Peter Gratton Reviews "Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization"

Peter Gratton reviews Hasana Sharp's Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (University of Chicago Press, 2011) for Society and Space (here). If I've understood Peter correctly, this review will be of interest if: 1) you've dabbled in post-Althusserian or Deleuzian interpretations of Spinoza; 2) you think that politics is mischaracterized when it is conceptualized around the transcendence of the Other; and/or 3) you have an interest in contemporary debates over materialism/realism and discussions of immanence. It's more than likely that a large majority of visitors to The Notes Taken fall into one or more of these categories.

I've been meaning to read Sharp's book for my not-so-urgent research into a paper I'd like to write, echoing a title of Pierre Macherey's, entitled "Schelling or Spinoza."

In Peter's words:

I have my own quibbles about the states of immanentism today, but nevertheless Sharp is convincing that one must first traverse Spinoza’s immanentist and naturalistic philosophy in a way that to my mind has never been done widely, whether we think ourselves post-Nietzschean or not. The element of the transcendent, if not the transcendental, conceived in terms of rights, the Other, the duties of practical reason, etc., still marks how we think the space of the political, and Sharp’s task is to have us think wholly otherwise, if not of the wholly Other.

What Sharp argues for is a “politics of renaturalization”. This surely is her most controversial claim, given the ways in which, throughout the era of the regimes of the biopolitical, nature has been used as the nom de guerre of the pernicious splits in society along racial, nationalistic, and patriarchal lines. But in true Spinozistic fashion, Sharp makes her points in ways that do less to anger her discursive partners than to build alliances by showing how the “denaturalizing” claims of feminists and critical race theorists are anything but anathema to her own project, though they need to be attenuated in terms of their “social constructivism.”

Unemployed Negativity on Treme and Negri

 
I've been catching up with my blog subscription/RSS feed list over the last few days, and imagine my surprise when, searching through Jason Read's Unemployed Negativity, I found his recent remarks on Treme while I was looking for his review of Antonio Negri's recent Spinoza et nous (his third book on Spinoza). I thought the latter would be of some interest, as I've been thinking about reading something by Negri again (this always falters due to the amount of Rancière/Sartre/Marx/Hegel that I've stacked in the 'to read' pile). Read writes:

Negri’s little book, a series of essays on Spinoza covering democracy, Spinoza and Heidegger, and a sociology of the affects, is presented as both a defense of his particular interpretation of Spinoza, which began with The Savage Anomaly, and of what is stake in the general turn to Spinoza. With respect to the latter, Negri argues that the return to Spinoza should be given the conspicuous date of 1968. This is its date in intellectual history, following the publication of Matheron and Deleuze’s studies, but it also places it within the post-68 crisis of Marxism and transformation of capital. As Negri argues, the crisis of Marxism opened the turn to Spinoza.

While you are there, check out his remarks on the first season of Treme. I recently watched Treme (after, surprise, surprise, watching The Wire), and I think it is a remarkable portrayal of tragedy and joy, which is not something I often say about television shows. By the first episode, which a few of my friends found to be a bit long, I was hooked by the music, which is front and center in the narrative. Here's Jason again:

Treme is very much about New Orleans, about its cultural, geographical, and historical specificity. [...] the first show was bleak, tragic even, in its outlook. While the second has preserved much of Simon’s skepticism [from The Wire] of American government and capital, illustrated by the massive failure of every institution that became synonymous with Katrina, it has moments of pure joy, culinary and musical, the likes of which are never seen on television.[...]

[He continues:] Treme is mostly about people who are outsiders, who function outside of institutions, at least official ones. The police, politicians, and reporters are still there, but they have become part of the background. What has moved to the foreground are musicians, “Indian chiefs,” chefs, and professors, all of whom are not so much outside of institutions, but outside of those institutions that are central in deciding the fate of post-Katrina New Orleans. We might argue that they are outside of institutions, but central to culture. 

Off to the PIC conference

Almost everything is ready for the road trip to Binghamton for the PIC conference (see here). Most importantly, the paper is ready, although, like the other times I've prepared for talks, I have too much material. The title is "Spinoza versus Schmitt: The Politics of Theology and the Theology of Politics." A bit of cut and paste produces the following summary:

This talk opposes the politicization of theology to the theologization of politics, as two systematic interpretations of the relation between politics, philosophy, religion, and theology. For Schmitt, the theologization of politics (or 'political theology' properly speaking) functions to limit the possibilities of praxis, condemning in advance attempts to revolutionize or transform politics, by restricting all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state to those with theological correspondences (others being infringements based on natural right or economic-managerial tasks).

To politicize and historicize religious belief and theology is to expand the possibilities of organizing political space rather than the attempt to restrict and curtail them. Politicizing theology allows us to think theology as one way in which politics is conceptualized or spoken, rather than presenting it as an originary ground of political concepts.

Politicizing theology also requires thinking it as a locus of social struggle, in which the significance of religious teaching is itself contested. In Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, it is obedience to and reverence for God that has two opposed meanings that are divided along political lines. On the one hand, obedience is often conceived as submission to sovereign and religious authority as a way of controlling the activities of the multitude. On the other hand, ‘obedience’ can be democratic and universal; it aims to promote justice and charity (and love of one’s neighbor). Based on works rather than thoughts, it affirms freedom of conscience. This is the basis of what we might call Spinoza’s 'democratic hegemony' of those who are dedicated to works of justice and charity, love of one’s neighbor, and, more problematically, real equality.

Immanence and Atheism

I've been preparing, over the last month, for a talk I am giving at the University of Toledo on Deleuze and Spinoza. After finishing the penultimate draft of my MA thesis at the aforementioned university (in 2002; I defended in March 2003), I spent some time reading some of the more contemporary figures in French and Italian philosophy, which included Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and What is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari. I thought it would be appropriate to return to some of them when I return to give a talk in Toledo.

The talk I am giving next week deals in part with what Deleuze* calls the 'plane of immanence.' He argues that philosophy is the creation of concepts, which has become somewhat of a motto for some Deleuzians, but what is more difficult is figuring out what he means by setting out, instituting, or tracing, a plane of immanence. There are several problems with the proliferation of his 'modes', as it were, of explaining immanence but I am going to leave them aside just to mention one of the compelling reasons in favor of his argument.

The third example of What is Philosophy? reorders the history of philosophy from the point of view of the institution of the plane of immanence. Much of this history becomes a refusal of thinking immanence in favor of contemplation (of the Object), reflection (of the Subject) and communication ('with' the Other); each of those capitalized nouns representing a figure of transcendence. According to Deleuze, these transcendent figures are  reappear in philosophy because they are illusions that arise on the plane of immanence. The decisive move is to attach the problem of immanence to the problem of the revaluation of values. The conceptual link gives us a clear way to assess why immanence has been rejected by so many philosophers,  and why so many have attacked the naturalism of Spinoza to 'save' freedom, because from the standpoint of transcendent values, all other values appear nihilistic, while from the standpoint of immanence, all transcendent values are illusory.

My question is whether or not 'immanence' is the best approach to talking about the philosophical commitments of atheism. An atheist cannot have recourse to supernatural or transcendent explanations or values, and I think immanence captures this. Nevertheless, it seems that Deleuze's plane of immanence neutralizes the divine name while keeping the image of the One-All. It's not even clear if Deleuze maintains a materialist position (this is something like Hallward's critique), so even Spinoza's naturalism might be more strict and more minimal that Deleuze's philosophy. Atheism and materialism reject transcendence, but which concepts are required to think immanence if the One-All won't work? While I can't go into it here, there are at least two options: contingency and inconsistency. Or even possibly the often rejected concepts of necessity or determination. In addition, no matter which concepts 'work', so to speak, there remains the question of relinking these conceptual questions to historical materialism.

*I am leaving aside Guattari, not because I think his approach should be separated from Deleuze's, but because I am also going to critique Deleuze's work on Spinoza. François Dosse's Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, biographie croisée also claims that much of What is Philosophy? was written only by Deleuze (pp. 538-539).