Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity by Antonio Negri (review)

Gilles Deleuze, writing in 2000 about Antonio Negri’s work The Savage Anomaly, argued, “Antonio Negri is authentically and profoundly Spinozian.” Negri had authored Anomaly, his first work dedicated to Baruch Spinoza’s place in philosophy, in prison in 1991 while awaiting trial on the false charge that he instigated the Red Brigades’ assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. In 2004, Negri wrote Subversive Spinoza, extending his work in Savage Anomaly and continuing his radical renewal of Marxism via new readings of the challenging metaphysics of Spinoza. His third, less ambitious yet piercingly insightful work on Spinoza, Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity, further nuances these previous readings.

Negri is not the first to champion a materialist Spinoza. The foundations of this inquiry were laid in part by Deleuze himself publishing Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza in 1968 while in 1969 Alexandre Martheron published Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, both texts arguing for serious readings of Spinoza into political philosophy. Deleuze combed the western philosophical tradition for alternatives to Hegel, and found important possibilities in Spinoza. While Louis Althusser wrote little on Spinoza directly, the influence of the philosopher is evident in the work of his students Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, both of whom have penned influential work on Spinoza. As Eugene Holland points out, Macherey’s work frames “a direct confrontation between Spinoza and Hegel, stressing the degree to which the former eludes the grasp of the latter’s history of philosophy, and therefore represents an important alternative to Hegelian views” (Eugene Holland, “Spinoza and Marx,” Cultural Logic 2, 1 [Fall 1998]). In the first book of Cahiers Spinoza, published in 1977, Maximilian Rubel, Martheron, and Albert Igoin all confront the possibility of Spinoza’s influence on Karl Marx. Particularly, they focus on extensive passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus found hand-copied into Karl Marx’s early notebooks.

As Eugene Holland argues, alternatives to Hegel and Hegelian Marxism are desirable for this group of philosophers, of which Negri is perhaps the most enthusiastic. For Althusser, alternatives to Hegelian Marxism became attractive as weapons in the fight against Stalinism within the French Communist Party. For Deleuze and many poststructuralists, Nietzsche (who acknowledged Spinoza’s influence), proved attractive because his method differed markedly from Hegel’s, and to some extent Marx’s. As Holland notes,

More generally, the impetus to reevaluate Hegelian Marxism in France arose in response to a number of post-war developments, in the fields of politics and academics alike: the decline of the French working class as a “class-conscious” political actor, and of the French Communist Party as its “revolutionary” vanguard, in Fifth Republic politics and society; but also the demise of Soviet and Chinese Communisms as viable or attractive Marx-inspired regimes; and within academics, the growing dissatisfaction with certain Hegelian elements of Marxism, among historians as well as philosophers themselves.

(Holland, “Spinoza and Marx”)

Holland helpfully recalls the importance that interpretations of the French Revolution of 1789 took on in disputes among historians, some of whom sought to revise Marxist takes on 1789 as a bourgeois revolution that would serve to spur a future, more proletarian one. For materialist historians, Holland argues, “the problem, in short, was how to square the actual diversity of motives and actions of particular French merchants, lawyers, and statesmen with the unifying notion of the bourgeoisie as a class acting as a (singular) political agent in the historical field.” Here, Spinozan materialism, read as a forerunner to Marx’s materialism, can eradicate Hegelian dialectics. For Negri’s work, the central goal has been to read Spinozan materialism as a mature precursor to Marx’s own materialism and as a result, to relate Spinoza’s central relevance for contemporary Marxism as a true materialist. In Savage Anomaly he noted, “Spinoza’s materialist metaphysics is the potent anomaly of the century: not a vanquished or marginal anomaly but, rather, an anomaly of victorious materialism, of the ontology of a being that...