It is a short trip into the annals of modern Philosophy...with the necessary concrete touch highly worthy of a reflection...
*
Thoughts out of the "left spectrum", which I think are worthy of a reflection; and I am ready to embrace with one arm, without departing from my teleological "determinants"/ as applied in "The Harmony Model"/ I promote ...
The "Harmony Model" as it goes like :-
*
May Science make it to Perfection
With Time and Space,
New Dimension.
May Culture be pure and Human
Would History cease to be?
For new Culture, Peace and free,
Life is Faith and Faith in Life
For Infinity — Eternity,
Through Harmony
To the Point, the Destiny.
JOY! is the final Act!
*
Through high Hope -Deliverance,
It is real; for the Human to feel the Source.
*
Be it Nature or Universe
With Mankind full of Wisdom
Where the State is History
And the Laws are Freedom.
Where faith and religion
Inspire pure Knowledge
Life for Heavon;
Is a challenge.
For perfection peace and culture.
JOY! is the final Act!
*
Through Harmony the glory purpose
The godly Human would touch the Source.
*
...A Model with more affinity to "Hegel's Absolute Substance" and a touch of some sort of "faith", which is not opposed to Spinozist's "Love" at all.
*
Leaving the substance of the "pre-ontological substance of Being" to be determined by the Beings, who may be dimensioned out of the "substance or non-substance of the pre-ontological Being", whatever that could be,... to get its own resolution through generations of the future, who are in a position to live phenomenologically as well as really and concrete; we should be able to re-dis-cover the "WE" beyond Modernity, i.e.. after the initial dis-covery of the dichotomy of the "I" and "They", which may end up (via the "I" -->> "HE/SHE" vector) in the "WE" of Post-modernity ( if one has successfully overcome nihilism during the process) . I.e. not necessarily in a sense of anti-modernity, but in my opinion, in a Post-Modernism rich with optimism and a principle of Hope.
Nonetheless I like the way Antonio Negri reflects...here:
**************
Interesting..........Extracts....Spinoza's Anti-Modernity.....Antonio Negri
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm
"Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory."
*
Consequently,
intellectual Love is what sheds light on the paradox of the
multitude and its becoming-community, since intellectual Love
alone describes the real mechanism which leads potentia from
the multitude to determining itself as the unity of an absolute
political order: the potestas democratic
*
These processes, on the
contrary, are always complete and always open, and the space
which gives itself between completion and opening is that of
absolute power, total freedom, the path of liberation.
***
>>>>>>>Here more quotations out of the link>>>>>>>>>>
"Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory."
*
Consequently,
intellectual Love is what sheds light on the paradox of the
multitude and its becoming-community, since intellectual Love
alone describes the real mechanism which leads potentia from
the multitude to determining itself as the unity of an absolute
political order: the potestas democratic
*
These processes, on the
contrary, are always complete and always open, and the space
which gives itself between completion and opening is that of
absolute power, total freedom, the path of liberation.
***
>>>>>>>Here more quotations out of the link>>>>>>>>>>
Spinoza's Anti-Modernity http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm
Without Spinoza it is impossible to philosophize,
but outside of dialectics it is impossible to be modern.
Modernity is the peace of the real, it is the fulfillment of history.
*
Here too, dialectics would be in a position to
restitute the being of reality and would contribute, through this
concretization of time, to elaborating the definition of modernity.
*
sub specie aeternitatis
What remains is the second Spinozian definition of time, as
presence and opening-up of power, sub specie aeternitatis. Now,
how might one be opposed to that Spinozian definition of Dasein,
or rather of the determinate being of the mode, which in its
singularity is irreducible to Gewordensein, and which radically
opposes determinate being to any dialectical synthesis? Hegel is
especially conscious of this objection when he claims that the
dialectical concept of temporality does not nullify concrete
determination—in other words, that the event, the determination
(as act, Bestimmung, as well as as result, Bestimmtheit) remains
in its concreteness.
*
Hegel is
especially conscious of this objection when he claims that the
dialectical concept of temporality does not nullify concrete
determination—in other words, that the event, the determination
(as act, Bestimmung, as well as as result, Bestimmtheit) remains
in its concreteness. If the time of modernity is that of fulfillment,
this fulfillment of the real could not mystify or conceal the
splendor of the event.
*
Hegel can well attempt the inversion of power, but this process
takes on the appearance of a sophism, since the goal pursued is
to reassert the same power. Hegel may indeed denounce in
Spinozian being the violence of an irreducible presence and push
it towards indifference and nothingness. But each time that this
singular presence reappears, the reality that Hegel claims to be
void, reveals itself on the contrary to be charged with all
positivities, openings, and singular potentialities. Hegel may
indeed consider the perspective of a time conceived as indefinite
duration to be unsatisfactory, but he can only oppose a repetitive
and sterile transcendental movement to a theoretical practice of
time where the latter appears charged with present
determinations. It is here that the Hegelian system is
endangered, here, when the time of modernity as fulfillment of
the historical development opposes itself to the emergence of
singularity, of the positive time of Dasein, of Spinozian presence.
*
The fate of modernity
The real, that is, modernity, is "the immediate unity of essence
and existence, in other words, of the inner and the outer, in the
shape of dialectic."
substance and power, Wirklichkeit and
Dasein became increasingly separated.
*
The preeminence
of relations of production over productive forces detaches itself
from the Hegelian utopia of the absolute and takes on the garb of
reformist teleology. The schemes of indefinite duration, running
counter to those of the dialectical infinite, are renewed as
projects of the progressive rationality of domination. Modernity
changes sheets without changing beds
*
Heidegger represents the extreme limit of this process, a
process which is perfectly integrated, if it is true that one of the
goals of Sein und Zeit is to rethink the transcendental
schematism,17 but a process which, at the very moment when it
is starting off again on the usual tracks, is completely thrown off.
*
If to interpret the meaning of Being becomes our
task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be
interrogated; it is also that entity which already
comports itself, in its Being, towards what we
are asking about when we ask this question. But
in that case the question of Being is nothing
other than the radicalization of an essential
tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein
itself—the pre-ontological understanding of
Being
*
Effectivity is no longer Hegelian
Wirklichkeit but a crude Faktizität. Modernity is fate. In the last
pages of Sein und Zeit, against Hegel’s mediation and Absolute
Spirit, Heidegger asserts that
Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the
contrary, starts with the 'concretion' of factically
thrown existence itself in order to unveil
temporality as that which primordially makes
such existence possible. 'Spirit' does not first fall
into time, but it exists as the primordial
temporalizing of temporality . . . 'Spirit' does not
fall into time; but factical existence 'falls' as
falling from primordial, authentic temporality.
*
The nostalgic
Hegelian demand of Bestimmung becomes a desperate
Entschlossenheit in Heidegger—a deliberation and a resolution of
the opening of Dasein to its own truth, which is nothingness. The
music which provided the rhythm of the dance of determination
and of the transcendental has come to an end.
*
Heidegger is not only the prophet of the fate of modernity. At the
same time as he divides, he is also a hinge-point opening onto
anti-modernity, that is, opening onto a conception of time as an
ontologi-cally constitutive relation which breaks the hegemony of
substance or the transcendental, and therefore opens onto
power
" 'We'
presuppose truth because 'we', being in the kind of Being which
Dasein possesses, are 'in the truth'."21 But Dasein—and this is
implied in the constitution of being as care—is ahead of itself
each time.
*
Openness and discovery belong in an
essential manner to being and the power-to-be of Dasein as
being-in-the-world. For Dasein, the issue is its power-to-bein-
the-world, and conjointly, the discovering circumspect
preoccupation with inner-worldly being. In the constitution of the
being of Dasein as care, in being-ahead-of-itself, the most
originary "presupposing" is included
*
Under
the same ontological conditions, love takes the place of "care."
Spinoza systematically inverts Heidegger: to Angst (anxiety) he
Spinoza's Anti-Modernity http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm
6 von 13 02.02.2009 11:40
opposes Amor, to Umsicht (circumspection) he opposes Mens, to
Entschlossenheit (resolution) he opposes Cupiditas, to
Anwesenheit (being-present) he opposes the Conatus, to
Besorgen (concern) he opposes Appetitus, to Möglichkeit
(possibility) he opposes Potentia. In this opposition, an
anti-purposive presence and possibility unite that which different
orientations of ontology divide.
*
From the same horizon, two constitutive
directions open up: if Heidegger settles his accounts with
modernity, Spinoza (who never entered into modernity) shows
the untamable force of an anti-modernity which is completely
projected into the future.
*
Love in Spinoza expresses the time of
power, a time which is presence, insofar as it is action which is
constitutive of eternity.
The formal condition of
the identity of presence and eternity is given before all.
"Whatever the Mind understands sub specie aeternitatis, it
understands not from the fact that it conceives the Body's
present actual existence, but from the fact that it conceives the
Body's essence sub specie aeternitatis."
*
"Insofar as our Mind knows itself and the Body
under a species of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God,
and knows that it is in God and is conceived through God."
*
The
ultimate explanation is to be found in Proposition 32:
Out of the third kind of knowledge, there
necessarily arises an intellectual Love of God.
For out of this kind of knowledge there arises
(by P32) Joy, accompanied by the idea of God
as its cause, i.e. (by Def. Aff. VI), Love of God,
not insofar as we imagine him as • present (by
P29), but insofar as we understand God to be
eternal. And this is what I call intellectual love of
God
*
Eternity is therefore a formal dimension of presence. But now
here is the reversal and the explanation: "Although this Love
toward God has had no beginning (by P33), it still has all the
perfections of Love, just as if it had come to be."26 Beware,
then, of falling into the trap of duration: "If we attend to the
common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed
conscious of the eternity of their Mind, but that they confuse it
with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory,
which they believe remains after death."27 Parallel to this:
This Love the Mind has must be related to its
actions (by P32C and IIIP3); it is, then, an action
by which the Mind contemplates itself, with the
accompanying idea of God as its cause (by P32
and P32C) . ... so (by P35), this Love of the
Mind has is part of the infinite love by which God
loves himself
*
This Love the Mind has must be related to its
actions (by P32C and IIIP3); it is, then, an action
by which the Mind contemplates itself, with the
accompanying idea of God as its cause (by P32
and P32C) . ... so (by P35), this Love of the
Mind has is part of the infinite love by which God
loves himself.28
*
Spinoza's Anti-Modernity http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm
*
Out of this we clearly understand wherein
consists our salvation, or blessedness, or
Freedom, viz. in a constant and eternal Love of
God, or in God's Love for men . . . For insofar
as it [this Love] is related to God (by P35), it is
Joy
What I wish to say is that intellectual Love is the formal
condition of socialization, and that the communitarian process is
the ontological condition of intellectual Love.
*
Consequently,
intellectual Love is what sheds light on the paradox of the
multitude and its becoming-community, since intellectual Love
alone describes the real mechanism which leads potentia from
the multitude to determining itself as the unity of an absolute
political order: the potestas democratic
*
These processes, on the
contrary, are always complete and always open, and the space
which gives itself between completion and opening is that of
absolute power, total freedom, the path of liberation.
*
The
negation of Utopia in Spinoza takes place thanks to the total
cooptation of the power of liberation onto a horizon of presence:
presence imposes realism as against utopia, and utopia opens
presence onto constitutive projection.
*
Contrary to what Hegel
wished for, measurelessness and presence cohabit on a terrain
of absolute determination and absolute freedom. There is no
ideal, nothing transcendental, no incomplete project which could
fill the opening, satisfy or fill a gap in freedom. Openness,
disproportion, and the Absolute are completed and closed in a
presence beyond which only a new presence can be given. Love
ren ders presence eternal, the collectivity renders singularity
absolute.
*
When Heidegger develops his social phenomenology of
singularity, between the inauthenticity of inter-worldliness and the
authenticity of being-in-the-world, he develops a polemic against
the transcendental which is analogous to that waged by Spinoza,
but once again the circle of the crisis of modernity closes on him
and productive power convulses itself in nothingness. On the
contrary, in determination, in joy, Spinozist love exalts that which
it finds in the horizon of temporality and constitutes it as
collectivity. Spinoza's anti-modernity explodes here in an
irresistible manner, as analysis and exposition of productive force
constituted ontologically as collectivity.
*
The cycle of definition of modernity inaugurated by Hegel—in
other words, the cycle in which the reduction of power to the
absolute transcendental form reaches its apex, and
consequently, in which the crisis of relation is dominated by the
exorcism of power and its reduction to irrationality and
nothingness—thus reaches completion. And it is here that
Spinozism conquers a place in contemporary philosophy, no
longer merely as an historica1 indicator but as an active
paradigm.
*
It is on this basis that Spinozism acts as the catalyst of an
alternative in the definition of modernity.
*
On the terrain of the alternative, we find compromise positions
well-versed in the art of mediation—such as those of Habermas,
who over the course of the long development of his theory of
modernity 35 has never successfully overcome the feeble and
bland repetitiveness of the pages where Hegel constructs
modernity phenomenologically as absoluteness forming itself in
interaction and incompletion.
Certain contemporary authors have happily
announced our definition of Spinoza's anti-modernity. Thus
Altbusser:
Spinoza's philosophy introduced an
unprecedented theoretical revolution into the
history of philosophy, probably the greatest
philosophical revolution of all time, to the point
that we can regard Spinoza as Marx's only direct
ancestor, from the philosophical standpoint.
*
Why? Because Spinoza is the founder of an absolutely original
conception of praxis without teleology, because he thought the
presence of the cause in its effects and the very existence of
structure in its effects and in presence. "The whole existence of
the structure consists of its effects . . . the structure, which is
merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing
outside its effects."37 For Foucault, Spinoza transforms this
foundationless structural originality into a mechanism of the
production of norms, which base themselves on a collective
present:
And thereby one sees that, for the philosopher,
to posit the question of belonging to this present
will no longer be the question of belonging to a
doctrine or a tradition, it will no longer be the
simple question of belonging to the human
community in general, but that of belonging to a
certain "We", to a We which relates to a cultural
whole which is characteristic of its own actuality.
It is that We which becomes the object of his
own reflection for the philosopher, and thereby
the impossibility of ignoring the philosopher’s
questioning of his singular belonging to that We
is asserted. All of this, philosophy as
problematization of an actuality and questioning
by the philosopher of that actuality of which he is
a part, and in relation to which he has to situate
himself, might well characterize philosophy as
the discourse of modernity and on modernity.
*
It is from this position that Foucault can propose a "political
history of truth" or a "political economy of the will to
know"39—from a position which reverses the concept of
modernity as fate to show it as presence and belonging. For
Deleuze, lastly, Spinoza pushes the immanence of praxis in the
present to the limit of the triumph of the untimely over
effectivity—and the subject, here, finds itself as collective
subject, presented in Spinozist fashion as the result of a
reciprocal movement of the inner and the outer, on the flattened
presence of a world which is always reopened to absolute
possibility.40 Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory.
*
Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory.
but outside of dialectics it is impossible to be modern.
Modernity is the peace of the real, it is the fulfillment of history.
*
Here too, dialectics would be in a position to
restitute the being of reality and would contribute, through this
concretization of time, to elaborating the definition of modernity.
*
sub specie aeternitatis
What remains is the second Spinozian definition of time, as
presence and opening-up of power, sub specie aeternitatis. Now,
how might one be opposed to that Spinozian definition of Dasein,
or rather of the determinate being of the mode, which in its
singularity is irreducible to Gewordensein, and which radically
opposes determinate being to any dialectical synthesis? Hegel is
especially conscious of this objection when he claims that the
dialectical concept of temporality does not nullify concrete
determination—in other words, that the event, the determination
(as act, Bestimmung, as well as as result, Bestimmtheit) remains
in its concreteness.
*
Hegel is
especially conscious of this objection when he claims that the
dialectical concept of temporality does not nullify concrete
determination—in other words, that the event, the determination
(as act, Bestimmung, as well as as result, Bestimmtheit) remains
in its concreteness. If the time of modernity is that of fulfillment,
this fulfillment of the real could not mystify or conceal the
splendor of the event.
*
Hegel can well attempt the inversion of power, but this process
takes on the appearance of a sophism, since the goal pursued is
to reassert the same power. Hegel may indeed denounce in
Spinozian being the violence of an irreducible presence and push
it towards indifference and nothingness. But each time that this
singular presence reappears, the reality that Hegel claims to be
void, reveals itself on the contrary to be charged with all
positivities, openings, and singular potentialities. Hegel may
indeed consider the perspective of a time conceived as indefinite
duration to be unsatisfactory, but he can only oppose a repetitive
and sterile transcendental movement to a theoretical practice of
time where the latter appears charged with present
determinations. It is here that the Hegelian system is
endangered, here, when the time of modernity as fulfillment of
the historical development opposes itself to the emergence of
singularity, of the positive time of Dasein, of Spinozian presence.
*
The fate of modernity
The real, that is, modernity, is "the immediate unity of essence
and existence, in other words, of the inner and the outer, in the
shape of dialectic."
substance and power, Wirklichkeit and
Dasein became increasingly separated.
*
The preeminence
of relations of production over productive forces detaches itself
from the Hegelian utopia of the absolute and takes on the garb of
reformist teleology. The schemes of indefinite duration, running
counter to those of the dialectical infinite, are renewed as
projects of the progressive rationality of domination. Modernity
changes sheets without changing beds
*
Heidegger represents the extreme limit of this process, a
process which is perfectly integrated, if it is true that one of the
goals of Sein und Zeit is to rethink the transcendental
schematism,17 but a process which, at the very moment when it
is starting off again on the usual tracks, is completely thrown off.
*
If to interpret the meaning of Being becomes our
task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be
interrogated; it is also that entity which already
comports itself, in its Being, towards what we
are asking about when we ask this question. But
in that case the question of Being is nothing
other than the radicalization of an essential
tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein
itself—the pre-ontological understanding of
Being
*
Effectivity is no longer Hegelian
Wirklichkeit but a crude Faktizität. Modernity is fate. In the last
pages of Sein und Zeit, against Hegel’s mediation and Absolute
Spirit, Heidegger asserts that
Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the
contrary, starts with the 'concretion' of factically
thrown existence itself in order to unveil
temporality as that which primordially makes
such existence possible. 'Spirit' does not first fall
into time, but it exists as the primordial
temporalizing of temporality . . . 'Spirit' does not
fall into time; but factical existence 'falls' as
falling from primordial, authentic temporality.
*
The nostalgic
Hegelian demand of Bestimmung becomes a desperate
Entschlossenheit in Heidegger—a deliberation and a resolution of
the opening of Dasein to its own truth, which is nothingness. The
music which provided the rhythm of the dance of determination
and of the transcendental has come to an end.
*
Heidegger is not only the prophet of the fate of modernity. At the
same time as he divides, he is also a hinge-point opening onto
anti-modernity, that is, opening onto a conception of time as an
ontologi-cally constitutive relation which breaks the hegemony of
substance or the transcendental, and therefore opens onto
power
" 'We'
presuppose truth because 'we', being in the kind of Being which
Dasein possesses, are 'in the truth'."21 But Dasein—and this is
implied in the constitution of being as care—is ahead of itself
each time.
*
Openness and discovery belong in an
essential manner to being and the power-to-be of Dasein as
being-in-the-world. For Dasein, the issue is its power-to-bein-
the-world, and conjointly, the discovering circumspect
preoccupation with inner-worldly being. In the constitution of the
being of Dasein as care, in being-ahead-of-itself, the most
originary "presupposing" is included
*
Under
the same ontological conditions, love takes the place of "care."
Spinoza systematically inverts Heidegger: to Angst (anxiety) he
Spinoza's Anti-Modernity http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm
6 von 13 02.02.2009 11:40
opposes Amor, to Umsicht (circumspection) he opposes Mens, to
Entschlossenheit (resolution) he opposes Cupiditas, to
Anwesenheit (being-present) he opposes the Conatus, to
Besorgen (concern) he opposes Appetitus, to Möglichkeit
(possibility) he opposes Potentia. In this opposition, an
anti-purposive presence and possibility unite that which different
orientations of ontology divide.
*
From the same horizon, two constitutive
directions open up: if Heidegger settles his accounts with
modernity, Spinoza (who never entered into modernity) shows
the untamable force of an anti-modernity which is completely
projected into the future.
*
Love in Spinoza expresses the time of
power, a time which is presence, insofar as it is action which is
constitutive of eternity.
The formal condition of
the identity of presence and eternity is given before all.
"Whatever the Mind understands sub specie aeternitatis, it
understands not from the fact that it conceives the Body's
present actual existence, but from the fact that it conceives the
Body's essence sub specie aeternitatis."
*
"Insofar as our Mind knows itself and the Body
under a species of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God,
and knows that it is in God and is conceived through God."
*
The
ultimate explanation is to be found in Proposition 32:
Out of the third kind of knowledge, there
necessarily arises an intellectual Love of God.
For out of this kind of knowledge there arises
(by P32) Joy, accompanied by the idea of God
as its cause, i.e. (by Def. Aff. VI), Love of God,
not insofar as we imagine him as • present (by
P29), but insofar as we understand God to be
eternal. And this is what I call intellectual love of
God
*
Eternity is therefore a formal dimension of presence. But now
here is the reversal and the explanation: "Although this Love
toward God has had no beginning (by P33), it still has all the
perfections of Love, just as if it had come to be."26 Beware,
then, of falling into the trap of duration: "If we attend to the
common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed
conscious of the eternity of their Mind, but that they confuse it
with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory,
which they believe remains after death."27 Parallel to this:
This Love the Mind has must be related to its
actions (by P32C and IIIP3); it is, then, an action
by which the Mind contemplates itself, with the
accompanying idea of God as its cause (by P32
and P32C) . ... so (by P35), this Love of the
Mind has is part of the infinite love by which God
loves himself
*
This Love the Mind has must be related to its
actions (by P32C and IIIP3); it is, then, an action
by which the Mind contemplates itself, with the
accompanying idea of God as its cause (by P32
and P32C) . ... so (by P35), this Love of the
Mind has is part of the infinite love by which God
loves himself.28
*
Spinoza's Anti-Modernity http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm
*
Out of this we clearly understand wherein
consists our salvation, or blessedness, or
Freedom, viz. in a constant and eternal Love of
God, or in God's Love for men . . . For insofar
as it [this Love] is related to God (by P35), it is
Joy
What I wish to say is that intellectual Love is the formal
condition of socialization, and that the communitarian process is
the ontological condition of intellectual Love.
*
Consequently,
intellectual Love is what sheds light on the paradox of the
multitude and its becoming-community, since intellectual Love
alone describes the real mechanism which leads potentia from
the multitude to determining itself as the unity of an absolute
political order: the potestas democratic
*
These processes, on the
contrary, are always complete and always open, and the space
which gives itself between completion and opening is that of
absolute power, total freedom, the path of liberation.
*
The
negation of Utopia in Spinoza takes place thanks to the total
cooptation of the power of liberation onto a horizon of presence:
presence imposes realism as against utopia, and utopia opens
presence onto constitutive projection.
*
Contrary to what Hegel
wished for, measurelessness and presence cohabit on a terrain
of absolute determination and absolute freedom. There is no
ideal, nothing transcendental, no incomplete project which could
fill the opening, satisfy or fill a gap in freedom. Openness,
disproportion, and the Absolute are completed and closed in a
presence beyond which only a new presence can be given. Love
ren ders presence eternal, the collectivity renders singularity
absolute.
*
When Heidegger develops his social phenomenology of
singularity, between the inauthenticity of inter-worldliness and the
authenticity of being-in-the-world, he develops a polemic against
the transcendental which is analogous to that waged by Spinoza,
but once again the circle of the crisis of modernity closes on him
and productive power convulses itself in nothingness. On the
contrary, in determination, in joy, Spinozist love exalts that which
it finds in the horizon of temporality and constitutes it as
collectivity. Spinoza's anti-modernity explodes here in an
irresistible manner, as analysis and exposition of productive force
constituted ontologically as collectivity.
*
The cycle of definition of modernity inaugurated by Hegel—in
other words, the cycle in which the reduction of power to the
absolute transcendental form reaches its apex, and
consequently, in which the crisis of relation is dominated by the
exorcism of power and its reduction to irrationality and
nothingness—thus reaches completion. And it is here that
Spinozism conquers a place in contemporary philosophy, no
longer merely as an historica1 indicator but as an active
paradigm.
*
It is on this basis that Spinozism acts as the catalyst of an
alternative in the definition of modernity.
*
On the terrain of the alternative, we find compromise positions
well-versed in the art of mediation—such as those of Habermas,
who over the course of the long development of his theory of
modernity 35 has never successfully overcome the feeble and
bland repetitiveness of the pages where Hegel constructs
modernity phenomenologically as absoluteness forming itself in
interaction and incompletion.
Certain contemporary authors have happily
announced our definition of Spinoza's anti-modernity. Thus
Altbusser:
Spinoza's philosophy introduced an
unprecedented theoretical revolution into the
history of philosophy, probably the greatest
philosophical revolution of all time, to the point
that we can regard Spinoza as Marx's only direct
ancestor, from the philosophical standpoint.
*
Why? Because Spinoza is the founder of an absolutely original
conception of praxis without teleology, because he thought the
presence of the cause in its effects and the very existence of
structure in its effects and in presence. "The whole existence of
the structure consists of its effects . . . the structure, which is
merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing
outside its effects."37 For Foucault, Spinoza transforms this
foundationless structural originality into a mechanism of the
production of norms, which base themselves on a collective
present:
And thereby one sees that, for the philosopher,
to posit the question of belonging to this present
will no longer be the question of belonging to a
doctrine or a tradition, it will no longer be the
simple question of belonging to the human
community in general, but that of belonging to a
certain "We", to a We which relates to a cultural
whole which is characteristic of its own actuality.
It is that We which becomes the object of his
own reflection for the philosopher, and thereby
the impossibility of ignoring the philosopher’s
questioning of his singular belonging to that We
is asserted. All of this, philosophy as
problematization of an actuality and questioning
by the philosopher of that actuality of which he is
a part, and in relation to which he has to situate
himself, might well characterize philosophy as
the discourse of modernity and on modernity.
*
It is from this position that Foucault can propose a "political
history of truth" or a "political economy of the will to
know"39—from a position which reverses the concept of
modernity as fate to show it as presence and belonging. For
Deleuze, lastly, Spinoza pushes the immanence of praxis in the
present to the limit of the triumph of the untimely over
effectivity—and the subject, here, finds itself as collective
subject, presented in Spinozist fashion as the result of a
reciprocal movement of the inner and the outer, on the flattened
presence of a world which is always reopened to absolute
possibility.40 Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory.
*
Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory.
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