“I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies. — Baruch Spinoza”
“the core of Spinoza’s ambitious philosophical agenda is an insistence upon the truth, achieved through the operations of reason, regardless of its social and political consequences”
“The three books I consider in this review — Sharp’s aforementioned Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, Knox Peden’s Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, and Antonio Negri’s Spinoza for Our Time — all deal with the question of the political meaning of Spinoza’s writings. Yet in each of them a different Spinozism breathes. Each offers a different answer to the question of what a Spinozist politics might look like, if such can exist at all. What sort of politics might we produce if we, too, understood human “actions and appetites” in terms of their production by “lines, planes, and bodies”?”
“Spinozism as a posture, stance, process, or even set of affects rather than a philosophical system”
“the broader sweep of his “nature,” a term that did not mean anything like “the natural environment,” but simply meant “everything.””
“she argues that the contemplation of the smallness of the human within the cosmic (a wonderful Spinozist theme) counterbalances our anthropocentrism.”
“Spinoza’s image of the intellectual love of God, in all the devotion and asymmetry of that love. As articulated in Ethics, such love comes from our appreciation of necessity, of the way all things partake of the divine essence. Peden glosses this as “aligning the self with broader, rational forces,” and it is the Spinozist version of the very old notion that philosophy isn’t just a method or a set of questions and answers but a practice of self-comportment.”
“While the lineage of subjectivity or consciousness can be traced back to Descartes, in the 20th century it was not just watered but soaked by the aquifer of phenomenology, originating in the Austro-German Edmund Husserl’s meditations on Descartes’s Meditations, revised by Heidegger’s “New Thinking,” and imported to France by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas.”
“The contrast between a Spinozist rationalism of the concept and a Cartesian rationalism of the subject is, essentially, that the former rejects the idea that the cogito (i.e., of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am) is the starting point for philosophy, something upon which Descartes insisted. Concepts are not consciousness.”
“interested in thinking beyond the limits of the human subject, in contemplating concepts that exist whether or not they are known by the mind”
“efforts to get a constructive politics out of Spinozism always fail, in a fashion evoked by Ferdinand Alquié’s claim that “nothing disorients us more than philosophy precisely because it takes us out of the world to something that is not a world.””
“Peden’s book reveals French Spinozism to be not a passage through which philosophy manifests in the world via practices of living (including political ones) but rather an obsession with concepts that sometimes demands specific styles of comportment within the world.”
“Hardt and Negri’s Spinozism has always seemed to go beyond “mere” critique; it involves making Spinoza into the prophet of a new world order. Spinoza for Our Time extends and reflects back upon the trilogy of longer, mosaic-like (sometimes Guernica-like, in their kaleidoscopic ambition) books that Negri wrote with Hardt: Empire (2000), Multitude (2005), Commonwealth (2009).”
“Beginning in Empire, which mapped what Gopal Balakrishnan calls an “acephelous supranational order,” the result of globalization, they presented Spinoza as standing for a form of desire that affirms life (they followed Hegel’s view of Spinoza, in this regard) and translates into a “vital politics” in which a collectivity organizes itself and takes action, challenging empire with another kind of power — a kind of power to which late capitalism turns out to be, Hardt and Negri tell us, all too vulnerable. This power, according to Hardt and Negri, is born out of the multitude’s tendencies toward movement, one key example of which is the movement of workers seeking a better life across state borders.”