This response focuses on Balibar’s method of thinking transindividuality through multiple figures, in their similarities as well as their productive differences. His essay ‘Philosophies of the Transindividual: Spinoza, Marx, Freud’ combines the three titular figures in order to better think the multifaceted idea of ‘classical’ transindividuality. Balibar’s method combines the three but nonetheless maintains their dissimilarities as real differences. This response attempts to test or apply that method in two ways. The first application links Balibar’s analysis of Freud’s hypnotic leader (...) with a theme Balibar does not here discuss: wonder’s connection to superstition in Spinoza. At the level of their effects, superstitious wonder and hypnosis are nearly identical transindividual processes which lead to affective mass formation. However, their causes are quite distinct. This response details the similar effects and different causes, then asks the question: does their difference render them irreconcilable or complementary? Given the prominent role Spinoza plays in Balibar’s work, and the strong overall equivalence of wonder and hypnosis, this first application of Balibar’s method of multiple combination likely presents a complementarity rather than a conflict. This response’s second application, attempting to integrate another figure into the transindividual multiple, presents greater difficulties: what role, if any, could Foucault play in Balibar’s transindividuality? With Foucault, the tensions or differences perhaps amount to fundamental and thoroughgoing incompatibilities. However, combining Foucault with ‘classical’ transindividuality potentially extends and deepens each. This response concludes with examples of these problematic tensions as well as possibly fruitful combinations. (shrink)

In his essay, ‘Aimances de Rousseau: Sur La Nouvelle Héloise comme traité des passions,’ Etienne Balibar analyses the structure of transition from love to friendship which are more than passions or sentiments; they are affective structures, interconnected within an affective network the political relevance of which transcends the dichotomy between the domestic and political sphere. Belonging to the genre of sentimental novel, Rousseaus Nouvelle Héloise transgresses the canonical structure of the genre in the eighteenth century. His innovative literary strategy, according (...) to Balibar, consists in creating couples and triangles of egalitarian and hierarchical status that cannot be considered independently but exclusively through their relational nature. This critical review focuses on the ‘figures of authority’ involved in La Nouvelle Héloise that parallel the figure of the legislator in the Social Contract. I argue that Rousseau struggles with the riddle of deference to auctoritas that does not undermine the basic principles of republican citizenship. I suggest that in Rousseau’s guiding thread, rites and ceremonies amount to founding cultural myths that are indispensable for any individual and collective relational identity. Reclaiming a psychoanalytic interpretation of the charismatic leader, Freudian figures of authority attract Balibar’s attention regarding the perilous, unquestioned forms of mass identification they trigger. In this vein, I claim that identification with the prestigious authority of an allegoric ‘legislator’ as depicted in the Social Contract also amounts to a conceptual ‘line of flight’ in Rousseau, indispensable to conceive plainly the unsettling potential of transindividuality. (shrink)

This article takes up Balibar’s treatment of fetishism as central for understanding Marx as thinker of transindividuality and to develop a materialist account of the appearance of isolated individuality. The article shows how Balibar elaborates a critique of a cryptonormativity in those accounts of transindividuality that diagnose problems of capitalism as a loss of ‘proper’ forms of individuation. I argue that this critique rests in Balibar’s rereading of commodity fetishism that foregrounds the reality of imaginative effects, which is irreducible to (...) an only psychic reality. Moreover, I explain how Balibar’s proposition of a secondary ‘fetishism of legal and moral personhood’ challenges mainstream left theoretical critiques of the subject of rights as illusory abstraction. (shrink)

Vardoulakis explores what Balibar means by designating transindividuality as ‘quasi-transcendental.’ He does so by turning to Balibar’s readings of Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics, the Part that is central to Balibar’s understanding of the transindividual in Spinoza. Vardoulakis shows that the quasi-transcendental in Spinoza can only be a form of agonistic relations if his political theory in the Theological Political Treatise is to account for political change.

Artykuł ukazuje polityczność ontologicznego systemu Benedykta Spinozy na przykładzie pojęcia conatus (pragnienia). Autorka broni spójności myśli niderlandzkiego myśliciela polemizując z interpretacją Leszka Kołakowskiego, podług której system Spinozy charakteryzują nieprzezwyciężalne antynomie jednostki i nieskończoności. Jak zostaje wykazane w tekście artykułu, dostrzeżenie fundamentalnie politycznego charakteru ontologicznych pojęć Spinozy pozwala przekroczyć owe antynomie w kierunku spójnej i klarownej interpretacji. Skupiając ciężar wywodu na pojęciu conatus, autorka poddaje analizie dwie antynomie Kołakowskiego. Pierwsza z nich dotyczy problemu trwania i jednostkowości i przedstawia pozorną sprzeczność pomiędzy (...) zasadą samozachowania indywiduów a niepodzielnością substancji. Druga zaś, dotyka kwestii ściśle etycznej – rzekomej niezgodności pomiędzy pragnieniem zachowania się w swym istnieniu a pragnieniem intelektualnej miłości Boga. Autorka wykazuje, że podstawą obydwu antynomii jest zapoznanie polityczności pojęcia conatus, a wraz z nim politycznego wymiaru Etyki. (shrink)

This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the debate on new materialism. It combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and new materialist thought, without abandoning a more classically ‘historical’ characterization of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science (emblematically represented here by the ‘conceptual couple’ Descartes-Hobbes) to Wiener’s (...) cybernetic theory of society. The political stakes common to these forms of mechanical materialism were attacked ontologically, epistemologically and politically by Simondon. His approach, I will argue, opens the path for a genuine materialist critique of the political anthropology implicit in modern political thought, and shifts political thinking from politics conceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation. (shrink)

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming (...) as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming. (shrink)

This commentary focuses upon the ‘fetishism of persons’ in Marx which Balibar claims both mirrors and animates the better-known fetishism of things. Revisiting the chapter on exchange in which Balibar grounds his thesis, the essay attends to the theatrical metaphors by which Marx presents legal personhood as a pantomime of commodity fetishism. The essay demonstrates how the movable immobility of the commodity comes to life in its inverse, the mobile and immovable figure of the legal person; it then claims that (...) this inversion positions legal persons as animate props for property. But if legal persons, the essay asks, merely personify economic relations, by what means are they sufficiently distanced from commodities to be able to become their reflex and puppet? In other words, what vestibule keeps personal liberty’s analogy with economic relations from collapsing into identity? A significant historical answer, the essay asserts, is transatlantic chattel slavery—not only because this institution is both ideological foil to, and material basis for, liberal capital, but also because the slave herself, as animate property, undoes the distinction between persons and commodities. The essay concludes by insisting upon the significance of this neglected figure in philosophies of the transindividual, while also taking first steps toward a transindividual analysis of slavery. (shrink)

"Roger Garaudy was for many years at the centre of the French Communist Party but was eventually expelled for his liberal views. In the Seventies he developed a project to bring Marxism and Christianity together, to include all humanity in a project to set all people free. What emerges from Garaudy's project is a very modern Marxism, with its emphasis on the individual, its ecological politics, and in its insistence on religion as central to human emancipation. Although Garaudy himself became (...) frustrated by the West and converted to Islam in 1982, ending his life discredited in the West, it is certainly possible that Garaudy's project represents a good, perhaps even the best, starting point for Marxism in today's world"--. (shrink)

The article considers some explicit or implicit and yet fundamental references to Althusser in Balibar’s text about transindividuality. Of particular significance is the attempt to think of an articulation of ideology and the unconscious which brings into play the three authors Balibar evokes—Spinoza, Marx, and Freud—so as to reactivate them beyond Simondon’s own theory of transindividuality.

Human nature is something of a taboo on the left wing of contemporary political theory and scarcely more than a commonsense assumption on its right wing. This article aims to expose the taboo and to challenge the assumption. There is no way, we argue, to defeat conservative political theory without delving into political anthropology. With this purpose in mind, our article analyses the writings of Marx and Engels, and Simondon’s concepts of the transindividual and technics. It shows that Simondon’s theory (...) of technics allows new interpretations of many of the themes scattered in Marx’s and Engels’s works and helps to formulate a materialist political anthropology which entails a political project of liberating ‘human nature’ _from_ labour. (shrink)

I follow Etienne Balibar in understanding Freud as not only an important thinker of transindividuality alongside Spinoza and Marx, but also the one that pushes an ontology of relations to its full development. In response to Balibar I critically examine Freud, who, outside of Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego, often referred individual and collective development to the family as the primal scene. I also explore how it would be possible to conceive of a concept of social relations that (...) recognizes the social and transindividual basis of subjectivity. Ultimately, it is not a matter of deciding whether Freud is a transindividual thinker, but of understanding that an ontology of relations can privilege no particular scene or social institution, such as family or the, economy. (shrink)

Artykuł ukazuje polityczność ontologicznego systemu Benedykta Spinozy na przykładzie pojęcia conatus. Autorka broni spójności myśli niderlandzkiego myśliciela polemizując z interpretacją Leszka Kołakowskiego, podług której system Spinozy charakteryzują nieprzezwyciężalne antynomie jednostki i nieskończoności. Jak zostaje wykazane w tekście artykułu, dostrzeżenie fundamentalnie politycznego charakteru ontologicznych pojęć Spinozy pozwala przekroczyć owe antynomie w kierunku spójnej i klarownej interpretacji. Skupiając ciężar wywodu na pojęciu conatus, autorka poddaje analizie dwie antynomie Kołakowskiego. Pierwsza z nich dotyczy problemu trwania i jednostkowości i przedstawia pozorną sprzeczność pomiędzy zasadą (...) samozachowania indywiduów a niepodzielnością substancji. Druga zaś, dotyka kwestii ściśle etycznej – rzekomej niezgodności pomiędzy pragnieniem zachowania się w swym istnieniu a pragnieniem intelektualnej miłości Boga. Autorka wykazuje, że podstawą obydwu antynomii jest zapoznanie polityczności pojęcia conatus, a wraz z nim politycznego wymiaru Etyki. (shrink)

In this short response to Balibar’s article, I discuss what I consider to be some of the most radical implications of Balibar’s notion of transindividualism. Specifically, I argue that in his reading of Marx, Spinoza and Freud, Balibar complicates not only the categories of the individual and the mass but also even the way that these two concepts are connected, along with a more general subversion of the most fundamental building blocks of capitalism. Balibar shows that communism is already present (...) and active within the heart of alienation, materiality and dialectical relationality and in this way can neither be rooted out nor denied its aleatory presence and possibility. (shrink)

In developing the concept of assemblages, Gilles Deleuze draws at least some inspiration from Gilbert Simondon’s concept of information. While his acknowledgement of Simondon’s influence is almost entirely positive, Deleuze explicitly distances himself from the concept of information in order to avoid its link to the field of cybernetics. However, a Deleuzian informational ontology could instead be leveraged as an alternative to cybernetics. Drawing on the Spinozan link between the work of Deleuze and Simondon, it is possible to develop a (...) hybrid informational ontology. This system can not only offer a different approach to information, data and technology than the essentialist concept of information embraced by cybernetics, but also aligns well with recent research in the biological sciences that has disrupted a long-held concept of individuals as entirely separate and autonomous. Shifting away from the Platonic Form to a Deleuzian/simondonian in-formation furthers the post-human project aimed at understanding processes of subjectivation at multiple scales, including the micro and macro. (shrink)

Con el objetivo de contextualizar los aportes intelectuales más contemporáneos de Étienne Balibar, el presente artículo estudia la filosofía de la historia presente en su obra de madurez, es decir, la manera en la que el filósofo interpreta el cambio histórico en el campo político. En primer lugar, se aborda la significación relativamente benjaminiana que adquiere el «momento insurreccional» constitutivo del principio de la igualibertad, estableciendo los puntos de contacto y las diferencias entre la idea de Balibar y la de (...) Benjamin. En un segundo momento, se rastrean los orígenes de dicha concepción del tiempo, que remiten a los trabajos tempranos elaborados junto a Althusser. Por último, y retomando algunos argumentos de la primera parte, se explica el sentido dialéctico del par ciudadanía/democracia y su relevancia en la actualidad. (shrink)

In this response, while agreeing with Balibar’s substantive positive position, I take issue with the way he situates it. Specifically, he casts it as a via negativa in relation to all previously existing thought. I suggest that it would be more accurate to say he is positioning the notion of the transindividual as a via media between two alleged extremes, individualism and organicism. I argue that the idea that there is an opposite and equal error to individualism is mistaken, and (...) that in actuality Balibar’s concept of the transindividual is not a radical departure from a long history of anti-individualism. (shrink)

Resumo: O presente artigo versa sobre o problema político-filosófico do fascismo. O conceito tem mostrado crescente relevância no cenário público nacional e mundial, figurando cada vez mais no debate leigo e especializado. O termo fascismo, hoje, é amplamente empregado, tanto na qualificação de movimentos políticos de diversos espectros quanto na grande mídia e revistas científicas. O objetivo deste artigo é utilizar o conceito de transindividual na compreensão do fascismo, a partir da teorização, ela mesma transindividual, do fenômeno, realizada por Deleuze (...) e Guattari, através da sua compreensão do desejo. O transindividual caracteriza um movimento filosófico de dupla rejeição em que se nega, simultaneamente, uma abordagem holista e individualista do campo social, procurando pensar o indivíduo e coletivo como coextensivos a um processo genético que produz a ambos, sem primado de um sobre o outro. Tal conceito vem se revelando uma ferramenta analítica de crescente uso e repercussão, no debate acadêmico contemporâneo. Nesse sentido, a utilização do transindividual, enquanto matriz teórica, na compreensão do fenômeno fascista ainda não foi realizada de forma esquemática e, desse modo, recorrendo à compreensão transindividual do fascismo de Deleuze e Guattari, pretende-se contribuir para o alargamento desse horizonte teórico.: This paper is directed towards the political and philosophical problem of fascism. This concept is manifesting increasingly relevance in the national and global public scenario, widely appearing in the specialized and lay debate. The term ‘’fascism”, today, is largely used in the qualification of movements from diverse shades of the political spectrum and in the mainstream media and scientific journals. The goal of this paper is the application of the concept of the transindividual to the fascist phenomena through Deleuze and Guattar theory of the fascist desire, in itself, a transindividual one. The transindividual marks a philosophical movement of a double rejection against an holistic approach to the social dimension as well as and individualist one, aiming to think both dimensions as coextensive to a genetic process that produces both of them, without any priority regarding any dimension in relation to the other. This concept has been revealing itself as an increasingly useful analytical tool in the contemporary academic debate. In this sense, the use of the concept of transindividuality as the theoretical framework in the philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of fascism has not been yet realized in a schematic way. Applying the concept of fascism of Deleuze and Guatttari in a transindividual framework, we intend to contribute to the development of this theoretical approach. (shrink)