RE: AUT: Hegel, Althusser, Negri &c

[rainzed rainzed <rainzed@xxxxxxxxx>]

> > 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.

Though 'absent centre' is Althusser's term, not
Negri's. Also philosophy is not taught nor thought in
the same way everywhere, and canonical narratives
differ too, so that doesn't actually help us in
getting to the bottom of the question underhand ?
which I am arguing lies in trying to understand the
particular way Spinozism was revitalised in 60's
France. The Negri essay I referred talks of the
different role that Spinoza played in these traditions
- Hegel is accused of forcing the 'absorption of
'Spinozism into Romanticism'. Here as elsewhere, (see
for instance Macherey's "Avec Spinoza", Negri's
"savage anomolie" &c - different ideologies of
Spinozism, and misinterpretations have been present
over time, differing greatly for instance from the
reaction of Spinoza's contemporaries (who saw him as
an athesist). Althusser talks of Spinoza being 'on the
margins', which is what I reported.

>

> > 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.

Forgive me, but one of my susbtantial points is that
Hegel can only concieve of philosophy as he does,
because of his idealism, because the absolute and the
(labour of the negative) is essentially the
development of the consciousness of freedom within the
idea, or the concept itself so to speak. Hence being
is not the point of departure, but is a necessary
point of mediation (Hegel in some parts of the Logic
almost apologises for talking of concrete
life!!!)Hegel can formally disregard ontology because
his whole work is one huge ontological claim.

Ontology does not do without epsitemology in Spinoza
as you suggest ? rather ? the whole point of spinoza
was to argue that the dualism between thought and
extension which you mildly restate, was a false
problematic. Hence I refer you back to the question of
?adequacy? in Spinoza.

I don't know what you mean here. Why is it that people
always refer to the first pages of Hegel's logic and
never its broader content - could it be that no one
actually reads the greater logic anymore, or is it
like the great Hegelian concept of Capital where we
can deduce all the nuances of the objective world by
totalising the contradiction between use and exchange
value? You have otherwise misunderstood me, or I have
misled you, Negri is highly critical of Heidegger and
where he took Hegel. Negri defines Hegel's modernity,
his project as the "the peace of the real' ? Negri
refers to Heidegger to argue the latter is ?a
hinge-point opening onto anti-modernity, that is,
opening onto a conception of time as an ontologically
constitutive relation which breaks the hegemomy of
substance or the transcendental, and therefore opens
onto power.?



>  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 !

Simply because the contradiction in Hegel is only the
contradiciton within thoughts development within
itself (hence identity and non-identity), whereas the
argument of Althusser was that material reality is a
complex of different levels of contradiction that are
not reducible to a singular narrative of emergence.
This is basic stuff really.I didn?t say Spinoza?s use
of contradiction was more nuanced, it is in fact a
different approach.


> 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.
>

There is something in this, and I can?t answer it
fully. I agree singularity lacks definition. I
understand singularity as means of talking
philsophically about finite subject entities that are
not ideologically constructed?.such as is inevitable
with the idea of individuality (that?s Bourgeois
reason for you). It is probably closer to the idea of
the ?particular? in Hegel. But as for Spinozism being
a theory of atomised entities, nothing could be
further from the truth, the quasi universal here that
allows for us to talk of singularity, is substance,
belonging to nature. You should take a look at chapter
2 of Ilyenkov's Dialectical logic, for quite a
Hegelian rendering of the same point.

> > 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.

You have a problem with sponteaneity, maybe you could
have inferred from my comments that I don?t!

> > 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.

Agreed. Please begin.

> > 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.

?in a closed process!

> 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.


A nice a-historical point in conclusion! I always
thought the problem with this C17th thinker was the
lack of class politics! Blimey! Yet Hegel saw the
resolution of that antagonism in a bureaucratic class
identifying with the state and enacting the universal
? revolutionary stuff huh? It is exactly this finality
which is perhaps being attacked in the French thought
we were discussing ? the progress ends up as a circle
? right back to those first pages of the Science of
Logic you mentioned, or worse simply in death as Negri
would have it.

?The time of power is therefore made up of eternity,
inasmuch as constiuitive action resides in presence.
The eternity which is presupposed here is shown as the
result, the horizon of the affirmation of action. Time
is the plenitutde of love. TO Heideggerian nothingness
correpsonds Spinozist plenitude ? or rather the
paradox of eternity, of the plenitude of the present
world, the splendor of singularity. The concept of
modernity is burned by love.?

(Love here is meant as a particular type of
intellectual love between the parts that make up a
whole, though when I first came across it I found it
hard to disassociate from its christian
connotations?H&N tread a fine line here, but hell, so
does Hegel). If even in its highest modern
elaboration, the absolute has as its premise its own
result, where does this leave us? Acting concretely
within depths of the now, as its constituitive forces.


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