The force of ideas in Spinoza

Political Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 6, 2007, Pages 732-755

  Sharp, Hasana ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Althusser; Ideology; Materialism; Spinoza

Indexed keywords

EID: 35648932044     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591707307326     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. For example, Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
2. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
3. Antonio Negri, Subversive Spinoza, trans. Timothy S. Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
4. Most notably, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey.
5. Louis Althusser, "The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza," trans. T. Stolze, in The New Spinoza, edited by Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7. Hereafter "The Only Materialist Tradition."
6. I use ideology in the broadest possible sense, which I defend below. It is perhaps closest to Althusser's use of "Ideology" in his essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation," even as I refer to something excessive of human representation. Althusser distinguishes between "Ideology" in the capitalized singular and "ideologies." Ideology is the invariant fact that human representations are mediated by the peculiar character of the social structure in which subjects live. Ideologies, on the other hand, refer to particular discourses that are motivated by a set of interests. Following Althusser, I consider ideology in the singular to refer to the more neutral sense of the social (though, any distinction between "social" and "natural" makes little sense in Spinoza's terms) determination of ideas rather than an explicitly interested discourse. In Lenin and Philosophy, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Hereafter "Ideology."
7. Althusser, "The Only Materialist Tradition," 9.
8. I will proceed to cite Spinoza parenthetically in the body of the paper with the standard notation, using Edwin Curley's edition and translation, The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Citations refer to the part (= Roman numeral), proposition (= p), demonstration (= d), scholium (= s), corollary (= c), appendix (= app), preface (= pref), and definition (= def).
9. Althusser, "The Only Materialist Tradition," 6.
10. See, especially Chapter 2 of Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries (London: Verso, 1999). For other examinations of the relationship between Spinoza and Althusser,
11. see Peter Thomas, "Philosophical Strategies: Spinoza and Althusser" Historical Materialism 10.3 (December 2002): 71-113;
12. Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (London: Blackwell Publishers, 199.1);
13. Caroline Williams, Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject (London: The Athlone Press, 2001);
14. Jean-Pierre Cotten, "Althusser et Spinoza," in Spinoza au XXième Siècle, edited by Paul-Laurent Assoun (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France),
15. and Althusser himself, "On Spinoza," Elements of 'Self-Criticism, trans. B. Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1976).
16. Althusser, "The Only Materialist Tradition," 5.
17. Ibid., 6, and E Iapp.
18. Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 280.
19. Warren Montag, Louis Althusser (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 78.
20. Ibid., 63.
21. One can likewise approach the question of freedom from the point of view that one is but a tiny particle within the infinite power of extension, a singular body amidst infinitely many other bodies, as Montag's work has done elegantly. My focus here, however, is how ideas move ideas.
22. Matthew Sharpe's is an interesting recent discussion of ideology as structurally analogous to aesthetic judgment, "The Aesthetics of Ideology, or 'The Critique of Ideological Judgment in Eagleton and Žižek, " Political Theory 34.1 (February 2006): 95-120.
23. Most notably, Terry Eagleton, Ernesto Lacalu, and Slavoj Žižek.
24. See Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 199.1),
25. "The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology," Journal of Political Ideologies 1.3 (1996): 201-220,
26. and the introductory essay in Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), edited by Žižek, respectively.
27. Laclau, "The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology," 202.
28. Although Marx's texts themselves are considerably more ambivalent and complicated than some, perhaps even most, of the traditions to which they gave rise, his texts can be understood, at least partly, to be objectively responsible for the effects they produced. From a Spinozan perspective, texts are bodies that affect and are affected by other bodies, some of which accord with the striving unique to them, or their particular "nature," but most of which are accidental products of energetic interactions between myriad forces.
29. See the interview of Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980): 109-133.
30. Evidence for this claim can be found throughout the Ethics, but especially, E Idef2, IIp7, IIIp2.
31. I am thinking, especially, of Warren Montag to whom I am deeply indebted, even as I offer this corrective supplement to his analysis of corporeal determination;
32. see Bodies, Masses, Power (London: Verso, 1999).
33. This is a bit of an overstatement, since Negri, Balibar, and Montag all examine the play of imagination and reason, the first two kinds of knowledge, but the sensual, affective, and corporeal remain the privileged sites of explanation for the tradition of Marxist interpretation.
34. Spinoza famously remarks: "To man, then, there is nothing more useful to man. Man, I say, can wish for nothing more helpful 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 together as far as they can, to preserve their being, and that all, together, should seek for themselves the common advantage of all" (E IVp18s). Space prohibits an analysis of this notion of utility, which I will take up in another paper.
35. For example, Margaret Wilson, "Objects, Ideas, and 'Minds' : Comments on Spinoza's Theory," in Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
36. Althusser, "Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter," in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, edited by François Matheron and Olivier Corpet, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2006), 183. Hereafter "Underground Current."
37. Antonio Gramsci, "Fable of the Beaver," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
38. Spinoza, The Letters, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1995), Epistle 58. Although I cannot address this within the scope of the paper, Spinoza and Althusser have different targets in their critiques of conscious freedom. Althusser is likely critical of a phenomenological or existentialist model of "consciousness" as radically free interiority, which is alien to Spinoza except insofar as it originates in Descartes. Althusser rather polemically equates Ideology in the omnihistorical sense to consciousness itself, suggesting that the precious consciousness of his peer intellectuals is invariably an expression of its social relations structured by domination. Spinoza, however, is concerned with superstitious and theological subjectivity that imagines human and divine freedom as unconstrained caprice rather than natural necessity.
39. Althusser, "The Only Materialist Tradition," 12.
40. "Conclusions without premises" is a notion from Spinoza (E IIp28d) that recalls "symptomatic reading" as the investigation of answers to questions unconsciously, or not yet posed; Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster (London: Verso, 1970).
41. Althusser, "Underground Current," 178.
42. Ibid.
43. That is, usually other humans, but Spinoza would hardly be surprised by wolf and bear children, since corporeal similarity is something that emerges as much through repeated contact as from given biology. There is no such thing as an essential human, bear, or wolf nature, but only infinitely many individual natures, or essences.
44. For a more detailed defense of this claim, see Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza, Ch. 4 (Paris: Maspero, 1979).
45. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990),
46. page reference is to French edition, Spinoza et le Problème de l'Expression (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968), 36.
47. Cf. Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power, xxi.
48. To preserve the irreducibility of the attributes to one another, however, one must bear in mind that the "body as a model" is an analogy to the life of ideas. Taking the body as a model entails that one understand something by way of something else. The story of the body in Spinoza may be even more properly called "allegorical" insofar as it tells us about ideas. Allegories, of course, are still indicative and useful ways of understanding things, but the difference (allegory from allos, other or different) that holds apart the phenomena must be kept in mind.
49. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 18-19.
50. Alexandre Matheron, Individu et Communauté Chez Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 19.
51. Althusser, "Ideology," 175.
52. Jane Bennett also notes parenthetically that "ideas strive to enhance their power of activity," "The Force of Things: Steps Toward and Ecology of Matter," Political Theory 32.3 (2004), 353.
53. What I call "human truth" refers to Spinoza's doctrine of adequate ideas, which are ideas that contain the ideas of their causes. Due to the autonomy of the attributes, in my interpretation, Spinoza's is not a correspondence theory of truth, where an idea is true insofar as it corresponds to its object (except in the case of the divine intellect, which has a grasp of the totality of ideas). For humans, we have adequate ideas that include knowledge of their causes, when ideas emerge more from our power of thinking than from external powers. Since we are largely moved by external powers, we mostly generate inadequate ideas, or ideas that do not include an apprehension of what brought them into being. (E IIdef4).
54. Spinoza seems to attribute a kind of spontaneous, yet mistaken (in contrast to Hobbes), ontological individualism to the fact that our bodies filter our experience of the world. The Marxist analyses of, for example, Macpherson, force us to ask whether such an interpretation of our experience is historically imposed rather than the inevitable consequence of embodied subjectivity. See C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
55. For a Spinozist analysis of our affective milieu during the war on terror, see Hasana Sharp, "Why Spinoza Today? Or, 'A Strategy of Anti-Fear,'" Rethinking Marxism 17.4 (October 2005): 591-608.
56. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 9.
57. Althusser, "Ideology," 161.
58. Cf. Smith, "What Kind of Democrat was Spinoza?," Political Theory 33.1 (2005), 13.
59. Vittorio Morfino, "An Althusserian. Lexicon," Borderlands e-journal 4.2 (2005).
60. Montag, Louis Althusser, 56.
61. Althusser, "The Only Materialist Tradition," 9.
62. Cf. André Tosel, Du Matérialisme, du Spinoza (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1994).
63. Many do not share my interpretation and argue that freedom and rationality for Spinoza can only be had by few individuals and are largely solitary projects. My argument here leads to the notion that even thinking, wisdom, and philosophy must be collective efforts, where collective is interpreted broadly to include inorganic conditions as well as human assemblies. For an argument that wisdom and philosophy are solitary endeavors, see Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity.
64. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), Ch. 16, 178.
65. Political Treatise, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), Ch. 9, par. 14, my emphasis.