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Spinoza Studies

Spinoza in Post-Marxist PhilosophySpeculative Materialism

By Katja Diefenbach

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£29.99

About this book

Revises continental philosophy’s portrayals of the relationships between matter, affect, thought and the power of the multitude

  • Provides a comprehensive overview and detailed analysis of central concepts and controversies in French post-Marxist and poststructuralist Spinoza scholarship
  • Introduces, and intervenes in, the post-Marxist and poststructuralist controversies over Spinoza’s concepts of immanent causality, conatus, and power of the multitude as tools to rethink politics in contemporary radical thought
  • Incorporates historical context with an extensive discussion of Dutch colonial capitalism
  • Provides conceptual and contextual groundwork for further research in Spinoza studies, early modern political philosophy, post-Marxism, poststructuralism, and French intellectual history
  • Widens access to the intellectual wealth of authors not yet widely translated into English, such as Ferdinand Alquié and Martial Gueroult

The book begins from the insight that very few seventeenth-century philosophers have received more antithetical interpretations than Baruch de Spinoza. He has been regarded as an atheist and a rationalist, as a pantheist and a vitalist, as a Jewish critic of religion and a great thinker in the Marrano tradition. In the twentieth century, however, Spinoza was conceived as a materialist who was strikingly ahead of his time, providing Marxism with concepts of overdetermined dialectics, plural temporality and nonteleological praxis.

Beginning with Althusser’s interest in the concept of immanent causality, the book reconstructs post-Marxist readings of Spinoza from Negri to Balibar, Matheron to Tosel, and Gueroult to Deleuze. It examines how these authors adapt Spinoza’s unconventional doctrines of the differentiality of being, the self-forming capacity of matter, the excess of the positive affects, and the multitude’s power of self-government. The book fundamentally revises continental philosophy’s portrayals of the relationships between matter, affect, thought, and the multitude.

Reviews

Exegetically rigorous and boldly argued, this book is one of the finest contributions to recent German-language Spinoza scholarship and a notable essay in contemporary Spinozist Marxism. It has had a substantial influence on the German academic discussion, and its translation is certain to captivate a discerning international readership.
While there have been multiple books published on Spinozist Marxism, Diefenbach’s is the first to consider the entirety of the different interpretations, encompassing Althusser, Negri, and others. In doing so, she demonstrates how much Spinoza is a provocative and productive point of reference for contemporary philosophy and politics.
None other than Hegel famously proclaimed: ‘You have to be a Spinozist or you are not a philosopher.’ Coming from Hegel, Spinoza’s harsh critic, the admission testifies to the towering status of Spinoza’s thought, to the point that in the subsequent history it presented a formidable alternative to the legacy of Hegelian dialectic. Katja Diefenbach’s book meticulously researches the impact of Spinozist thought in the twentieth century, particularly its political implications, discussing all its major proponents from Althusser to Negri, from Gueroult to Balibar, from Derrida to Deleuze above all, and many more. But this is not merely a scholarly work, notwithstanding its thorough and awe-inspiring scholarship, this is a passionate plea for Spinoza as a source for a reinvention of politics for our times.
The first book that I have seen that tries to think through the different invocations of Spinoza in "post-marxist philosophy."
Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Reference Conventions
A Note on the Translation

Introduction: Althusser’s Overture
Which Spinoza?
Spinoza Between Structuralism and Post-Marxism
The Concept of Immanent Causality in Althusser
‘[…] A Knowledge, in That Which Permits Us to Think Against Hegel, of That Which Remains Hegelian’
Immanence Immanent to Itself: From Althusser to Deleuze
Post-Marxist Spinoza Studies Between the Poles of Negri and Balibar

I. Of the Agency of the Multitude: Negri’s Interpretation of the Conatus Doctrine
1. Philosophy of Joy
The Excess of the Positive Passions
Natural Right without State of Nature
As Much Right as Power
The Dethematisation of the Sad Passions
Labour Power and Conatus
The Real-Imaginary Constitution of Society in Balibar
2. The Pantheistic Undercurrent of Materialism
The Conatus of Metaphysics
Cassirer’s Spinoza
Negri’s Deleuze: The Birth of Materialism from Pantheism
3. The Controversy over the Doctrine of Attributes
Transcendent Attributes
The First Propositions of the Ethics and the Enigma of Their Meaning
Ontologically One, Formally Different: The Doctrine of Attributes in Gueroult and Deleuze
Negri’s Re-Idealisation of Spinoza
4. Of the Conatus Principle
Conatus Doctrine and Anti-Finalist Anthropology
Spinoza with Hobbes: Egalitarianism of Ability
Last-Ditch Teleological Defences in Fénelon
Communism of Conatus
From the Physics of Bodies to the Doctrine of Essences: The Anarchy of the Conatus Principle
Consubstantiality of Affect and Reason: The Three Kinds of Life and Knowledge
From Knowledge of Effects to Common Notions and Essential Ideas: Excess of Joy and Becoming-Cause
Inversion of the Mind-Body Parallelism
Materialism of Thinking and Exaltation of Being
5. Spinoza contra Hobbes: Possessive Transindividualism
‘The first anti-Hobbes that the history of Western political thought presents’
Passions and Interests
Being Able to Kill: Hobbes’s Anthropology of Fear
The Sacrifice of Society in Leviathan
6. Which Eternity, Whose Blessedness?
A Vitalism That Incorporates Nihilism
Neither Master nor Servant: Matheron’s Conception of Ego-Altruism
The Socialisation of the Affects through Processes of Imitation
The Annulment of Affective Ambivalence
Becoming-Eternal and the Genesis of the Third Kind of Knowledge
Politics of the Third Kind

II. History and Ontology: Holland’s Historical Untimeliness
1. The Savage Anomaly of the United Provinces
Huizinga’s Moderation, Negri’s Incongruity
The Dutch Model of Accumulation
‘County without a Count’: The Republic of the Regents
Spinoza, a Heretic among Heretics
Heterodoxies in the Amsterdam Jewish Community
Marrano Power
Derrida contra Negri: Creation, Crypt
2. Of Spinoza’s Fear of His Own Thinking
Balibar on Spinoza’s Fear
Between Sects and Regents
On the Power of the Political-Theological State Apparatus: Spinoza’s Critique of Liberalism
The Religion of Obedience and the Controversy over Grace within Protestantism
The Exclusion of the Multitudo from Democracy
3. Colonial Hallucinations: Marronage and Political Violence
Spinoza and Caliban: The Lepers of This Earth
Atlantic Diaspora: Amsterdam Sephardim in Pernambuco
Henrique Dias, Maroon Commander
Racism and Anti-Semitism in the Dutch-Portuguese Atlantic
The Immanent Transformation of Political Violence

III. Of the Physics of the Political: Balibar and the Paradoxes of Spinozist Philosophy
1. Ambivalences of the Political Theory of the State
Proposition 37 of Part IV of the Ethics
The Complexity of Real-Imaginary Socialisation
The Transindividuation of Multitude and State
Theory between Government and Revolution
2. Wherein Lies the Power of the ‘Multitude Led as If by One Mind’?
Potentia Multitudinis, Quae Una Veluti Mente Ducitur
Matheron with Foucault: The Birth of Democracy from the Lynch Mob
Politics and Mass Imagination
The Theory of National Ingenia in the Theological-Political Treatise
From Rule of Law to Power State
From Monos to Demos: The Production of Mass Intellectuality
Wherein Does the Power of the ‘Multitude Led as If by One Mind’ Lie?
3. Active Matter: Spinoza’s Speculative Materialism
Balibar on the Relation between Physics and Metaphysics
Things Bring Themselves into Existence
Is There a Quiet Rule of the Essences?
4. The Birth of a Non-Cartesian Epistemology
The Differentiality of the Simple
Physics of the Transindividual, Primacy of Relations: The Interpretation of the Corpora Simplicissima in Deleuze and Gueroult
The Infinite Modulation of Nature
From Analysis to Synthesis
Bachelard’s Quiet Spinozism
Homonymy of Concepts of Order
Spinoza contra Descartes: From the Finalism of Nature to the Voluntarism of Mind

IV. Spinoza or Descartes: Immanent or Impossible Cause
1. Heterodox Readings of Descartes in Structuralism and Phenomenology
Gueroult and Alquié between Descartes and Spinoza
Alquié’s Descartes: The Trauma of the Thinking Thing
Gueroult’s Objection: Descartes according to the Order of Reasons
Sum Cogitans, Sum Ambulans: Wherein Lies the Ego Sum’s Primacy?
The In/Comprehensibility of God: Alquié and Gueroult Trade Accusations of Theology
Structuralism and Phenomenology: Crossed Readings
Cavaillès’s Anti-Phenomenological Rallying Cry: Against the ‘Philosophy of Consciousness’
Derrida contra Foucault: ‘Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum.’
Différance and Cartesian Causality
Foucault contra Derrida: Let Us Not Forget – History
2. Lacan’s Detour through Descartes: Negative Potentiality of Being
The Cogito as Subject of the Unconscious
Cogito without Sum
Causality through Object
Being without Thinking
The Two Walls of the Impossible
The Excess of the Drive
The Impossibility of Repetition
The Potentiality of the Negative, or The Myth of the Lamella
From Mēden to Den: ‘Less Than Nothing’
Excrement and Expropriation
Certeau’s Lacan: Between Mysticism and Torture
3. The Cogito as Subject of the Revolution: Žižek Reading Lenin
Politics of the Death Drive
Philosophical Fictionalisation of Lenin
Anti-Evolutionist Materialism
Sacrifice and Administration
Guattari’s Lenin: The Megalomania of the Subjugated Group
Politics of Violence, Government of Things
Exacerbating the Class Struggle from the Height of the Party
4. Deleuze and Badiou between Descartes and Spinoza
Althusser with Deleuze
The Event in Badiou and Deleuze: Disjunction or Turn?
Badiou’s Minimal Marxism
The Causa Errans of the Void
The Grace of the Event
Deleuze contra Badiou: Beyond One and Many
Deleuze’s Rewriting of Transcendental Philosophy
Spinoza with Duns Scotus
Transcendental Empiricism and Difference of Intensity
‘Is There Such a Thing as a Deleuzian Politics?’
Politics of Potentiality

Conclusion: Thinking, Differing

Bibliography

About the contributors

Katja Diefenbach

Katja Diefenbach is Professor of Cultural Philosophy at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt, Germany. She is a member of the scientific committee of Sive Natura: International Center for Spinozan Studies, Bologna, and the German Spinoza Society. She won Geisteswissenschaften International’s special award in 2021 and is a co-initiator of the research project Perception, Jurisdiction, and Valorization in Colonial Modernity as well as a member of the editorial board of the Berlin publishing house collective b_books. Katja has published widely in German and also in English. She is co-editor of Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013) and she has contributed to Radical Philosophy. This is her first book to appear in English.

Gerrit Jackson

Gerrit Jackson studied literature and philosophy and works as a translator on a regular basis for a number of museums; longstanding clients include the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Lenbachhaus, Munich. His published translation projects include Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology (Fordham University Press, 2012), Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics (Bard Graduate Center, 2016), Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland (London: Reaktion, 2018) and Peter Geimer, Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

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