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Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity

ANTONIO NEGRI New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013; 125 pp.; \$24.00 (hardback)
BRANDON D. C. FENTON
Dialogue / FirstView Article / September 2015, pp 1 - 3
DOI: 10.1017/S0012217315000530, Published online: 01 June 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0012217315000530

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Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity

ANTONIO NEGRI

New York: Columbia University Press, 2013; 125 pp.; $24.00 (hardback)
doi:10.1017/S0012217315000530
The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri is perhaps most well-known for
co-authoring the book Empire (2000), along with Michael Hardt, but he has long
been an active voice and agent of leftist political thought in Europe. The year 1991 saw
the English language publication of Negris The Savage Anomaly, an important work
dedicated to revealing the contemporary significance of the political thought of Spinoza.
The book reviewed here connects with and advances several strands of thought from
that earlier work. However, although each section of Spinoza for Our Time covers some
common elements, its chapters do not, as a whole, display a clearly unified progression
of purpose. This is because each of its four main chapters is derived from various
conference presentations given from 2005 to 2009.
The introduction to the collected papers makes up about a third of the books length
and sees Negri defending his earlier interpretation of Spinoza as reawakening the
possibility of willing and acting consciously to transform or overthrow the capitalist
mode of production, of asserting human equality and the human common (2-3). But he
is not here speaking of some disconnected or merely personal reawakening. Indeed,
Negri characterizes Spinoza as a radically subversive political thinker whose project
remains outside the bounds of modernist and individualist political thought. The modernist approach to politics, against which Negri positions Spinoza, is characterised in
terms of neo-liberal contracts and pacts which are taken to stand as a necessary safeguard against the inevitable social evils presumed to otherwise follow in their absence.
The modern view, according to Negri, is a thoroughly individualistic and transcendent
approach to politics, which places one or another version of the sovereign in the seat of
power. Contrary to this model, Negri draws primarily from Spinozas Ethics to present
us with a political ontology of an immanent and creative power of resistance and
renewal that is made manifest by way of the vital force of natural common desires
embodied in the subjective singularities that make up the multitude. This vision is one
of a fluid and ever-evolving democracy that is both perpetually constituted and
sustained by the common desiring of these singularities in the form of the multitude.
Dialogue (2015), Page 1 of 3.
Canadian Philosophical Association /Association canadienne de philosophie 2015

Dialogue

Chapter One develops further the notion of the dominant modern political consciousness as a thoroughly individualistic vehicle of capital that not only imposes the rule of
a sovereignbased on the onto-theological conception of the Onebut also deprives
subjects of the ability to recognize their own singular [productive and political]
potency (37) while simultaneously suppressing any justifications for resistance or
revolt. In opposition to this form of alienation that is justified as necessity, Negri
develops further the Spinozist conception of immanence as being-against. And this
being-against of Spinozas philosophy is doubly heretical in that it both breaks with the
commands of the dominant order while utterly refusing the notion of transcendence.
The politics of immanence, according to Negri, is creatively and interdependently
constructed through the conscious and imaginative production of the common.
In Chapter Two, Negri contrasts what he takes to be the ontological and political
implications of Heideggerian thought with that of Spinoza. Here, it is suggested that,
while Heideggers philosophy of Da-Sein likewise represents a rupture with modernity
in the sense that it too rejects the dominant notion of transcendence (and its associated
problems), it nevertheless fails to generate a positive account of political power or
potency in its absence; focusing instead upon nothingness and being-toward-death as
the most authentic determination of Da-Sein. Against this inherent emptiness at the
centre of Heideggers view, Negri instead proposes a Spinozist fullness of potential in
being. In short, although there are several points of contact between the two thinkers,
Negri concludes that the most significant difference between them can be presented in
terms of the empty presence of Heidegger vs. the ontological plenitude of Spinoza,
whereby the vision of plenitude is to be preferred given its understanding of and significance for the construction of the common as radical resistance to the dominant power
of capitalism and its current political order.
Chapter Three sees Negri developing and defending his 1968-inspired reading of the
Spinozist notions of singularity and multitude and their relation. Here, a singularity, for
Negri, is to be understood as something which always exists in the same perspective
as eternity (72) and is thus partially defined in terms of an eternal substance that is
nonindividual and nevertheless self-transforming by way of interindividual rapport.
This means that the singularity is within the common as multitude and is expressed
as creative and constructive force that takes shape and mutates along with the selfconstitution of the multitude through praxis.
The final chapter is dedicated to exposing the differences between Spinozist thought
and standard approaches to sociology as well as saying something about what a
Spinozist sociology might look like. From this latter perspective, Negri tells us that the
social is political (98) and that seeing that this is so enables us to recover the collective
potency and power of our common desiring, efforts, and imagination to reconstruct a
more equitable and life-promoting political basis for our common existence. This,
according to Negri, is Democracy [a]s an act of love (98). But it is not at all the kind
of romantic or possessive individual love that is characteristic of the modern era; rather,
it is love as subversive force creatively constituted by the multitude for the benefit
of all.
Spinoza for Our Time is a hopeful collection of articles aimed at provoking us to
imagine along with the author that the collective of singularities that form the multitude
are capable of recognizing their inherent power and of effectively wielding it by the
light of the common to transform the sphere of politics into a more genuinely democratic and life-affirming space. It is a short book, and Negri leaves it to us in many

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 3

places to see what such a radical shift of perspective in the general political being could
amount to. Many philosophers will likely want to hear much more about what the
Spinozist notions covered here practically entailto them I suggest starting with
Negris The Savage Anomaly, followed by his trilogy of books co-authored with
Hardtbut I suspect that others will agree that we are long past due to reimagine
what may come next together.
BRANDON D. C. FENTON

York University