Love and Spinozan Politics

Here I attempt to establish, in brief, the terms of a Spinozan politics; my goal is not necessarily to impose this as the sole or true definition but rather to assist us in understanding what it means for Hardt and Negri to adopt Spinozan definition of “politics” and "love" as well as to open our discussion to competing determinations of politics.

For Spinoza, the multitude is not a form of politics, nor is it necessarily a politics at all. Multitude is foremost, for Spinoza as for Hardt and Negri, constitutive, becoming. Insofar as they draw from the Ethics as well as the Theologico-Political Treatise and the unfinished Political Treatise, the term "multitudo" appears (in some form) in the Ethics only once, in Part V, in the Scholium to Proposition XX. Here, in order to prove that "love towards God is the highest good which we can seek for under the guidance of reason," he explores how, "the mind's power over the emotions consists" in, among other things, "the number of causes [multitudine causarum] whereby those affectiones are fostered, which have regard to the common properties [communes proprietates] of things or to God." The multitude here, if we read it as consistent with the TPT and the PT, is foremost one of causes, not subjects. Love of God refers back to the first Books of the Ethics and invites us to think about ontology and composition and the primacy of such forces or fields in the consolidation or constitution of politics. This is Heidegger in reverse; ontology or being are not the question but the first foundation, and love directs us to this--and to the commonality, or common access, to shared affects and forces. Being is not revealed to us apophatically in the passivity of Angst; becoming is revealed to us in a love that, in turn, returns us not only to God/Nature but to the multitude of causes and to the common forces and properties which are ours in becoming.

Spinoza's love is a principle not unlike conatus; it is less an affect in an emotional sense than as a description of forces. It is in no way subjective nor should it be conflated with emotion without losing sight of its role as an affect (not a passion) in the Ethics. I'm not convinced there is anything human or subjective about love. At its best, Commonwealth asserts this, but the point gets lost in the ecumenical thrust of the first half of the book, where Hardt and Negri seem to respond to critics by creating and deploying "generous" strategic connections with any number of philosophical approaches, social movements, and excoriated theological concepts. At times this is compelling, at times less so, but ultimately what is obscured is the real challenge Spinozism has posed (and continues to pose) to thought and politics since the seventeenth century (to phenomenology, for instance, which is, from the standpoint of the Ethics, disdainful). Spinoza’s has never been an academic philosophy, and as Negri has articulated elsewhere (across the articles collected in Subversive Spinoza, in somewhat more satisfying terms), conflicting versions of modernity are at stake in recuperations of Spinozism since the seventeenth century. But I am in solidarity with Commonwealth insofar as Hardt and Negri continue to pose the multitude as constitutive power, as becoming, in Spinozan terms—terms which are not, as David Harvey suggests in Artforum, arcane or impenetrable, but rather which provide resources for remaking politics not only from below but from the ground up, ontologically. Hardt and Negri are innovative in affirming a continuity across Spinoza's work, investigating how multitude takes shape politically in the TPT, the PT and the Ethics.

A problem arises, however, in the assumption that one can translate multitude and love from the Ethics into political philosophy without explaining this move. Indeed, there is something of a problem in assuming that Spinoza is foremost a thinker of politics. He is decidedly and declaredly not--that is to say, he thinks about politics, but only through an conceptual and empirical edifice established in the Ethics. Spinoza enables us to approach and construct a no-less-immanent plane of politics, yes, but not without a crucial mediation (not a negation!), the terms of the Ethics: ethics. The multitude, in a truly Spinozistic sense as in the Ethics, does not begin as a politics but rather as an infinite array of bodies and affects. The project of the Ethics is to reveal an ethics without morality, to discover how bodies relate to one another on a fundamental plane of immanence, affecting one another and being affected. There is no good or bad politics, just as there is no "good" or "bad"; there is only the discovery of an ethical physics, an economy of happiness and sadness, of activity and passivity where different degrees of power or force lie in a body’s ability to increase its power of activity and decrease its potential for passivity. It is only from here Spinoza moves to articulate a more human ethics which takes this economy into account in terms of emotion and which extends through his later work to a radical recomposition of politics, exegesis, and religion. This is what strikes me as the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s approaches to politics and art, of Foucault’s interest in ethics and its fundamental relation to rethinking Marxism and politics, and to some of the most compelling political projects of the last 50 years. All of these approaches proceed from the assumption—really, the demonstration and proof, lest we forget the very form of the Ethics—that politics begins with an adequate understanding of causality and affect as well as of the terms and strategies of power. It begins as a diagnostic, as an ethics. Whether or not Spinoza strikes you as right is beside the point here; it is an ethics, for Spinoza, that gives shape to his understanding of power as well as politics. The multitude, for Spinoza, does not begin as a political body or as a general will but rather as an infinite reservoir of bodies (irreducible to human bodies) and affects. It is a collection of singularities and becomings, as Deleuze and Guattari frequently affirm, not an organization. These forces, insofar as they proceed from and participate in the same nature as human bodies, are forces we hold in common. This is what Spinoza’s Ethics enables us to think, the terms of our participation in a vast ontological “commons” which we do not merely inherit but rather create and transform insofar as we are, fundamentally, part of nature, a nature to which there is no outside. We proceed from here to understand, through the diagnostic method of the Ethics, how fundamentally active forces become passive and how this is at the same time a diagram of power. We proceed from here, in turn, to something we might call politics, to recognizing our capacity to create and manipulate forms (autonomously) as they are, immanent, and thus increase our power of activity.

Certainly, Spinoza is not the only resource for Hardt and Negri, nor is he the sole influence on such thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, etc. But his work, and how it has been read, does give us valuable insight into competing determinations of politics as well as to the successes and failures of a book like Commonwealth. Hardt and Negri begin Commonwealth (as well as their trilogy, in Empire) with the assumption that the multitude is a politics, or that it is a political form. I do not pretend to know or understand what “the political” is, but it is clear to me that the multitude is for Spinoza a concept of immanence that proceeds from his work in the Ethics. This does not seem to be the case for Hardt and Negri; the mediation of the Ethics is lost, for better or worse. Perhaps this is a conceptual trend which first takes shape as early as The Savage Anomaly, where Negri discovers a certain break between Books II and III of the Ethics on the grounds that Spinoza abandons an unsatisfying utopian or pantheistic ontology (the First Foundation, foremost a bourgeois ideology) for a more realistic and constitutive diagram of affects (the Second Foundation, the locus of the production of subjectivity). The multitude, it is assumed, begins from the assumptions made in Book III and beyond in the Ethics. Moreover, the love for God we reach by the end of the Ethics--and, at length, in Commonwealth--refers back only as far as the beginning of Book III, to a taxonomy of human affects and passions which found a politics that takes shape in terms of subjectivity and not necessarily in relation to the affects and forces which precede and compose subjectivity, the supposedly-ideological and -bourgeois understanding of God/Nature in Books I and II.

My contention here is not purely scholastic but rather practical, an attempt to understand how Hardt and Negri determine the multitude again in Commonwealth. I will post again as I continue to work through the book, and return to this topic soon...