Re: AUT: Hegel, Althusser, Negri &c

[rainzed rainzed <rainzed@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've been following this discussion on a friends
computer and thought I'd intervene.

I think the missing link to make sense of some of
these debates is the role of Spinoza. Althusser
inaugurated (liscensed?) the rediscovery of Spinoza in
60's french philosophy, terming him the 'absent
centre' of the philosophical tradition. His sketchy
work on the philosopher claimed him as only direct
ancestor of Marx, in the sense that Spinoza saw
effects as interior to structure, i.e. structure as
not existing outside of its objects. In the Self
Criticism works, Althusser claimed Spinoza was the
insipiraiton for the infamous 'theoretical
anti-humanism' and we might add the critiques of the
teleology of hegelian dialectics.

Negri thinks outside of these particular paradigms,
but his philosophical leanings appear to be much
influenced by the thought associated with Althusser's
circle - Pierre Macherey (who argued for sturcturalist
interpretation of literature, and went on to be
perhaps number one reader of Spinoza in France),
Alexandre Matheron, Balibar (spinoza and Politics)
aswell as a slightly different tradition in the work
of Deleuze. One can find healthy approvals of a number
of these works in for instance Negri's recent essay,
Spinoza's anti-modernity. One should also consult
Montag's _bodies masses and power.

In his essay, Negri argues that the fate of Hegel's
modernity culminates in Heidegger, it results in a
preoccupation with nothingness, whereas that
dialectical tradition had at first seen itself as
resulting in plentitude. Hence the quite inchoate
Althusserian critique of the simple contradiction in
Hegel, and the teleologies of subject centred reason,
have in Negri and others been fleshed out and given a
much fuller articulation in Spinozism. This has
certain affinities with Althusser in the sense that in
his interpetation of Hegel, totality is a result, the
absolute is arrived at and can not be presupposed (see
Althusser's book the Spectre of Hegel)without
historical or logical movement of becoming. The
de-temporalisation of presence, the termination of the
philsophical conception of being in terms of duration,
allowed for what Althusser could not have envisaged in
his wildest dreams, the return of an ontology of
production, of affective determinating behaviour in
the form of singularities. This flys in the face of
much contemporary scholarship, the crude and base
criticsms by Thompson etc, that failed to see in so
called 'structuralism' the basis of a new insistence
on the power of production.

As far as I understand it, Negri's critique of Hegel,
in so far as he has one in Marx beyond Marx, is simply
that Marx wrongly chose his particular mode of
presentation, which restricted the exposition of
thought into tight categories that negated the
constitutive role of the subject. Hence Negri's
critique of capital, is implicitly a criqitue of
Althusser as he uncovers the continued reliance on
Hegel in Marx's later works. But Althusser is still
right in the sense that Marx broke with Hegel's
systematic dialectics - Negri is right in that Marx
retained the formal mode of exposition of those
dialectics, and right to criticise him for the
negation of constitutive class subjectivity that
entailed. Althusser was right in attacking the notion
that Marx's dialectics were subjective, historical
dialectics of origin and emergence - Negri implicitly
attacks the objectivism of Althusser's marxism, and
gives it a different ontological materialist
foundation.

Negri returns to Spinoza, because he is a thinker of
plentitude, community, love, unity and fullness of
being, and of subjectivity as effect. He shares with
Althusser the admiration of the concept of adequacy in
Spinoza, where thought is identical with its object.
What Hegel criqitiqued in Spinoza was the lack of
inner unity between defintions and axioms and modes,
perhaps what Garaudy was thinking of when he lambasted
Althusser's affection for this 'dogmatic rationalist'.
But the correct reply to this is to percieve that it
is only when thought its identical with the notion,
with the absolute - in short simple contradiction,
that such a systematic unity could be possible in
Hegel in the first place. Where Althusser went wrong,
and Negri puts him right, was in not going beyond
Marx, wheras Althusser's desire for fidelity led him
to denounce Marx's own Hegelian impostures, Negri goes
beyond Marx materially, historically, - in the respect
to outlining the limits of Marx's own prescience. What
Negri and others find in spinoza, is exactly what
Althusser wrongly claimed to find consistent in Marx:
that he consistently presupposes the material totality
(e.g. in Capital where the specfic object totality
needs to be thought first in abstraction).

Both Negri and Althusser's critique of hegel seem to
be critiques of predetermination - and especially in
Negri, the critique of modernity. Hegel leads to a
formal and conceptually external notion of democracy,
whereas Spinoza furnishes us with a one based in the
immanent and immediate power of being, of subjects not
reducible to their concept. Hegel's mediated
determination found a response in Althusser's
over-mediation (and philosophical, not political) that
comes very close to indeterminacy (though that lonely
hour never quite comes). In Negri speaking 'with' not
'about' Spinoza, we come back to a critique of
mediation, (dasein with brass knobs on) that puts the
power of determination right back in the hands of
people as a practical immediate power.

cheers,
Bananaman

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