In this commentary, I respond to the core question of Ruddick’s paper: How does the theoretical dethroning of humanity force us to reinvent ethics? In so doing, I expand on Spinoza’s profound contribution to the radical rethinking of the subject at the level of ontology. Although Ruddick invokes Spinoza, first and foremost, as a potential resource for ethics in light of climate disruption, I conclude that those resources offer only a glimmer of how to live differently. The work of re-imagination (...) at the level of metaphysics is flourishing, but we have yet to develop its implications for ethics and politics. (shrink)

Assunto pouco estudado na obra de Espinosa, o trabalho ocupa centralidade em seu pensamento acerca do direito comum. Através do exame das ocorrências do trabalho nos dois tratados políticos, bem como da observância da correta tradução de _ opera mutua _, procura-se jogar nova luz sobre a história em Espinosa, em particular sobre a gênese do direito comum e sobre as ideias de justiça e injustiça nesse autor.

Although largely neglected in Schelling scholarship, the concept of bliss assumes central importance throughout Schelling’s oeuvre. Focusing on his 1810–11 texts, the Stuttgart Seminars and the beginning of the Ages of the World, this paper traces the logic of bliss, in its connection with other key concepts such as indifference, the world or the system, at a crucial point in Schelling’s thinking. Bliss is shown, at once, to mark the zero point of the developmental narrative that Schelling constructs here and (...) to interrupt it at every step. As a result, bliss emerges here in its real utopian force but also its all-too-real ambivalence, indifference, and even violence, despite Schelling’s best efforts to theorize it as ‘love’; and Schelling himself emerges, in these texts, as one of modernity’s foremost thinkers not just of nature or freedom, but also of bliss in its modern afterlives. At stake in Schelling’s conception of bliss, I argue, is the very relationship between history and eternity, the not-yet and the already-here, the present, and the eschatological—as well as between Spinozian immanence and the Christian temporality of salvation, so important for modernity —not to mention the complex entanglement of indifference, violence, and love or the ideas of totality, nonproductivity, and nonrelation that Schellingian bliss involves. (shrink)

In this article, I trace lines of materialist pedagogies in the history of women workers’ education following feminist interpretations of Spinoza’s assemblage of joyful affects. More particularly, I focus on the notions of laetitia [joy], gaudium [gladness] and hilaritas [cheerfulness] as entanglements of joy and trace their expression in practices and discourses inscribed in archival documents that I have reassembled around the theme of women workers’ education. My reading of Ethics follows a range of feminist thinkers that have engaged with (...) Spinoza’s ‘ethics of joy’ in education and beyond. The article draws on extensive archival work with personal auto/biographical documents and public essays of women workers/educators/writers in Paris and New York that span the period between 1830 and 1950. What I argue is that it is the experience of creative and radical education that has created a platform for workers to re-imagine themselves in the world with others. (shrink)

This paper approaches the question of Spinoza and education via the work of Louis Althusser. One important aim is to show how Spinoza’s description of the imagination underpins Althusser’s description of the ideological ‘infrastructure’ of educational practices and institutions. To achieve this, I begin by addressing Spinoza’s treatment of the physiological foundation of the imagination: by showing that the realm of ‘individual consciousness’ is more like the effect of an anonymous field, or process, Spinoza, we see, becomes a kind of (...) immanent cause for the Althusserian claim that ‘ideology has a material existence’. I go on to examine, in detail, Althusser’s description of ‘educational apparatuses’, locating these as the expressions of a Spinozistic ontology. However, Althusserian anti-humanism can also appear to negate transformative agency; and in the specific context of the classroom, Althusser suggests, apparently ‘heroic’ teachers seem almost doomed. Hence a ‘return’ to Spinoza, enacted, here—that is, an examination of Spinozistic potentialities, mainly adumbrated in the unfinished Political Treatise. My article concludes by suggesting that, in light of these, the foundational unit of pedagogical practice—the group, the class—might still be reconfigured as a collective subject, rather than the mere object of ideology. (shrink)

This article explores the affinities and parallels between Foucault's Nietzschean view of history and models of complexity developed in the physical sciences in the twentieth century. It claims that Foucault's rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open, relatively borderless system of infinite interconnections, possibilities and developments. His rejection of Hegelianism, as well as of (...) other enlightenment philosophies, can be understood at one level as a direct response to his rejection of the mechanical atomist, and organicist epistemological world views, based upon a Newtonian conception of a closed universe operating upon the basis of a small number of invariable and universal laws, by which all could be predicted and explained. The idea of a fully determined, closed universe is replaced; and in a way parallel to complexity theories, Foucault's own approach emphasises notions such as self‐organisation and dissipative structures; time as an irreversible, existential dimension; a world of finite resources but with infinite possibilities for articulation, or re‐investment; and characterised by the principles of openness, indeterminism, unpredictability, and uncertainty. The implications of Foucault's type of approach are then explored in relation to identity, creativity, and the uniqueness of the person. The article suggests that within a complexity theory approach many of the old conundrums concerning determinism and creativity, social constructionism and uniqueness, can be overcome. (shrink)

Negri celebrates a conception of democracy in which the concrete powers of individual humans are not alienated away, but rather are added together: this is a democracy of the multitude. But how can the multitude act without alienating anyone’s power? To answer this difficulty, Negri explicitly appeals to Spinoza. Nonetheless, in this paper, I argue that Spinoza’s philosophy does not support Negri’s project. I argue that the Spinozist multitude avoids internal hierarchy through the mediation of political institutions and not in (...) spite of them; nor do these institutions merely emanate from the multitude as it is, but rather they structure, restrain and channel its passions. In particular, the required institutions are not those of a simple direct democracy. There may be other non-Spinozist arguments on which Negri can ground his theory, but he cannot legitimately defend his conception of the democratic multitude by appeal to Spinoza. (shrink)

What I plan to do in this paper is to provide a survey of the ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy has been deployed in relation to early modern thought, in the history of ideas and in a number of different domains of contemporary philosophy, and to offer an account of how some of this research has developed. The past decade of research in Spinoza studies has been characterized by a number of tendencies; however, it is possible to identify four main (...) domains that characterize these different lines of research: studies of Spinoza’s individual works, of its problematic concepts, from the point of view of the history of ideas, and comparative studies of Spinoza’s ideas. (shrink)

Constituent power : the concept of a crisis -- Virtue and fortune : the machiavellian paradigm -- The Atlantic model and the theory of counterpower -- Political emancipation in the American constitution -- The revolution and the constitution of labor -- Communist desire and the dialectic restored -- The constitution of strength.

This article explores the affinities and parallels between Foucault's Nietzschean view of history and models of complexity developed in the physical sciences in the twentieth century. It claims that Foucault's rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open, relatively borderless system of infinite interconnections, possibilities and developments. His rejection of Hegelianism, as well as of (...) other enlightenment philosophies, can be understood at one level as a direct response to his rejection of the mechanical atomist, and organicist epistemological world views, based upon a Newtonian conception of a closed universe operating upon the basis of a small number of invariable and universal laws, by which all could be predicted and explained. The idea of a fully determined, closed universe is replaced; and in a way parallel to complexity theories, Foucault's own approach emphasises notions such as self‐organisation and dissipative structures; time as an irreversible, existential dimension; a world of finite resources but with infinite possibilities for articulation, or re‐investment; and characterised by the principles of openness, indeterminism, unpredictability, and uncertainty. The implications of Foucault's type of approach are then explored in relation to identity, creativity, and the uniqueness of the person. The article suggests that within a complexity theory approach many of the old conundrums concerning determinism and creativity, social constructionism and uniqueness, can be overcome. (shrink)

I propose a theory of popular power, according to which a political order manifests popular power to the extent it robustly maintains an egalitarian basic structure. There are two parts to the theory. First, the power of a political order lies in the basic structure's robust self-maintenance. Second, the popularity of the political order’s power lies in the equality of relations between the society's members. I will argue that this theory avoids the perverse consequences of some existing radical democratic theories (...) of popular power which focus on mass expression, either in plebiscites or in social movements, as popular power's canonical instances. In particular, my theory does not valourise momentary expression over durable effect, and it offers a ready framework for conceptualising the sometimes-oligarchic substructure of the supposedly canonical instances of popular power. I will show that this theory has strong precedents within a certain republican tradition of political philosophy. (shrink)

With Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reinvigorated debates in political theory and radical philosophy about the cultivation of revolutionary subjectivity. Their theorization of Empire and multitude has also significantly affected the tenor of critical approaches to educational theory during the past two decades. In this article, we discuss Hardt and Negri’s contribution to what we call the biopolitical turn in educational theory, emphasizing the influence of autonomist Marxism on their work. Even more specifically, we discuss the impact of the (...) autonomist tradition on their formulation of the nature of the relationship between the multitude and Empire: that the multitude is the generative force of the social world, whereas Empire is merely an apparatus of capture. This autonomist approach reveals a set of questions regarding subjectivity, materialism, and social ontology, which we argue are ripe for engagement by educational theorists, and indicate the enduring relevance of Empire as a valuable text for educational theorists interested in matters of biopolitical production, collective opposition, and revolutionary subjectivity. (shrink)

Pierre Macherey’sHegel or Spinoza?suggests that Hegel was driven to his now legendary misinterpretations of Spinoza because he could not accept Spinozism without compromising his own philosophy. Macherey shows us a Spinoza that pre-emptively resists and challenges Hegel’s understanding of Spirit as Subject realising itself through self-negation and contradiction. This review draws out the central arguments in the book, and those arguments most salient for contemporary theories of capitalism and revolution, and points towards possible implications for Marxist theory.

This paper adopts Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s expressionism and pure semiotics to argue that Spinoza’s Ethics offers an alternative notion of freedom of speech that is based on the potentia of the individual. Its aim is to show how freedom of thought is connected to the problem of individuation that connects our mode of being with our power to speak and think. Rather than treating freedom of speech as an enlightened idea that is in opposition to, for example, religious authority, (...) or the suppression of human rights, this paper argues that freedom of speech should be understood by what Spinoza calls ‘an adequate idea’: an idea that explains the cause of its own production. What is to be considered is: who wants this freedom, in what situation, why, what is at stake? No freedom in itself is ever given. This paper argues for speech as an assembled body that is always in connection with other bodies. It is argued that to understand the power and value of the freedom of speech, we should study the praxis of the utterance as an assembled body, its causal dimensions, and its affective immanent relations with other bodies, and other modes of speaking. (shrink)

We suggest in this paper that the practice of philosophy with children can be fruitfully understood as an example of a transindividual system. The adoption of the term ‘transindividuality’ serves two main purposes: it allows us to focus on individuation as a process and at the same time to problematise some of the classical antinomies of Western philosophy that continue to inform our understanding of the relation between individuality and community. We argue that the practice of philosophical inquiry with children, (...) when interpreted in terms of Spinoza’s conceptions of relational individuality and affective reason, offers a compelling example of how shared thinking operates as an individuating process in that knowledge and affect, interiority and exteriority, individuality and collectivity can be experienced in action and thought as complementary aspects of the same process. (shrink)

This article focuses on the power of technological mediation from the point of view of autonomist Marxism. The first part of the article discusses the theories developed on technological mediation in postphenomenology and critical theory of technology with regard to their respective power perspectives and ways of coping with relations of power embedded in technical artifacts and systems. Rather than focusing on the clashes between the hermeneutic postphenomenological approach and the dialectics of critical theory, it is argued that in both (...) the category of resistance amidst power-relations is at least similar in one regard: resistance to the power of technology is conceptualized as a reactive force. The second part of the article reads technological mediation through the lens of the antagonistic power-perspective on class struggle developed in autonomist Marxism. The outline of a provisional autonomist philosophy of technology is developed using Foucauldian dispositifs of biopower in contrast to the hermeneutic and dialectical approach. It is thus argued that resistance should here be understood in terms of practice that subverts the technically mediated circuit of production itself. (shrink)

Themes of mastery, domination and power are familiar to any scholar of modern technology. Science is commonly cast as enabling the technological control over both the natural and physical worlds. Indeed, Francis Bacon famously equated scientific knowledge with power itself—stating that ‘knowledge itself is a power’. Bacon’s now ubiquitous phrase—commonly repeated as the banal ‘knowledge is power’—was an attempt to combat three heresies in scriptural interpretation by asserting the conjunction between biblical knowledge and divine power. Opening his critique of the (...) heresies he states: ‘You err, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God’. In this sense the equation made between knowledge and power is of cosmic significance for Bacon in that knowledge is fundamentally associated with divine power. This image of scientific knowledge, method and rationality is deeply seductive. In this Baconian mode scientific method is irreducibly associated with human mastery over natural systems and the material world. In this image science and technology are defined as a kind of power over the physical world—the power of knowledge, method and the logos over nature, myth and irrationality. In its original Latin sense—ipsa scientia potestas est—the word that translates in English as simply power is a in fact a specific type of power. Potestas is defined as ‘power over’—with particular resonances with political and juridical traditions in Roman law. That is, knowledge is equated not simply with personal capacity. Rather, knowledge produces the power of mastery, domination and coercion... (shrink)

Despite the increasing attention devoted to the theme of political judgment, the question of how to theorize judgment as specifically democratic remains elusive. This article shows the promise of Spinoza for approaching such a vexing issue. Through a combined reading of his major political and metaphysical texts, I develop a new concept of political judgment that I call ‘citizen jurisprudence’. Citizen jurisprudence is at once a right and a power that is internally related to the ‘power of the people’. Put (...) another way, citizen jurisprudence is the figure and effect of democracy understood in an expansive sense: not solely as a state form but as an activity of equally free individuals determining the sense and the scope of common affairs. An account of this concept simultaneously nuances Spinoza’s current profile as a political thinker and contributes to efforts within contemporary political theory to recuperate the radical potential of judgment as a mode of democratic agency. (shrink)

Resumen: Este escrito aborda la interpretación deleuziana de la sustancia spinozista. Su objetivo es mostrar que el núcleo fundamental de dicha interpretación reside en el señalamiento del carácter único y a la vez múltiple de la sustancia, carácter que Deleuze conceptualiza a través de la categoría de distinción formal, tomada de Duns Scoto. Con este propósito, se caracterizan las nociones de univocidad y de expresión, que nos conducen a plantear que la sustancia, por ser a la vez única y múltiple, (...) consiste en el desarrollo de una contradicción. Esta condición nos permite concluir que la interpretación deleuziana, más allá de su propósito manifiesto, enfatiza una arista del trabajo de Spinoza que lo acerca a la filosofía de Hegel. Lo cual implica que la propia producción de Deleuze ofrece, también, aspectos que la aproximan a la del filósofo alemán.: This paper addresses the Deleuzian interpretation of the Spinozist substance. It aims at showing that the fundamental nucleus of this interpretation lies in pointing out the unique and simultaneously multiple character of the substance, which Deleuze conceptualizes through the category of formal distinction, taken from Duns Scoto. To reach this goal, the notions of univocity and expression are characterized. This leads us to affirm that substance, being both unique and multiple, consists of the development of a contradiction. This character allows us to conclude that the Deleuzian interpretation, beyond its manifest purpose, emphasizes a dimension of Spinoza’s work that brings it closer to Hegel’s philosophy. This implies that Deleuze’s own production also offers aspects that approach it to the German philosopher’s work. (shrink)

Thinking with Spinoza about education involves thinking with and beyond his authored texts, situating his work within the tradition of Western thought, and exploring his contribution to the philoso...

Reading 'Capital''s promotion of the Spinozist sources of Marxism has stimulated a series of important studies in several major zones of Marxist theoretical work. A more general reassessment of Spinoza's thought in the project of a 'radical Enlightenement' provides the opportunity to consider critically the contribution of these studies to the elaboration of Marxist political theory. Vittorio Morfino, well known Italian scholar of Spinoza and Althusser, proposes to study Engels's reading of Spinoza in the context of the inheritance of classical (...) German idealism in the Marxist theory of history. He argues that Spinoza provides resources for rethinking Marxist notions of temporality and structure. The result is a theory of conjunctural analysis, in distinction from 'normative' and 'prescriptive' perspectives. (shrink)

Despite its advanced age of about 375 years, the mind–body problem is alive and well, in part because it is anchored so well institutionally in schools and in research. This continued presence is astonishing in the light of the fact that the seed for its solution, sown in Spinoza’s Ethics, is almost as old. The solution rests on the position that there is only one substance, which, invisible, manifests itself in two attributes, thought and extension. By thinking with Spinoza, especially (...) by following the ways in which Vygotsky and Marx think with Spinoza, we arrive at an approach suitable for a social psychological theory of learning that does not separate knowing from doing and emoting. A classroom fragment from a 10th-grade physics curriculum is used as the starting point for overcoming the body–mind problem by thinking with Spinoza. (shrink)

In Spinoza’s philosophy affects illustrate the way human beings interact with each other and the world, where the necessary meetings with other particular things define their being and its expressions. Most human beings don’t know themselves, are not conscious of their affects and, even less, do they know what the affects of others are. Although, they are by their definition as particular things obliged to exist in society and create a minimum of consensus. According to Spinoza, this consensus is built (...) upon the biological substrate defined by human body’s physiology, through the mechanism of imitation and is supported by empathy. Leading researchers in affective neuroscience argue for a theory of embodied cognition and recent research in neurosciences attributes human capacity for empathy to mirror neurons, recognising in Spinoza’s texts the philosophical roots of current scientific thinking on body, mind and feeling. Keeping in mind the debate concerning how different levels of explanation can be related to each other or how different disciplines can form the context for interpreting neuroscience’s data, we attempt to promote an implicit dialogue between Spinoza’s psychological theory and the neuroscientific findings, supporting that is legitimate and necessary to examine these questions from the point of view of philosophy and formulate new research questions that can promote further theoretical and empirical study of the complex phenomena concerning human nature and society. (shrink)

This article clarifies and resituates Althusser’s materialist philosophical project in relation not only to such predecessors as V.I. Lenin and Jean-Toussaint Desanti but also to such successors as Pierre Macherey and Pierre Raymond. The thesis of the article is that Althusser’s project to establish a philosophical practice that would be appropriate for Marxism did not simply consist of identifying and defending a ‘materialist’ position in philosophy against external ‘idealist’ challenges or threats. On the contrary, it recognised that there exists an (...) interminable struggle between inextricably linked but ever-shifting materialist and idealist tendencies – a struggle that operates as a defining feature in the history of philosophy. As a result, the problem explored in this article concerns how best to conceptualise this struggle and to determine whether or not the term ‘tendency’ genuinely holds analytical value and can serve as an important conceptual resource for Marxists working within the field of philosophy. (shrink)

In this article I start with Marx's transcriptions of Spinoza, and the deep significance of what he transcribed, from the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Correspondence, and in what order. I contend that this demonstrates what was of particular interest and importance to him at that time. Second, I examine the presence, even if not explicit, of Spinoza in Marx's works, and turn to the question whether Marx was a Spinozist. I think he was. Third, I turn to Ilyenkov and his (...) engagement with Spinoza, and fourth, to Ilyenkov's place in the Marxist tradition of Spinozism. Fifth and sixth, I present an analysis of Ilyenkov's instrumental deployment of Spinoza first in his Dialectical Logic and then in his The Dialectic of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital. (shrink)

The Guantanamo detention facility, from its early days an emblem for human rights abuses, is a space where legal subjectivity of detainees is contested or even permanently suspended. This essay argues that we should look for the underlying rationale for this treatment not in the politicians who pursue intelligence, security, and strategic interest, or indeed even revenge for 9/11, but rather in the logic—or the ontology—that drives the present political and legal system. This is not to say, of course, that (...) politicians play no role, or that they are mere ‘victims’ of social and political power relations—far from it; yet, it has to be acknowledged that the foundational assumptions on which the existing system operates create conditions of possibility for such degrading actions and exclusionary politics. This paper will first explore these philosophical foundations that enable such an understanding of exclusionary legal subjectivity as we see practiced in Guantanamo, amongst other places; secondly, it will search for an alternative logic of legal subjectivity as a ‘foundation’ for rights. Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming’ as a potentially facilitative practice for an ‘open’ notion of legal subjectivity, as well as Alain Badiou’s account of ethics and evil, which points to a more ‘inclusive’ yet ‘situational’ understanding of human rights, will prove particularly useful here. (shrink)

Somewhere between use and mere whim there is a place for the expressivity of affect as a concept. This paper raises the question of how the concept of affect might be mobilized without reducing its expressions to the logic of work. We suggest that the very attempt to put affect to work in order to solve pressing problems may be symptomatic of an anxiety to master the events of the world. With this in mind, we make a case for the (...) importance of Georges Bataille's critique of an instrumentalist form of thinking, which reduces events to objects of human sensemaking. Bataille's “general economy” opens onto all that the restricted economy of use negates; namely, that which exceeds our efforts as humans to make sense of, and thus appropriate, events. Ultimately, Bataille's antihumanist thought limits the potential of the gift economy, by rendering it the negative of the social order. We argue that a more posthumanist thought can realize the immanent potential of affect and apprehend its gift to thinking. (shrink)

This essay focuses on three primary issues i. The conceptual resources offered by Spinoza to challenge the idealism and perfectionism underpinning much educational theory and dominant educational imaginaries; ii. His descriptions of a non-ideal, practical and systematic approach to developing understanding that could be applied to educational theorising and practice; and iii. The potential for a different vision of education premised upon understanding the human as simply a part of nature. Decentring the human and treating affective and mental life as (...) one would lines, planes, and bodies, as Spinoza claims we must in Ethics, invites another way of thinking about the politics and ethics of educational practice. Enacting experimental approaches to pedagogy produces new subjectivities and also invents new connections and relations between different bodies and different ideas. I argue that a properly Spinozist understanding of education would require it to be understood through practices of experimentation, in short, developing capabilities to compose relations in such a way that one also develops a the awareness of oneself as finite, dependent, vulnerable and as a part of nature. Seemingly paradoxically then, having understood how and that one is determined, and which bodies agree or disagree with one, one becomes more capable of agency and thus an ethical life. (shrink)

The theory of knowledge objectification, initially presented and developed by Luis Radford, has gained some traction in the field of mathematics education. As with any developing theory, its presentation contains statements that may contradict its stated intents; and these problems are exacerbated in its uptake into the work of other scholars. The purpose of this study is to articulate a Spinozist-Marxian approach, in which the objectification exists not in things—semiotic means that mediate interactions—but as real relation between people. As a (...) consequence, the concept of mediation is unnecessary and can be abandoned. A concrete classroom example from Radford’s own studies is used to exemplify and develop pertinent issues. In particular, the societal nature of the ideal—a synecdoche of relations between objects that reflect relations between people—should be added and the notion of mediation no longer is required. (shrink)