wpsa.research.pdx.edu · Web viewTo read a text philosophically is not to regurgitate the arguments word for word to the letter; this may serve use for historical record but it is

“We were Spinozists”: Contingency and Necessity in Contemporary Readings of Spinoza

Zachary KimesUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst

[email protected]

AbstractOver the past 40 years, theorists such as Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and Gilles Deleuze have turned to Benedict Spinoza to rethink political agency under contemporary capitalism. Although each thinker brings his own concerns, each of these “French Spinozists” emphasize Spinoza's anti-teleology and downplay his metaphysical concept of substance for a stronger emphasis on the modes. Rather than a rigid determinist without any purchase on politics, Spinoza is read as a thinker who provides tools to think the complexity of political events and their contingency. These theorists saw Spinoza as an alternative to the vulgar Marxism of the Communist Party and as a proto-materialist without the baggage of Hegelian teleology. In this paper, I address the issues of this turn to what I call a “contingent Spinoza.” Firstly, I argue that their appropriation has little to do with the texts of Spinoza. But more importantly, this use of Spinoza does not bare out in the type of politics they want to maintain. If reality and its processes are absolutely, metaphysically contingent, then there is no reason to privilege one political commitment over another. In conclusion, I argue that Spinoza is a helpful and even necessary theorist for a radical politics, but this is to be found in Spinoza's emphasis on the metaphysical necessity of substance.

Introduction

Invoking Benedict Spinoza as a profound and radical political thinker might strike some

as odd.1 Traditionally, or at least more often than not, Spinoza has been considered a dry

metaphysician who starts with God and logically deduces the rest of the world, moving from

proposition to proposition shown in his unique more geometrico, and unconcerned with the

political realities of humans. God, substance, infinity, or any other term Spinoza uses swallows

up the human, modes, and finite. According to this admittedly exaggerated caricature, Spinoza's

philosophy is acosmic, unable to think a concrete reality, individual, or persons, and therefore,

1 Jonathan Israel sees Spinoza as the main figure of what he terms the “radical enlightenment” in contrast to the “moderate enlightenment” (for example, Locke). See Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, especially, pp. 159-270. A discussion of Israel's work is beyond the scope of this essay. For an edited volume that pertains to themes of this paper, see Montag and Stolze, ed. The New Spinoza.

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incapable of thinking politically.

Thus, it appears even stranger that several Marxists (or at least thinkers drawing from

Marx) would find resources for contemporary critiques of capitalism and radical politics that

derive from such critiques. There are a few sparse references to Spinoza in Marx's work, but not

a sustained engagement with his work like readers see with regard to Hegel, Feuerbach, Smith,

and Ricardo.2 This has been the case generally throughout the history of Marxism as well.3 Yet

one of Louis Althusser's main theses is that Spinoza is Marx's materialist antecedent and is a

more direct relation to Marx's materialism than Hegel. If there is little of Spinoza in Marx (and

Engels) that is explicit, then the influence must be implicit.

Drawing out this influence is not a purely scholastic exercise for thinkers as diverse as

Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and Gilles Deleuze i.e. pointing to the influence of Spinoza on Marx

is not an exercise done solely for academic reasons but also, to put it in Spinozian terms, has

theoretical and political affects. In other words, the “detour”4 through Spinoza is supposed to

improve one's theoretical understanding in order to better understand one's situation and in turn

to change that situation. Spinoza's texts are not dry pieces of parchment relegated to the historical

archives of passé human knowledge but speak to the contemporary politico-socio-economic

2 Marx did take notes to Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, but the manuscript is just copied out passages from Spinoza's text without any commentary. Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, Vol. 2, p. 78. Nonetheless, there is a fairly palpable influence of Spinoza on Marx. For a perspective that comes from the history of ideas see Yovel, ibid., pp. 78-103.

3 One example that is in closer to proximity to Marx's lifetime and an important figure in the broader Marxist movement was Georgi Plekhanov: “Thus, Feuerbach’s ‘humanism’ proved to be nothing else but Spinozism disencumbered of its theological pendant. And it was the standpoint of this kind of Spinozism, which Feuerbach had freed of its theological pendant, that Marx and Engels adopted when they broke with idealism. […] However, disencumbering Spinozism of its theological appendage meant revealing its true and materialist content. Consequently, the Spinozism of Marx and Engels was indeed materialism brought up to date.” Plekhanov, “Fundamental Problems of Marxism.” Another, more contemporary exception, who is not a focus of this essay, is Evald Ilyenkov. This Soviet philosopher devotes an entire chapter to Spinoza in Dialectical Logic:Essays on its History and Theory. Ilyenkov, “Thought as an Attribute of Substance,” pp. 27-74.

4 Althusser, “On Spinoza,” Essays in Self-Criticism, p. 132.

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moment.

The focus of this essay will be on the readings of Spinoza by Althusser, Macherey, and

Deleuze, particularly their readings of the Ethics. While each thinker brings his own concerns

with him as he reads Spinoza, I argue that they can be read as offering a “contingent” reading of

Spinoza. Rather than focus on Spinozian substance that necessarily causes all of its

modifications, these theorists emphasize contingent aspects of his theoretical philosophy. One

key move they all share is to place less emphasis on substance in favor of the attributes and the

modes. This move allows Althusser, Macherey, and Deleuze in various ways to move away from

teleological understandings of radical politics in favor of a more “immanent materialist”

conception that provides no guarantee from the outset.5 Furthermore, the contingent reading of

Spinoza supposedly can better think the dominant material production of the social, political, and

economic and can provide a critique of those forms. My point of contention is that ignoring or

downplaying the importance of substance makes thinking these issues of political action such as

critique, solidarity, resistance, and revolution a problem at best, unthinkable at worst. If the

modes are what are truly real and substance is a secondary category or completely collapsed into

the modes, then each mode becomes absolutely infinite rather than infinite in kind and any of

these claims are arbitrary or unthinkable.6 At the end I gesture toward a “necessity” reading of

Spinoza that would provide a better theoretical framework for thinking the above mentioned

political actions.

A Detour through Martial Gueroult

5 I avoid using “dialectics” here because of Deleuze's affirmationism. 6 Spinoza, E1D6: “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of

attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence. Exp: I say absolutely infinite, not infinite in its own kind; for if something is only infinite in its own kind, we can deny infinite attributes of it [NS: (i.e., we can conceive infinite attributes which do not pertain to its nature)]; but if something is absolutely infinite, whatever expresses essence and involves not negation pertains to its essence.”

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In order to better understand the reception of Spinoza in Althusser, Macherey, and

Deleuze it is helpful to take a detour through the work of an important French philosopher,

Martial Gueroult. Although virtually unknown to the English-speaking audience,7 Gueroult

played a highly influential role in the reception of Spinoza in the post-WWII French academy.

Althusser acknowledges the importance of Gueroult's method of studying the history of

philosophy in The Future Lasts Forever, even if Althusser thought Gueroult's reading was fairly

apolitical.8 Deleuze was one of Gueroult's students and wrote a positive review of his teacher's

first volume study of the Ethics.9 A brief summary of Gueroult's approach to Spinoza and the

history of philosophy will help us better understand the subsequent readings put forward by the

contingent Spinozists.10

As Gueroult understands it, philosophy should eliminate the first-person perspective, i.e.

one should not try to reduce a philosophy to its historical context or the personal experience of

the author, and should instead seek “a proliferation of structurally interconnected concepts

indifferent to their source.”11 To put it differently, Gueroult's take on philosophy is one that seeks

to avoid a crude historicism in favor for the conceptual argumentation of a text. The value of a

text is not based upon a historical situation but in its way to rationally produce a coherent

argument or a system. The goal of the history of philosophy is not to reconstruct the historical

context but rather to see how a philosophical system breaks with the contingencies of its

context.12 The fact that Gueroult produced a two-volume study of the Ethics, which tried to bring

7 Only one text of Gueroult's has been translated into English that I am aware of. Gueroult, “Spinoza's Letter on the Infinite,” Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marjorie Grene, pp. 182-212.

8 Knox, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 282 n.8.9 Deleuze, “Gueroult's General Method for Spinoza,” Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, pp. 146-155.10 Due to a lack of knowledge of French, I am heavily reliant upon Knox Peden's account of Gueroult in Spinoza

Contra Phenomenology, pp. 65-93.11 Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 66.12 Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 69.

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out the coherence or incoherence of Spinoza's propositions and conceptual moves, seems to

make sense. Gueroult appears to be a universal rationalist concerned with universal concepts and

their deductions.

However, it must be kept in mind that Gueroult practiced the history of philosophy as

well and any simplistic move to lump him in as a philosopher of the universal would actually

undermine his historical method. Although Gueroult thought that the value of text should be

measured by its conceptual argumentation, he also “maintained the irreducibility and singularity

of philosophical works.”13 When appointed as the chair at the Collège de France, Gueroult made

this point in his inaugural address. In a typically Socratic/Platonic fashion, Gueroult notes that

one of philosophy's virtues is to counter mere opinion. Philosophy must have an internal

coherence and demonstration. Yet the fact that philosophy has coherence and differs from mere

opinion does not mean that it somehow has more purchase on reality. Instead, all that philosophy

can aspire to is internal rationality. Gureoult argues, “The rationality that grounds any philosophy

– whether that philosophy is rational or not […] has a constitutive function: since the philosophy

is not already finished before it is developed, only existing after its completion despite numerous

obstacles […] a double end in one is thus realized: the construction of a monument, the

demonstration of a truth.”14 If the importance of a philosophical text is its internal rational

demonstration of its own truth, and there are an infinite plurality of texts across history, then one

cannot speak of a philosophical “truth” but only philosophical “truths.” Gueroult's practice of the

history of philosophy is anti-Hegelian in the sense that philosophy should not be concerned with

bringing out the truth of a previous work into a more fully realized truth, but historical texts have

13 Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 70.14 Gueroult, Leçon inaugurale. Quoted in Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 70.

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their own truth and reality.15 Thus, Gueroult is an advocate of pluralism in philosophy, which

judges a philosophy on its own terms rather than in comparison to a contemporary philosophical

system or to the extent the philosophy under question relates to an external reality.

Having passed through Gueroult's general approach to philosophy, it is now time to pass

briefly through his interpretation of Spinoza specifically. As it has been noted before, Gueroult

is, in part, responding to the (mis)interpretation at the hands of Hegel and his progeny, which

says that the “attributes” serve as determinations of substance that would be entirely

indeterminate without the attributes. In his reading, Gueroult argues that substance and attributes

must be read “genetically” and are in fact equivalent, i.e. the attributes and substance occupy the

same “plane”; this reading is supposed to distinguish Spinoza's philosophy from others in that

the foundation is not to be found beyond, behind, outside the world itself but coterminous with

it.16

As a tentative reader of Spinoza knows, substance has an infinity of attributes but only

two are known to humans, i.e. thought and extension, which are not causally related.17 Thought

and extension share the same immanent cause (substance) but one cannot cause the other. A

thought may cause another thought but not another modification of extension or vise versa;

thought as an attribute is fundamentally different from extension as an attribute. Or as Gueroult

puts it, “There is no juxtaposition of the attributes, since they are identical as to their causal act,

but neither is there fusion between them, since they remain irreducible as to their essences.”18

This is how Gueroult interprets what other scholars call Spinoza's parallelism.19 According to

15 Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 71.16 Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 82.17 Spinoza E2A5 and E3P2: “The body cannot determine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the

body to motion, to rest, or to anything else (if there is anything else).”18 Gueroult quoted in Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 84.19 The literature on Spinoza's parallelism is vast. For an analysis about the complexity of parallelism in Spinoza,

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Gueroult's reading of Spinoza's parallelism, there is an ontological and epistemological

distinction between the attributes known to humans. In fact, the only way that humans are able to

make a conceptual distinction between thought and extension is because in some sense they are

ontologically distinct. This distinction between attributes thus allows for a radical distinction

between cause and effect. Substance as cause is separate from itself as a mode of thought

because this mode of thought is a specific instance of substance as infinite mode, while substance

as cause has an infinity of attributes and modes. In a difficult passage, Gueroult writes,

The incommensurability between God as cause and his intellect coincides therefore with the incommensurability between God as object and his intellect as idea. […] this incommensurability, far from excluding the knowledge or truth of the idea, is on the contrary their condition, for the conformity of the idea to its object, which defines the idea, or truth, would be impossible without their fundamental distinction.20

God as a mode of thought (intellect) is distinct from God as cause (in this case, object), but for

Gueroult, this is not a problem because this separation generates the truth of an idea. To put it

rhetorically: Why would one need to do philosophy if there were no fundamental distinction

between the thought of God (which he creates) and God himself as object? This is why

Gueroult's reading of Spinoza as a genetic and synthetic thinker is important and idiosyncratic.

As Gueroult understands Spinoza, thought and extension are fundamentally distinct not only

epistemologically but also ontologically, which allows for the production of “truths” under the

protocols of philosophy. The lesson of Spinozism for Gueroult is not the correspondence

between a concept and an object. Instead, philosophy and Spinozism specifically “becomes for

Gueroult not the site of a singular truth in and of itself but rather an epistemology (gnoseology)

see Melamed, “Spinoza's Two Doctrines of Parallelism,” Spinoza's Metaphysics: Thought and Substance, pp. 139-152.

20 Gueroult quoted in Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 86.

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that allows for articulation and understanding of a plurality of “true ideas” to be produced ad

infinitum.”21

In his unique reading of the substance/attributes/modes relation, Gueroult reveals and

reinforces his approach to philosophy. There are a plurality and infinity of “truths” in philosophy,

which allows for the plurality of systems and further creation of concepts and systems. But if this

is the case then it becomes an issue as to how one argues for one philosophical system over

others. Why is Spinoza to be preferred over Descartes? Given Gueroult's concept of philosophy,

one cannot argue for one philosophy over the other because the former's concept of substance

provides a better explanation of reality; that is an impossibility according to Gueroult's approach,

since philosophy is not concerned with concepts as they relate to reality but rather how they

conceptually cohere. Gueroult seems to inadvertently undermine Spinozism and a rationalist

monist metaphysics when he writes that “absolute rationalism, imposing the total intelligibility

of God, key to the total intelligibility of things, is Spinozism's first article of faith.”22 What a

philosophy says can only be evaluated from the internal protocols that it creates within itself and

stands or falls according to conceptual coherence and relation. Spinozian substance is therefore

not a necessary metaphysical concept but something one voluntaristically chooses to affirm or

deny. According to this mentality, one cannot argue for Spinozian rationalist monism but can

only affirm it by faith.23

Reading as Production, Reading as Creation

21 Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 87.22 Gueroult quoted in Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 92.23 In another context, William Connolly says as much as well about Spinozism being a faith: “But in my judgment

Leo Strauss is right: Spinoza's conviction that the structure of human thought at its highest level of attainment corresponds to the structure of the world is grounded partly in faith and not in demonstration alone.” Connolly, “The Radical Enlightenment: Faith, Power, Theory,” Theory & Event 7:3 (2004). For a compelling critique of Strauss's reading of Spinoza, see Frim, “Sufficient Reason and the Causal Argument for Monism,” Society and Politics, Vol. 5, No. 2 (10), pp. 137-158.

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Before examining the texts that deal with Spinoza specifically, it is important to work

through some texts in which some of the thinkers under consideration elaborate their approach to

philosophy and reading texts. This is an important undertaking because it brings to light the

idiosyncratic nature of their respective readings of Spinoza. One must have a firm grasp of what

these thinkers mean when they “read” and “philosophize” broadly speaking.

One aspect that unites these thinkers is their insistence that one does not merely read a

text. To read a text philosophically is not to regurgitate the arguments word for word to the letter;

this may serve use for historical record but it is not the philosophical approach. Being “faithful”

to the text is not the responsibility of the philosopher. It is a guilty reading and necessarily so.24

The task of reading is not to extract the “rational kernel” of a text and to bring out its

unbeknownst true meaning; for Althusser the alternative to this naïve reading is what he calls

symptomatic reading.25 Althusser claims that the later Marx as an embodiment of symptomatic

reading (after the supposed epidemiological break) and says it “divulges the undivulged event in

the text it reads, and in the same movement relates it to a different text, present as a necessary

absence in the first.” Reading does not bring out the hidden meaning of the text, but points

toward an absence that leads to a creative appropriation of the text. Furthermore, what

distinguishes this new kind of reading is that symptomatic reading presupposes two texts, a text

24 “Hence a philosophical reading of Capital is quite the opposite of an innocent reading. It is a guilty reading, but not one that absolves its crime on confesing it. On the contrary, it takes the responsibility for its crime as 'justified crime' and defends it by proving its necessity. It is therefore a special reading which exculpates itself as a reading by posing every guilty reading the very question that unmasks its innocence, the mere question of its innocence: what is it to read?” Althusser, “From Capital to Marx's Philosophy,” Reading Capital, p. 15. Although Althusser is focusing on reading Marx in this book, given the question he poses, he is also concerned with reading in general.

25 Macherey had an important influence in Althusser's revision of this chapter of Reading “Capital”. For an illuminating discussion on this point see Montag, “Between Spinozists, The Function of Structure in Althusser, Macherey, and Deleuze,” Althusser and His Contemporaries, pp. 72-100. Macherey's essay “Literary Analysis: The Tomb of Structures” had a significant influence on Althusser's reformulations. See Macherey, “Literary Analysis: The Tomb of Structures,” A Theory of Literary Production, pp.136-156.

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divided against itself, and measures the first against the second, articulating the lapses in the first

text.26 The task of reading is to show the discrepancies and gaps in a text that the thinker could

not think (as opposed to conscious suppression). When one reads symptomatically, one does not

“reproduce” the text and its concepts but engages in “production”:

It is therefore a question of producing, in the precise sense of the word, which seems to signify making manifest what is latent, but which really means transforming (in order to give a pre-existing raw material the form of an object adapted to an end), something which in a sense already exists. This production, in the double sense which gives the production operation the necessary form of a circle, is the production of knowledge. To conceive Marx's philosophy in its specificity is therefore to conceive the essence of the very movement with which the knowledge of it is produced, or to conceive knowledge as production.27

Symptomatic reading and knowledge do not bring out the “essence” of things, or the truth

underlying all things, but are productive, transforming the text and object.

Deleuze and Guattari's approach to philosophy shares similarities to Althusser's (and his

students') symptomatic reading. In their last collaborative work, What is Philosophy?, Deleuze

and Guattari's answer to that question is that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and

fabricating concepts” or more precisely “philosophy is the discipline that involves creating

concepts.”28 Concepts do not exist in a vacuum, nor do they arrive deus ex machina without

drawing on some “raw” material of previous philosophies and concepts, but neither are concepts

the realization of what was previously there. Similar to symptomatic reading, philosophy,

according to Deleuze and Guattari, does not (or at least should not) concern itself with knowing

the underlying truth of reality. The success or failure of a philosophy depends on its ability to be

interesting, remarkable, important, in short, in its ability to create a new concept.29 With regard to

26 Althusser, “From Capital to Marx's Philosophy,” p. 28.27 Althusser, “From Capital to Marx's Philosophy,” p. 34.28 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 2 and 5.29 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 82-83.

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the history of philosophy, one can assume in reading historical philosophical texts, it is not the

concern of the philosopher to merely reproduce the content of the text and its context. In fact,

Deleuze and Guattari argue that “the history of philosophy is completely without interest if it

does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this

comes at the price of turning it against itself.”30 If there is an essence to a philosophy (a word that

Deleuze and Guattari would at the very least hesitate to use), it is the creation of new concepts

which produce new lines of flight and ever new possibilities for creation. Texts are paint palettes

where one dabs in various colors to create new schemes, new creations. Furthermore, the text or

philosophy can be used against itself to undermine its initial meaning and to be put to use in a

contemporary context.31

What is striking in Althusser, Macherey, and Deleuze's approach to reading texts is how

much it departs from their main source of philosophical inspiration. As laid out in the

Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza's method of interpretation has more to do with philology

than with any symptomatic or creative reading. In that text, Spinoza says the proper way to read

text requires meticulous historical reconstruction, an in-depth knowledge of the original

language, and understanding of the political and social structures of the times.32 Another contrast

30 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 83. Macherey has a valuable insight into how Deleuze approaches of reading texts, especially Spinoza: “This is exactly how one should see Expressionism in Philosophy: not as a study in the history of philosophy striving after a faithful, correct reading, attempting merely a risk-free identical reproduction or charting of what is written in the Ethics as though it belonged to a realm of past thoughts; rather as an attempt to put the text to work, to to bring its theoretical and practical concerns into play, and bring out 'another language in its language' through a kind of repetition freed from the phantoms of identity, and productive differences.” Macherey, “The Encounter with Spinoza,” Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton, p. 148.

31 In another text dealing specifically with Spinoza, Deleuze writes, “There is a double reading of Spinoza: on the one hand, a systematic reading in pursuit of the general idea and the unity of the parts, but on the other hand and at the same time, the affective reading, without an idea of the whole, where one is carried along or set down, put in motion or at rest, shaken or calmed according to the velocity of this or that part.” Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 129.

32 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Ch. 7. Timothy Brennan also makes this point in Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies, p. 47.

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between Spinoza and this branch of progeny is that unlike the latter, Spinoza thinks that one can

extract the truth of a text and that there are proper interpretations of the text.33 Pointing out this

discrepancy is important because it is an indication of how to understand the contingent reading

of Spinoza. The “method” or form is intertwined with the content.

A Lack of Substance, or Contingent Spinoza

The contingent Spinozists, through their idiosyncratic reading of their forerunner, see in

Spinoza a contemporary thinker who is the true materialist predecessor of Marx instead of Hegel.

Furthermore, Spinoza does not have the supposed teleological baggage of positing any

metaphysical goals of humanity, which he most clearly lays out in the appendix of part one of the

Ethics. My point of contention is not that Spinoza is not an important predecessor of Marx; a

study of Spinoza is necessary in understanding Marx's project. Rather, my main concern is that in

their radical re-reading and appropriation of Spinoza they either downplay or ignore the role of

substance in Spinoza's system and the ultimate importance the concept plays in his political

convictions.34 Substance is an essential concept in Spinoza's philosophy and is intricately tied to

his political arguments. In their anti-Hegelianism, the contingent Spinozists want to escape the

notion of totality and say that Spinoza's notion of substance is either not important, or secondary

in comparison to attributes or the modes. But this lack of substance, which I am using in a

Pickwickian sense,35 makes their radical political positions, which could be broadly construed as

anti-capitalist if not precisely Marxist, incoherent. What follows in this section is an exegesis of

the contingent Spinozist's understanding of Spinoza's metaphysics. Only after exploring this

33 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, passim.34 Melamed shows how the metaphysics undergird the politics of the Theological-Political Treatise in “The

metaphysics of the Theological-Political Treatise,” Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, ed. Melamed, Yitzhak Y and Michael A. Rosenthal, pp. 128-142.

35 Harrison Fluss in a recent review of Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology uses a similar playful and polemical phrase, “substance abuse.” See Fluss, “Natura highs,” Radical Philosophy, 188 (2014), p. 52.

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topic can one understand the politics of the contingent Spinozists.

I. Althusser

In his Elements of Self-Criticism, Althusser tells his readers that, contrary to some critics,

he and his students were never structuralists but “were guilty of an equally powerful and

compromising passion: we were Spinozists.” Yet this admission of heresy is not to be confused

with the following of Spinoza's texts and arguments. Althusser's self-proclaimed Spinozism put

forward theses “which [Spinoza] would surely never have acknowledged, though they did not

actually contradict him.” This heresy can in fact be read as a kind of orthodox Spinozism, one of

the greatest heresies in the history of thought.36 Althusser's detour was less a journey to Spinoza

than a journey through Spinoza, i.e. an attempt to better understand Althusser's own

philosophical materialism. What Althusser et al tried to do in working through Spinoza was to

find out “under what conditions a philosophy might, in what it said or did not say, and in spite of

its form – or on the contrary, just because of its form, that is because of the theoretical apparatus

of its theses, in short because of its positions – produce effects useful to materialism.”37 The

relevance of Spinoza is not what his philosophy says (since a text's silences can be as revealing

as the text's words) but rather what kind of effects a philosophy produces that is useful to the

materialist enterprise. Spinoza's argument for substance, attributes, modes, and all other concepts

and theses are at best secondary; the usefulness of a concept for materialism takes precedence

over its place and deduction in a system.

According to Althusser, one materialist aspect of Spinoza's philosophy is his

understanding of God. While Althusser admits that Hegel's God shares similarities with

36 Althusser, “On Spinoza,” Essays in Self-Criticism, p. 132.37 Althusser, ibid., pp. 134-135.

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Spinoza's, Hegel makes a theoretical error in what Althusser perceives to be a positing of telos

through the negation of the negation, i.e. that subjects through dialectical contemplation can

comprehend the goal of history, spirit, and can have complete transparency of the totality; this

claim is one instance of what Althusser calls “the 'mystification' of the Hegelian dialectic.” In

contrast, Spinoza does not posit any goals for mankind or any kind of transcendence.38 Because

Spinoza “begins with God” and never deviates from the path of immanence, Althusser sees in the

former the true predecessor of a materialist philosophy. In an inversion of Hegel's criticisms of

Spinoza, i.e. that the latter never went beyond Substance and was unable to see that Substance

was also Subject, Althusser argues that Spinoza was a greater materialist for having not made the

transition from Substance to Subject.39 Through his sticking to God and immanence, Althusser

argues, Spinoza provides the theoretical foundation of a materialism.

Another aspect of Spinoza that Althusser thinks is a materialist corrective of bourgeois

ideology is Spinoza's understanding of truth. In the famous dictum “verum index sui et falsi” (the

true is the index of itself and what is false),40 Spinoza reorients the perspective of philosophy and

its relation to truth away from a “criterion of truth” and jurisdiction to a notion of the true

internal to itself. Althusser contends that this conception of the true avoids the issues of how to

justify the criterion without resorting to an infinite regress; criterion can and must be rejected

“for it only represents a form of Jurisdiction, a Judge to authenticate and guarantee the validity of

what is True.” Furthermore, Althusser claims that Spinoza, as a good nominalist, avoids talking

about the “Truth” in favor of talking about what is “true” and that “Truth” and “Jurisdiction of a

Criterion always go together.” These aspects are tied to dogmatic and transcendental arguments

38 Althusser is basing these claims off of Spinoza's critique of final causes. See Spinoza, E1 Appendix.39 Althusser, “On Spinoza,” p. 135. For now, I leave aside a discussion as to whether Hegel was right in his

characterization of Spinoza.40 Spinoza to Burgh, Ep. 76.

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that want to relate the true to some kind of transcendental Truth, a form of mystification

according to Althusser. What Spinoza's conception of the true allows for is that the true identifies

itself within itself as a product, which shares a common lineage with the Marxist “criterion of

practice.”41 Althusser's interpretation of Spinoza's theory of the true argues that the true emerges

from its own internal processes (along with the mind that tries to retrace the true's production).

What Althusser gleaned from Spinoza can be best articulated by Althusser himself: “I 'defined'

knowledge as 'production' and affirmed the interiority of the forms of scientificity to 'theoretical

practice,' I based myself on Spinoza: not in order to provide The answer, but to counter the

dominant idealism and, via Spinoza, to open a road where materialism might, if it runs the risk,

find something other than words.”42

In the concluding passages of his self-reflection, Althusser argues that Spinoza's dialectic

surpasses Hegel's. The latter's, Althusser claims, is “a dialectic which produces its own material

substance,” i.e. the various spheres (abstract right, morality, civil society, the state) that Hegel

lays out in the Philosophy of Right; these spheres are too tightly bound with their “truth” lying

beyond themselves with all of them ultimately sublated into a bound whole. The parts fit too

neatly with the whole, which Althusser argues is an expression of bourgeois ideology: “it is (the

capitalist's) labor which has produced capital.”43 Althusser's alternative for Marxist philosophy is

to replace sublated spheres with the “real, distinct” “sites” of “Topography.” The economic

infrastructure and the ideological superstructure are somehow related but fundamentally distinct;

the state is “up above” the economic but in a mystified contradiction. Althusser's point is to

critique a dialectic that sublates the “truth of” previous moments in favor of a dialectic that

41 Althusser, “On Spinoza,” p. 137.42 Althusser, ibid., p. 138.43 Althusser, ibid., p. 140.

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emphasizes “the determination in the last instance by the economic” and a “forced recognition of

the material conditions of its own efficacy.”44 Althusser bases this Spinoza through a re-reading

of attributes and their connection. The order and connection of ideas (superstructure – ideology)

is the same as the order and connection of things (base – economic production).45 But since the

attributes are causally distinct, this allows one to explain why ideology has some autonomy from

the base, thus providing a more materialist critique of bourgeois ideology. Spinoza is again seen

as the beginning of a correction of pitfalls of the Hegelian dialectic.

In his reading of Spinoza's concepts of Whole (substance) and parts (modes), Althusser

asserts that in Spinoza's attempt to grasp a “non-emiment” causality he provided a unique way to

understand the part/whole relation: “an unbounded Whole, which is only the active relation

between its parts...”46 Like he admits earlier in the essay, this claim about Spinoza does not

necessarily appear in Spinoza's philosophy. The concept of the “unbounded Whole” is an indirect

influence that enabled Althusser et al to use Spinoza as “unique guide.” Contrary to Spinoza's

insistence that substance precedes its modifications in the chain of causality and having its own

distinct reality,47 Althusser claims without textual evidence that the whole is its effects, i.e.

substance is collapsed into the modes. A consequence of this reading is that Althusser thinks this

is a stepping stone to a more materialist understanding of social relations in that it seeks only to

understand finite relations (capitalist production with its ideological expressions) with substance

as a place holder to make these finite relations cohere in some way. There are no claims about a

coherent, sublated, conceptual totality but only a science of the infrastructure and superstructure.

As I show later, this collapsing of substance into the attributes and modes makes it hard to

44 Althusser, ibid.45 Spinoza, E2P7: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”46 Althusser, “On Spinoza,” p. 141.47 Spinoza, E1P1

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maintain a project that wishes to separate “science” from “ideology.”

In the unfinished manuscript translated as “The Underground Current of the Materialism

of the Encounter,” Althusser continues to explore the significance of Spinoza for his philosophy.

Along with Epicurus, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger, and Derrida, Althusser claims

that Spinoza is part of a hidden tradition in the history of philosophy: “the 'materialism'... of the

rain, the swerve, the encounter, the take [prise].”48 This materialism of the encounter – which

Althusser admits is a tradition of his own creation, his “misreading” – is distinct in that it is a

materialism of the aleatory and the contingent. In a reading of Epicurus, Althusser depicts a

world that is not ruled or (in)formed by meaning, cause, reason, or logos but the swerve, i.e. that

there is no inherent comprehensiveness of the world but is an after affect of contingent

occurrences: “But accomplishment of the fact is just a pure effect of contingency, since it

depends on the aleatory encounter of the atoms due to the swerve of the clinamen. Before the

accomplishment of the fact, before the world, there is only the non-accomplishment of the fact,

the non-world that is merely the unreal existence of the atoms.”49 Contingency and the void give

birth to reality. The existence of these circumstances means that philosophy should not seek

reason or the origin of things but produce “a theory of their contingency and a recognition of

fact, of the fact of contingency, the fact of the subordination of necessity to contingency, and the

fact of the forms which 'gives form' to the effect of the encounter.”50

Althusser then applies the framework of the materialism of the encounter to the

philosophy of Spinoza. Although there is some indication of where Althusser's reading of

Spinoza was going in the essays in self-criticism, Althusser further radicalizes his reading of

48 Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, p. 167.

49 Althusser, ibid., pp. 169-170.50 Althusser, ibid., p. 170.

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Spinoza in his pivot to aleatory materialism.51 Rather than a rational monist who thinks

everything has a reality and can be conceptualized as a modification of substance, Spinoza is

turned into an aleatory materialist of the encounter, the swerve. “For Spinoza,” Althusser writes,

“the object of philosophy is the void.”52 Instead of seeing in substance the supreme reality, i.e.

the entity that has the most reality, Althusser says the Spinozian substance is really a void.

Spinoza begins with God rather than experience of the world or the thinking subject, and this

God is in fact nothing since “by starting with this beyond-which-there-is-nothing, which, because

it thus exists in the absolute, in the absence of all relation, is itself nothing.”53 Althusser further

elaborates what he understands the Spinozist God to be. He lists characteristics typically

attributed to substance (absolute, unique, infinite, with infinite number of infinite attributes) and

humans only know the two attributes of thought and extension because of their finite nature. The

fact that there are infinite attributes of which only two are known by humans leads Althusser to

state this gap “leaves the door to their [infinite attributes] existence and their aleatory figures

wide open.”54 Furthermore, this insight allows Althusser to re-read Spinoza's parallelism of

attributes as recalling Epicurus' rain – that the different attributes fall in parallel succession like

atoms but with thought (soul) and extension (body) never colliding or uniting.55 After restating

philosophical claims found in other works (e.g. that Spinoza's philosophy has no Subject),

Althusser concludes his section on Spinoza with a reworking of his theory of knowledge in its

51 For an insightful analysis of Althusser that shows how the aleatory Althusser is present in earlier phases, see Negri, “Notes on the Evolution of the Thought of the Later Althusser,” Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Traditions, ed. Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio, pp. 51-68.

52 Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” p. 176.53 Althusser, ibid.54 Althusser, ibid., p. 177.55 Althusser concludes, “In sum, a parallelism without encounter, yet a parallelism that is already, in itself,

encounter thanks to the very structure of the relationship between the different elements of each attribute.” ibid. How these attributes relate to one another (how they could already be an encounter) is unlikely since Althusser does not clearly deduce the attributes from substance.

Kimes 18

relation to the external world through Heideggerian lexicon. Although he does not use

“substance,” instead opting for “world,” Althusser reformulates Spinozian substance through

Heideggerian Dasein arguing that Spinoza turns his back on theories of knowledge and a theory

of nature “for the recognition of the 'world' as a unique totality that is not totalized, but

experienced in its dispersion, and experience as the 'given' into which we are 'thrown' and on the

basis of which we forge all our illusions [fabricae].”56 Through his cross-breeding of Spinoza

and Heidegger, Althusser wants to emphasize that the totality of reality and social relations are

not capable of being conceptually totalized, i.e. that humans cannot have knowledge of a whole

but can only know the contingent finite modes which fall in parallel.

The reading put forth by Althusser here is revealing in showing his “contingency” re-

reading of Spinoza. Instead of Spinozian substance being read as the whole that encompasses all

of its attributes and modes, Althusser says God is “nothing” because it exists independently of all

relations, i.e. substance is not reliant on the modes. The attributes and the modes are not united

through substance (since according to Althusser, it is a totality that is not totalized), but fall in

parallel never colliding. Relations between and amongst different modes (for example, one could

think of various political actors) share absolutely contingent relations like Epicurus' drops of

rain. While Althusser thought he was opening up a scene for political action, that communism is

not an inevitability, that there are contingent events that cannot be predicted, that moments for

socio-politico-economic transformation can be missed, by making Spinozian substance the plane

for contingency, turning Spinoza's philosophy into one of contingency actually weakens agents'

ability to act (or as Spinoza would put it, increase their power) and does not provide a theoretical

grounding for understanding how finite modes, i.e. different actors and expressions of power, can

56 Althusser, ibid., p. 179.

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relate to each other at all. The modes have absolutely contingent relationships with one another,

and therefore one's affections or ideas cannot be related to another. Furthermore, Althusser's

turning into a negative relation or void makes the critique of ideology too difficult to maintain. If

the modes are contingently following in parallel in the void, there is no reason to believe that

they could ever relate, and one's critique of a given social, economic, or political formation

becomes an assertion, a quasi-will to power, rather than a critique that works through the totality

and its various manifestations.

II. Macherey

Pierre Macherey was Althusser's first student to write a monograph about Spinoza's

thought.57 Like his mentor, Macherey tries to show that Spinoza is as much, if not more so, the

theoretical antecedent to Marx as Hegel is. Unlike Althusser, Macherey has a more sophisticated

and extended comparison (in contrast to Althusser's more polemical remarks) between the two

philosophers in his Hegel or Spinoza.58 One of Macherey's main contentions is that Hegel found

“something indigestible” in Spinoza's philosophy, and Spinoza was an ever-present limit in

relation to Hegel's philosophy, i.e. there are aspects of Spinoza's philosophy that anticipate

Hegel's, which the latter could never completely embrace “even at the moment of its inclusion.”59

In other words, Hegel could never sublate the moment of Spinoza because in many ways Spinoza

had already read and anticipated Hegel. The focus in this essay is less about the merit of

57 Balibar would go on to do the same at a later date. See Balibar, Spinoza and Politics. Evaluating Balibar's interpretation of Spinoza is beyond the scope of this paper.

58 In the preface to the second edition, Macherey says the “or” in the title is one of opposition as well as comparison and equation, like sive in Spinoza's formulation Deus sive natura. Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, pp. 4-6.

59 Macherey, ibid., p. 9. For another piece from another tradition of thought that evaluates Hegel's understanding and critique of Spinoza, see Melamed, “Acosmism or Weak Individuals?: Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Finite.” Errol Harris has some insightful comments on Hegel's critique of Spinoza that acknowledges the former's short-comings, while having a more sympathetic relationship to Hegel. See Harris, “The Concept of Substance in Spinoza and Hegel,” The Substance of Spinoza, pp. 200-214. Macherey has a more sympathetic reading of Hegel in “Spinoza, the End of History, and the Ruse of Reason,” In a Materialist Way, pp. 136-158.

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Macherey's evaluation of Hegel's critique of Spinoza, even though there are valuable insights

against Hegel's reading, and more about how Macherey reads Spinoza.

Macherey spends a considerable amount of time showing that the very things of which

Hegel accuses Spinoza of being guilty, e.g. Spinoza's geometric method is external to its object,

are misplaced, and that the two thinkers are in agreement on this issue, i.e. Spinoza is just as

critical of an abstract method of knowledge.60 Thus, both Spinoza and Hegel are opposed to any

kind of philosophy that wants to establish a method or rules of procedure before the act of

thinking itself, contra Descartes and Kant. For Spinoza, according to Macherey, is a thinker

opposed to an absolute beginning in the sense that there must be an established truth before one

begins to think about concrete things and processes. With an Althusserian-bent, Macherey reads

Spinoza's theory of knowledge as one of production:

Knowledge is by contrast an activity – this idea is essential for Spinoza – and as such never truly begins, nor begins in truth, because it has always already begun. There are always already ideas, because “man thinks” in accordance with his nature. This is why the argument of infinite regression, which we have already addressed, retains a certain validity, if at the same time we deny it the value of a refutation: it simply describes the conditions in which knowledge is produced, through a sequence of absolutely continuous ideas without any assignable beginning.61

According to Macherey, Spinoza is not concerned with finding the “truth” of reality or its

foundation. There is no guarantee for truth because thinking has already begun and is always in

the process of producing, i.e. there is no return to “foundation.” This is an aspect of Spinozism

that Macherey says Hegel ignores.62 When Spinoza begins the Ethics with definitions they are

60 Spinoza's most extensive critique of method is the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Macherey argues that it is necessary to read this text as “a sort of 'Discourse against Method.'” Hegel or Spinoza, p. 44. For an insightful discussion of the importance of the Emendation in Spinoza's philosophy and why it needs to be read along the Ethics, see Frim, “Sufficient Reason and the Causal Argument for Monism.”

61 Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, p. 49. My emphasis.62 Macherey, ibid., p. 50.

Kimes 21

not, as Hegel would suggest, the source of truth from which everything is formally and abstractly

deduced. Key definitions such as substance, attributes, and modes are not rigid but preliminary

principles and “are exactly the equivalent to the rough-hewn stone that the first black-smiths

needed 'to begin' their work.” As Macherey understands the definitions, axioms, and other

preliminary concepts, they are “notions that are still abstract, simple words, natural ideas that

acquire no real significance except at the moment when they function in the demonstrations and

where they produce real effects, thus expressing a capacity that they did not have at the

beginning.”63 Macherey also notes that the Ethics and Hegel's Logic should be approached in the

same way, i.e. not a rigidly deducted system. With regard to method and knowledge, Spinoza and

Hegel are on the same side.

However, the similarity with regard to method and knowledge ends there. There is a

complete absence of contradiction that drives rational development in Macherey's reading of

Spinoza. In the latter's theory of knowledge, the power of the intellect is “integrally positive, an

affirmation of self, that excludes any retreat or failing; it does not incorporate negativity of any

kind.” On the other hand, for Hegel, contradiction is the driving force of all conceptual

knowledge. This distinction is important for Macherey because the Hegelian contradiction has

“an orientation that directs the entire process toward an end that is the principal secret of all its

operations.”64 One result of this thinking according to Macherey is that Hegelian rationalism

remains stuck in the mire of the notion of classical order with the absolute functioning as a

guarantee that is always present throughout its historical moments. In some sense, the end is

always guaranteed and completed in Hegelian spirit, while Spinozian substance and its process

63 Macherey, ibid., p. 51.64 Macherey, ibid., p. 52.

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of knowledge is “absolutely causal” and is free from “all pre-established norms.”65 Because

substance is absolutely causal there is no end to posit, only the infinite production of substance

and its modes. Causa sui is thus the more materialist approach for Macherey because of its anti-

teleogical consequence, which can allow for the contingency of history since substance and its

history is ultimately production.

Another key concept in Spinoza is that of adequate idea, which is a main focus in both

the Emendation and the Ethics.66 In Macherey, an adequate idea for Spinoza is not about a

concept corresponding to an object, i.e. the idea of a cat represents the actual object of a cat. This

would place a concept in a hierarchical position with regard to an object, or to put it in in

Spinozian terms, the attribute of thought is somehow above the attribute of extension. The

attributes in terms of causal links are separated in a fundamental way. The idea of two cats

causing the production of kittens is in a different causal order than the two existing cats in

extension causing the production of kittens. Or to make it more relevant for politics and

economics, the material production of capital (economics), while related, does not communicate

directly with the ideological production of capital (politics).67 People should not confuse the two

attributes because an adequate idea must be determined within itself; the idea of adequation can

function as critique.68

Furthermore, a consequence of such an understanding of truth is that knowledge is not

dependent upon an active willing subject, but the idea itself is active or a modification of

substance. The truth of an idea, an adequate idea of a political situation for example, finds its

65 Macherey, ibid., p. 53.66 Spinoza, Emendation. Spinoza, E267 Macherey shares this reading of the attributes with Althusser. See above. For a helpful guide exploring this

reading of the attributes in the work of Macherey, see Read, “The Order and Connection of Ideas: Theoretical Practice in Macherey's Turn to Spinoza,” Rethinking Marxism, 19:4, pp. 500-520.

68 Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, p. 64.

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adequateness within itself as opposed to what the subjective wills of the agents involved would

like to happen. A Spinozian politics is not based upon a free will, but rather the awareness that

knowledge is a “matter of politics.”69 The process of knowledge is non-evolutionary in Spinoza

or a “process without end” and thus an adequate idea of a political situation should find its truth

within itself, i.e. through a materialist analysis of the given as opposed to what people

subjectively would like to happen.

Having briefly delineated Macherey's understanding of the Spinozian theory of

knowledge, it is important to address another key aspect of Spinoza's system: the attributes.

Macherey is informative in addressing Hegel's understanding of the attributes; the latter claims

that there are only two, arbitrary attributes, thought and extension, while Spinoza actually claims

there are infinite attributes.70 Rather than external predicates (thought and extension) that are

attached to a subject (substance), the attributes are contents that stand for the form of the

substance.71 Macherey further elaborates what he means by this claim in a passage that is

revealing of his idiosyncratic reading of Spinoza. Macherey explains,

Thus, what we would have gained on one hand, by ceasing to consider the attributes as forms engendered by intellect, we would have evidently lost on the other, by reducing them to ideas that passively reflect an external reality. To overcome this new difficulty, it must be added that attributes are neither “active” representations nor “passive” representations, images, nor even ideas of the intellect or in the intellect; the attributes are not in the intellect, as forms through which the latter would apprehend them, objectively or not, a content given in substance, but they are in substance itself, whose essences they constitute. It is clear that this precision is enough to rid the definition of attributes of any notion of passivity: the attributes are active insofar as it is substance that expresses

69 Macherey, ibid., p. 70.70 Spinoza, E1D6: “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of

attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.”71 “Or else we could just as well say they [attributes] are themselves contents that stand for a form, substance,

because the latter 'consists' of them and comprehends them as 'constituting' its essence. What this signifies, quite simply, is that the terms form and content are altogether inappropriate to characterize the relation that links attributes to substance.” Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza., p. 86.

Kimes 24

itself in them, in all of its essences.72

The attributes are not passive aspects of substance but are actively constitutive of it. Another

aspect of Macherey's reading is that in his attempt to make attributes active, they in some sense

have their own reality or independence; the attributes become essences of substance. Instead of

substance being the cause of all its attributes and modifications, substance becomes dependent

upon its attributes reversing the causal order. Macherey becomes more explicit about the

consequence of his reading when he emphasizes “the causa sui is nothing other than the process

within which substance engenders itself through the “essences” that constitute it, on which its

existence is established; this movement succeeds at the moment when it produces substance, as

the product of its activity, as the result of its own determination.”73 Macherey insists that in order

for Spinozian substance to be coherent and adequately “materialist” then the order between

substance and attributes should be reversed so that the attributes come before substance.74

Macherey acknowledges that there is a potential problem in reading the attributes in such

a way. Drawing on Gueroult's commentary, Macherey points out that if substance is coterminous

with its attributes then there could be as many substances as there are attributes. In other words,

it would be accurate to say that all there are are substances.75 To use words from Spinoza, the

72 Macherey, ibid., p. 88. My emphasis. 73 Macherey, ibid., p. 91. Causa sui italicized in original. All others my emphasis. Macherey concludes, “Thus,

engendered in its attributes, which are its internal efficient cause, substance is also the cause of itself; it is clear from then on that the substance is not an immediate absolute, because it must be deduced, even if from itself.”

74 “We thus find the relation between substance and its attributes to be profoundly modified. First it is no longer possible to affirm the exteriority of the attributes in relation to substance: the attributes are in substance as elements or moments through which it constitutes itself. On the other hand, if we absolutely insist on the need to establish an order of succession between substance and attributes, it is no longer at all certain that substance should be placed before the attributes, but it is they rather that precede it, as conditions of its self-production, because they maintain an essentially causal role in the process of its constitution. This explains a frequently observed anomaly: the Ethics does not 'begin' with God, but it ends there, or at least it arrives there, after a whole series of demonstrations, a difficulty that interpreters traditionally circumvent by emptying of all content all the propositions that do not yet concern the unique and really existing substance, in order to turn them into nothing more than the formal preconditions of a discourse that really begins after them.” Macherey, ibid., p. 92. Emphasis in original.

75 Macherey, ibid., p. 96.

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attributes or rather the substances would be infinite absolute, not infinite in kind, which would

produce a problem of how each of the substances could relate to one another without an arbitrary

assertion, i.e. without a rational deduction integral to Spinoza's system. For Macherey, it would

seem at first that resolving the unity and differentiation problem cannot avoid force: “substance

actualizes itself through its attributes in an entirely different manner: substance actualizes itself

in a clean break, which passes without intermediary from one level to another, in such a way that

the relationship between the infinite only in its kind and the absolutely infinite first presents

itself as a true contradiction, which is resolved suddenly, by force, beyond any attempt at

reconciliation.”76 Not quite satisfied with positing one side of the issue over the other, Macherey

is forcing himself to maintain that substance is both the diversity of its attributes as well as their

unification; for Macherey, “these two aspects are not sequential but simultaneous.”77 In an almost

Kantian formulation, Macherey maintains that both positions of substance → attributes and

attributes → substance must both be asserted as adequate to substance's nature.

When Macherey continues into a discussion of the modes, he continues to acknowledge

this ambivalence in his reading. If the necessity of the modes and the necessity of substance are

one and the same, then the two become indeterminate, which is especially a problem for

substance since it is supposed to have the most reality due to it being an infinite cause of itself.78

A full analysis of how Macherey attempts to resolve this issue will take us too far astray. But

76 Macherey, ibid., p. 97. My emphasis.77 Macherey, ibid., p. 98. Toward the end of his discussion of the attributes, Macherey reiterates this point: “But we

have said enough not to have to insist again that, for Spinoza, the infinite diversity of the attributes implies that they are at the same time irreducible to and equal within substance. Thus the difference between thought and extension, or any relationship between any attributes whatsoever, does not have their subordination to substance as a consequence (as with that which is divided compared to that which is united), but on the contrary, it identifies them with substance absolutely. This is as true for thought as it is for any other attribute in general.” ibid., p. 110.

78 Macherey, ibid., p. 143. Spinoza, E1D1: “By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.” E1P7: “It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist.”

Kimes 26

Macherey seems to have to hold onto these contradictory positions without adequately

demonstrating their truth, or perhaps, in a language his brand of Spinozism is comfortable with,

adequate.

Macherey has to maintain this potential contradiction because of his emphasis on the

“materialist dialectic” of a “process without subject” and his anti-teleological commitments. His

version of Spinoza must maintain that substance is nothing but its affections,79 i.e. its attributes

and modes, in order to not, supposedly, posit an end. To use Macherey's words, “the struggle of

tendencies that do not carry within themselves the promise of their resolution. Or again, a unity

of contraries, but without the negation of the negation.”80 Given the failures of certain trends of

Hegelian Marxism, Macherey's skepticism of the negation of negation is understandable and

warranted, since communism's inevitability prevented certain thinkers at the time from actually

engaging with the contradictions of the present. The existence of capitalism's potential downfall

and gravediggers does not necessarily mean that they will be actualized and fulfilled. But such a

reading of substance has potential problems for such a materialist project of the critique of

political economy and the critique of ideology. First, if substance is nothing but its affections

then it can only be known negatively, i.e. substance is never concretely and adequately known.

Thus, substance acts as a secondary category rather than a necessary one. Second and more

importantly, when substance becomes its affections, attributes and modes, Macherey runs the

risk of undermining substance's unicity in favor of a multiplicity, which he acknowledges as a

potential problem. Substance becomes substances, i.e. infinities absolutely rather than infinite

through substance's nature. The modifications that would result would each be self-subsisting

79 Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, p. 200 and p. 210.80 Macherey, ibid., p. 212.

Kimes 27

without communication or relation. There is nothing that unifies the affects one person to

another, and therefore the critique of political economy and ideology becomes merely an

assertion of one's affections. Macherey's ideology critique, which is an important aspect of the

Althusserian project, collapses on itself since it cannot distinguish between another's affections

as “ideology” from the dialectical materialist's affections as “science.” Granted, Macherey does

say that substance unifies as well as multiplies but substance essentially acts as a negative

concept for Macherey (substance is its affections); substance is not a concept that is adequately

demonstrated as concrete but is only a negative referent.

III.Deleuze

Although Deleuze has a slightly different philosophical project, he shares an anti-

Hegelianism and a re-reading of Spinozian substance with Althusser and Macherey. In fact,

Deleuze is quite explicit in his Spinoza not being one of metaphysical monistic substance.

Deleuze says in an interview, “What interested me most in Spinoza wasn't his Substance, but the

composition of finite modes.... the hope of making substance turn on finite modes, or at least

seeing in substance a plane of immanence in which finite modes operate...”81 Here and in other

passages Deleuze is straightforward in turning Spinoza from a philosopher of substance monism

into a philosopher of pluralistic immanence. Yet stopping at these remarks is not enough in

addressing Deleuze's philosophical innovation. One must work through Deleuze's work on

Spinoza and see how this move comes about and whether it is one of merit and worth pursuing.

The focus here is on Deleuze's larger book, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, although

81 Deleuze quoted in Joughin, “Translator's Preface,” Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, p. 11. See also Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 48. “Immanence does not refer back to the Spinozist substance and modes but, on the contrary, the Spinozist concepts of substance and modes refer back to the plane of immanence as their presupposition.”

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Spinoza: Practical Philosophy deals with similar themes in a more accessible form.82

Expressionism in Philosophy, originally published in French as Spinoza et le problème de

l'expression,83 was Deleuze's minor thesis along with the major thesis, Difference and Repetition.

Although he acknowledges that Spinoza hardly uses the term, Deleuze claims that the main

insight of Spinozian philosophy is the problem of expression unbeknownst to the former. What

distinguishes Spinoza from all previous philosophy is that Spinoza is able to avoid the pitfalls of

prior theology and neo-Platonism of placing a One that undergirds all of the Many, where the

former is the ground on which the latter stand. The technical term “expression” allows Deleuze

to emphasize that Spinozian substance or God is not a ground or a being external but is an

expression of itself and its affections. Like Althusser and Macherey, Deleuze emphasizes the

immanence of substance and its non-hierarchical nature to its affections.84 Expressionism in

Philosophy is a complex work, spanning the history of philosophy and Spinoza's unique position

within it. Although one cannot do complete justice to all of the arguments of this book, there are

relevant passages for the concerns of this paper.

Through the idea of expression, Deleuze seeks to re-work Spinozian substance to revolve

around its attributes and modes. Rather than substance (or any other concept in the history of

philosophy standing for Absolute) having more of a reality than its affections, and thus

establishing a hierarchical conception of reality, Deleuze claims that “the essence of substance

has no existence outside the attributes that express it, so that each attribute expresses a certain

eternal and infinite essence. What is expressed has no existence outside its expressions; each

82 The latter acts almost like an introduction to the thought of Spinoza through the lens of Deleuze. The reason why I focus on the former is that many of Deleuze's key theses in both books are developed in greater detail in the former.

83 Peden says the title of the English translation is potentially misleading since it introduces a formulation that Deleuze did not develop until later in his career. See Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 305 n.10.

84 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 13-22.

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expression is, as it were, the existence of what is expressed.”85 In an attempt to make substance

fit what Deleuze calls in other texts the “plane of immanence,” substance is said to have no

existence outside of the attributes that express it, resulting in an ontology that is entirely

immanent and a flat plane.

When the attributes are read in such a way, they cease to be of a lesser reality or a

negation of the wholeness or perfection of substance but have a positive reality in themselves.

Since the infinite attributes are no longer seen as limits (especially as thought placing a limit on

extension), the attributes and modes are seen has having infinite affirmative reality themselves.

Deleuze writes,

It is the nature of real distinction between attributes that excludes all division of substance; it is this nature of real distinction that preserves in distinct terms all their respective positivity, forbidding their definition through opposition one to another, and referring them all to the same indivisible substance. Spinoza seems to have gone further than any other along the path of this new logic: a logic of pure affirmation, of unlimited quality, and thus of the unconditioned totality that possesses all qualities; a logic, that is, of the absolute. Attributes should be understood as the elements of such a composition of the absolute.86

Although there are infinite distinctions amongst the attributes, they are unified in substance; but

simultaneously each attribute has its positive reality without limiting other attributes. Spinoza is

the thinker of affirmation par excellence and has no conception of negativity or dialectics.87 Even

in this early text, it is clear that Deleuze is trying to think the plane of immanence and life as

opposed to any philosophy of hierarchy or negation.88 Each attribute is a pure affirmative quality

of substance; if certain attributes were to be subordinated to others (e.g. thought as opposed to

extension) or if attributes were to be subordinated to substance then Spinoza's philosophy would

85 Deleuze, ibid., p. 42.86 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, p. 80.87 This is one key difference between Deleuze and Macherey.88 For the most concise and condensed exposition of immanence see Deleuze, Immanence: A Life.

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not be one of expression.

As was noted earlier, Deleuze is more interested in the modes than substance. One key

move he makes is to make substance revolve around the modes, rather than substance being the

cause of the modes and their further modification. Deleuze notes,“But if it be true that modes, by

virtue of their power, exist only in their relation to substance, then substance, by virtue of its

power, exist only in its relation to modes: it has an absolutely infinite power of existence only by

exercising in an infinity of things, in an infinity of ways or modes, the capacity to be affected

corresponding to that power.”89 It is important to note that Deleuze is not saying that substance

must have infinite attributes and infinite modifications because it is truly infinite and perfect –

that would be a fairly orthodox reading of the substance/modes relation. What Deleuze is saying

is that substance can only exist as substance through its modes, or in other words, he has not only

collapsed the modes into substance but also the substance into the modes. Substance in order to

be substance must be its affections for Deleuze.

At times, Deleuze will qualify this claim of what appears to an equivocation of modes

and substance. He remarks that “[t]he univocity of attributes does not mean that substance and

modes have the same being or the same perfection: substance is in itself, and modifications are in

substance as in something else.”90 In order for God to be distinguished from its modifications, it

must have more reality or perfection; in the Spinozian system, a cause has more perfection than

its effects. But even while Deleuze wants to maintain this essential tenet of Spinozian

philosophy, he still wants to maintain that they are equal at least in a very particular sense.

“Spinoza posits the equality of all forms of being, and the univocity of reality which follows

89 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, p. 95. My emphasis.90 Deleuze, ibid., p. 165.

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from this equality,” Deleuze argues, “The philosophy of immanence appears from all viewpoints

as the theory of unitary Being, equal Being, common and univocal Being. It seeks the conditions

of a genuine affirmation, condemning all approaches that take away from Being its full

positivity, that is, its formal community.”91 Deleuze's solution to the potentially conflicting

claims that the modes precede or constitute substance and simultaneously that substance is the

cause of its modifications is to claim that they are unified through seeing God as immanent,

equalizing all aspects of its being without limiting its various manifestations.

Showing how this reading of the modes manifests itself throughout the whole of

Deleuze's oeuvre is beyond the scope of this essay, but there are some moments in his other work

that draw on his previous studies of Spinoza, implicitly or explicitly, that are revealing of this

move. To put it crudely, the following passages are the “applied” aspects of Deleuze's Spinozism.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome can be seen as an

expression of Deleuze's idiosyncratic reading of Spinozian substance. Deleuze and Guattari

argue that the anti-hierarchical rhizome starts from the middle or milieu, not seeking totalization

or order. The rhizome is seen as doing away with beginnings and endings allowing for the

multiplicity of life to explode the transcendent hierarchical order of the state, of linguistics, etc.92

The modes in a plane of immanence are not subordinated to a unifying force that seeks to capture

them but are anarchic desires that seek flight. It can be hypothesized that the privileging of the

desiring modes (whatever form they might take, such as the rhizome) is summarized in this

collaborative work when Deleuze and Guattari make the claim “PLURALISM = MONISM.”93

The influence of Spinoza, or at least Deleuze's reading of him, is more explicit in his and

91 Deleuze, ibid., p. 167.92 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 22.93 Deleuze and Guattari, ibid., p. 20

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Guattari's concept of the body without organs (BwO) through which they seek another way of

conceiving of a flight from unifying organization. In fact, they claim that the Ethics is the great

book of the BwO.94 As Deleuze and Guattari develop the concept of the BwO, they raise the

issue of whether there is a unifying entity or totality that brings together the multiplicity of all

BwO's in explicitly Spinozian terms.95 The tentative answer to this problem is that Deleuze and

Guattari want to explode this opposition of the One and the Multiple, that the BwO's is a

“fusional multiplicity that effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one and the

multiple,” and emphasize the formal multiplicity of the attributes and ontological unity of

substance; in effect, the “BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency

specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any

exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it).”96 Harking back

to Deleuze's Spinoza monograph, substance is its modes as much as the modes are in substance,

and for Deleuze and Guattari potentially breaks out of hierarchical relationship between One and

Many. The reading of the modes in this way allows for Deleuze to reappropriate substance so

that it is not necessitarian, i.e. fully determining its modification in the causal chain, but opens up

a space for the anarchic, contingent, multiplicity of modes or life. As Deleuze and Guattari claim,

“Spinoza, Heliogabalus, and experimentation have the same formula: anarchy and unity are one

and the same thing, not the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the

94 Deleuze and Guattari, ibid., p. 153.95 “The problem of whether there is a substance of all substances, a single substance for all attributes, becomes: Is

there a totality of all BwO's? If the BwO is already a limit, what must we say of the totality of all BwO's?” Deleuze and Guattari, ibid., p. 154.

96 Deleuze and Guattari, ibid. Deleuze and Guattari provide another tentative answer (although they would cringe at a suggestion that the answer is somehow final) to this question at a later point in the discussion: “When we asked the question of the totality of all BwO's, considered as substantial attributes of a single substance, it should have been understood, strictly speaking, to apply only to the plane. The plane is the totality of the full BwO's that have been selected (there is no positive totality including the cancerous or empty bodies.” ibid. p. 165.

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multiple.”97 Now that the modes are freed from any deterministic system, their trajectory is open

to the contingency of events and new formations, which produce ever new ones ad infinitum; the

modes are not bound by the previous causal change, since they are as much that chain

themselves, and can flee the capturing tendencies of capital, the state, et al. Like Althusser and

Macherey, Deleuze (and Guattari) (re)read Spinoza in order to understand the contemporary

conjecture without an appeal to any teleological guarantee that would ultimately do violence to

singularities.

Thus, these conceptual formulations in Deleuze's work with Guattari provide some

insight into what Deleuze meant when he wrote, “All that Spinozism needed to do for the

univocal to become an object of pure affirmation was to make substance turn around the

modes...”98 Having tried to show how Deleuze makes substance turn around the modes, it is now

necessary to point to the perhaps unintended political consequences. Deleuze thought that

making Spinoza a philosopher of contingency opened up the possibility of new radical politics

that renounced any teleology and would pave the way for a new materialist philosophy. Yet, I

want to claim, as I did with Althusser and Macherey, that Deleuze's politics become unthinkable

given his reading of Spinoza.

As indicated above, Deleuze tries to make the claim that the modes in some sense

constitute substance. The first move in the construction of this claim is to make Thought and

Extension ontologically distinct,99 although Deleuze claims that they are unified in substance. Yet

97 Deleuze and Guattari, ibid., p. 158.98 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 304.99 Deleuze shares this claim with Gueroult. See Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 194. Although there

many formulations of how the attributes relate, here is fairly concise explanation: “Why not deduce the unity of substantial modification directly from the unity of substance? Because God produces things in attributes that are formally or really distinct; attributes are indeed expressive, but each finds expression on its own account, as an ultimate and irreducible form.” Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, p. 127.

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if they are substantially distinct, i.e. distinct in that thought cannot causally determine extension,

the problem arises as to how they relate at all, or Deleuze notes how to these two (and the infinite

others) attributes express the same thing.100 In other words, it raises the issue as to how the

infinitely multiple relate to one another, if at all. Deleuze is aware of Kant's critique of Spinoza

in that the latter (supposedly) could not account for the unity of attributes and modes:

Everything leads us to expect that there will be modes in different attributes expressing the same modification. Yet we have no absolute certainty in this matter. One might even conceive as many worlds as there are attributes. Nature would be in substance, but multiple in its modifications, what is produced in one attribute remaining absolutely different from what is produced in another. It is because of their individual coherence, their specificity, that we are forced to seek a separate ground of the unity of which they are capable.

The answer that Deleuze provides to this dilemma is that the idea of God synthesizes these

qualities because “God's understanding has no less unity than divine substance, and so the things

he understands have no less unity than God himself.”101

Knox Peden notes that Deleuze's making the attributes themselves substantial makes

substance “purely ideational” or a formal category without content.102 While I agree with the

insight that substance acts as secondary consideration or a place holder in Deleuze, Peden

overemphasizes the issue that this is a problem of rationalism qua rationalism (as opposed to

materialism?) or idea qua idea and seems to miss the larger point that this idea of God is asserted

or added on arbitrarily rather than being necessarily deduced through itself – like Spinoza does

the true idea in the Emendation.103 With the emphasis on the substantiality of the attributes and

the attempt to make substance turn around the modes, Deleuze seems to undermine any kind of

100Deleuze, ibid., p. 62. 101Deleuze, ibid., p. 128.102Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, p. 214.103Landon Frim makes the case that substance is not a formal idea but is necessarily the most concrete idea through

a close reading of the Emendation. See Frim, “Sufficient Reason and the Causal Argument for Monism,” especially pp. 141-151.

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radical politics because when modes constitute what is the most real then one cannot speak of

substance but substances. The modes become contingently related without an argument as to

why or how they can relate to one another. One cannot speak of a critique of existing poltico-

economico-social forms because it has not been demonstrated from Deleuze's premises as to why

one's politics is communicable to another; in other words, there is no reason provided as to why

my political ideas, commitments, and practices could ever be related to someone else,yet alone

many others, for they would be merely thoughts in my own head. Deleuze's version of Spinoza,

in its emphasis on contingent anarchic multiplicity, was a response to totalizing tendencies

throughout social and political life as well as their philosophical expressions (especially Hegel).

But in his attempt to make a Spinozian philosophy more open to contingent multiplicity of

history and political events, Deleuze undermines any attempt to make sense of those contingent

aspects of political life and further to be able to communicate political commitments through

resistance, solidarity, or any other radical political action.

Conclusion

Throughout this essay, it has been argued that Althusser, Macherey, and Deleuze have a

idiosyncratic take on Spinoza's philosophy, making the latter a philosophy of contingency. There

were specific philosophical and political reasons behind this move to a contingent Spinoza – an

anti-teleological Marxism, a non-Hegelian dialectic, an affirmation of life, and so on. By re-

reading Spinozian substance in a way that emphasizes the immanence of attributes and modes in

substance, these thinkers sought to provide a more materialist understanding of the contemporary

situation that allows for the contingency of events, i.e. that political actors are not defined by a

Subject but can make their own history and construct their own politics. But as I argued, this

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move toward a substance that is causally constituted by its attributes and modes makes the unity

of these aspects of substance spurious at best, unthinkable at worst. For the emphasis on

immanence that makes the modes the primary concepts of concern runs the risk of making each

its own substance without being able to relate to one another – the modes are not an expression

of substance but are causally constitutive of it. Thus, the modes are not infinite in kind (and

therefore, unified in substance) but become absolutely infinite, each acting as its own self-cause.

Although my focus has been on the more abstract theoretical aspects of Spinoza and the

contingent Spinozists via the latter's readings of the Ethics, there are political consequences to

these theoretical problems. While Althusser, Macherey, and Deleuze each have their own

emphases and subtle differences, they are unified in some key conceptual moves. Substance is no

longer causally prior; substance is not important but rather the modes are what are most real; the

attributes are substances themselves; contingency or pluralism is privileged over necessity or

monism. What their readings of Spinoza have trouble addressing is the way the modes (such as

political actors) relate to one another; or their relationships are absolutely contingent without any

explanation as to why a certain political, social, or economic organization is preferable over

another. The affections one person experiences (their political “preference” or “belief”) are

absolutely infinite from others. Thus, a person's commitments cannot be articulated through a

connection to the necessity of substance, i.e. what unifies one with an infinity of others, and

becomes an assertion, making any kind of democratic politics (yet alone a communist politics)

unthinkable. Another related aspect is that a critique of capitalist social relations also becomes an

arbitrary assertion of one's will, since the thoughts that occur in one's head are not shown to be a

part of substance's unity. Althusser and Macherey's attempt at a critique of ideology runs the risk

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of becoming a Nietzschean will to power, and Deleuze's attempt to think the singularity of a life

runs the risk of turning into its opposite: a violent conception asserted on a life.

Most of this paper has been spent tracing the arguments of Althusser, Macherey, and

Deleuze about Spinoza with little explicit references to the work of the lens maker himself.

While these comments are cursory, here are some suggestions toward reading Spinoza as

necessitarian monist and how such reading could provide a framework to think a radical politics.

Spinoza has already a provided a way to think the unity of all finite modes, and this

requires a serious reading of the first five definitions of the Ethics, especially D3 and D5, which

Gueroult, Macherey, and Deleuze say are tentative or speculative, and not to be taken too

seriously.104 From definitions three and five, Spinoza puts forward the following as his first

proposition: “A substance is prior in nature to its affections.”105 For Spinoza, the unity of

substance is cause of the affections of the modes, i.e. the plurality is derived from the unity or

monism. The knowledge of the modes is dependent upon the knowledge of substance as their

cause, since modes are known through another with substance as the ultimate referent. Given

Spinoza's definitions, propositions, and demonstrations, the modes are capable of being thought

as unified because substance is their infinite absolutely necessary cause; thus, the modes can

relate to one another because each is a modification of absolutely infinite substance. This unity

should not be confused with acosmism because as Spinoza argues, “From the necessity of the

divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes, (i.e., everything

which can fall under an infinite intellect).”106

104E1D3: “By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.” E1D5: “By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another which it is also conceived.”

105E1P1106E1P16. For an analysis of acosmism see again Melamed, “Acosmism or Weak Individuals?: Hegel, Spinoza, and

the Reality of the Finite.”

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Each mode or thing strives to persevere in its being,107 and although each is affected in

different ways, they are not absolutely different since they express God's or substance's power,

which is the unity of them. As a result each individual seeks the increase of his or her power. As

Spinoza puts it, “To man, then, there is nothing more useful than 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.”108 Through Spinozian substance and its

causes it is possible to promote solidarity amongst different groups in different places and times

and to criticize any condition in which their ability to preserve their being is degraded because

all modes adhere in substance. Political concepts such as these are shown as necessary, moving

away from any arbitrary or contingent relation, i.e. away from any moralizing or voluntarism

that has no basis.

107E3P6108E4P18S

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