HEGEL OR SPINOZA This page intentionally left blank HEGEL OR SPINOZA . Pierre Macherey TRANSLATED BY SUSAN M. RUDDICK University of Minnesota Press MINNEAPOLIS · LONDON Originally published as Hegel ou Spinoza. Copyright 1979 Librairie François Maspero, Paris; copyright 1990 Éditions La Découverte, Paris. Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Translator’s introduction copyright 2011 by Susan M. Ruddick All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Macherey, Pierre. [Hegel ou Spinoza. English] Hegel or Spinoza / Pierre Macherey ; translated by Susan M. Ruddick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-7740-5 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8166-7741-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. 2. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. I. Title. B2948.M1513 2011 193—dc23 2011028085 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents . Translator’s Introduction: A Dialectics of Encounter k vii Translator’s Note and Acknowledgments k xix HEGEL OR SPINOZA Preface to the Second Edition k 3 The Alternative k 7 1. Hegel Reads Spinoza k 13 2. More Geometrico k 33 3. The Problem of Attributes k 77 4. Omnis Determinatio Est Negatio k 113 Abbreviations k 215 Notes k 217 Index k 235 This page intentionally left blank Translator’s Introduction: A Dialectics of Encounter Hegel or Spinoza first appeared in 1979 after an eight-year near-hiatus in Macherey’s work. As Warren Montag argues, it marked a divergence in the philosophical paths of Pierre Macherey and his mentor and colleague Louis Althusser, each responding in his own way to the violent misreading of their work as a so-called structuralism and the resurgence of humanism (or, perhaps more correctly, an anti-antihu- manism) in France at the time. Montag suggests that Hegel or Spinoza began a new phase in Macherey’s work, one that could be viewed as “a displacement, neither a rejection of nor a return to the past, but instead the attempt to discover new points of application from which one might speak about certain problems and questions without being drowned out by a chorus of commentators.”1 What possible interest could the book hold, we might ask, ex- cept for a limited audience concerned with obscure points of phi- losophy? But to view the work this way is to miss entirely its critical relevance both to contemporary philosophy and to politics. Although stylistically the focus of the book eliminated “all but the most seri- ous of readers,”2 this was not a strategy of retreat. It is a rigorous and precise text that exposes the legacy of a Hegelian misreading of Spinoza, a misreading that arguably undergirded the post-1968 humanist backlash. And it is a seminal engagement with the work of Spinoza itself that has informed political philosophy going forward, neither a break nor a retreat from political engagement but rather an elaboration of a cluster of philosophical problems that invested Mach- erey’s thinking through the early 1960s, which persisted after 1968 and remain central today. This is a pivotal and arguably prescient work. The questions it ad- dresses speak not only to the historical legacy of Hegel in France but vii viii translator’s introduction to persistent fault lines and potential points of convergence in contem- porary social theory and political philosophy. These include questions about the role of the dialectic and the negative in the work of Negri and Althusser; questions about the politics of ontology and how we conceive of multiplicity, a point of contention between Deleuze and Badiou; and questions about the immanence of expression and the role of representation in the play of difference, a point of divergence between Deleuze and Derrida. Hegel or Spinoza offers us a clear under- standing of the exact points of divergence of readings—and indeed often of misreadings—of Spinoza’s Ethics, misreadings that undergird contemporary philosophical debates and their implications for how we envision societal struggle and social transformation. The decision to reengage on the terrain of philosophy after the failure of political projects of the 1960s, then, was not a turn away from politics by Pierre Macherey toward a different object—the “consolation of philosophy”—but rather a reengagement of politics through phi- losophy.3 As Macherey argues in a different context, “philosophy . is not before you as you imagine, but behind you, in that element of the always-already over which the veil of ignorance is usually drawn. It is not a problem of not knowing enough philosophy but, in a very particular sense of the word ‘know’ which comprises a relation with non-knowledge, of knowing it already too well, in forms whose con- fusion needs to be unraveled, necessitating an intervention that will trace within them their lines of demarcation.”4 What forms of knowledge and nonknowledge continue to haunt contemporary debates, and in what ways were they “known too well” in the aftermath of 1968 to precipitate the falling out of favor of Marx and Marxism and the recasting of Macherey along with the rest of Althusser’s circle as “structuralist dinosaurs”? And what might we learn from the staging of this encounter between Hegel and Spinoza, in terms of both the specific points of application and the method of inquiry? Macherey offers an answer to these questions, not only inHegel or Spinoza but also in a series of articles addressing Hegel’s prior uptake in France, an engagement that had solidified tendencies in Hegel that were also, not coincidentally, the points of Hegel’s misreading of Spi- noza. Read together, they offer us a fuller picture of the long shadow translator’s introduction ix cast initially in Hegel’s misinterpretation of Spinoza and amplified subsequently in the uptake of Hegel in France. This is not to offer a reading of a “good” Spinoza set against a “bad” Hegel. To proceed in that way would be to suggest it would be possible to undertake a reading (or a writing) that was not tethered to the material conditions of its production and that certain texts might therefore operate entirely free of ideology. Hegel or Spinoza is first of all an interrogation, with surgical pre- cision, of the exact points of misreading of Spinoza by Hegel—an interrogation that attests, contra Hegel, to the immanent power of Spi- noza’s work. It begins by challenging the teleology of Hegel’s project, a teleology that situates Spinoza’s work in a progression within mod- ern philosophy, in which Spinoza’s work marks a crucial beginning, but one that, because of the nature of Spinoza’s “arrested thought” one must “pass through,” ending finally with Hegel’s own corpus. Macherey reveals the necessity of Hegel’s misreading in the kernel of thought that is “indigestible” for Hegel, that makes the Spinozist system move in a way that Hegel cannot grasp, exposing the limited and situated truth of Hegel’s perspective, one that reveals more about Hegel himself than his object of analysis. Thus, as Macherey remarks in his “Soutenance,” When Hegel reads Spinoza, which he does with great care, it is as if he were prevented by the appearance of his philosophical problematic from seeing—even before setting himself the ques- tion of understanding it—what Spinoza had actually been able to say: Hegel is then obliged to set up an imaginary form of thought, or that which is, at the very least, a product, indeed a figure of his own doctrine.5 Against Hegel’s characterization of Spinoza’s work as immobile, Mach- erey offers a reading of a lively alternative that upsets the comfortable historical progression of philosophical knowledge. Against Hegel’s view of the geometric method of Ethics as a formalism precluding the movement of thought, Macherey offers evidence of a method that is only apparently geometric and Cartesian and instead expresses an immanent philosophy that is not subordinated to the guarantee of x translator’s introduction an a priori truth: in Spinoza’s work truth emerges through exposition rather than being fixed at the outset as a set of formal principles. Against Spinoza’s supposedly immobile substance (which for Hegel lacks a subject and finds only degraded expression in its two attributes), Macherey finds in Spinoza’s work a relation of substance and an infinite variety of attributes (of which we can know only two), neither set in dialectical opposition nor subordinated to substance but emerging simultaneously as the expression of substance rather than sequentially as its degradation. And against Hegel’s distillation of Spinoza’s entire corpus to the misattributed phrase “all determination is negation,” whereby the finitude of determinate beings can approach the infinite only via an endless (and impossible) mathematical aggregation, Macherey un- covers a misinterpretation of a geometric progression, which in fact demonstrates the infinite movement inherent in a bounded and finite object—a mobile expression of conatus, a purely positive essence that encounters the negative not as essence but as existence. What was the significance of this pairing in Hegel or Spinoza at the time of its first appearance, when interest in Hegel was on the wane, or for our own time, when the overwhelming influence of Spinoza all but eclipses Hegel? Hegel or Spinoza discloses the operative “non- knowledges” that were active in the violent misreading of Macherey and Althusser’s philosophical projects in the mid-1960s.