Who's afraid of the multitude? Between the individual and the state

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 104, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 655-673

  Montag, Warren ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950564263     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-104-4-655     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. See Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
2. I realizè that in choosing to focus on the multitude, I will be accused of giving in to fashion, especially now that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire has introduced this once obscure term into such general currency that even Time magazine has deemed it appropriate for its readership. Those familiar with Spinoza will hasten to point out that the multitude as a concept appears only in Spinoza's last and unfinished work, the TP, and does not appear perhaps even under another name in the Ethics or the TTP and therefore cannot serve the task I seek to assign to it: the task of designating what is most disturbing about Spinoza's work as a whole in the current theoretical conjuncture. I will respond to these perfectly reasonable objections by insisting that while Hardt and Negri's use of the term "multitude" in Empire and in some subsequent essays is undoubtedly derived from Spinoza and therefore exists in a certain as yet unspecified relation to the concept as it appears in the text of the TP (after all, Negri himself was the first to explore this aspect of the TP in detail: see Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991]), it remains in essential ways distinct from it, conditioned as much by the history of Marxism and communism, both theoretically and practically, as by the work of Spinoza. To the second objection, that is, to the charge that I have made central to Spinoza a concept that only appears in his last unfinished text, I would respond by citing Matheron's argurpent that the theoretical conditions of possibility of the multitude are established not in the TP, where these conditions are presupposed, but only in the Ethics (particularly parts 3 and 4);
3. see Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1969)
4. and "L'inignation et le conatus de l'état spinoziste," in Spinoza: Puissance et ontologie, ed. M. R. D'Allonnes and H. Rizk (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1994), 163. In fact, I would go further than Matheron (and to some extent oppose him) and argue that the path on which Spinoza embarks in chapter 16 of the TTP, the equation of right and power, requires as a condition of its validity the absent concept of the multitude, a concept that I will thus regard not so much as absent as deferred from the TTP. Let me provisionally argue, then, that the constellation of problems surrounding the concept of the multitude, whether logically preceding it as its condition of possibility or necessarily following from it, cannot be grasped by following the apparent chronological order of Spinoza's texts and that the order of arguments is not identical to the order of the texts.
5. Étienne Balibar, "Spinoza the Anti-Orwell," in Masses, Classes and Ideas (London: Routledge, 1994).
6. Antonio Negri, L'anomalie sauvage: Puissance et pouvoir chez Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).
7. Matheron, "L'inignation et le conatus de l'état spinoziste," 163.
8. Benedict Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. Samuel Shirley (New York: E. J. Brill, 1991), 237.
9. The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1995);
10. and A Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2002).
11. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 237.
12. Negri, L'anomalie sauvage, 9.
13. Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (New York: Doubleday, 1972).
14. Étienne Balibar, "Potentia multitudinis quae una veluti mente duciter," in Ethik, Recht und Politik bei Spinoza, ed. M. Senn and M. Walther (Zurich: Schultheiss, 2001).
15. Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza;
16. Antonio Negri, "Reliqua Desiderantur: Towards a Definition of the Concept of Democracy in the Final Spinoza," in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
17. Lee C. Rice, "Individual and Community in Spinoza's Social Psychology," in Spinoza: Issues and Directions, ed. Edwin Curley and Pierre-François Moreau (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990);
18. D. J. Den Uyl, Power, State and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza's Political Philosophy (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983).
19. Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza and "L'inignation et le conatus de l'état spinoziste."
20. Pierre-François Moreau, Spinoza: L'expérience et l'éternité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).
21. Balibar, "Potentia multitudinis quae una veluti mente duciter," 135.
22. Louis Althusser, "On Feuerbach," in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003).
23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970).
24. Pierre-François Moreau, Le récit utopique: Droit naturel et roman de l'état (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982), 9.
25. François Zourabichvilli, Spinoza: Une physique de la pensée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002).
26. Negri, The Savage Anomaly.
27. Rice, "Individual and Community in Spinoza's Social Psychology."
28. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 16.
29. Spinoza, Letters, 125.