RE: AUT: Hegel, Althusser, Negri &c

["Adrian Wilding" <adrianwilding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.
>

Just one or two queries / objections about this (and I think I'm
disagreeing with Negri more than your paraphrasing of him). I agree
Spinoza is certainly important to this whole genealogy, but whether he
is the 'absent centre of the tradition' is a bit far-fetched, as anyone
who teaches philosophy will recognise. He has always been an essential
part of the tradition. Now it may well be that the interpretation of
Spinoza which Negri wants to give is novel and hence neglected, but
that's another matter.

> 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.

This is ironic as no-one is more at odds with Heideggerian ontology than
Hegel. Indeed a cursory reading of Hegel makes you realise that ontology
should not be 'first philosophy' ; it should not even be last
philosophy. Ontology (all of it, from Heidegger to Sartre back to
Spinoza) is exploded in the first few pages of Hegel's greater 'Logic'.
To 'think being' we need _to think_, and hence use concepts. Ontology
cannot do without epistemology, the 'labour of the concept' (Hegel),
precisely what Heidegger would like to reject. Look at the
unacknowledged contradictions Heidegger gets caught in by trying to
'name' Being. They culminate in a poetry that is indistinguishable from
mysticism. Adorno's 'Negative Dialectic' should be read on this point.

 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.

I would like to see how Spinoza or Spinozism has a more elaborate idea
of contradiction than Hegel !

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.

The term 'singularities' is over-used and under-theorised. I suspect it
succumbs to Hegel's critique of the medieval idea of haeccity -  Hegel
points out that nothing singular can be described without invoking
universals. The singularity is a atomised substance, a monad, and hence
fetishises immediacy and uniqueness, in a way not dissimilar to liberal
ideology.


> 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.

The subject is both constitutive and constituted, determining and
determined. Without this Hegelian insight you court spontaneism.

> Negri returns to Spinoza, because he is a thinker of
> plentitude, community, love, unity and fullness of
> being, and of subjectivity as effect.

Each one of which is open to critique.

> 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.

Read Adorno's Negative Dialectic which concedes this point but produces
a better alternative.
Even Adorno is unfair to Hegel here; object and concept are for the
latter always in a relation of identity _and_ non-identity.

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.
>
'the people' is an abstraction of liberal political thought. At least
Hegel in the Philosophy of Right (for all that book's faults) sees the
forces militating against democracy as the differing interests of the
estates and the classes. In Spinoza there is no politics based around
conflicts such as these.

Adrian



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