Tracing Out Laruelle’s Kantian Reduction of Spinoza

I’ve been having a (very loose) discussion of the relationship between Laruelle and Spinoza over at An und für sich, where Anthony P. Smith is helping me understand where Spinoza and Laruelle diverge. In the last day I’ve been reading up on this nexus, combing through Laruelle’s Response to Deleuze where most of the resistance to Spinoza is spelled out, as well as attempting to get a grasp of Laruelle’s rather vocabulary-entrenched argumentative conception of “decision” within all of philosophy, much of which I draw from Brassier’s treatment. Not an easy task. So this post operates only as a touching point of intuitive difficulties I have with Laruelle’s treatment of Spinoza, and not a rigorously explication of them. I sense that part of the problem is the global approach that Laruelle attempts to bring out of what is really much more an analysis of Kant and Kant-related philosophies. That is to say, the “Dyad” of Laruelle, which is supposed to find its source in an orginary ”decision” between Idealism and Materialism fits quite well in the Scheme/Content form of Kantian and perhaps most post-Kantian philosophy, but this “science” of philosophy may not really be as well suited to pre-Kantian, or at least Spinozist positioning.

I think part of the problem may be genetic, which is to say, Laruelle isolates the first act of his non-philosophy to be an explicit Plotinean/Kantian duplicity. He frames the orientation of his problematic in terms of Plotinian One and Kantian transcendence:

… Non-philosophy does not effectively or successfully begin until Une biographie de lhomme ordinaire [A Biography of the Ordinary Man (1985)], because it is there that the problem of how to bind the four sides together is thematized and basically formulated –albeit not without difficulties– through the notion of unilaterality. The conditions for this solution are that the One acquire a radical autonomy with regard to philosophy, that it stop being a philosophical object, and that the latter is revealed to be a transcendental appearance. It is as though an over-neoplatonization of the One was accompanied by a corresponding over-kantianization of philosophy as appearance…

“A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy”

Though in this very interesting essay Laruelle traces out the various stages of non-philosophy as its stemmed from this original “dyad” (we want to say), one has to wonder at the full-wealth of a proposed science of philosophy that necessarily drags with it an inherently Kantian partner. As a Spinozist there is a very real, non-representational sense in which Spinoza precludes or forecloses the path that Kant and Kantianism took, and took hold of the Plotinean One in more or less Plotnean terms (a degree-of-being resolution), so much so that a science derived from Kant as a constitutive part simply misses the analytical mark. One cannot read Kant back into Spinoza (unless of course a Spinozist, such as Deleuze, has been busy putting Kant into Spinoza as an expansive permutation of his thought). This leaves us with the sense that Laruelle’s science of philosophies is perhaps best conceived as aimed towards post-Kantian appropriations of Spinoza, which one intuits perhaps really is the historical case.

In a certain way, admittedly from the beginning, Kant helped form the very conception of the originary ”decision” which is said to characerize ALL philosophy, giving one to wonder if once we carefully pair away Laruelle’s Kantianism (assumed in the characterization of decision) a space opens up, historically, for a communication between Spinoza and Laruelle (one which Laruelle himself may not have been able to grasp due to the global nature of the claims of his science).

Part of my problem in reading Laruelle on Spinoza is attempting to locate the all important “decisional” dyad. Brassier in his dissertation on non-philosophy does a very good job of characterizing it in particular Kantian terms, terms otherwise recognized as scheme vs. content (Davidson). Philosophy is said to make a core, axiomatic choice which divides the Real into some “transcendent” a priori “faktum” (scheme) and some “immanent” empirical “datum”:

“Alien Theory” [click for larger image]

We can certainly see the strong Kantian nature of the decision in this telling by Brassier, but with the equations of immanence = empirical datum and transcendence = a priori faktum *at the simplest level), there really is no correspondence that I can see between the nature of this “distinction” (or Dyad) and the various distinctions we read in Spinoza. We feel like we are swimming in really the Kantian half of the originary Plotinus/Kant dyad.

Brassier opens up the distinction into its simplest form, that of the knower and the known, the perceiver and the perceived, but I still cannot find the traction point in Spinozist philosophy, largely because these elemental dyads are refused in a great number of ways which generally foreclose an essential materialist/idealist reading.

“Thus for any philosophical distinction between two terms (or Dyad), as such, in the…”

Curiously Laruelle has found a kind of incipient “ego” in Spinoza’s philosophy (in his Response to Deleuze, cited further down), which he links to concepts of Oneness, and perhaps his reading of Spinoza is leveraged in accepting this, but many actually find the opposite of this as Spinoza’s explanation of perceptions, thoughts, knowing are radically against any isolated ego or self, continually de-centering any supposed knower/known dyad. It could be that Laruelle’s need for an “ego” to be found in Spinoza is based upon the desire to graft Kantian distinctions/decisions back onto him, but thus far I cannot quite grasp where he locates this and rather suspect a deficiency in his reading (driven by both a desire for global description and his contest with Deleuze). For thoughts on Spinoza’s subversion of the “subject”: Subjectless Subjectivity, A Geography of Subject: Beyond Objectology, where Williams’s “Reconfiguring Body and Mind: Thinking Beyond the Subject with/through Spinoza” is discussed.

Where Lies the Decisional Dyad In Spinoza?

Anthony Paul Smith has been helping me uncover just where the decisional dyad occurs in Spinoza, and in the comments linked above you can find the context of the causal discussion. There he locates the decision not within a faktum/datum, but within a One/All division, and then further in the natura naturans/natura naturata specification:

The problem in Spinoza is the convertibility of the One with the All, for Laruelle. This leads to all sorts of amphibologies and melanges, rather than any kind of identity. The split is then between the natura naturans and the natura natuarta, in Spinoza. I do think this leads to a kind of slippage in Spinozist thought, but one that can be recast non-philosophically and still Spinozistic.

Connecting all the dots between the naturans/naturata distinction in Spinoza, and the Kantianish transcendent faktum/immanent datum seems very difficult to do. In fact, I can’t do it. IF there is a transcendent part of the dyad, it is the naturans which certainly doesn’t fall into any easy empirical/immanent category. In fact if this is an orginary decision in Spinoza it certainly doesn’t seem to operate in the transcendent/immanent manner Laruelle’s Kant-derived essentialization of philosophy finds important. Instead, in the cognitive plane, acts of perception are naturans actions (affirmations) which concretize themselves into naturata states of relative being, degrees-of-power, in which “knowing” refuses the distinction between knower and known. They are not parsed in order to be reglued, and certainly not via the naturans/naturata distinction. To put it another way, the naturata do not make up a datum that is the conditioned. Nothing is “given”, so to speak.

Anthony Paul Smith also mentions the reversibility of the One and the All in Spinoza, and there is good evidence that Laruelle does hold this as central to his analysis. He makes this point clear in his Response to Deleuze where he objects to Deleuze’s drawing comparisons between Laruelle’s One and Spinoza’s One:

(1) To the first objection: The One in question, the radical immanence through which it is defined, is not above all the One-All, whether ‘close’ or not to Spinoza, but instead a One-without-All, and even a Onewithout- Being, which we call the One-in-the-last-instance in order to oppose it to the convertibility which it refuses of the One and of Being, similar to the Spinozist reversibility of the One and the All. Certain contemporary philosophers abhor the One—and with good reason. We do as well: however, on the condition of specifying that it is then a question of the One correlative to the Multiple under any title or relation, and convertible through an inversion—whether close or not—with Being. Because the One prevails over Being or the Multiple, or the Multiple over the One, or because they alternately prevail over one another, these are clearly possible solutions which must be explored, but this is precisely not our problem. A real critique of immanence according to Deleuze is now possible; and among other possibilities, it can be constructed on behalf of a form of immanence still more radical, excluding all transcendence outside of it: not only theological objects and entities, but also the ultimate form of transcendence, auto-position or survey, the fold or doublet, etc. The One-in-the-last-instance is the true suspension of this One-All and, in a general way, of all reciprocity, in other words, of all relation without possible exception, essentially ‘without relation’ to Being.

Because Laruelle is responding to a “Spinozist reversibility of the One and the All” we are not sure if he is taking Spinoza on directly or not. And this is a problem we’ve already mentioned, as Laruelle has Deleuze specifically in mind here. The situation is further problemized because characterizing Spinoza’s philosophy as a One and All explication actually stems from the German Idealist reinvigoration of him in the 18th century, leading to the Pantheism Controversy. It was Lessing’s recasting of Spinoza Substance into questions of the One and All (Hen kai pan) that eventually lead to Schellings’s Idealist insertion of “negation”  into the Spinoza program, all in the name of rectifying it with, yes, Kantianism, ultimately culminating in Hegel’s ontological negation. The entire matrix of the One and All re-characterization of Spinoza, in attempts to avoid a percieved threat of radical Nihilism and Atheism, not to mention the dissolution of the “subject” and anthropocentrism, has to be considered as historically driven (ideologically so), well within the aims of domesticating Spinoza. So, in a certain sense, Laruelle’s acceptance of a One and All Spinoza (under the auspices of a Kantian diagnosis of “decision”) is quite in line with the philosophical attempts to domesticate him in synthesis with Kant (via the subject). Indeed, the question of the “I” (in Schelling with Kant and Fichte), which Laruelle discovers as implicit in Spinoza, haunts this fundamental mis-reading of his position. Kant should not be brought to Spinoza.

Substance As Ego?

I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, I suppose I should include it, here is the passage where Laruelle imagines that the very unity of Substance becomes an originary projection of a “ego”.:

In reality, Spinoza has always been invoked for two contradictory reasons: for the immanence characteristic of causality, no doubt, but also for the transcendence all too characteristic of the unity of substance in relation to the so-called ‘human subject’ as the supposed or site of immanence. The formula of the ‘human subject’ is kept here, but it is obviously ambiguous (which subject? which man?). This double enlistment is significant: Spinoza, this is justifiably immanence in effect, but immanence as it is lived or received as transcendent by the human subject, external to it and too great for it—let us retain this formula—and thus Deleuze recognizes and lays claim to it, rejecting man as the third and final moment of the triad, as a piece adjacent to machines, as a persona adjacent to concepts. Here there is no essence or absolutely autonomous form of man: the latter is a system of effects and is composed beginning from its content, affections and perceptions. The argument given is this: immanence is not to something else which is always transcendent; it is thus not to the cogito or to the ego; it is to self but not ‘to itself’ (emphasized p. 208, understood consequently: the ego is a preliminary form, transcendent to the immanence of the One- All). What does this argument mean? It begs the question: if immanence is that of the Spinozist substance, then in fact it is the ego which is now a transcendent form; but this is to be given what is necessary to demonstrate. The recent interpretations of the Cogito (Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion) are more subtle and show that radical immanence, without representation, is the essence of the Cogito.

“Response to Deleuze”

One can certainly see the lasting residue of the Idealist reappropriations of Spinoza in this reading, that any unity must be a cogito unity. While I am not familiar with the proofs of Henry and Marion, on any number of fronts one can argue that in fact Spinoza’s philosophy subverts not only the human cogito (and “ego”) to such a radical degree, but also does so at the level of Substance itself. The human subject is torn asunder from within, in a necessary Conjoined Semiosis (as I argue in these three posts: Aggregates, Groups and Trans-semiotics; Conjoined Semiosis: A “Nerve Language” of Bodies ; The Necessary Intersections of the Human Body: Spinoza ), but as well, that Substance is unity in no way correspondent to human cognition. In fact only a strong Idealist commitment (and one might say implicit Kantian commitment) would drive the preoccupation with a One and All reading of Spinoza. Spinoza himself really does not make this sort of distinction in his philosophy (far from it being the essential dyad), chosing other determinations upon which to organize his thinking. As such, perhaps Laruelle’s critique falls more heavily upon “Spinozists” and much less so than on Spinoza himself. This leaves us right back where we started, attempting to locate the initial decision of Spinoza’s philosophy.

The non-Euclidean: A Change of Axioms

Because this is not a thorough investigation but only a report on my followings of an intuition, it is perhaps better to change tact and find a certain strange correspondence between Spinoza and Laruelle, a correspondence of analogy. The attempt to locate the Kantianish ”decision” in Spinoza seems to ground itself upon the reef of German Idealism’s appropriation of (and inoculation of itself against) Spinoza. It could be that an approach of the problem rhetorically would yield unexpected results.

Key to understanding Laruelle’s non-philosophy, perhaps more key than any other factor, is appreciating the “non” in non-philosophy. It is not a negation in the least, but rather a kind of expansion, or alteration. Laruelle tells us that it must be seen in the light of the “non” in non-Euclidean geometry. Brassier in Alien Theory puts it this way:

[click for larger image]

And Laruelle expands on the nearly literal connection between Non-Euclidean geometry and his change of axioms. It achieves a science status by breaking the internal logic of the (Kantian) decision (comparable to the changing of the 5th axiom of Euclid).   

Non-philosophy is obviously not a theory of knowledge or a system in general. It is a real-transcendental science of the world. The only way of discovering it is by relativizing the exclusive primacy of the logic that hides it and prevents one noticing it in philosophy, even of the non-analytical kind. We could say, in our customary style, that it is a transcendental logic that is real-and-nothing-but rather than logical; one that is without-logic or non formal, so to speak. Contrary to the logicist reduction of philosophy, which leaves the hidden prerogatives of philosophical sufficiency intact, specifically in the form of positivity and hence of a kind of dogmatism, this non-philosophical reduction of philosophy is at once real-transcendental and capable of a wide variety of realizations, not only in terms of logic but in terms of the sciences in general. There is an instance that is more radical than logic, and this is the real. Not that it is possible to replace logic by just any science while maintaining the same privileges for the latter. It is the universal posture of science that must take the place which in philosophy is held by the restricted universality of logic. Non-philosophy shatters the strictures of logic and analytical reduction, just as it dissolves the residues of a compulsory, exclusive and primary logic in the transcendental logic of philosophers, granting the transcendental the sole support of the radical real, and hence the possibility of entering into combination with each of the sciences. Non-philosophy is unified theory: a radical extension of philosophy beyond transcendental logic, but one that deprives it of its traditional pretensions. As a result, it is philosophy and its logical organon that lose their prerogatives by being turned into a simply real-transcendental organon. Thus, it is necessary to take the expression ‘non-philosophy quite literally, so to speak. It is not just a metaphorical reference to ‘non-Euclidean…

“A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy”

Now Brassier’s footnote references over 30 pages of text, so perhaps Laruelle works out a rigorous comparison between his non-philosophy and philosophy itself (all of them making the same sort of “decision”), different than that expressed in Laruelle passage cited which explicates the non-Euclidean analogy. This I cannot say. At first blush though we can read a very rough equivalence. Euclidean geometry possesses one group of axioms, and non-Euclidean geometry constitutes a change in these axioms. Pointedly, the fundamental decision of philosophy is avoided in favor of a radical Immanence. Okay, we can see that. But more is at stake in the literalized analogy, the movement from a “geometry” to a “science” and Laruelle’s expansion brings most of this out. In no-way does the non-Euclidean refusal of the parallel-postulate (related to Euclid’s fifth) give non-Euclidean geometry a position of taking the products of Euclidean geometry as its empirical objects, so the comparison holds within itself a slight of hand. This meta-like positioning of non-philosophy via non-Euclidean reference actually reads a kind of perverse disassociation.

This is what I find buried in the provocative metaphor. Primary among the interest in non-Euclidean geometry is the curious features of elliptic geometry. What we have in the globalization of space in such a geometry (which denies the parallel postulate of Euclid), is the kind of hermetic space that Laruelle finds problematic in Kantian philosophy (and by extension, philosophy in general), that is to say, the a priori conditioning creates the empirical conditioned, folding the “decision” back into the whole coherence, obscuring in a way its transcendence. The sphere of non-Euclidean geometry, invoked, a world where parallel lines SEEM like they would go on forever, in the seclusions of philosophical axioms, are shown to be recursively closed, intersecting at antipodes. In a way, Laruelle’s non-philosophy actually claims to expose the non-Euclidean (elliptic) nature of Kantian inspired analysis of “decision”. From the point of view of earth, when we draw two parallel lines on the ground, they appear actually Euclidean, transcendent, whereas in almost a Lacanian Symbolic fashion, our space is curved. They will intersect.

So when Laruelle invokes the non-Euclidean nature of his non-philosophy, I believe he is rather exposing both the illusion of an infinite Euclidean space (within a philosophy), and it’s actually curved, hermetic isolation of the Real (when seen from without). Kant’s logical necessity of Euclidean space further orients this reference to fifth postulate differences in geometry, and the kind of critical and axiomatic break that Laruelle is attempting to make.

The invocation of Euclid’s geometry, apart from Kant’s love for it, also has something of a reverbative affect back through the history of philosophy to the Ur-philosopher of Euclidean clarity, Spinoza himself. How can one rigorously (or literally) compare your radical approach to non-Euclidean geometry and not call to mind Spinoza’s famous more geometrico, and his desire to treat human emotions as if they were lines and points? In fact, at the face value of rhetorical forms, Laruelle’s non-Euclidean non-philosophy stands in strict opposition (I know, Laruelle refuses “non” as opposition, but I am speaking of the rhetorical form here) to Spinoza’s Euclidean Philosophy. As I’ve tried to point out in the above, it is hard though, given Laruelle’s Kantian framework of dyad, to locate exactly where the decisional diagnosis will fall. Instead they stand apart, perhaps as pictures. Or, as different sorts of Space, just as the original analogy might most strongly suspect.

Now this is the interesting thing. Non-Euclidean geometry largely developed over the contest of Euclid’s 5th axiom, what came to be described as the parallel postulate. And elliptic geometry (among others) arises with the change of this postulate, that parallel lines will not meet ad infintum. The appeal to the Non-Euclidean is an appeal to the challenge of the parallel postulate. Perhaps this is only a contingent jewel of historic happenstance, or perhaps Spinoza’s Euclideanism somehow floats behind Laruelle’s invocation, but Spinoza’s philosophy possesses its own much debated “parallel postulate”. In fact his gnomic parallel postulate can be said to be fulcrum upon which he balances the entire materialism vs. idealism quaesta.

With some homology to Euclid’s unmeeting parallel lines Spinoza asserts that “E2P7: The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” In fact upon this parallelism of infinitely extending parallel lines of causes seems to create the entire woof and weft of Spinoza’s seeming Euclidean space. It is the fiber of an abstract rejection any form of Idealism, a placing of the material on equal footing with the ideal (positioned within, one supposes, an infinity of other order and connection expressions of other unknown Attributes). Spinoza accomplishes a flattening of space required for his analysis, but in doing so in just this way refuses any scheme/content, conditioning/conditioned binary. What can we make of this?

Let us take up our provisional reading of the implicit Euclidean and non-Euclidean reversals in Laruelle’s rejection of the Kantian decision. The internal (spherical) realm of Kantianish decision creates an appearance of phenomena which are quite Euclidean in appearance (flat). The decision producing a philosophical coherence of the world in terms of material and idea, in a sense, bends the Real creating the very Kantian restricted access to Real, through an illusion of Euclidean infinity. The decision performs the very structure of Kantian philosophy itself (no matter which axiomatic dyad one makes). It appears straight because it is curved. Okay, let’s accept this doubling.

But because we are hard pressed to locate the original dyad in Spinoza – Is it between Substance and Attribute, as Laruelle suggests late in his Response to Deleuze, is it between Attribute and mode, between Substance and mode as in naturans/naturata, or Between Attributes themselves for instance in the parallel postulate itself? – we might want to take up the very case of Euclidean Space itself, the Space of the Ethics. This assessment of space is further complicated by Spinoza’s famous dismissal of geometry itself in Letter 12, wherein figures and shapes (as well as numbers and maths) are given to being mere imaginary products. Clearly, Euclidean geometry is taken up as a form of argument not because it presents a fundamental truth about Substance. Nature does not speak mathematics. All the same, Spinoza flattening of the ground through his own parallel postulate does well to be compared to Kant’s flattening through the bending of Space. Could it be that Spinoza’s Euclidean geometry presentation is actually the inverse of Kant’s, exoterically flat, esoterically elliptic? That is, despite the parallelism of thing and idea, is it not that parallel lines do in fact intersect, and that these intersections are regularly performed in the foreclosure of any knower known dyad as well as the remarked absence of any “subject”?

Spinoza tells us rather radically that any idea we have of something in the world is actually an idea we have of the state our body is in, so that when I phenomenologically look at my dog and perceive it, this is nothing more than imaginary relationship I have to the world (and myself), and that my idea of my dog is actually the idea (I prefer the concept “information”) of my body being a certain state. The reference is entirely cybernetic and recursively defined, and this is due to his parallel postulate. Friends of a neurological, brain-science view of the body and consciousness like this internal reference. All our thoughts about the world are our bodies coming into certain states of combination. What Spinoza tells us is that certain states of combination are more powerful, more active, more free, that others. Another way of stating this that our informational distribution and organization can become more or less self-determining.  We can see here a non-Euclidean bending of space buried within the flatness of the parallel postulate itself. Each human being makes a kind of self-referential sphere. But this is really not so either, for even though our ideas are merely ideas of our body being in certain states, we can have better ideas than others, and because we and the external things of the world are both expressions of the One Substance, occasions of us actually coming to know things external to us are necessarily participatory occasions, occasions which not only defy any restrictive notion of “subject” and “object”, but also cross out any ultimate boundary between one’s own body and that of another thing.

As I have argued in my treatment of the Prophetic Imagination, Spinoza’s Scheme of the Prophetic Imagination ; Omens of the Future: Intellection and Imagination, Spinoza ensures the possibility of a sharing of essences even at the level of the imagination. In addition to this, Spinoza’s definitions of body and individual as communications of parts and the causes of unitary effects all promote a variable negotiation of boundary which undermines any self/other essentialization, and in fact runs this mutuality right down to a panpsychic core which is neither materialist nor idealist. What one might propose with non-Euclidean, elliptic Geometry floating in the air, is that the knower and the known (in the Idealist sense) form the antipodes of a spherical mutuality of real communication of parts, such that the identity between each is blurred if not collapsed. And this antipodal notion actually expresses itself in an ignorance which takes the podes to be opposed because the spherical space is forgotten in an ignorance. This is to say that there are a spherical space of causes which have colluded to bring about the relations almost all of which is invisible. But not only this, the spherical space is filled with its own infinity of antipodes, and the space itself can be, and is perpetually redrawn in other spheres, all of which end upon the Immanence of Substance itself. This is to say, the Sciences are in the business of identifying antipodes (objects and knowings) and reconstructing the spheres of their collaboration, ultimately in the face of a necessary distortion (not of flatness or parallelism, but of infinities). And the monism of Substance, along with parallel postulate flattenings of our own thoughts, serve as tools for correcting the dislocations of our self-oriented and imaginary Euclideanism.

It seems to me that because the Ethics has to be read as a material thing with which our bodies are meant to interact and combine with, something upon which to grind our body lenses, so to speak, and not merely a mental, Ideational world to drift into, and because the philosopher is to conceive of his/her thoughts of the world (even the most transcendental thoughts) as thoughts of his/her body being in a certain state, forming a kind of combinative, material power, precisely the non-Euclidean dislocation of philosophical truth of Laruelle occurs buried within the implicit fractal and non-linear relations bound within the Euclidean exoteric form of Spinoza’s Euclidean presentation. In all, Spinoza’s coherence of argument is meant to provoke the intuition of connection, and thus to alert the mind to its own distortions of space, in particular how it reads its causal relationship to the world. Spinoza’s is a non-philosophy in the sense that it is meant as a philosophy meant to be left behind, once used.

While I try to shrug off all this Neo-liberalism this, and Neo-liberalism that, as other blogsters are using fancy acronyms for Neo-liberalism as if they are busy making entries in the Merck manual, this one passage of qualifications and analogies from the Neo-liberal hating Levi Bryant I find interesting (yes, he has equated Neo-liberalism with Nazism recently):

While I do not disagree with Rowan William’s thesis that the picture of the human as an intrinsically self-seeking creature constitutes a false anthropology, I have noticed that there is a tendency to treat the core of neo-liberal capitalist ideology as consisting almost entirely of this false anthropology. What is missing in this conception of neo-liberal ideology is the legal and normative framework that underlies this way of relating to the world and others. On the one hand, in order for neo-liberal capitalist ideology to get off the ground it requires what what might be called a “pure subject” or a “subject-without-qualities”, not unlike Descartes’ cogito or Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. At the heart of neo-liberal capitalist ideology (NLCI) is not so much a subject pursuing self-interest, as a legal subject functioning as the substrate of property, commercial obligations and debts, and divorced from social context and conditions of production.

One can see right away from the bolded material that analogies abound. Levi objects to an anthropological view being read as the core of Neo-liberalism, because there is a framework (legal normative) in which (?) a substrate operates (legal subject) onto which various formal economic relations adhere.  What Levi denies, in something beyond a point of emphasis, is that the “heart” or the “core” of Neo-liberalism is the self-interested subject. Instead it is a mere formalism of “subject” and its laws. To put it briefly, it’s not the self-seeking, self-interested desiring-subject, it’s the structured-subject (legally and philosophically) that is the troublesome kernel of Neo-liberalism. Let’s leave aside the kind of rhetorical slippage between philosophical “subject” and legal “subject” here, is it really correct to say that THIS is the core/heart of Neoliberalism (whatever that is)?

From my perspective the attempt to minimize the anthropological myth, the idea that human beings are essentially and naturally selfish beings, and instead draw a different heart/core made of some kind of structuralization, misses something. The entire legal and normative framework, we would say, came into existence and into justification in the very strong context of the belief that human beings are self-interested beings, essentially. The entire formalized drive towards privatization is made in response to this picture of humanity, it is naturalized within it. While I’m not sure who is saying that Neo-liberalism is nothing but this myth – David Graeber does make a vivid anthropological argument that “even” exchange is something that is done between enemies, suggesting that economic models of abstract equivalencies are necessarily mythologically self-interested ones - I am also unsure how much of the “framework” and its formalized subject could operate without it. In fact, as Spinoza knew just at the cusp of the Cartesian subject, one cannot cut off the conception of the cogito from the idea of its separate faculties of Willing and Judgment. In order undo the abstract subject, willing and freedom have to be radicalized. The desiring subject, how it desires, and what it desires for is integral to the very isolation of the said “substrate” of the subject in the first place. In fact, all of this stems to a great degree from Representational conceptions of knowledge and related questions of autonomy, freedom and desire.

I don’t really know what good finding the heart or the core of Neoliberalism does, other than create a kind of rhetorical force to steady the aim of our critique. But I do doubt that our narratives about how humans naturally (or if one is in Lacanian moods, structurally) desire are not every bit as important as the laws and norms that are created to regulate and shape those desires. I personally find the Neo-liberalism stigma mark to be something of a canard, designed by those that think “radical break”, getting “outside”, is the only way towards justice, but in any case, philosophies of “lack” (including much of what flows from Hegel, and those that hunger after essentialized “nothingness” or “absence” or “object”) have a great deal to do with foreclosing the possibilities of thinking about the “subject”, or better, the self beyond its normative product-buying, object-chasing behavior. One  also has to ask, as we pre-occupy ourselves with “objects” as essential and constitutive relations, are we not already caught up in economies (of desire, of real capital) which presuppose the “lack” which drives them, sinking deeper into our mental concrete the assumptions which secure the relations we would wish to change or improve upon.

“I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange! Incidentally, I am not at all as well as I had hoped. Exceptional weather here too! Eternal change of atmospheric conditions!—that will yet drive me out of Europe! I must have clear skies for months, else I get nowhere. Already six severe attacks of two or three days each!! — With affectionate love, Your friend”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, in a postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria, July 30, 1881

Fini definisce “stronzo” chi offende gli stranieri. La legge con Bossi deve averla firmata quello dei tortellini.

(Spinoza)

I’ve been giving some thought to the objections that have been raised by those who see anthropocentricity as an objection to creationism or even theism. The epistemological gap is fundamental and cannot be avoided. I can only see the universe through my perceptions and then rely on my perceptions of others to come to what really amounts to a perception-consensus about what truth is. Nobody in the RichardDawkins.net forum seems to account for the fact that even a unity of thought, as to what scientific observations/perception mean, does not warrant the conclusion that the issue of how the universe or Man came to be is resolved.

Name one scientific rule that is wholly infallible and which can never be changed. Does evolution theory get a special dispensation from its believers? Why not admit that evolution may very well be only a partial answer, a best answer, but certainly not the final answer? Until one ‘gets off the dime’ on the position of absolutism, there cannot be the possibility of argument. If either the the evolutionists or the creationists have the absolute final answer, there is nothing to talk about. If there are, among them, those who are willing to come off the absolutism platform, at least for purposes of argument, a discussion can be had.

As Denish D’Souza points out, for example, it may very well be that is has been accepted as a rule that light travels at 186,000 mph. However, no scientist knows whether that is true in all places in the universe or near wormholes or blackholes, assuming these exist. If there is a background noise, we don’t know what happens to light at the ‘edge of the universe.’ The law of physics as they apply to light, for example, are subject to revision. In several places in the God Delusion, and in Dawkins’ Darwin Lecture at Stanford, he does unequivocally claim that natural selection and evolution are the only plausible answer(s) for all that is — thereby allowing him to eliminate one more god from the list of others who have fallen at the hands of intellectualism and science. Nevertheless, he has not, and cannot, defeat the human conception that there is something higher than genetic destiny and that higher thing sits outside of our personal/human condition.

The response that I see to the anthropocentricity objection is essentially as follows:

I am the center of my perception as you are to yours. The further we look into the world the more we come to an understanding of the atomic universe and the principles that govern it. Incredibly, microbiology seems to be coming up with many of the same findings or observations that the astrophysicists are (i.e., as to the atomic structure of all that is and the rules that govern it).

Similarly, the further out we look into the universe, we revert to a principled view of the atomic universe. Under either analysis, we come back to the same place and remain the center of our universe. We are the center of our universe and we always come back to the same place — as we must. Can you separate yourself from your perceptions? What is it that you know about the universe that has not come through and by perception?

Just think about it — at any given time, you are at a center of Earth since it is a sphere. (unless there is a desire to get into a discussion about the earth’s magnetic fields and pole alignment). Indeed, you can begin measuring away from yourself in any direction and will reach the same infinitude in terms of space and time. Prove otherwise. Until the astrophysicists can measure from Earth to the ‘background noise’, the presumption seems to be in favor of treating the Universe as though it is infinite in any direction.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that we are so anthropocentric and limited by our human condition. My own anthropocentric perception is unique and cannot be the mere byproduct of a genetic destiny and yet be so vastly different from the perceptions of others. Again, animals seem to have a limited sense of self and the ability to change the self. Humans seem to be created by evolution, or otherwise, as something completely different as to function and purpose (or lack thereof).

We are each undeniably the center of the universe known for us. Separate yourself from your perception and you might have the opportunity to live the life of an animal. Our awareness of our own perception dictates our ability to strive for change in the self, environment, and a glimpse of something higher than ourselves. Our perception is the beginning of freewill. The question seems to be whether our ability to engage in freewill (moral behavior by ‘choice’) is the result of being created/evolved from something higher or different than the general animal kingdom. In any event, the anthropocentric position is equally applicable to evolutionists as well as the creationists. Self loathing by either side doesn’t seem to fix this fundamental problem.

Absolutism has absolutely no place in human existence where it has to be admitted that human perception, even in groups, is subject to revision.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. – Spinoza, The Ethics, closing line

Spinoza (1634–77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness. – Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy.

To the extent we believe in the most dangerous of all modern illusions, that of Progress, we may mistake the specific mode of cumulative advances in scientific knowledge, in which the superseded theories of the distant past, like phrenology and the phlogiston theory, retain only a quaint antiquarian interest reserved to scholars, for a more general mode obtaining across the disciplines of the mind generally, and adopt the belief that the only way to “keep up” with the higher cerebrations of our species is to follow slavishly the latest headlines in a given sphere. The belief that “we moderns”, standing proverbially after Newton “on the shoulders of giants”, have along our stretch of the historical escalator absorbed into our latter-day theory and practice all that was good and sound in the work of our distant forebears, de-fragmented it, added to it software upgrades of our own before releasing them to a complacent world such that all previous operating systems might be safely recycled, dies hard. We think that simply because even the humblest among us today may access tools and technologies that would set an envious King Midas in reverse moodwise, that so too, our collective conceptual apparatus, as expressed in words, must needs be of an articulacy, of an unprecedented elaboration and refinement capable of casting searching light over a range of infinitely subdividing present challenges, of a sort of which the presumably cruder and more rudimentary minds of the past, through no cognitive or character failings of their own save those arising from birth on steps lower on time’s escalator, could only dream.

Many a humanist has hoped that such fond illlusions born of “presentism” might be dispelled under direct exposure, however fleeting in or out of school, to one example or another of the great literature of the past, that in a reading of The Death of Ivan Ilyich or the Phaedo of Plato, on the death of Socrates, we might still catch sparks capable of fanning to blaze on the question of how best we might after our divers fashions live, and how best we might face death, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”, as Hamlet would have it. As we press on in our study, we find articulated at any point over the last three thousand years questions and attempted answers to problems of perspective and insight and judgment we still face every day with fresh puzzlement, set down often enough in soaring language of a sort that no school of creative writing of today could possibly teach, available everywhere in paperback and requiring as prerequisite to profit no advanced degree, or degrees of any kind. One can only speculate as to the sheer amount of enjoyment and self-improvement via the training of the mind that have been foregone in the mistaken belief that learning is only for the professionally learned.

This capacity of true literature to become “news that stays news”, as Pound had it, is true no less of the works of the great philosophers, and of none among the latter more than Benedict (né Baruch) de Spinoza (1632-1677), the Dutch rationalist and excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam, born of a lineage of Sephardic Jews driven from Spain and Portugal under the Inquisition and into Holland. Young Baruch’s mind by age 24 had proven too restless to contain itself within the bounds of Hebraic orthodoxy, and the stern anathemas of the synagogue elders were not long in coming (for just how stern, see bottom of post); from a 2006 comment of ours:

As for Hebraic orthodoxy within the C17 Netherlands proper, every philosophy major has read of how the Pharisees among Dutch Jewry Amsterdamned their fledgling philosopher-immortal-to-be as a heretic, declaring their Tabernacle a no-Spinozone layer unto eternity (…worldly redemption came soon enough, though, as the ostracized Baruch/Benedict moved downtown and formed the indie lute-distortion band Sophic Youth…)

Thanks to a growing circle of learned friends and the stipends resulting offered him, allied to an extraordinarily frugal and modest mode of life, Benedict (his chosen Latinate version of Baruch after excommunication) devoted the remaining twenty years of the forty-four that would prove his allotment to unceasing metaphysical, ethical and political speculation, supplementing his stipends through the grinding and polishing of lenses, whose dust may have hastened his death at 44 in 1677.

Wikipedia: Textbooks and encyclopedias often depict Spinoza as a solitary soul who eked out a living as a lens grinder; in reality, he had many friends but kept his needs to a minimum. One reviewer noted “No one has ever come nearer to the ideal life of the philosopher than Spinoza.” Another wrote: “As a teacher of reality, he practiced his own wisdom, and was surely one of the most exemplary human beings ever to have lived.” “In outward appearance he was unpretending, but not careless. His way of living was exceedingly modest and retired; often he did not leave his room for many days together. He was likewise almost incredibly frugal; his expenses sometimes amounted only to a few pence a day.” “He appears to have had no sexual life.”

The twin terrestrial sources from which his thought, much of it unpublished while he was alive, would blaze across the night sky like a comet, were the Jewish rabbinical tradition on the one hand, and the new mathematical philosophy whose bold figurehead was the Frenchman René Descartes, on the other. But where Descartes had sought an unassailable certainty, attained with inescapable mathematical checkmate, Spinoza sought other rewards, as a leading C19 translator has noted:

In the fragment on the Improvement of the Understanding, Spinoza sets forth the causes which prompted him to turn to philosophy. It is worthy of note that they are not speculative but practical. He did not seek, like Descartes, “to walk with certainty,” but to find a happiness beyond the reach of change for himself and his fellow-men. With a fervour that reminds one of Christian fleeing from the City of Destruction, he dilates on the vanity of men’s ordinary ambitions, riches, fame, and the pleasures of sense, and on the necessity of looking for some more worthy object for their desires. Such an object he finds in the knowledge of truth, as obtainable through clear and distinct ideas, bearing in themselves the evidence of their own veracity.

Of the several works of Spinoza, it was the Ethics that would stand for all time as his summa, the one work in which the unity of all the universe and and of his own system would be at one.

i just finished the ethics again – my second reading – a couple of months ago.  my plan is to start it again in the fall. it is incredibly fruitful. – reader Jeff S., Letter to DSL., July 26, 2005

In its special “Books of the Millennium” symposium in 1999, The Times Literary Supplement of London asked several dozen leading humanists across England, Europe and North America to nominate one work or several fitting the brief. The distinguished French novelist Michel Tournier, who had lived for several decades in a converted village presbytery and whose most famous work expounded Crusovian themes,  chose the Ethics of Spinoza:

Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) was of Jewish Portuguese origin, but was born and lived in Holland. The sum of his learning is contained in the Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata, which was published shortly after his death. Other great philosophers – Plato, Aristotle, Kant, etc – can undoubtedly stand comparison with him. But none of them incorporated his whole doctrine into a single book. This is what makes the Ethics a unique monument in the history of thought.

Other paradoxical qualities help to make this treatise an incomparable work. It is a mathematically rigorous system in which are demonstrated all the elements of humanity: God, nature, man, knowledge, ignorance, passions, misery and happiness find their place as in a gigantic, sublime machine. But the Ethics is equally rich in profoundly human thoughts and admirable wisdom: “la joie que nous eprouvons a voir souffrir notre ennemi n’est pas une joie pure, car il s’y mele toujours une secrete tristesse.”*

*The joy that we feel in seeing the suffering of our enemies is not a pure joy, for it mingles with it a secret sadness; for a graphic take on Spinoza on the suffering of one’s enemies, see action-figure at bottom of post.

The article on Spinoza in The Columbia Encyclopedia summarizes nicely the many attractions of the Ethics, suggesting to readers in an age like ours, long known for its desire to unmask the hidden logic and meaning of our thoughts and actions, and to expose the ubiquity of fundamental drives and the will to power,

The first and only foundation of virtue, or the rule of right living, is seeking one’s own true interest. - The Ethics.

the better to overcome illusion and neurosis, the perennial late-modern import for us of this towering thinker from the early-modern era of the C17:

Spinoza’s ethics proceed from a premise similar to that of Hobbes-that men call “good” whatever gives them pleasure-but they reach very different conclusions. Human beings, indeed all of Nature, share a common drive for self-preservation, the conatus sese conservandi. By this drive all individuals seek to maintain the power of their being, and in this sense virtue and power are one. But in Spinoza’s system power is discovered to be a knowledge of necessity. Powerful, or virtuous, persons act because they understand why they must; others act because they cannot help themselves.

To be free is to be guided by the law of one’s own nature (which in Spinoza’s rational universe is never at variance with the law of another nature); bondage consists in being moved by causes of which we are unaware because our ideas are confused. Another important feature of Spinoza’s ethical system is his view of the intellect as active. He rejects the distinction between reason and will that assumes that ideas can be passively entertained. All thinking is action, and all action has its accompaniment in thought. What accounts for action is not an agency (the will) beyond the intellect, but ideas. Ideas are active and move us to act; an absence of action may be accounted an absence of insight: knowledge, virtue, and power are one.

As those two powerful paragraphs alone suggest, it is small wonder that Spinoza would, if not in his own lifetime – he declined to publish much under his own name, and friends published more after his death – soon enough in the fullness of  historical time, come to captivate a dazzling galaxy of not just other philosophers, but poets, dramatists, playwrights, artists, scientists, critics and psychologists, most notably in the early instance among leading writers both German (Goethe, Schelling, and the lion’s share of other rising idealists and Romantics), and English (Coleridge, Shelley, and George Eliot, who translated the Ethics). Small wonder as well that in our own day, a distinguished neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, seeking to overcome the Cartesian mind-body dualism that has plagued us these last four hundred years, devoted a 2003 book (Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain) to the fruitful implications to be harvested in re-examining, in pursuit of deeper truths in our own day about the connections between the body and the mind, – two attributes of one substance, as the master would say – that noblest of modern philosophers whose works will, as they have earlier readers these last three hundred years, outlive us all.

Ian Vandewalker on the action figure:

Baruch Spinoza
1632-1677
Nationality: Jewish/Portugese/Dutch

Group Alliances:
“Contumelious” Continental Rationalists
“Destructive” Determinists
“Pernicious” Pantheists

AKA: Spinoza the Bulldoza
Spinoza Spins Over Ya
Throws Ya Spinoza
Benedictus de Spinoza

Powers: knowledge of the infinite intellect of God, invisibility

Weaknesses: geometric method, excommunication

From The Super Spinoza Haters’ Page, the text of the 1656 excommunication of Spinoza:

“Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lieth down, and cursed be he when he riseth up; cursed be he when he goeth out and cursed be he when he cometh in; the Lord will not pardon him; the wrath and fury of the Lord will be kindled against this man, and bring down upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law; and the Lord will destroy his name from under the heavens; and, to his undoing, the Lord will cut him off from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of the Law; but ye that cleave unto the Lord God live all of you this day! We ordain that no one may communicate with him verbally or in writing, nor show him any favor, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor be within four cubits of him, nor read anything composed or written by him.” -Spinoza’s excommunication

PLG’s comment: this excommunication is hardcore! I think the “cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night” covers the bases–he’s damned all the time. But these guys don’t seem content to stop there–they include some mundane activities, as well. I’m not sure why they’d have to list going out and coming back as extra-special occasions on which Spinoza should be damned. Why not list getting a haircut, eating pancakes, or break dancing? Also, what happens “if the Lord will destroy his name from under the heavens”? Then whom do we know the excommuncation concerns? “Damned be that one guy whose name we cannot speak.” “Which guy?” “Spin… arrrrgghhhh!”

sem tempo para blogs.

minhas senhas foram hackeadas no inicio deste ano: minha vida re-trackeada.

fazer o que!?… se assim eles querem: tornar-me publica entre eles. eles: os vigilantes da “vida dos outros”.

…

dei-lhe a chance de escolher o melhor para si. ela escolheu.

este velho blog jah dizia: surveillanceme. faz parte de nossa sociedade disciplinar.

meu corpo foi esquadrinhado, desarticulado e serah recomposto para continuar a servi-los, para melhor servir.

assim, quem disse q me tornarei docil?… tentei lhe dizer, menina: adentrei aa academia para ser disciplinada [continuar a ser disciplinada], no te acordas?!… nos disseram: “um diamante bruto a ser lapidado”… e mesmo assim: tornar-me-ei docil?!…

…

sei o q virah em dez anos [ou menos]. vcs tentam fazer memoria, ego-memoria. gostam de julgar os outros, invejar-nos, mas se esquecem de que nós os pagamos. É o trabalho de nosso povo neste brasil que sustenta a sua rebeldia e seu sonho de revolução!… queria poder te sustentar sim, pq queria acreditar q vcs farão um mundo melhor. mas nestes poucos ultimos anos, vcs tem mostrado cada vez mais um ego-inflado, uma luta por existir midiaticamente, uma guerra de vaidades! Todos querem ser artistas! aurea! ouro.

querida, sabemos quem somos.

As escolhas foram feitas. A guerra jah estah iniciada. Iniciam-se as mortes, as quedas, os desaparecimentos e as desmemorias.

C’est la vie…

Plato’s Prisons of Techne

I repost here the quote from the Republic that in usual Platonic, imagistic language is full of potential truths. Here we find Socrates discrediting primarily the sophists, but really by virtue of a whole class of technically skilled [techne] workers, those whose power and knowledge consists in their experiences, and standing, as workers. In condensed fashion he runs the gambit from prisoners to technicians to mere machine workers. All of these he tells us, wish to gravitate, actually more, leap or fly to the prestige of philosophy:

Just as men out of prisons into holy sanctuaries are fleeing, so these joyous men out from technical arts are leaping into Philosophy, as if those being most intricate would hit upon the little art of themselves. For in comparison with the other arts the honor of philosophy even though abandoned is more magnificent. This is the flight of the many unaccomplished by nature, who from the technical arts and even workmanship, their bodies have been mutilated and their souls envined and even crushed through the mechanical arts.

Plato, Republic [495d]

Leaving the question of the sophists aside and picking up the word-image, we really have something here. There is the interminable sense that our experiences as workers confined to the techniques of our knowing and doing, caught within the demands of an economic and thereby psychic necessity, contort us, alter us. And Plato’s image is quite strong as he evokes the worker or technician (and some editors have thought that he had the military arts in mind, but the image carries through) whose body is maimed by the arts he practices. We see vividly the industry worker, or other friends of the ”machine” who has lost fingers or received other bodily harm, even desk workers whose time in the chair have changed their posture. All of these graftings of a machinic upon the human body are rolled up into the image of the prisoner at the beginning of the passage, the one who is confined, shackled by circumstances of every degree. And all of these make for Socrates those who are unqualified to the seat of Philosopher. This is because, as the body is the image of the soul, it is not only bodies that have been exacted upon, it is souls, and here in the end forming a bookend to the prisoner the image is striking. The mechanical arts (by which we are to see mean arts, perhaps those of low craftsmen, even with the association of the weaver who is feminine), actually “envine”, they envelope and slowly twist and choke the soul, even eventually crush or pulverize it. What comes to mind for me is of a gear-working, a rack that out of its unnatural nature incrementally destroys the cognitive powers of the soul. Here “work” in every mechanical gradient becomes the equivalent of torture.

At a certain level we have condensed here all of the reasons why the economic freedoms of others become a high priority for us. For it is not just in political restriction that the voice and soul becomes contorted, but also that the very lived mechanical – and we read mechanical even in the most abstract sense of purposed and productive repetitions - states of workers are binding and cognitively contorting devices. At least that is the rhetorical picture. Aside from Plato’s political aim, the freeing of cognitions from devices remains a kind of halo of a hope, an attractor.

Scholastic Silence: How to Comtemplate

But in this ethical picture stands its opposite, the idea that the Philosopher is he who is not contorted, maimed or crushed. The one whose body and soul stands relatively whole, unpressured, the one who can see clearly, from a distance. It is there that Bourdieu’s critique of the “scholastic point of view” which I brought up in my last post, occurs. The production of the quietude of the Philosopher, the near monastic, let us say scholastic isolation from the contortions of mechanical art pressures, is, Bourdieu wants us to know, artificial. The cocoon and buffer that creates the gap between a world of devices and techniques exacted, and the imagined realm of reasons, has to be built. It has been constructed through labors which themselves are structured. And then it too is structured by internal devices and arts. What Bourdieu wants us to know is that when the philosopher adopts the scholastic point of view, he/she is likely carrying with him/her the vast train of social constructions (literal constructions) which enable that monastic cell of contemplation, and there is both a social and epistemic responsibility towards the excavation of those inherited and largely unconscious relations (an excavation that in some sense is retarded by flat ontologies who know only their surface).

The One Machinist of the 17th Century

In a way it is the Philosopher who knows least the mutilations of his/her body, the envinings of his/her soul, the pulverizations, due to the very quietude of contemplation. And to this great dis-orientation of thinking towards the mere mechanical, my mind turns towards the rise of the philosophy of the mechanical, the Dutch flowering of Cartesian mechanism. It seems here that most, if there was to be a philosophy that embraced the mechanical nature of thinking it would be found here. I wrote some time ago about the “hand of de Beaune” a brilliant mathematician who was working hard in the service of Descartes on the production of a fantastic automated lens-grinding machine :Descartes and Spinoza: Craft and Reason and The Hand of De Beaune. With somewhat of a coincidence de Beaune’s hand was severely cut just as Plato’s technician’s body was maimed. Descartes’ dream though was of producing machines which no hand would touch, pure, abstract machines, concretized maths, in a sense, those which would free the otherwise fettered human mind. Plato’s dichotomy duplicates itself, the machine as enemy to the mind because of the body, as well as its instrumental aid. As I have pointed out in my investigation of Spinoza’s lens-grinding, Spinoza was the only “worker” of the period, and in fact the only craftsman per se. While lens-grinding and machine fascination was an elite hobby among the new scientist riche, Spinoza was actually a worker, and engaged his lens lathe daily as a matter of his economic sustainance. Deep in this machinic age, only Spinoza new the machine in a fashion Plato’s Socrates could not. He knew it with his hands.

In an interesting fashion, Spinoza’s “scholastic point of view” embodies a unique self-reflective awareness that is encapsulated in his worker, machine status, as well as one might admit, his standing as an ostricized Jew. He occupied a position at the border, a stand-point, that made of his quietude a different sort of awareness. Born of the age of the machine, Spinoza understood the human being too as a device, a complex series of ordinations, to which other complex serieses of ordinations are connected, a “spiritual automaton” he called the human being. In this awareness the “worker” takes on a different place: Not that of “prisoner” to stand in dialectical opposition to the unmutilated man, but of machinic degree. Our work becomes an expression of machines, machines of which we never extricate ourselves. It is only that we need to choose our machines (those of which we are made) more carefully, with an eye to liberation. The gaze of leisure is to be questioned.

Blogged Quietism

In this view blogging of course becomes a significant phenomena. Some philosophical bloggers write out of a self-created cocoon to escape the twisting techne of university or college, forming however brief a contemplation of respite, engaging the machinic of the internet. Some blog in order to be able to speculate, to freely exhibit what they might be able to think, if they were allowed to. Yet, as we produce our ideas and disseminate them, to the degree that we do not embrace the machinic, we are fraught with generating the modes that have produced our monk-cell, unconsciously, not recognizing the shapes of our bodies and souls.

Atop this image of the mechanical arts that contort there is the artist, we might say, is also the self-artist. The one that grasps the inherent machinic character of the human, and purposely undergoes specific machinic contortions upon both body and soul, not to perfect, but to express (and to some degree soterologically free themself and others from) the specific techne of the world, as it stands. To take on the machine, in the way that a poet takes on a complex meter.

Philipp Mainländer

La filosofía de la redención.

Por la influencia que iba a tener sobre Nietzsche, merece ser presentado especialmente Mainländer, cuyo verdadero nombre era Philipp Batz. Inclinado a la especulación y la poesía, fue un lector apasionado de Schopenhauer y después de Leopardi, a los que descubrió en los casi seis años transcurridos en Nápoles, entre 1858 y 1863. Su obra capital, La filosofía de la redención, tras cierta resonancia inicial fuera rápidamente olvidada, para ser redescubierta sólo recientemente.

Tomando como modelo El mundo como voluntad y representación, la obra desarrolla un sistema de pensamiento en seis partes: “Analítica de la facultad cognoscitiva”, “Física”, “Estética”, “Ética”, “Política”, “Metafísica”, a las que se añade un apéndice sobre la “Crítica de la doctrina de Kant y Schopenhauer”. El todo está fundado sobre una ontología negativa, que parte del principio según el cual “el no ser es preferible al ser”. En la explicación de la facultad de conocer Mainländer se atiene a la gnoseología poskantiana de Schopenhauer, y está, como éste, convencido de que no conocemos la cosa en sí sino sólo apariencias. Sin embargo, Mainländer extrae la consecuencia opuesta a la de Schopenhauer: la “cosa en sí” no es identificada con la “voluntad de vida” schopenhaueriana, la cual es universal, supraindividual y está más allá de tiempo y espacio, sino, más bien, con la “voluntad de muerte”, Para Mainländer, esta última es individual y está en la base de todos los seres. EN el vivir de éstos está ínsito, paradójicamente, un impulso de muerte. Pero ¿de dónde brota tal ímpetu disgregador? Mainländer avanza una osada hipótesis teológico-metafísica: la voluntad de muerte que es inherente a todo el ser depende del hecho de que la sustancia divida – concepto que retoma de Spinoza – transita desde su originaria unidad trascendente a la pluralidad inmanente del mundo, el cual, en dicha transición, recibe su propia génesis. Mainländer declara: “Dios ha muerto y su muerte fue la vida del mundo” (Mainländer, 1996-1999_ I,  108), acuñando así por primera vez una expresión que Nietzsche volverá famosa. Quien mató a Dios no fue, sin embargo, el hombre, no hemos sido nosotros, como afirma Nietzsche, sino que, más bien, es Dios mismo quien se da muerte, siguiendo el impulso, que le es connatural, de pasar del ser a la nada.

En realidad, aceptando la prohibición kantiana según la cual nuestra conciencia no puede impulsarse más allá de los límites de la experiencia, Mainländer intenta ser fiel a la inmanencia, y niega, por tanto, que se pueda conocer la naturaleza del principio divino trascendente. Profesa, pues, un “ateísmo científico”, según el cual la esencia del principio divino es consititutivamente incognoscible. Con todo, sostiene que, desde un punto de vista “regulativo”, podemos pensar el origen del mundo “como si fuera el resultado de un acto de voluntad motivado” .(Mainländer, 1996-1999_ I, 322). Se trata del resultado, por así decir, de una acción de la trascendencia – que, por lo demás, nos permanece desconocida e incognoscible-, más precisamente del acto mediante el cual la trascendencia, es decir el “súper-ser” que está más allá del ser y precede al mundo se disuelve en la inmanencia del mundo, esto es, en el no-ser: la génesis del mundo tiene origen en la voluntad de Dios de pasar del súper-ser a la nada, es la “autocadaverización de Dios”. Todo lo que vemos en el mundo es la manifestación de tal voluntad de autoanulación.

Mainländer transforma y radicaliza, pues, el pensamiento schopenhaueriano, en la forma de una verdadera y propia “metafísica de la entropía”, de la cual deriva con sistematicidad todo su pensamiento: su filosofía de la naturaleza, su filosofía de la historia sometida a la ley universal del dolor, su política y su ética eudaimonística, que sostiene la máxima de la virginidad y recomienda el suicidio como negación radical de la voluntad. En esta elección radical Mainländer ve la posibilidad de una “redención de la existencia”, la desengañada esperanza de poder al final “mirar en los ojos de la Nada absoluta” (Mainländer, 1996-1999_ I,  358)

Con rigurosa coherencia sin esperar al capricho de la Madre Natura, se apresuró por sí mismo a extinguir tal esperanza. Recibida la primera copia, recién impresa, de su obra, en la noche del 31 de marzo al 1 de abril de 1876, el filósofo, de treinta y cuatro años, no deja escapar el momento de hacer coincidir de modo definitivo su vida con su pensamiento, mostrando con el ejemplo que de las cosas importantes no sólo se debe dar demostración sino también testimonio: se anudó una soga al cuello, y se colgó.

[extraido de:  VOLPI, Franco - El nihilismo]

In fact, in respect to all this situation, Bourdieu even take into account Spinoza`s Politico-Theological Treatise to recommend it to the philosophical hermeneutists adepts as a program that founds (I`m translating here) a truthful science of the cultural oevres, a program that promotes the rupture of the ritual embalmment that endorses any textual canonization, in order to put such oevres into an historical investigation, that shall determine (paraphrasing Bourdieu quote on Spinoza): “not only the life and the habits of the author that wrote it, in which epoch, and for who and with which language such oevre was written, but also to determine in which hands such oevre fell into, who decide admitted it as canonic, etc…”

This all can be read in Bourdieu`s most sober philosophical book, his Pascalien Meditations, specially a chapter entitled “The critique of the scholastic reason”, where he states his famous “radical doubt radicalized” procedure. Something to enjoy http://is.gd/503at

Comentado por Naxos en:

The Play of Fascist Objects: Object-Orientation and Latour

On November 20, 2009 at 7:15 pm

Hi Kevin: Great. I just want to say that I am kind of intrigued regarding to the critic that you imply here against the ‘flat ontology’ and that the object-oriented defenders (mostly speaking about Levi) are phantomizing to justify their supposed democratic foundment of objects. It comes to my mind how interesting it would be to remark how this specific ‘flatness’ is depotencialized as it does not take into account the parallel that Spinoza traces to demonstrate how that passions-of-the-body are the same than the passions of-the-soul (an operation that makes possible an immanent conceptualization of potentia and that Deleuze explains in the chapter 2 of his Spinoza and expressionism). I mean, Levi keeps on saying that his ontology is a flat one while he cuts the aspects that are related to potency. I just think that maybe this is something that you would also want to retrieve to Spinoza. Thanks

Comentado por Naxos en:

Fascist Bindings In Latour: The Blinding Glory of Non-Human Agency

On November 20, 2009 at 8:36 am

––

I’m still reading and digesting the essay, but Steve Fuller’s critical treatment of Latour, with its deep investigation into the economic and political matrix out of which it came is extremely interesting reading, in particular for those that imagine that there is something inherently liberating by either Flat Ontologies, or the raising of objects to the level of actor.  I want to reproduce here two pages of thought provoking text wherein Latour and ANT is taken to task for its Capitalist and Fascist potentiality, as well as an implicit Neoliberal stake (which Fuller examines elsewhere). For an panpsychist like me, an advocate for Animal Agency-Right recognitions, and a thorough-going Cybernetic conception of mankind and human beings, this presents a serious challenge on the ethical/political axis. If it is to be resolved, for a Spinozist, it is within the one thing that separates out Spinoza, strongly, from Latour, the power of rational explanation of cause, and the directional degree of liberation entailed in forming networks in the first place. The one thing that unbinds any imposed corporeal union of technology and humanity, is the dutiful liberation of all elements beyond their single axis of connection or network. Otherwise Fascism haunts.

It is worth considering that Fuller brings up some of the recent commentary fears that have attended criticism of various blogged appropriations of Latour which stake their soul upon not being Neoliberal, and certainly not Fascist. Some have feared that displacing the importance of the human is a demotion of human, in particular of political concerns. Fuller raises this problem of increase agency under the auspices of liberation with some worthy argument. I have an answer for this from a Spinozist, non-Flat perspective, but I’m unsure if the new metaphysicians of Latour do.

I hope to formulate a more comprehensive post of Fuller’s point, and the Spinozist answer, in particualr of the terms where Latour and Spinoza agree. I duplicate the prose here because the pages are relatively succinct and convincing in their argument, and form a kind of brief, elegant picture of what is wrong with Flat Ontology, in particular from a political and ethical perspective.

This last point is worth stressing because actor-network theory is full of emancipatory-sounding talk that claims to reveal the “missing masses” needed for any large-scale sociotechnical achievement. However, the masses are presented as if they were literally physical masses whose movement is necessary to give an elite forward momentum. The agency of these masses is thus limited to the extension or withdrawal of collaboration, not the initiation of action. The current fashion for distributing agency across both people and things merely underscores the value of the masses as means to the ends of other parties, since in many cases nonhumans turn out to be at least as helpful as humans in achieving those ends. (The locus classicus is Callon 1986; for subsequent applications, see Ashmore and Harding 1994.) Although actor-network enthusiasts often make much of the innovative political vision implied in this extension of agency from persons to things, some disturbingly obvious precedents for this practice seem to have been suppressed from STS’s collective memory, the first from capitalism and the second from totalitarianism. The first precedent concerns actor-network theory’s affinity with the metaphysics of capitalism, which, through the process of commodification, enables the exchange of human and machine labor on the basis of such systemic values as productivity and efficiency. This is the sense in which technology is normally regarded as a “factor of production,” that is, a potentially efficient replacement of people. Indeed, the metaphysically distinctive tenet of socialism in modern political economy has been its revival of the medieval doctrine that human beings are the ultimate source of value in the world. But like capitalist cost accounting, actor-network theory knows no ontological difference between humans and machines. Consequently, the subtext of the title of Latour (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, might have read “We Have Never Been Socialist” to capture the increasingly neoliberal climate of French science policy that makes ontological leveling seem so attractive. This point is lightly veiled in Latour’s refashioning of the word “delegation” to capture the process whereby humans and nonhumans exchange properties, which legitimates the treatment of humans as cogs in the wheels of a machine, and machines as natural producers of value.

Here we might compare the Parisian treatment with the most developed set of arguments for extending agency to nonhumans. These fall under the rubric of “Animal Liberation,” as popularized by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer (1975). In this guise, the politics of agency veers toward restraint and caution rather than mobilization and facilitation. An important difference between Singer and Latour is that the Animal Liberation movement has gravitated toward a conception of “animal rights” modeled on the civil rights accorded to humans. Significantly, a sentient creature, usually a mammal, is the paradigm case of a “nonhuman.” In contrast, the various Parisian exemplars of a “nonhuman” have typically resided much lower on the evolutionary scale: scallops, microbes, and even mechanical door closers all serving as examples at various points (Callon 1986; Latour 1988, 1995). The overall effect is that in its proliferation of agency, actor-network theory dehumanizes humans, while Animal Liberation humanizes animals.

When Hegel, following Spinoza, said that freedom fully realized is the recognition of necessity, he had in mind an idea that can easily be lost in the liberatory rhetoric associated with the extension of agency to nonhumans, namely, that to increase the number of agents is not to increase the amount of agency in the world. On the contrary, it is to limit or redefine the agency of the already existing agents.A’s full recognition of B’s agency requires that A either make room for B as a separate agent or merge with B into a new corporate agent. In both cases, A is forced to alter its own identity. In the former case, the change may be rationalized as A’s coming to lead a simpler life, whereas in the latter, it may be rationalized as A’s now having access to more power than before. The former corresponds to Animal Liberation, the latter to actor-network theory: the former retains the human as unique agent (at least at the species level) but at the cost of diminished wants and power, whereas the latter magnifies the wants and power of the human but at the cost of rendering each individual a (potentially replaceable) part of the larger corporate machinery. (For an earlier treatment that mistakenly assimilated actor-network theory to the Animal Liberationist perspective, see Fuller 1996.) Animal Liberation’s excesses are regularly documented in the forced entries into university laboratories to “free” animals that have been caged for experimental purposes. Yet, there is an even less savory precedent for the extremes to which an actor-network perspective can be taken, namely, the twentieth century’s unique contribution to political theory and practice: totalitarianism. Contrary to Latour’s oft-repeated claim that politics has never taken technology seriously, totalitarian regimes stand out from traditional forms of authoritarianism precisely by the role assigned to technology as the medium through which citizens are turned into docile subjects, specifically, parts of a corporate whole.

While attention has usually focused on totalitarian investments in military technology, of more lasting import have been totalitarian initiatives in the more day-to-day technologies associated with communication, transportation, and building construction. The early stages of these developments already informed science policy debate in continental Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century (Fuller 2000, chap. 2, sec. 3). Ultimately, these technologies enabled unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and mobilization, all in the name of configuring the national superagent. In the course of this configuration, any sharp division between humans and nonhumans was removed. An important consequence was that a subset of the human population— say, the Jewish race or Communist ideologues—could be excluded from the corporate whole as such great security risks that the rest of the human population would agree to submit themselves to sophisticated invasive technologies in order to become part of, say, the “Nazi cyborg.”

This last point was first made by Carl Schmitt, the Weimar jurist who provided the original legal justification for the one-party state that became Nazi Germany. Schmitt ([1932] 1996) held that technology was the latest and most durable corporate glue because its apparently neutral character seemed to impact everyone equally, thereby enabling conflict to metamorphose from the elite cross-border confrontations of the past to “total war” involving a nation’s entire population. Schmitt envisaged that the threat of an external foe more powerful than any internal foe would lead citizens to submit to the application of mass technologies for purposes of defeating that foe, however much their own personal freedoms may be constrained. Actor-network theory can be understood as the account of society that results once there is no longer a hegemonic state apparatus in charge of this technostructure: a devolved totalitarian regime; in a phrase, flexible fascism. Instead of a unitary state that renders everyone a means to its specific ends, now everyone tries to render everyone else a means to their own ends. The former members of the corporatist state may have lost their sense of common purpose, but they retain the personal ethic which attended that purpose. The difference in actual outcomes is much less predictable than under a totalitarian regime, but ultimately explainable in terms of the agents’ differential access to the resources needed to attain their ends. Thus, the necessitarian myths that originally propped up Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin have now yielded to contingent narratives centered on Pasteur (by Latour), Edison (by Hughes), and Seymour Cray (the inventor of the mainframe computer, by MacKenzie).

Indeed, one of the eerier similarities between the predilections of totalitarian and actor-network theorists is the glorification of the heroic practitioner—be it the power politician or the heterogeneous engineer—whose force of will overcomes the self-imposed limitations of superstitious citizens and academics in the grip of a theory. Thus, comparable to Pareto’s disdain for the planning pretensions of social democrats is Callon’s (1987, esp. 98ff.) contempt for the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine, who define in mere words the contemporary state of French society, something engineers supposedly do much more effectively in their daily practice.

One of the most remarked upon features of fascist ideology is its easy combination of an animistic view of nature, a hyperbolic vision of the power of technology, and diminished sense of individual human agency. The same could be said of the “delegations” and “translations” that characterize the accounts of sociotechnical systems provided by actor-network theory. Interestingly, in his brief discussion of totalitarianism, Latour (1993, 125-27) comes closest to endorsing the Pirandellist “it is so, if you think so” form of relativism of which his critics have often accused him. Specifically, he explains the formidability of totalitarian regimes in terms of a widespread belief in their underlying philosophies, rather than, say, the collective impact of the actions taken under their name. Latour officially wants to ensure that people are not inhibited by philosophies that stray too far from the scene of action, but his argument also implies that one ought not be inhibited from forming alliances with people to whom such philosophical labels as “totalitarian,” “capitalist,” and “imperialist” are conventionally attached. In this way, Latour allows nominalism all too easily to slide into opportunism (22-24)

“Why Science Studies Has Never Been Critical of Science Some Recent Lessons on How to Be a Helpful Nuisance and a Harmless Radical”, Steve Fuller

Thank you for the essay Adriano.

Recently I read in connection to Latour that there has been a pulverization of the material, somehow, and that this somehow points us towards a world of objects. It calls to mind for me that for Spinoza the world itself too is pulverized, or must be pulverized unto a microstate, so as to become fully active (that leap, that direction). Individual things must be grasped, not abstractions, or generalizations, not the ens rationalis. That is, there is a kind of degree-zero intensification of a thing into its raw, state of potentiated energy (Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs perhaps). It also reminds me of the very poetic rendition of the birth of sandman in Spiderman 3, wherein he gets pulverized, one of the most moving scenes of animation ever assembled. Pulverization occurs in a field, we are reminded. Nostalgia and wound last across persons, and objects are summoned into orbs of direction not always benign. It is not the pulverization of matter, but the context into which it is done, the motivations and inflammation that occur around such acts. I’m reading an essay as well that suggests that Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern should be read as We Have Never Been Socialist. Interesting. We turn things into “objects” so that forces can act upon and through them. We make ourselves into objects for the same. We  give them to the field. Think of what has been made. Think of the field.

The poetry starts at the 2:26 mark.

di Simona Maggiorelli

In the mood for love di Wong Kar Wai

L’ Atlante delle emozioni,  con cui Giuliana Bruno ha vinto nel 2004 il premio internazionale Kraszna-Krausz come migliore libro sulle immagini in movimento, è davvero uno dei saggi più sorprendenti degli ultimi anni per chi si occupa di arte contemporanea e di estetica. Non solo per l’affascinante cartografia di percorsi e di nessi che tesse viaggiando fra architettura, arti visive e cinema. Ma anche per il linguaggio con cui  queste cinquecento pagine sono scritte.  Fondendo discorso accademico e racconto, teoresi e linguaggio rapsodico, «con il piacere – annota l’autrice stessa – di selezionare e organizzare il discorso in forma di travelogue visivo».
Laureata all’Orientale di Napoli e dal 1990 professore di Visual and enviromental studies a Harvard con il suo monumentale Atlante delle emozioni e con libri come Pubbliche intimità, anch’esso uscito in Italia per Bruno Mondadori, Giuliana Bruno ha “imposto” una voce radicalmente diversa nel rigido panorama internazionale della critica dominato da scelte razionaliste, gelidamente concettuali, astratte.

Ci è riuscita “partendo da sé,” dal proprio sentire, rifiutando uno sguardo oggettivante e recuperando alla scrittura immagini e affetti. «E’ vero – ammette la studiosa che in questi giorni è a Roma per la due giorni di studi che ha inaugurato il MAXXI  ( e che ha visto la presenza di Aaron Betsky- e della stessa Hadid) ho cercato un modo di guardare differente, uno sguardo nuovo, per così dire “tattile”. La maniera classica di guardare ci ha insegnato una fredda distanza fra noi e le persone che guardiamo.

A me sembra, invece, che ci sia un modo un po’ più carezzevole di avvicinarsi e di essere toccati dalle immagini. In modo che l’occhio non sia di un voyeur ma di un voyager, per me declinato al femminile, come voyageuse. Insomma mi interessava una modalità più fluida di entrare e di guardare attraverso le cose e di rapportarsi agli ambienti che attraversiamo, a quei luoghi che raccolgono le nostre emozioni, le nostre memorie. Niente è neutro, tanto meno gli spazi della rappresentazione.
Possiamo leggerlo come un recupero delle emozioni ostracizzate dai filosofi?
Le emozioni non hanno nulla a che fare con il sentimentalismo. Sono una forma di conoscenza. E l’immagine ha un contenuto, un sostrato. Al di là di quello che mostra di per sé. Le immagini emotive si muovono nel tempo e non solo nello spazio.
Mentre lei scriveva il suo Atlante delle emozioni, il filosofo Remo Bodei sceglieva per il proprio lavoro  un titolo spinoziano come Geometria delle passioni, due diverse modalità?
Ho incontrato più volte Remo Bodei, è una persona straordinaria, sensibile. Però sul piano intellettuale, innegabilmente, esprime una forma di geometria, mentre, per dirla con Deleuze, il mio pensiero ha molte pieghe.
A proposito di cultura francese, lei prende le distanze dal discorso che Julia Kristeva ha fatto sull’«apparato cinematico». Perché?
Semiologia e  psicoanalisi si sono occupate dello sguardo filmico e lo hanno trattato non solo come testo ma come apparato di una forma di visione. Ho letto molto ma mi sembrava che mancasse qualcosa di fondamentale in quegli scritti. Ovvero che il modello applicato a questo apparato filmico fosse una sorta di trappola lacaniana da cui non si riusciva a uscire. La soggettività veniva rinchiusa in una forma di rappresentazione duplice e spaccata di fronte allo specchio. A mio modo di vedere lo schermo cinematografico è più di uno specchio o di una finestra.  E non mi corrispondeva lo sguardo trascendentale e incorporeo,  questo io-ego come grande occhio, che emergeva da questa lettura lacaniana del cinema che è stata a lungo dominante nella cultura francese.
Così si è rivolta al filosofo Hugo Münsterberg, collaboratore di William James. Un curioso personaggio che riconosceva forza psichica alla rappresentazione cinematografica. Come l’ha scoperto?
Mentre cercavo di mettere a punto un mio diverso approccio al cinema scrivendo l’Atlante delle emozioni mi sono ricordata di avere un libriccino di questo filosofo ebreo tedesco che avevo letto molti anni prima. Münsterberg faceva ricerca agli inizi del XX secolo, in un periodo molto fertile, quando nasceva la psicologia sperimentale. E aveva dato vita a suo laboratorio filosofico sulle immagini.  Nel 1916, dunque molto presto, Münsterberg scoprì il cinema e scrisse  un libro assai interessante. All’epoca nessun filosofo si occupava  di cinema. Né tanto meno si pensava che fosse un’arte. Avendo lavorato molto sulla psiche, invece, Münsterberg riconosceva al cinema non solo la possibilità di rappresentare delle cose ma anche di rappresentare come pensiamo. Parlare di forza psichica del cinema per lui significava riconoscerne la forza emotiva, ma anche cognitiva. Naturalmente lui non andava oltre. Si trattava, invece, di leggere le forme di immaginazione e di rappresentazione cinematografica. Ma il suo pensiero mi è parso comunque importante. Tanto da dedicargli una monografia che sta per uscire negli Usa.
«L’indubbio progenitore del cinema è l’architettura», scriveva Ejzenštejn. è stato per lei una fonte?
Sono tornata a Ejzenštejn proprio per il rapporto che vedeva fra montaggio e architettura. Di  lui, ovviamente, si è scritto molto, ma  un suo saggio degli anni Trenta mi ha spinta a continuare una ricerca trasversale  che associa il cinema alla produzione di spazio in tutti i sensi, non solo  fisico. Come l’architettura anche il cinema è una maniera di “spaziare” in molti sensi. Il primo film, diceva Ejzenštejn,  è l’Acropoli di Atene. Non la caverna di Platone. Proponendo così un modello metaforico molto diverso. Il  cinema  richiama l’attraversamento di luoghi  in una città con una serie di visioni, di immagini in movimento. Lo spettatore non è più intrappolato nella caverna platonica. Ma l’accostamento fra l’architettura e il cinema funziona anche se si pensa al  solo fatto che l’architettura non si contempla. Si recepisce con il corpo, con la sensazioni.
Nel suo lavoro il cinema di Antonioni occupa un posto importante. Come regista capace di creare «uno spazio mentale» e di raccontare per immagini il mondo interiore dei  personaggi. Ci sono registi oggi ai quali riconosce una ricerca analoga?
Sì amo molto Antonioni, con il suo modo di filmare quasi minimalista riesce a tracciare personaggi a tutto tondo, non meri caratteri. Antonioni non parlava del personaggio attraverso l’azione, ma con l’introspezione che traspare dalle sue inquadrature. Talvolta anche di bellissime architetture vuote. Basta questo per restituirci il mondo interiore di un personaggio, il modo in cui sente e vive. Una cosa che ritrovo per esempio in Wong Kar Wai, regista di In the mood for love. Anche se  con un’estetica diversa, ritrovo nel suo cinema un certo modo di guardare il rapporto fra uomo e donna, lo spazio psichico, lo spazio della memoria, lo spazio dell’immaginazione, il tempo. Si ha la sensazione che questo spazio contenga una durata che non riguarda la  “velocità”. Questo sguardo differente torna anche in molte installazioni di arte. Lo trovo non di rado espresso nelle immagini in movimento che oggi si vedono nelle gallerie d’arte.
La videoarte, integrando più linguaggi d’arte, apre nuove possibilità espressive?
In Pubbliche intimità ho insistito molto su questo cambiamento che a me pare molto interessante. Non è la morte del cinema ma un’estensione dello sguardo filmico che entra nelle gallerie e nei musei proponendo un modo diverso di relazionarsi con le immagini. Non è più la contemplazione della pittura come immagine fissa, ma comprende il movimento dell’immagine, il movimento dello spettatore e il movimento di un tempo che direi interiore. Nella concitazione della vita metropolitana alcune opere di videoarte e installazioni offrono un modo di riappropriarsi del tempo,  dell’interiorità.  In un certo senso queste nuove forme di arte ci invitano a guardare le immagini guardandoci dentro e a guardarsi dentro per vedere meglio fuori e, spero, per cambiare.
Nel tempo breve, ellittico, di un’opera di videoarte le immagini talora ,possono arrivare ad avere un “calore” speciale, una deformazione quasi onirica, poetica.
E’ una dimensione che riguarda il “tenore” delle immagini ma non solo. Penso, per esempio, a certe opere sonore di Janet Cardiff: seguendo la sua voce si entra in uno spazio. Altre volte c’è una piccola videocamera che ti permette di percepire la forma di relazione che l’artista ha con il mondo. è come se ti facesse entrare nella sua mente, nella sua maniera di sentire. In una sua installazione realizzata dopo l’11 settembre, ricordo, aveva collocato delle casse in un luogo molto grande. Gli spettatori potevano muoversi e ascoltare dagli amplificatori oppure mettersi dove  volevano. L’atmosfera che si veniva a creare era molto particolare, intensa, partecipata. Ognuno in silenzio seguiva il filo delle proprie immagini interiori, ma al tempo stesso era vicino agli altri. In un momento molto duro per New York, in un museo, stranamente si aveva la sensazione di poter attraversare questo trauma in maniera anche pubblica, sociale. è un aspetto del cinema che mi ha sempre molto affascinato e che qui trovavo allo zenit. L’installazione di Cardiff permetteva di essere al contempo molto dentro di sé e insieme di condividere con altre persone  emozioni, sensazioni, pensieri, forme di discorso. Di nuovo a Berlino qualche mese fa ho incontrato una sua installazione. Ho notato che i più giovani avevano spento tutto, telefonini, iPhone e quant’altro e ascoltavano a occhi chiusi. La dimensione in cui si era trasportati non aveva nulla di nostalgico, niente di religioso. Era come se l’artista ci invitasse a fermarci un momento. Per non essere sempre spezzati tra le cose, per trovare un modo, anche solo per un istante, di connettersi con gli altri e con il nostro mondo interiore.

da left avvenimenti del 13 febbraio 2009-

No me arrepiento de nada. El que se arrepiente de lo que ha hecho es doblemente miserable.

Baruch Benedict Spinoza

]]> http://paoblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/bloccata-la-fan-page-del-blog-spinoza-it/ Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:56:29 +0000 paoblog http://paoblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/bloccata-la-fan-page-del-blog-spinoza-it/

Forse ne avete sentito parlare, è il blog più cinico e irreverenete della blogosfera italiana, ma è anche il più popolare, un riconoscimento messo nero su bianco quando ha vinto i Macchianera Blog Awards del 2009.

Spinoza.it si autodefinisce un blog serissimo. E allora perché i grandi capi di Facebook hanno deciso di boccare la sua fan page? Da circa un mese  più di 18 mila fan da circa un mese non possono fare affidamento sugli aggiornamenti di Alessandro Bonino e Stefano Andreoli, i suoi creatori.

Continua a leggere “Zuckerberg colpisce ancora: bloccata la fan page del blog Spinoza.it”

Freud and Spinoza on Kant’s Freedom

A few days ago I listened to the paper by Michael Mack (Nottingham), “Spinoza and Freud, or how to be mindful of the mind”  from the Spinoza and Bodies conference (audio here), and one quote really stood out, taken from Heine on Spinoza. Mack’s paper argues that Freud subverts the primary aim of Kantian philosophy: the autonomy of the human under and definition of Freedom. That is, the Copernican turn accomplishes a radical autonomy of man which is strictly modern, that the recursively defined categories of thought provide humanity with a kind of fresh space, a topos, upon which to do and be and make whatever they well, a cocoon of freedom. He doesn’t express it in this way, but I do. Freud takes this from Kant and the modern heritage in that he takes from the inside the autonomy that Kant attempted to carve out,  the “self”. I had never really thought if it in these terms, but one can see that it is precisely at the level of freedom that Spinoza’s Freedom and Kant’s Freedom collide, and one can see Mack’s point that Freud and Spinoza are on the same side on this, that the “self” is ever only partially free, and the sense that we are all exposed to causal forces far beyond our control, the ignorance of which deceives us into thinking we are freer than we are.

The paper is a wild ride at times, and Mack has the haltering verbal excitement of someone overly familiar with a history of ideas and some much neglected material that makes his reading engaging, at least to my ear. He exposes some, one wants to say sublimated, or at least seldom acknowledged even by Freud himself, influence of Spinoza on the father of psychoanalysis. Mack’s point falls off in the area of the Death Drive where he doesn’t do a sharp enough job of contrasting the admitted radical difference of Spinoza and Freud on this point, a chasm gap, surely on account of time .  For me, any comparison between Spinoza and Freud must at least start or end there. Where Mack is really strong is how he positions Freud and Spinoza towards Kant’s autonomy, and the subject of the Self.

In making his point about Freud, Spinoza and Jewishness, Mack brings the wonderful quote by Heine on the subject of Spinoza’s charged atheism. In an almost over-statement in response to the Pantheism Controversy, Heine declares, it is not God that is denied by Spinoza, but rather Man:

“Nothing but fear, unreason and malice could bestow on such a doctrine the qualification of atheism. No one has spoken so sublimely of Deity than Spinoza. Instead of saying that he denied God, one might say that he denied Man. All finite things are to him but modes of the Infinite Substance, all finite substances are contained in God, the human mind but the luminous ray of infinite thought, the human body but an atom of infinite extension. God is the infinite cause both of mind and of body, natura naturans.”