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(Un)Contemporary Variations ANGELAKIHUMANITIES ANGELAKIHUMANITIES � editors Charlie� Blake Pelagia Goulimari Timothy S. Murphy Robert Smith SUBVERSIVE SPINOZA general editor Gerard Greenway (un)contemporary variations Angelaki Humanities publishes works which address and probe broad and antonio negri compelling issues in the theoretical humanities. The series favours path­ breaking thought, promotes unjustly neglected figures, and grapples with edited by timothy s. murphy established concerns. It believes in the possibility of blending, without translated by timothy s. murphy, michael hardt, ted stolze compromise, the rigorous, the well-erafted, and the inventive. The series and charles t. wolfe seeks to host ambitious writing from around the world. Angelaki Humanities is the associated book series of Angelaki -joumal of the theoretical humanities. Already published Evil Spirits; nihilism and the fate of modernity Gary Banham and Ch01"lie Blake (eds) The question of literature: the place of tIle literary in contemporary theory Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell Absolutely postcolonial: writing between the singular and the specific Peter Hallward The new Bergson Johrl Mullarkey MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS MANCHESTER AND NEW YORK distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Timothy S. Murphy, Michael Hardt, Ted Stolze and Charles T. Wolfe 2004 The right of Timothy S. Murphy to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY lOOlO, USA http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY lOOlO, USA CONTENTS Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T lZ2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Editor's preface page vii A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Editor's acknowledgements xiii Conventions and abbreviations xv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied fo r I Spinoza: five reasons for his contemporaneity 1 ISBN 0 7190 6646 8 hardback II The Political Treatise, or, the foundation of modern democracy 9 07190 6647 6 paperback III Reliqua desiderantur: a conjecture for a definition of the concept of First published 2004 democracy in the final Spinoza 28 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 IV Between infinity and community: notes on materialism in Spinoza and Leopardi 59 V Spinoza's anti-modernity 79 VI The 'return to Spinoza' and the return of communism 94 VII Democracy and eternity in Spinoza 101 Postface To conclude: Spinoza and the postmoderns 113 Index 119 Typeset by Northern Phototypesetting Co Ltd, Bolton Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow v EDITOR'S PREFACE In addition to his renown (some would say infamy) as a political theorist and activist, Antonio Negri is also one of the world's leading interpreters of the recondite philosophy of Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-77). He came to prominence in that field with the 1981 publication of Danomalia sel­ vaggia: Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza [The Savage Anom­ aly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics],l which was written during his first full year in prison, 7 April 1979 to 7 April 1980, awaiting trial on charges stemming from the kidnapping and assassination of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Those charges were soon dropped for lack of evidence, but a succession of other, ever flimsier ones was brought that kept Negri in pre-trial 'preventive detention' until he was elected to the Italian parliament on the Radical Party ticket in 1983. Freed as a con­ sequence of parliamentary immunity, Negri attended the sessions of the legislature for several months until it voted to revoke his immunity and send him back to prison. At that point he fled to France, where he lived in exile until his 1997 returnto Italy. Negri arrived in France an intellectual celebrity, not only because of his situation as a political prisoner but also because of the tremendous impact The Savage Anomaly had on the study of modern philosophy. The book was immediately translated into French and published with laudatory prefaces by leading Spinoza scholars Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Macherey and Alexandre Matheron.2 Tw o elements made Negri's interpretation not just influential but truly revolutionary. Firstly, he succeeded in demonstrating that Spinoza's anomalous metaphysical work was directly linked to the historical anomaly of his homeland, the Dutch Republic, in the seven­ teenth century: it �'aS a nearly mature capitalist market economy with an enlightened oligarchiC government surrounded by a decomposing set of ,i: ' Ii F' editor's editor's preface pre-capitalist European monarchies. Secondly, as a consequence of this so much the origins of the bourgeois State and its crisis but, rather, the the­ anomalous historical position, Spinozas philosophy itself divides (though oretical alternatives and the suggestive possibilities offered by the revolu­ not in a clear and distinct manner) into two parts or periods , which Negri tion in process.3 calls the 'first foundation' and the 'second foundation' of his metaphysics, This renewed interest in the 'rcvolution in proccss' finds its point of depar­ respectively. The first foundation, manifested in the early works up ture in the work of Spinoza, understood not as a mere source of concep­ Ethics through the Second Part of the (publishcd posthumously in 1677 tual topoi in the history of philosophy, but rather as a dctour necessary for but begun considerably largely conforms to the neo-Platonic idc­ the effectiverefoundation of revolutionary theory and praxis: 'This reeog­ alism that had dominated much of the Renaissance. It gives rise to an nition ... of Spinoza s thought but also of a terrain and a proposition that ontology of the radical immanence of being, from which human praxis I permits us to construct "beyond" the traditionof bourgeois thought, all this appears to emanate as an epiphenomenon or after-effect; this quasi-ema­ II constitutes an operation that is really oriented toward another that of nationist logic has inspired the many mystical interpretations of Spinoza s constructing a "beyond" for the equally weary and arthritic tradition of work. The second foundation, cmerging from the tension prescnt in the revolutionary thought itself" Negri's reading of Spinoza, thcn, is not only Theological-Political Treatise (1670) between the alienation imposed by the pivot point of his work as a historian of philosophy, but it is also a cru­ the social contract and the direct democratic constitution of the multitude cial enabling element in his political activism. that only the final Parts of the Ethics and the unfinished Political Tr eatise The most important consequence (and sign) of this shift froma negative could resolve, abandons neo-Platonic emanationism in favour of a radi­ first foundation to an affirmative and ontological second foundation lies in cally constructive materialism of bodies and smfaces. Spinoza's refounded the new perspectives it opens up on the problem of time. The first foun­ ontology remains radically immanent, as it was in its first foundation, but dation was almost exclusively rctrospective in its temporality, while the now praxis constructs and constitutes being ratherthan the reverse: being second foundation is predominantly prospective, oriented toward the dis- only 'is' in its perpetual (re)construction by human praxis. This second tinctive modalities of future time. Thus insists that foundation, according to Negri, represents Spinoza's attempt to extend and intensifYthe historical and political anomaly of the Dutch Republic in the liberation of a cumbersome past [is not] worth anything if it is not car­ metaphysical terms. ried throughto the benefit of the present and to the production of the future The Savage Anomaly itself can alsobe read self-reflexively as a kind of [futurol. This is I want to ... introduce time-to-come [l'avvenirel into this discussion, on the basis of the power of Spinoza's discourse ... Bring­ 'second foundation' of Negri's own thought. Most of his writings from the ing Spinoza before us, I, one poor scholar among many, will interrogate a 19505 up to that point were focused on thehistory of the modern capital­ true master with a method of reading the past that allows me to grasp the ist state, with special attention to the forms of its metaphysical and juridi­ elements that today coalesce in a definition of a phenomenology of revolu­ cal legitimation (as this manifests itself in the philosophical works of tionary praxis constitutive of time-to-come.' Descartes, Kant and Hegel, in the writings of Hans Kelsen, Norberto Bobbio and Evgeny Pashukanis, and in the political economy of John May­ TIme-to-come is the time of alternativcs, of affirmation, the time in whieh nard Keynes, among others). This 'first foundation of Negri's thought was Spinozas early modern project of liberation dovetails with Negri's post­ essentially a negative one, in that while it generated extremely aggressive modern one to create a new matrix for communism and radical democraey (and effective) theoretieal assaults on these hegemonic disciplinary forms that Negri calls 'anti-modernity' in this book. In explicating the way Spin­ of ideology, it was unable to produce similarly powerful models
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