis. 35 Ibid. My emphasis. I. 36 TP, XI/135. 37 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” The MarxEngels Reader, pp. 19–20. 38 Cahier, [142], 86. Marx’s emphasis (absent in the TTP). 39 The emphasis here is on “may be said to be,” since for neither Marx nor Spinoza does the natural state exist as such. 40 Cahiers, [37] 44. 41 Cahiers, [58] 54. 42 MER, “Contribution,” Introduction, p. 64. 43 Ibid. 44 MER, “Contribution,” Introduction, p. 60.

11

Spinoza, Hegel, and Adorno on Judaism and History Jeffrey A. Bernstein

Introductory remarks In his poem “I Wasn’t One of The Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open”, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai writes the following lines: “Jewish history and world history/grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes to a powder.”1 To the extent that it expresses the sentiment of Jews throughout the world, what follows can be understood as a commentary upon Amichai’s verse. Indeed, a great deal of the most prescient Jewish thought of the past three centuries occurs precisely as a result of this “dual allegiance” to world/ universal history (with its striving for some iteration of perpetual peace) on the one hand, and Jewish history (with respect either to the fulfillment of divine promise or the creation of a Jewish State) on the other.2 My contention in this chapter is that the intersecting thoughts of Spinoza, Hegel, and Adorno provide a crucial resource for continued reflection upon this issue. Methodologically, I take as my point of departure Pierre Macherey’s insightful attempt at effecting a “rapprochement” between Spinoza and Hegel: “We shall only be concerned to read Spinoza and Hegel together, that is, one with the other, but also one against the other, so as to draw out the eventual elements of divergence as they can appear through their very convergence . . . . [N]o doubt Spinoza and Hegel talk about the same thing—and this is why there exists a real community of thought between them—but they speak about it differently, and perhaps even in an opposite way—and this is why, if it is not permissible purely and simply to equate their philosophical positions, neither can they be completely separated.”3 The beginnings of such a rapprochement will be attempted here largely by means of reading Spinoza’s Theological-Political

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Treatise4 and Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History5 together as they relate to the question of Judaism and history. It is a matter of showing how their insights relate despite the widely varying philosophical contexts in which they occur. In Spinoza’s terms, the aim is to “infer correctly the differences, agreements and oppositions of things.”6 Can the same claim be made in Hegelian terminology? Will the otherness of the two thinkers undergo reconciling mediation? Not exactly. One of the principal points of this chapter is to show that, in reading Spinoza and Hegel together nonreductively, reconciliation occurs only as abstraction. Differently stated, my thesis runs as follows: if Spinoza’s political history of the Jewish people is thought within the context of Hegel’s speculative history of Spirit (where real Jews become transformed into the figure of “the Jews”), the outcome replicates Adorno’s insight that “Auschwitz” names the historical and figural reification of real Jews by objective Spirit. Spinoza and Hegel together point toward a politically and historically unreconciled Judaism insofar as it is the product of external reification. If Adorno is correct—if “wrong life cannot be lived rightly”7—mediation simply allows one to better apprehend current socio-political alienation. Adorno’s thought can thus be understood as formalizing Spinoza’s account of real, historical Jews thereby driving the Hegelian conception of history past its own reconciling tendencies (at least according to a certain interpretation). In this way, Adorno allows us to think the simultaneity of “Hegel after (i.e., ‘emerging out of ’) Spinoza” and “Spinoza after (i.e., ‘in light of ’) Hegel.”

On the “poverty” and “truthfulness” of language for history In attempting to discern the contexts which separate Spinoza from Hegel, it is important first to articulate why simple preferences for one thinker over another cannot be what is at issue in understanding the question concerning Judaism and History. Both Spinoza and Hegel were critical of the ancient Hebrew Commonwealth. Indeed, on the surface, Spinoza’s comment that the fundamental principles of Judaism make the Jews effeminate (effaeminarent) (TTP III/46; translation modified) appears every bit as disparaging as Hegel’s pronouncement that the spiritual self-alienation of the Jews renders them “the most depraved (das verworfenste).”8 Despite the tone of these remarks, both Spinoza and Hegel advocated civil rights for the Jews.9 Were one to leave the analysis at this level, however, very little about these thinkers would be

Spinoza, Hegel, and Adorno on Judaism and History

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understood. The pertinent question deals with what exactly differentiates their apparently similar accounts; what necessitates Hegel’s transformation of real Jews into the figure of “the Jews” such that his criticism and advocacy take on such a radically different character than Spinoza’s? I use the term “figure” (with respect to Hegel) deliberately in order to indicate that the question of language plays a crucial role in this transformation of real Jews into “the Jews” (and therefore, in the difference between Spinoza’s and Hegel’s reflections about history). For this reason, a brief discussion of language and its relation to historical inquiry is appropriate at this point. “Figural interpretation,” according to Auerbach, “establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself, but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension . . . of their interdependence is a spiritual act.”10 When a first event prefigures a second, the concrete particularity and historical context of both events is de-emphasized in favor of a relationality the index of which is decisively nonsensuous. Put differently, the spiritual truth of the events is what gets expressed in the activity of figuration; as such, this spiritual truth is inevitably universal. For this reason, I use “figuration” to name the speculative employment of language in Hegel. Before turning to Hegel, however, it is important to understand what conception of language is being transformed in (and rejected by) Hegel’s thinking. What is Spinoza’s understanding of language such that it becomes subsumed in the Hegelian transformation? Insofar as it expresses thought, the aim of language (for Spinoza) is to indicate individual things. To the extent that this same language always refers to universal categories, it is constituted by an inherent limitation, or (in Spinoza’s terms) “poverty” (TIE, 258). Hence, definitions—whether they have a determinate (extra-mental) object or not—always express individuals.11 That real individual things (as modes) are not substantially distinct from one another (E IID7) only serves to indicate a double sense to this “poverty”: not only does language fail to fully capture the individuality of modes but it also cannot fix the fluid character of individuals which occur in the modal efflux. For this reason, “hardness” cannot refer in (God, or rather) nature to anything other than this or that hard thing; thus understood, essences (as the “ideated” content of definitions) are not metaphysically distinct from the singular existences to which they refer.12

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Given his thoroughgoing nominalism, Spinozan history can only indicate that which is provisional, local, and geared toward what in Hegelian terms would be called “sensuous particulars.” If language ultimately cannot help (at least in one respect) referring to universals, one can nonetheless opt for the “intellectual affirmation” of individuals (TIE, 258). And insofar as “nature creates individuals, not nations, and it is only differences of language, laws, and of established customs that divides individuals into nations” (TTP XVII/200), historical inquiry can only refer to conventions. This point can be differently stated in the following manner: historical inquiries, when approached correctly, serve to instruct the reader about specific social-political situations (e.g. the Hebrew Commonwealth) and their causes. Moreover, if the distinction between the “content” of an historical inquiry and the circumstances under which that inquiry was written are only modally distinct, then the historical inquiry expresses a specific set of contemporaneous circumstances as well—that is, Spinoza’s account of the Hebrew Commonwealth in the TTP amounts to a moment of reflective praxis aimed at resisting the attempt by the Dutch Calvinists at instituting a Hebraic-styled theocracy in Holland.13 But just because the TTP expresses individual events and contexts, this does not mean that it has to be thought merely contingently. Rather, it is ultimately reason and intellect which allow the reader to approach the material in the TTP by means of its causes. As a result, according to Spinoza, people who are motivated solely by fear and superstition—in the terminology of the Ethics, “sad affects”—are ill-suited to understand it. Spinoza’s concern in the TTP relates, unsurprisingly, to the specifically religious expression of these affects: “I know how deeply rooted in the mind are the prejudices embraced under the guise of piety. I know too, that the masses can no more be freed from their superstition than from their fears. Finally, I know that they are unchanging in their obstinacy, that they are not guided by reason, and that their praise and blame is at the mercy of impulse. Therefore, I do not invite the common people to read this work, nor all those who are victims of the same emotional attitudes” (TTP Pref./7–8). Qua historical inquiry, therefore, Spinoza’s TTP is located (one might say) in a “gray area”—that is, just the other side of imagination (focused as it is on contingency) and just this side of the “geometrically fashioned” discourse of the Ethics. The TTP is a political intervention in contemporary discourse by virtue of its ability to narrate concrete individual circumstances which may provoke understanding in its readers. With respect to (1) the conception of language embedded in it and (2) the political emphasis in both its “content” and circumstance, it would not be wrong to call the strategy of the TTP “historical materialism.”


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Hegel’s conception of language also cannot help directing thought toward universality. But this does not mean that language, for Hegel, is impoverished; rather, Hegel views this as its benefit. If it is not yet the house of being (à la Heidegger), language is at least the house of essence; for Hegel, the universalizing capacity of language is what allows for the expositor of systematically organized science (Wissenschaft)—or rather, philosophy, to move beyond the mere contingency of existing sensuous particularity to the essential character of phenomena: “It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: ‘This’, i.e., the universal This; or, ‘it is’, i.e., Being in general. Of course we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sensecertainty we mean to say. But language, as we see, is the more truthful” (PhS: 60). This capacity of language allows for the dialectical mediation of particular sensible phenomena, and for the self-surpassing of such phenomena, so that they can become exhibited essentially (i.e. in their truth). To claim that language inevitably says more than its utterers want it to say, however, is not to claim that it says everything all at once. Rather, such a claim means that the exhibition of the truthful and essential character of phenomena happens over time—that is, historically. Put differently, as inevitably connected with self-conscious, knowing and expositing subjects, such an exhibition of truth and essence amounts to stages in the historical development of spirit. The more sensuous particulars are grasped in their intelligibility and “mindedness”14 (i.e. viewed in their universality), the more they are understood as moments of spirit’s unfolding process in/as history. This capacity of language to grasp the universal essence of things over time Hegel terms “speculative.” As alluded to above, this employment of language neither issues in an immediate grasping of the systematic whole (i.e. everything at once) nor reduces such a whole to the final moment within a developmental narrative. Its promise is simultaneously lofty and modest—speculative language promises to elucidate the development of spirit both as development and as completed whole. However, since spirit has not yet completely unfolded itself, this promise remains, to a certain extent, something still to be achieved. Differently stated, the speculative employment of language ultimately refers to language as a whole even as it concretely occurs in the subject-predicate form of particular sentences. For this reason, Hegel ceaselessly reminds his readers that they will misunderstand philosophical thought if they look either for strict identity between subject and predicate or for a complete presentation of system at any one time: “the matter (Sache) is not exhausted by its goal (Zwecke), but by

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carrying it out, nor is the result the actual whole, but rather the result together with its becoming (Werden)” (PhS 2; translation modified). This capacity to refigure, transfigure, and configure apparently disparate phenomena (understood within the context of the systematic unfolding of the whole) is how language expresses essence over time. Differently stated, this speculative employment of language allows for its ordinary, propositional appearance to “achieve the goal of plasticity” (PhS: 39) and express the movement of history. It is in this sense, therefore, that Hegel can hold that “[t]he True is the whole” (PhS: 11). If speculative language and thought expresses the universal in the particular, and if spirit is nothing less than the universal in its intelligible totality (development as well as result), then speculative discourse carries within itself the function of showing the spiritual character of phenomenal reality: “[T]he task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to actualize and spiritualize (zu verwirkilichen und zu begeisten) the universal” (PhS: 20–1; translation modified). In other words, the phenomenon is simultaneously destroyed (with respect to the contingent aspect of its particularity), preserved (with respect to its essential connection to the universal), and raised to a higher unity (within the universal). Insofar as this movement displays the spiritual essence of phenomenal reality, it exposes the structure of reality as a mediation between universal and particular—that is, as incarnational. That Hegel’s thought occurs in a thoroughly Christian context is generally acknowledged. Similarly, that Hegel understands the Christian religion to have been (in some sense) superseded by absolute knowing is not a terribly controversial claim.15 However, because this supersessional movement occurs through the transfiguration of the particular, doctrinal content of Christianity into form, Christianity remains operative. The claim here is that Hegel’s thought is fundamentally Christian in its form insofar as the incarnational movement operates throughout his thinking and his conception of reality. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Hegel gives the following articulation of spirit’s unfolding in/as history: “In our knowledge, we aim for the insight that whatever was intended by the Eternal Wisdom has come to fulfillment—as in the realm of nature, so in the realm of spirit that is active and actual in the world. To that extent our approach is a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God” (IPH, 18). Differently stated, the fundamental character (or form) of Hegel’s conception of history is religious.


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In juxtaposing Spinoza’s “impoverished” language with Hegel’s “truthful” language, and in showing the respective roles they play in Spinoza’s political history and Hegel’s speculative-religious history, I have thus far traveled an analogous course to the one covered in chapter six of Karl Marx’s The Holy Family;16 for both courses show that the movement away from politics issues in religion. Differently stated, Hegel’s speculative world history transforms Spinoza’s political history of Judaism into a necessary (if ultimately inadequate) figure of spirit. At this juncture, it might be tempting to argue that Hegel’s conception of history—as informed by a Protestant incarnational sensibility—is every bit as particular as Spinoza’s account. There are two points which recommend against proceeding thus. First, in transforming incarnational Christianity from a doctrinal moment to the form of history, Hegel is divesting it of its particularity in favor of a universality in which all manifestations of spirit would participate; the argument that a false-consciousness pervades Hegel’s thinking on this issue thus loses some force. Second, by arguing against Hegel as if he were simply mistaken would be to miss the deep and sobering insight of Hegel’s conception of Judaism and history. This insight is, to be sure, not immediately evident, but becomes so through the ensuing rapprochement with Spinoza and the Adornian development. It may be provisionally stated as follows: the particularity of the Jews, while crucial in the development of world spirit, has proved an impediment for the rest of the (Western) world in recognizing them as an authentic and living people. This is borne out historically by the fact that the offspring religions have historically had such difficulties in accepting the actuality of Judaism. Writing in the aftermath of the Shoah and the subsequent attempt to redress the Jewish question, Herman Levin Goldschmidt puts the point thus: “Judaic studies are compromised without the vital support of the surrounding, nonJewish community, when that community does not take Judaism seriously as an object of study and rejects Jews as a witness to their own truth, or unconsciously suppresses Jewish concerns while praising the Jewish past.”17 Returning for the moment to the question of civil rights for the Jews, the point might be put this way: whereas Spinoza favors civil rights for the Jews insofar as no individual is less deserving of rights than any other (and “Jews” ultimately refers to the sum total of individual Jews [TTP XVII/200]), Hegel favors civil rights insofar as the Jews (whatever else they are) are “primarily human beings” (EPR, 295). These distinct positions follow directly from Spinoza’s and Hegel’s respective conceptions of the role which language plays in terms of history. In recasting sensuous particularity in terms of universality, Hegel transforms the

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political question of actual Jews into the speculative-religious question of the figure of “the Jews.” At this point, I will now show how the differing contexts yield divergent statuses to largely similar claims made by Spinoza in the TTP and by Hegel in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History.

Jews—political and figural: Spinoza and Hegel on Jewish history In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel locates Judaism and Spinoza in the same spiritual epoch/historical world—the Oriental. The Oriental epoch/ world is characterized by an emphasis on abstract unity: “In the world of the ancient Orient, people do not yet know that the Spirit—the human as such— is free. They know only that one person is free; but for this very reason such freedom is mere arbitrariness, savagery . . . . This one person is therefore only a despot, not a free man” (IPH, 21). Spinoza’s one substance (in which everything occurs) is simply the conceptual expression of this un-freedom. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel holds that, “[t]his abstract negativity and complete dissolution, coupled with the abiding of the one [substance], is the basic characteristic of the Oriental mode of representation . . . Spinozism is [its] most general and most customary mode of intuition.”18 Since Spinoza relegates all particular being “into the abyss of the One Identity” (LHP 163), his thought expresses both the despotic character of the abiding One and the passive and contingent character of the finite many. But does this mean that Judaism (with its intellectual representative in Spinoza) is simply other to (Western) world history? Not exactly. In holding that Spinoza’s thought replicates Chinese philosophy as much as Eleatic monism (IPH, 70), Hegel quietly prepares his readers for an interesting articulation of the aforementioned dialectic between inner and outer characteristic of Enlightenment Judaism. For while Judaism is, as such, located in the Orient, it also prepares the transformation into the Occident: “the idea of Light [as found in the Persians] has at this stage advanced to that of ‘Jehovah’—the purely One. This forms the point of separation between the East and the West; Spirit descends into the depths of its own being, and recognizes the abstract fundamental principle as the Spiritual” (PH, 195). The concept of the One emerges from the Oriental world and makes its appearance by means of Judaism into the West. Whereas Judaism understands this relation in an unmediated fashion—that is,


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as a radically transcendent God over and against a radically finite creation— Christianity will develop it (by means of incarnational mediation) into the GodMan figure whose philosophical analog is the systematic union of the one and the many. Current Judaism is, therefore, a problematic phenomenon. It serves the crucial historical function of bringing the Oriental and Occidental worlds together, but its current iteration resists the incarnational character of the Occidental world. It is, so to speak, a throwback; it is a strange exclusivity which is literally of another time and place. This situation of exclusivity is lost neither on Hegel nor on Spinoza, although their comprehension of it is dissimilar. For Hegel, this exclusivity follows essentially from their conception of the radically transcendent divinity: “God is known as the creator of all men, as he is of all nature, and as absolute causality generally. But this great principle, as further conditioned, is exclusive Unity. This religion must necessarily possess the element of exclusiveness, which consists essentially in this—that only the One People which adopts it, recognizes the One God, and is acknowledged by him” (PH, 195). In sharp contrast, Spinoza views this perception of Judaism as status in statu in political terms: “As to their continued existence for so many years when scattered and stateless, this is in no way surprising, since they have separated themselves from other nations to such a degree as to incur the hatred of all, and this not only through external rites alien to the rites of other nations but also through the mark of circumcision, which they most religiously observe. That they are preserved largely through the hatred of other nations is demonstrated by historical fact” (TTP III/45). Wherever Jews live, they are (in a decisive respect) outsiders. Moreover, the fact that they are both exclusive and excluded serves to strengthen the social and political identity of actual Jews. For Spinoza, the ceremonial laws and practices serve a decisive political function in this regard (TTP V/59–61). But is the quality of exclusivity essential to Judaism on Spinoza’s terms? Given that Spinozan “essence” is not different from Spinozan individuals, the answer would be yes, but not in any universal sense. In his discussion of the Jews as “chosen,” Spinoza holds that this only refers to the specific government of the Hebrew Commonwealth and the society issuing from it: “the individual Jew, considered alone apart from his social organization and his government, possesses no gift of God above other men, and there is no difference between him and a Gentile” (TTP III/40). In other words, given the conventional character of all collective identity, nature bestows no greater gifts or benefits on any one group than on any other. In holding this, Spinoza tacitly secularizes

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the normative rabbinic view that the Jews are “chosen” in the sense of being called to accept the Torah and follow its commandments and prohibitions. This is “essential” insofar as it characterizes the actual situation of individuals (which follows a causal order in the modal efflux) but not in any other sense. For Hegel, in sharp contrast, this exclusivity is the spiritual shape of Judaism in its emergence from Oriental despotism and in its subsequent refusal to undergo historical transformation into the Western world. It is true that Hegel’s later reflections on Judaism accord a necessary developmental place for the religion and people in history and, therefore, lack the severity of his early remarks (where Judaism is seen, by and large, as something simply different from Christian Europe).19 However, the emphasis on the Jew as pariah remains unchanged. It is not just the “outsider” quality which disturbs Hegel. Were the Jews to have taken a prophetic stance toward the host society—as their forerunners did during the period of the Hebrew Commonwealth—one senses that this would meet with Hegel’s approval. After all, Hegel views the negation of natural deities invoked in the figure of the monotheistic divinity as a genuine historical development: “The Spiritual speaks itself here absolutely free of the Sensuous, and Nature is reduced to something merely external and undivine. This is the true and proper estimate of Nature at this stage; for only at a more advanced phase can the Idea attain a reconciliation . . . in this its alien form. Its first utterances will be in opposition to Nature; for Spirit, which had been hitherto dishonored, now first attains its due dignity, while Nature resumes its proper position” (PH, 196). Put differently, the function of the Biblical prophetic stance is to negate the immanence and particularity of nature in favor of something higher—ethics and divine law. It is, similarly, not simply the fact that Judaism negates nature which is problematic for Hegel. Rather, it is that Judaism negates without sublation; it destroys without recomposition; it finds no actual reconciliation with what it opposes. Judaism, one might say, is death without resurrection. It is precisely in the rejection of synthesis with the host cultures, that Judaism evinces (for Hegel) a developmental delay, a “particularized moment hypostatized into the whole.”20 It is the “slavish” adherence to its own laws and customs which leads the young Hegel to exclaim that “The great tragedy of the Jewish people . . . can rouse neither terror nor pity . . . it can arouse horror alone. The fate of the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped out of nature itself, clung to alien Beings, and so in their service had to trample and slay everything holy in human nature, had at last to be forsaken by his gods (since these were objects and he their slave) and be dashed to pieces on his faith itself ” (ETW 204–5).


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Differently stated, in failing to both (1) reconcile with what it negates and (2) raise itself to a higher developmental stage, current Judaism occupies for Hegel much the same developmental status as does art21: it exists as something past. Judaic alienation from a transcendent divinity is the legacy which Judaism bestows on world history. In Hyppolite’s words, “It is the destiny of the Jewish people to live eternally separated from God and men so as to project its ideal outside of itself through rejection and to have cut this ideal off from life.”22 Once superseded, Judaism has (as it were) fulfilled its mission. How does one refer to a figure or community which is dead yet (as the British pop standard goes) “won’t lie down”? In a possible ironic echoing of the opening sentence to Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Leo Pinsker writes the following in 1882: “Among the living nations of the earth the Jews occupy the position of a nation long since dead . . . the world saw in this people the frightening form of one of the dead walking among the living. This ghostlike apparition of a people . . . could not fail to make a strange and peculiar impression upon the imagination of the nations. And if the fear of ghosts is something inborn, and has a certain justification in the psychic life of humanity, is it any wonder that it asserted itself powerfully at the sight of this dead and yet living nation?”23 What is interesting about Pinsker’s statement is that, locating as he does the concern over ghosts within a problematic of fear, he returns the discussion to a social and political register in the vicinity of Spinoza’s thought. To say that fear is “inborn” is to say that it is natural. The problem of the specter of Judaism is thus recast as a political problem. And irrespective of how one might view Pinsker’s proposed remedy to the problem, this recasting allows for the deeply Spinozan option of education and habituation away from sad affects toward something like joy. At the very least, it locates the problem on the societal and political level. Hegel’s exposition of the history of the Jews, however, does not constitute a break within history (although, in some sense, it continues the Kantian attempt at influencing the direction of history in the very writing of it). That Jews may be deserving of civil rights insofar as they are essential human beings in no way affects the essential character of world history—that it is “not a place for happiness” (IPH, 29). While it would be wrong to read Hegel’s remarks to the effect that history is a “slaughter-bench” (IPH, 24) in a justificatory manner, it would be less incorrect to view them as a description of what eventually happens to outmoded forms of spirit. If the Jews cannot attain the next level of development, such development will occur in spite of them. From the standpoint of world history (i.e. from the standpoint which has attained philosophical cognition

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with respect to history), this in no way devalues the study and understanding of Judaism. What it does mean, however, is that this understanding occurs on the hither side of the supersessional movement: “However erroneous a religion may be, it possesses truth, although in a mutilated phase . . . and a philosophy of History has to seek out the spiritual element even in the most imperfect forms” (PH, 195–6). Again, the resonances with Spinoza’s thought are strangely clear: the history of the Jews is to be studied for what we can learn from it. And in both cases, the lessons of this history have to do with its limitations. For Spinoza, the social and political history of the Hebrew Commonwealth (plagued as it was by theologico-political fanaticism) leading to the exclusivity of Diasporic Judaism teaches the dangers of religious extremism. For Hegel, this same extremism is the result of an essential developmental failure to incarnationally overcome spiritual alienation. Again, one sees that it is the respective philosophical contexts which determine the different trajectories followed by Spinoza and Hegel. Simply stated, Hegelian history is fundamentally teleological; Spinozan history remains steadfast in its rejection of final causality. This dichotomy amounts to the difference between a historical theodicy and one that makes secularized use of the Judaic ban on divine representation.24 The spiritual alienation characteristic of Hegel’s Jews finally manifests itself politically in the problematic nature of the Hebrew Commonwealth. For Hegel, the Jewish adherence to law and custom in the face of a radically transcendent divinity exhibits a “prosaic” type of cognition in which human beings are understood as individuals with a merely finite existence (PH, 196). To name this cognition “prosaic” is to invoke its opposite, presumably the “poetic,” which would be the form of cognition appropriate to incarnational mediation as it expresses (by means of figuration) the universal/infinite in the particular/finite. This reiteration of the Pauline distinction between the letter and the spirit is now taken up in Hegel’s claim that “the [s]tate is an institution not consonant with the Judaistic principle” (PH, 197) insofar as the State does not operate in a prosaic manner. Insofar as, for Hegel, “[t]he state is the divine Idea as it exists on earth” (IPH, 42), it systematically manifests spirit in all of its particular aspects and institutions. Hegel elaborates: “[t]he state is the Idea of Spirit in the externalized form of human will and its freedom. It is in the state, therefore, that historical change occurs essentially, and the elements of the Idea are reflected in the state as various political principles. The forms of government, in which the worldhistorical peoples have blossomed, are characteristic of those peoples” (IPH, 50). Human will and freedom (subjective spirit) and governmental and societal


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institutions (objective spirit) are therefore the incarnation of spirit as it occurs in the specific unified form of the State. To say that this form is not consonant with Judaism is to mark a failure of Judaism to express the identity of identity and difference. Mired in finite particularity, even the divine covenants express nothing so much as an emphasis on the family as the primary organizational unit (PH, 197). But this organizational unit has quite limited extension: the internal dissention during the period of the first Hebrew Commonwealth was a result of an inability to allow the one God to be worshipped “in different Temples” (PH, 198). It is, ultimately, the prosaic attitude of Judaism which brought about the dissolution of the Commonwealth. It is for this reason that Hegel holds that, “properly speaking, no political union existed” (PH, 197). This explanation is perfectly in keeping with the speculative-religious character of Hegel’s conception of history. The problem, in other words, is not the relation between religion and politics (for in this conception, the State has its basis in religious soil) but rather the essentially abstract and alienated character of this specific religious formation. As mentioned above, Spinoza does not view the limitations of the Hebrew Commonwealth along developmental lines. For him, these limitations are solely theologico-political. The differentiated structure of governance present in the Hebrew Commonwealth left the law-making authority in one body (the Levites) and the law-enforcing authority in another (the Supreme Councils). Both sides craving power, internal discord ensued. Moreover, the prophets— reacting to the consolidated religious authority of the Levites—intervened by supporting emergent potential rulers. Insofar as the corrupt character of the political organization remained, Spinoza holds that “[the prophets] merely succeeded in installing a new tyrant at the cost of much citizen blood. There was no end, then, to discord and civil wars, but the causes which led to the violation of the divine law were always the same, and could be removed only along with the whole constitution” (TTP XVII/203). Differently stated, the intrusion of religion into the structure of governance has disastrous results. This is exactly the opposite lesson from the one which Hegel gleans; since the Hegelian state has an essentially religious character, the problem has to do with the religious formation which can best accommodate the differentiated political character of the state. For Spinoza, the problem is, in sharp contrast, one of finding a political formation which can best accommodate the differentiated passions (religious or otherwise) of the individuals making up the commonwealth. For Hegel, this is an issue to be solved through evolution and development. For Spinoza (if such a

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problem is not simply coeval with political association), it is to be solved through education, habituation, and the formation of government. In figuratively taking up the history of the Jews, Hegel transforms Spinoza’s political history into a speculative-religious one. Thus, as Steven Smith notes, “[e] ven if Hegel shows a greater appreciation for Judaism in his later works . . . [it] occupies only a ‘moment’ in the progress of Geist through history.”25 In other words, Judaism is a moment which does not progress (qua Judaism). It can either remain what it is (by developmental delay) or, to the extent that it attains societal form, it does so in the mode of being surpassed—that is, by/as Christianity. Insofar as Christianity raises incarnational mediation to a conceptual level, it (1) preserves its essential (if nondoctrinal) integrity—it does not become surpassed and (2) shows itself as the deep structure of Hegelian dialectics. The following question now emerges: if this rapprochement between Spinoza and Hegel necessitates a nonreductive dialog between the two, what might this now look like? More specifically, is it possible to think the concretely political character of Spinoza’s history of Judaism within the context of Hegelian developmental history? Might Spinozan Judaism have attained a societal figure or form (in Hegel’s sense)? My claim is that the accomplishment of this is to be found in Adorno’s thought. It is to his reflections on Judaism and history that I now turn.

Adorno’s Auschwitz If Spinozan history narrates particular natural human associations, and if Hegelian history explicates the unfolding of spirit within nature (i.e. the raising of sensuous and particular nature to intelligible universality), Adornian history amounts to the remembrance of such natural particularity after its eclipse by spirit. Writing with Horkheimer in the 1940s Adorno states that: “A philosophical interpretation of world history would have to show how, despite all the detours and resistances, the systematic domination over nature has been asserted more and more decisively and has integrated all internal human characteristics.”26 It cannot be a matter, therefore, of “undoing” Hegelian speculative history. Rather, it is solely a matter of finding the particular after its subsumption in the universal. For Adorno, the very labeling of natural sensuous particularity as “inessential” (as occurs in Hegelian history) signals an attempt by Enlightenment societies to dominate it. And since (as for Spinoza) “nature creates individuals,” the domination of nature constitutes the real problem.


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While there can be no question of simply returning to such particularity after it has been eclipsed, it can be mediately approached through memory. Mediation, for Adorno, provides no social or political reconciliation, but rather heightens the awareness of present injustice: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head. If he transfigured the totality of historical suffering into the positivity of the self-realizing absolute, the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.”27 Adorno inverts Hegel’s speculative emphasis on the universal by following (to the letter) his statement about the “slaughter-bench” of history, thereby deducing the consequences of universal suffering of particulars. Put differently, if Hegelian history is itself anything other than an abstraction, then it must refer back to sensuous particularity. Once this move is made, it becomes clear—given that world history is not the place for happiness—that the legacy of such history is suffering. Hence, it is no exaggeration but rather (again) a literal reading of Hegel—from the standpoint of the particular—when Adorno states: “The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment” (MM, 49). Reading Hegel from the standpoint of the negative allows Adorno to focus on the particular and thus return the discussion to social and political concerns over and against speculative ones. For this reason, Adorno transforms the historical focus from spirit in its totality to objective spirit—the institutions which both structure and emerge from society. It is, therefore, no longer a matter of attaining systematic cognition of the whole in any positive sense. Such a conception, from the vantage point of the “socio-modal efflux” can only express ideology. It is precisely this which leads Adorno to state that “[t]he whole is the false” (MM, 50). The question now becomes: what is the legacy of the Jews from the vantage point of the objective spirit of Europe? Does Judaism become a figure for European objective spirit? Adorno’s answer is: horrifically, yes. Jewish exclusivity becomes the principle by which the Jews are excluded: “The Jews are today the group, which in practice and in theory, draws to itself the destructive urge which the wrong social order spontaneously produces. They are branded as absolute evil by absolute evil. In this sense they are indeed the chosen people” (DoE, 137). Differently stated, the figurative perception of the history of actual Jews has

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created a society informed by that perception; Judaism has attained the societal form of exclusion and destruction. Adorno elaborates: “Civilization is the triumph of society over nature—a triumph which transforms everything into mere nature. The Jews . . . are pronounced guilty of what, as the first citizens, they were the first to subjugate in themselves: the susceptibility to the lure of base instincts, the urge toward the beast and the earth, the worship of images. Because they invented the concept of the kosher, they are persecuted as swine” (DoE, 153). With Spinoza, Adorno emphasizes the ceremonial laws as a structuring quality of historical Judaism. With Hegel, Adorno emphasizes the negation of nature through ethics and law as an essential feature of this same history. Finally, in simultaneously adopting the developmental model and emphasizing natural particularity, Adorno is able to locate the problem of European anti-Semitism as a societal reification of concrete Jewish practices now turned back against the Jews. Put otherwise, Adorno’s analysis focuses neither specifically on the Jewish polity (as does Spinoza) nor developmentally on Judaism with respect to Christianity (as does Hegel). Instead, Adorno locates the particularity of current Judaism through the lens of dysfunctional societal mediation. It is for this reason that Adorno’s thought is able to express what the figure of Judaism would look like “raised” to a societal form. This is not to say that “Judaism-in-itself ” produces this kind of society. Rather, it is in the raising of Judaism to a societal form that it loses its particularity and becomes completely “for society.” For this reason, Adorno can legitimately locate the characteristics imposed upon Jews as ones historically developed in Judaism without creating a stereotype. That Judaism developed certain laws or practices has more to do with social and political circumstances than it does with speculative essence. That such circumstantial practices get taken as essential qualities is a product of societal reification. For Adorno, such reification has a direct affect on the reified subject as well; responding to the question of the spectral and unreal quality which European societies have bestowed upon Judaism (with respect to [1] the perception of developmental delay and [2] the extreme psychological opacity and torment undergone in the Shoah and its aftermath), Adorno provides a rare autobiographical allusion: “it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the


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drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence has since been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier” (ND, 362–3). With this, Adorno yokes together the themes of exclusivity and spectrality under the aegis of internalization: survival in Auschwitz called for exclusive concern over one’s own survival, and the guilt-effect of such comportment is the dream of becoming a “specter-to-oneself.” “Auschwitz,” for Adorno, thus names both the figural status of the Jews as societally reified, excluded, dominated, and destroyed, as well as the internalization of this figural status.

Conclusion The forgoing analysis misses its mark if it suggests anything like a special historical status for Judaism. If Spinoza is correct, then Jews are no different than any other collectivity formed in the modal efflux which is nature. If Hegel is correct, then Judaism (like all collectivities) can be viewed from a broader historical perspective as to what it may have contributed to an emerging world. Adorno reminds us that such historical emergence cannot be thought along teleological and figurational lines without risking the loss of the particularity in question. Put differently, an important lesson one might learn from this trio’s reflections on Judaism and history is that the speculative Good Friday runs a continuous risk of ushering in an actual Kristallnacht. And the scope of this lesson, as unfortunately confirmed on a daily basis, is indeed universal.

Notes 1 Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open, trans., Chana Bloch (USA: Harcourt Inc., 2002), p. 7. 2 I do not mean to imply that Jewish history has always and only been tethered to particularity. Similarly, world history has not always expressed universality. 3 Pierre Macherey, “Spinoza, the End of History, and the Ruse of Reason,” in Pierre Macherey, In A Materialist Way: Selected Essays, ed. Warren Montag, trans. Ted Stolze (New York: Verso Books, 1998), p. 136.


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4 Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 2nd edn, ed. & trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001). Citations refer to chapter number and page number in Shirley’s edition. 5 For the Introduction to the Lectures, see G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History with an Appendix from The Philosophy of Right, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988). For the actual text of the Lectures, see G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956). Subsequent references occur as (PH: page number). 6 Baruch Spinoza, “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,” in Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans., Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), p. 239. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections On A Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso Books, 2005), p. 39. 8 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 206; translation modified. 9 See Spinoza, TTP, XX/229 and G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 295–6, respectively. 10 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality In Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 73. 11 See Letter 9 in Baruch Spinoza, Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995), p. 91. 12 Baruch Spinoza, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy with Metaphysical Thoughts, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), p. 99. 13 Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowden (New York: Verso Books, 1998), pp. 18–22. For a reading of the TTP which emphasizes its role as a theory of history which simultaneously plays a role in history, see André Tosel, “Superstition and Reading,” trans. Ted Stolze, in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 146–66. 14 Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 233. 15 This is one way to understand Hegel’s famous claim in Glauben und Wissen that philosophy must replace the historic Good Friday with the “speculative Good


227

Friday” in exhibiting the development of spirit (see G. W. F. Hegel, Faith & Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977], p. 191). 16 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, trans. Richard Dixon and Clement Dutts (USA: Progress Publishers, 1956). 17 Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, The Legacy Of German Jewry, trans. David Suchoff (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 242. 18 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825– 1826—Volume III: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. R. F. Brown, J. M. Stewart and H. S. Harris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 39. 19 See G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975); subsequent references occur as (ET: page number). 20 Werner Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 50. 21 See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art—Volume 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 11. 22 Jean Hyppolite, Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, trans. Bond Harris and Jacqueline Bouchard Spurlock (Florida: University Press of Florida, 1996), p. 31. 23 Leo Pinsker, “Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew,” in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1984), p. 184. 24 For further development of this aspect of the TTP, see Jeffrey Bernstein, “Aggadic Moses: Spinoza and Freud on the Traumatic Legacy of TheologicalPolitical Identity,” Idealistic Studies, 38, 1–2 (2008): 3–21. 25 Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 193. 26 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 185. 27 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. 320.

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Index Absolute Spirit 77, 92–4, 99–100, 124–5, 128, 138–9 see also spirit acosmism 99, 103–10, 113, 115n. 35 Adorno, Theodore 16–18, 192, 209–10, 215, 222–5 Afghanistan 157 Agamben, Giorgio 173 Albiac, Gabriel 14, 156, 163 alienation 57, 86, 89, 137, 173, 195, 200–4, 210, 219–20 all determination is negation see omnis determinatio est negatio Althusser, Louis 4–6, 11, 83–96, 173 Althusserian circle 6, 19n. 21, 85 Amichai, Yehuda 209 amor Dei intellectualis see intellectual love of God Anselm, Saint 104–5 anti-humanism 4, 173, 178 see also humanism anti-Semitism 157, 224 aristocracy 191–2 Aristotle 73, 121, 128, 137, 159, 194 atheism 23, 92, 98, 102, 109 attribute 5, 7, 25–31, 34, 66, 70, 91–2, 95, 100–3, 110, 112, 115n. 36, 134, 171 Auerbach, Erich 211 Augustine, Saint 120–1 Auschwitz 210, 222–5 Badiou, Alain 19n. 21, 173, 175, 181–2 Balibar, Étienne 4, 7–9, 39, 42–4, 51, 56, 59n. 2, 60n. 27, 165, 173, 205 Balling, Peter 193 Bauer, Bruno 190, 194–6, 203 Bible 161, 218 Böhme, Jakob 112, 115n. 33 Bove, Laurent 8, 56, 179

Burgh, Albert 116n. 46 Butler, Judith 14–15, 151–66, 173–4, 179–80 Calvinism 194, 202, 212 causation 7–9, 11–12, 14, 29, 31–3, 44–7, 71, 93–4, 102–5, 111–12, 114, 119–21, 133–5, 155–60, 180, 212, 217, 220 causa sui (cause of itself) 8, 29, 33, 93–4, 102–5, 107, 112, 114 final cause 103, 115n. 32, 220 see also teleology immanent cause 44, 46, 93, 135 see also immanence Chinese philosophy 216 Christianity 83, 112, 120–1, 128, 194–7, 201–4, 214, 217–18, 222, 224 civil society 1, 7, 9–10, 55–8, 67, 87, 201–5 common notions 46, 51, 136, 145, 158 communism 44 communitarianism 44, 57 conatus 8, 12, 15, 44, 46, 48, 71–2, 100, 112, 115n. 37, 121–30, 133–6, 141–2, 145–7, 148n. 5, 151–7, 161–3, 167n. 2, 172, 175–82 death-conatus 124–6, 129 see also death drive continental philosophy 3, 6, 15, 170 corpora simplicissima 8, 45, 73 death drive 12, 125 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 5, 19n. 14, 45, 83, 133, 135, 138, 146–7, 151, 167n. 4 democracy 1, 16–17, 70, 77, 163–4, 168n. 16, 169n. 19, 189–206 Derrida, Jacques 83–4, 90, 94 Descartes, René 2, 48, 90, 101, 105–6, 117n. 48, 192–4

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desire 3, 9, 15, 44–58, 121–2, 151–4, 158, 173, 178–82, 191 dialectic, of Hegel 10–12, 44, 49, 65, 67–9, 75, 77, 83, 86–8, 90, 95–6, 111, 145–7, 153, 166, 222 and logic see logic, dialectical of Marx 4, 16, 88 see also Marx, Marxism of master and slave 2, 48–51, 55, 58, 87, 138–9, 145, 173–4 materialist 4, 86–9, 189, 191–4 see also materialism mathematical 10 method see method, dialectical nonteleological 58 progression 13, 31, 33, 47, 63, 76 of recognition 51 see also recognition and Spinoza 78, 108, 110–11, 117n. 48, 153, 171, 192 of the subject 174, 180 dreaming soul 14, 137, 139–41, 149n. 12 Engels, Friedrich 88, 219 Enlightenment 1–2, 4, 16, 23, 216 moderate German Enlightenment 23 Jewish 216 ethics see moral philosophy Euclid 98, 106, 111–12, 193

Germany 23, 128, 194, 196, 202, 205, 206n. 6 German philosophy 83 di Giovanni, George 41n. 12 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 23, 125 Goldschmidt, Herman Levin 215 Greek philosophy 121 Hardt, Michael 163 Harris, Errol 108, 110, 116n. 46 Hebrew language 95 Hebrew State 16–17, 53, 56, 189–206, 210–12, 218–21 Heidegger, Martin 19n. 18 Herder, Johann Gottfried 23 Hobbes, Thomas 7, 42, 54, 70–2, 76, 87, 164–5 Hölderlin, Friedrich 24, 189 Holocaust see Shoah Horkheimer, Max 192, 222 humanism 49, 87 see also anti-humanism Humanist Controversy 87 humanitarianism 223 Hume, David 120 hylomorphism 43, 65 Hyppolite, Jean 87–9, 174, 219

family 9–10, 53–5, 58, 67, 121, 158, 221 fascism 43–4 Feuerbach, Ludwig 87–8, 190, 195, 203 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 23 Fischbach, Franck 49 Foucault, Michel 160, 172–7 France 4, 6, 19n. 17, 203 French Communist Party (PCF) 86 French philosophy 83 French Revolution 165 Frankfurt School 16 free will 2, 11–12, 63–7, 119–21 Freud, Sigmund 12, 42, 120, 175, 178 Fukuyama, Francis 49

imagination 13, 27, 36–7, 45, 53, 56–9, 71, 74, 100, 102, 136–9, 149n. 9, 154–5, 157, 161, 172, 176–82, 193, 212 immanence 2, 5, 7, 10–12, 29, 33, 35, 37, 44, 46, 51, 75, 90, 93, 95, 110, 112, 135, 146, 161–2, 165, 170, 179, 182, 218 individual 2, 4, 7–10, 26, 36, 42–7, 50–8, 65–78, 98, 103, 122–3, 144, 146, 154, 157, 161, 176–8, 198, 211–12, 217 see also methodological individualism intellectual love of God 99, 101–2, 115n. 32 Iraq 157 Israel 157, 209 Italy 6

Gainza, Mariana 37–9 Geist see spirit Genesis 93, 95

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 23, 34, 189 Jelles, Jarig 99, 102, 207n. 8 Jena 24

Index Johnston, Adrian 179 Judaism 16–18, 91, 189–206, 209–25 Kant, Immanuel 1–2, 23, 48–9, 53, 120, 125, 127, 129, 219 Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf 129 Kojève, Alexandre 49, 89, 171, 174 Lacan, Jacques 173–80 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 179 language 44, 210–16 Laplanche, Jean 179 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 70, 71, 76, 103, 105, 129 Lenin, Vladimir Illyich 6, 88 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 23, 206n. 6 Levinas, Emmanuel 83 liberalism 4, 42–4 logic, dialectical 11, 171 of Hegel 11, 25, 31–2, 61–2, 83, 86, 89, 90–5, 99, 102–3, 106, 109, 112, 119 Plotinian 11 transindividual 44 Lucchese, Del 168 Macherey, Pierre 4–6, 58, 85, 89–95, 118, 130, 151, 153, 155, 167n. 2, 171, 181, 209 Machiavelli, Niccolò 73 Marx, Karl 2, 4, 6, 11, 16–17, 42, 53, 84–9, 189–206, 215, 219 Marxism 4, 17, 19n. 17, 42, 85–7 Massumi, Brian 177 master and slave see dialectic, of master and slave materialism 1, 4, 6, 23, 85, 88, 92, 166, 177, 191–4, 212 Matheron, Alexandre 6, 46, 56–7, 193–4, 196, 201 Matheron, François 87 memory 46, 48, 56, 60n. 27, 133–4, 143, 148n. 5, 223 Mendelssohn, Moses 23, 206n. 6 Mennonites 194 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4 method, deductive 10, 69 dialectical 35, 62, 68, 98

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geometrical 10, 65, 69, 75, 98–101, 106–8, 115n. 30, 116n. 46, 135 of Hegel 25, 61–2, 68–9, 75–6 immanent 75 of Marx 194 mathematical 25, 34–5, 98, 105–6 progressive 10, 76 resolutive-compositive 72–3 of Spinoza 10, 61, 65, 72, 75–6, 98, 100–2, 105–6, 115n. 30 methodological individualism 4, 7, 42, 65, 76 see also individual Meyer, Ludwig 194–5 Miller, A. V. 93 mode 7–9, 11–12, 26, 28–31, 35, 37, 39–40, 45, 92, 95, 99–103, 110–12, 114n. 30, 115nn. 31, 36–7, 122, 129, 181, 211, 225 monarchy 70, 157, 191 monism 216 monotheism 91, 98, 218 moral philosophy of Spinoza 99–103, 113, 124, 142, 156 multitude 10, 56, 73–4, 152, 163–5, 168n. 16, 178 Nancy, Jean-Luc 149n. 12, 171–4, 179, 182 natural law 70, 76 natura naturans 117n. 47 natura naturata 115n. 36, 117n. 47 necessitarianism 70, 103, 108, 152, 158–60 negation 3, 8, 10–15, 25–31, 36, 40, 48, 50, 64, 66, 69–70, 75, 83, 87–8, 91, 96, 98–112, 115n. 36, 135, 138–44, 147, 151, 153, 163, 171, 173–4, 178, 182, 204–5, 218–19, 224 see also negation of the negation negation of the negation 10, 19n. 14, 29, 31, 35–6, 40, 69, 84, 88–90, 99–101, 103, 105, 107–13 Negri, Antonio 6, 19n. 17, 86, 163, 165–6, 167n. 4, 169n. 19 Netherlands 192, 194, 202, 212 Nietzsche, Friedrich 83, 126

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nihilism 23 nominalism 212 Oldenberg, Henry 195 omnis determinatio est negatio 5, 17, 25, 29, 36, 39–40, 99, 102–3, 110, 192, 194, 203 see also negation ontological argument 102, 104–5, 113, 116n. 39 overdetermination 86, 88, 153 Palestine 157 panpsychism 139 pantheism 24, 98, 175 Parmenides 63 passions 47, 99–101, 109, 123, 135, 144–5, 179–80, 198 Paul, Saint 220 Persia 216 person 9, 29, 64–6, 76, 98, 103, 105, 109–12, 135, 155–6 personal identity 133, 146 see also individual philosophy of history 3, 17–18, 46, 153, 191 of Feuerbach 88 of Hegel 18, 62, 64, 68, 77, 89, 119, 126, 129–30, 152, 165, 210, 215, 223 and Judaism 209–25 phrenology 140, 145 physics, of Spinoza 8, 73, 156 Pillow, Kirk 139 Pinsker, Leo 219 Plato 112, 122, 128, 197, 203 Plotinus 11 postmodernism 43 proportion of motion and rest see ratio of motion and rest Protestantism 128, 215 psychoanalysis 15, 172, 174, 176, 178–9 Rand, Ayn 42 ratio of motion and rest 45–6, 71, 133–4, 137, 148n. 4, 162, 177 rational choice theory 2, 52 recognition 9, 48–54, 58, 66, 151–4 reflection 5, 8, 28–30, 35, 67, 91, 104, 108, 110

reification 210, 224–5 relationality 2, 9, 36, 40–55, 70, 76, 176–7, 180 resistance 152, 165, 179 Roman Catholicism 196 Romanticism 24 Rosen, Stanley 108, 117n. 48 Rubel, Maximilian 192 Ruge, Arnold 195 Rumsfeld, Donald 141 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 23–4, 189 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 24 Schmitz, Kenneth 99 self-negation see negation of the negation September 11, 2001 120, 157, 161 Shoah 215, 224 Simondon, Gilbert 7, 43–4, 51, 59n. 2, 60n. 18 simplest bodies see corpora simplicissima Smith, Steven 222 social contract theory 10, 17, 42, 52–5, 70, 73, 76, 87, 197, 199–200 Sophocles 124–5 Spanish poet 133–4, 141–2, 146, 148n. 5, 162 spirit 37, 61–4, 77–8, 83, 87, 92–5, 98, 105, 109, 121, 129–30, 134, 137–8, 140–1, 143, 145–6, 174, 189, 210, 213–14, 218–19, 220–3 see also Absolute Spirit Stalinism 43 State 9–10, 17, 42, 52–3, 55, 57–8, 67–8, 74, 77, 157–8, 161–2, 191, 194–206, 220 state of nature 17, 70–3, 87, 196–201, 204 stoicism 145, 198 striving see conatus structuralism 85–6, 173 subject 6, 8, 11, 13, 15–16, 23, 27, 32, 34–5, 42, 46–52, 55–7, 65, 67, 89, 93, 98, 105, 109–10, 129, 151, 165, 170–82, 201, 205, 213 substance 5–9, 11, 24–37, 40, 42, 67, 91–5, 98–103, 107, 109–12, 115n. 36, 129, 171, 175, 177, 181, 214 suicide 14, 154–5

Index teleology 4, 11, 15, 35–6, 46, 50, 55–8, 89–91, 98–112, 115n. 32, 126, 129–30, 153, 155, 160, 163–5, 169n. 19, 174, 181, 220, 225 theocracy 53, 57–8, 60n. 27, 190, 192, 199, 212 theodicy 15, 152–3, 214, 220 totality 18, 29–30, 32, 34, 39, 42–3, 66, 77, 83, 89, 104, 115n. 36, 134, 143–4, 152, 155, 172, 174, 181, 214, 223 transindividuality 7–10, 39–40, 42–4, 47–53, 56–8, 60n. 18, 161 Travolta, John 143, 147 Tucker, Robert 192

unhappy consciousness 15, 87, 124, 128, 174–5 United States 157, 161 universals 158–60, 211–16 de Vries, Simon 193–5 Walter, Ferdinand 141–2 Wolff, Christian 129 Yovel, Yirmiyahu 108, 110, 117n. 47, 190 Žižek, Slavoj 15, 173, 175, 178–9

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