Saving Spinoza

We all know the cliché according to which Spinoza remains a pre-critical philosopher insofar as, in his assertion of the identity of God and nature, he naively asserts a kind of reductionist materialism. Spinoza's nature is a 'closed mechanism', a blind chain of necessity, and freedom, far from some mystical exemption from this chain, is no more than the assumption of this necessity, et cetera. Thus Žižek claims that for Spinoza, ethics (deontology) is simply reduced to ontology, to this blind necessity free of any obscurantist language of teleological aims, a 'Good' which should be imposed on the way things simply 'are'. Such 'oughts' are no more than fictions that falsely impute to God a will or aim, when God in truth is ignorant of any aim and refers to the blind mechanism of natural causality.

So Spinoza ultimately leads us to a naive scienticism in which we need only learn the way things 'really work', devoid of any ideological mystifications. This 'post-ideological' reign of a pure science, in which we should simply administer the means of a satisfactory life free of any overriding prescriptions or projects, is the paradigm of submission to capitalism; Spinozism thus becomes the perfect capitalist ideology. There is no place for the Cartesian subject, subtracted from the closure of this natural necessity, lacking a proper place and lost, necessitating some perhaps 'fictional' narrative of a moral telos in order to act. Indeed, in this model there is properly no 'subject', but only the free play of natural impulses which, upon assuming their modest place within the natural causal order, can live free of such delusions and the harm they cause.

This reading of Spinoza is exemplified in his discussion of Adam's fall: God does not arbitrarily prohibit Adam from eating from the Tree of Knowledge in a simple exercise of authority, with death as the punishment; God is simply warning Adam of the 'scientific fact' that this fruit would be poisonous to him, that eating it would simply 'cause' him to die... Yet as A. Kiarina Kordela puts it in her remarkable book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, it matters not whether this is an arbitrary prohibition or a mere natural fact, because either way, the notion that Adam should prefer life to death would already entail an aim, that he should live, which imposes on the mere 'facts' a fictional telos. [7-8] The point, then, is that any bare scientific analysis of facts, if it is to have any relevance for us, must already be warped by some fictional (ethical) aim imposed upon them; in short, Adam would've already had to have chosen to live.

Kordela's point, in reading Spinoza 'against himself', is that there is no neutral ontology which can simply see God/nature free of any imputed aims; that we are subjects insofar as we necessitate such a fictional imposition. This is the basic Lacanian point, that any chain of knowledge is incoherent, irrelevant without the stabilizing power of the Master-Signifier, the quilting point which fastens this knowledge to some determinate course of action. This quilting point is a fiction, but a necessary one, without which the world and a 'neutral' ontological analysis thereof would have no consistency for us. Yet can we account for this necessity within Spinoza's thought, or must we resort to 'turning him against himself' so as to draw out the inconsistency of his explicit statements? While I like to think I do not succumb to what she identifies as the 'Neo-Spinozist' tendency to take his words at face value, effacing confrontation with the deadlock intrinsic in his work, I nonetheless think his explicit doctrine is more nuanced than she gives it credit for. To be fair, I have only just begun reading this truly fantastic work, and do not know exactly where she will take her reading; yet, at this early stage, I already find it quite useful in explicating my own reading of Spinoza (to what degree this reading conforms to her's I cannot yet say).

I would contend that, far from the naive position that we can be done with the illusion of ethical aims and modestly resort to a neutral scientific analysis of nature, which must be supplemented with the 'critical' assertion of the necessity of these illusions for us, we can take Spinoza a bit further. The point would then be that, if we were to attempt a truly neutral, 'aimless' dwelling within nature, we would find ourselves unable to act, to do anything. Yet far from a mark of our imperfection, our inability to recognize and fully identify with our proper place in the perfect causal order, and the resulting necessity of supplementing this imperfection with a fiction, what if we radically assert that there is nothing to recognize, that there is no 'natural necessity' to which we would conform if freed from fictive aims?

In other words, insofar as God/nature is the complete chain of causes, a 'closed mechanism', that is, insofar as God is not the constitutive exception to the totality of the world but identified directly with the totality without exception, this totality in its 'infinite perfection' is thereby incomplete, inconsistent. Without the exceptional external view which could explicate 'the next link', that is, the 'natural aim' or 'God's will', there is no way to determine the necessary course of things, inclusive of 'what I should do free of any fictive moral aims'. In other words, the only conclusion of a purely neutral knowledge of nature is that necessity coincides with impossibility, with the impossibility of determining necessity without 'taking a chance', acting without any guarantee... We can thus see how Spinoza is the paradigmatic feminine philosopher in the Lacanian sense: God/nature is 'non-All', that is, there is nothing exempted from it, there is no exempted point of God's will (or, for that matter, a 'free subject' in the vulgar sense), but for that very reason this totality cannot attain closure, it remains incomplete and 'open'. Perfection paradoxically coincides with incompleteness just as the completeness of a fictional aim which gives meaning to arbitrary natural necessity is image of imperfection.

So the 'imperfection' of man is not simply his inability to recognize his place within the perfect order of God/nature; rather, this imperfection is transposed into God/nature itself, such that the shift from imperfection to perfection is no more than a change of perspective on one and the same thing. Whereas we, even in accepting that our aims are ultimately fictional, 'relative', may still continue to posit the divine chain of natural causes as simply epistemologically inaccessible to us, though complete in-itself, Spinoza radically asserts, with his 'third kind of knowledge' (intuition), that we can in fact directly know this perfection; my hermeneutical claim is that this 'intuition' involves no more than transposing this inaccessibility of a complete knowledge of perfection into the very incompleteness of perfection itself. We are thus this incompleteness of the Divine as 'for-itself'. (Furthermore, I would propose against Kordela that Deleuze's reading of Spinoza is not filtered through some vulgar Bergsonian vitalism; rather, if we take his understanding of intuition in Bergson as determined by the Spinozan concept as I read it, we can see that, rather than a 'Bergsonized Spinoza', Deleuze already 'Spinozizes Bergson'; I think his reading of élan vital as not some vulgar Universal Life, but rather a principle of self-difference, is evidence in this direction.)

So, to be precise, if we take Spinoza's God/nature along the same lines as the Lacanian assertion that 'God is unconscious', this does not mean that without the fictions constitutive of consciousness we would find a 'true' necessity, a 'proper place' within nature; rather, God/nature is ultimately no more than the impossibility of discovering such a necessity, the limit internal to every aim that prevents it from coinciding with itself, the very incompleteness of perfection as such. Indeed, Kordela hints at such a reading when she insists that Spinoza's assertion that God has no will, that nature is ultimately 'aimless', is to be read in the same way as Lacan's 'the big Other does not exist':

Lacan...maintains that the Other is inconsistent, that "there is no Other of the Other," that the Other in itself has no will or aim... [H]e adopts the Spinozian conception of history as aimless, and supplements it, according to the Spinozian conception of truth, with a willful and intentional gaze (and, hence, aim), which, however, is "a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other". [17]

And precisely as subjects, who depend on fictional impositions of aims in order to make sense of the world, we are no more than this gaze already inscribed in God: not God's will, but God's opaqueness to itself, the fact that even God does not know his own will, that precisely as perfect, God cannot explain why necessity itself is necessary. Think, for example, of God's speech at the end of the Book of Job, in which he enumerates his own creations as if he himself is amazed at them, as if they are inexplicable even to their creator.

Thus, if freedom is affirmed necessity, it is precisely the assumption of the 'miraculous', inexplicable character of this necessity, the fact that not even God can explain why this was necessary. Spinoza never really elaborates a theory of the subject because the subject is no more than this splitting internal to the divine perfection of nature, this incompleteness/openness that is perfection, necessity. To return to the example of Adam, it is not simply that Adam, in order to make a decision regarding the fruit, must choose some aim (to live or to die), out of ignorance of what God really wants from him; the point is that God himself does not know what he wants of Adam, and hence must leave the decision up to Adam's ignorant, impulsive hubris. The gaze desperately seeking meaning from God is already inscribed in God himself, and is, far from a mark of imperfection, is precisely his perfection as such.

Of course this is only the preamble to such a reading of Spinoza, and I am here setting myself a task I probably won't even begin until my thesis is finished. And I still have a long ways to go in Kordela's book, among others. In any case, I highly recommend $urplus, which presents in my opinion the most original and exciting reading of Spinoza since Deleuze. Whether or not it supports my position, that Spinoza is already a 'critical' philosopher in the strict sense, has yet to be seen, but I am resolute that this is in fact the case. What this means is that, far from reducing deontology to ontology, fictive 'oughts' to the scientific 'is', any more than maintaining the gap between them, Spinoza more radically transposes the gap into the 'is' itself, so that Ethics is the name of the impossible coincidence of God/nature, of the One, with itself. The ethical subject then must assume this gap as his very being, he must identify with this gap/incompleteness that defines the perfection of God/nature.

Contrary to Žižek, Spinoza does not reduce deontology to ontology, but rather raises ontology to deontology. Thus we at the same time denounce fictive 'oughts', ideological aims imposed on the world, and a pure necessary order of 'is' accessible to science: the is, the Being of God/nature, is said only of the must, the vertiginous decision of the subject absent of any justification through aims (the Lacanian act): it is this tautological assertion of an act without any grounding in symbolic coordinates that would 'make sense of it' which selects what must be, which remakes 'what is' by dissolving the symbolic framework that previously defined it, retaining only that which can endure a new evaluation (ultimately, no more than the New itself in History, in the guise of the failed attempts to break out of the given symbolic order which were rendered meaningless by that very order; the act is thus one of Benjaminian Redemption). The is, the Lacanian Real, is ultimately nothing but this immanent limit of symbolization, this necessary inconsistency of every symbolic order, and hence the potential for the New to escape its confines.

Materialism of the Problem

If Deleuze is a materialist, it is because he brings materiality to its limit: the familiar materiality of bodies and their physical relations of force, matter as substantial and formed, at its limit, passes over into the bodiless, insubstantial realm of an unformed and non-formal matter-function. We have the physico-empirical plane of material bodies, of visibilities or sensibilities, which relate in the passage of forces from body to body in causal chains. A cue strikes the cue ball, which strikes another ball, et cetera, constituting a series of passages of force. The complication here is that the passage of force becomes autonomous, inscribed on a different plane than that of the bodies which act and react.

It is this autonomy of passage which Deleuze and Guattari name rhythm. Rhythm must be understood in terms of an alternation, a passage from one thing to the other; they say that rhythm is what happens between milieus, it is a transcoding, a "coordination of heterogeneous space-times." (ATP 313) Coding refers to what Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, calls 'habit': a regular pattern, a series of relations that endures coherently, that repeats. A milieu or habitus is ultimately no more than a consistent set of habits/codings which endures. Rhythm, however, is not simply a habit, a regular pattern or 'meter', but refers to that which interrupts habits/codes, undermines them, and forces them to reorient.

Rhythm, as alternation, involves a passage from one coded milieu into another; yet this does not simply mean that two foreign milieus relate to each other, that one relates to the other as different from itself, composed of different codes. Rather, they together relate to the outside, to an alterity irreducible to some determinate other. It is this outside upon which the passage is inscribed, in which rhythms reverberate. Rhythms are basically the relation between disparate codes, series, or patterns, such that two different codes relate to the Disparate, to their divergence as such. It is across this disparity that a novel conjunction of the coded elements occurs, that a 'transcoding' is born.

Rhythm is that reorientation of codes or patterns that results when two milieus encounter, between each other, that paradoxical element which undermines their consistent conjunction; ultimately, this element is nothing but a pure distance - not the distance between them, but the distance of each from its threshold, the point after which coding breaks down and the consistency of the milieu is compromised, resulting in a change in nature. Every coding envelops this distance, this threshold of decoding, which is not simply the distance of one set of habits from another, but more like the distance of each coding from itself, its inability to extend itself infinitely, to perfectly coincide with itself. At this point, the being of the thing (milieu) becomes indistinguishable from its problematic status - the consistency of the milieu depends upon the problem of its relation to the limit beyond which it will decompose.

Rhythm as alternation is ultimately the incessant oscillation between the consistent encodings of a milieu, including the transcoding that preserves this consistency when foreign milieus must relate across their difference, and the decoding or loss of consistency which characterizes a passage to the limit. This is the passage which becomes autonomous, drawing a plane apart from that of the milieus and their codes. Passage to the limit is the way an arrangement composes itself as such: beyond the incidental conglomeration of the milieu, an arrangement organizes itself on the basis of a limit it must posit as such by extending its power that far, by occupying the whole distance between its borders, and thereby realizing the threshold beyond which its influence ceases. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the territory is a place of passage, or even the place of passage, the taking-place of passage. The territory is constituted precisely when the threshold of a milieu (or the vertiginous conjunction of several thresholds, converging on the paradoxical element of an encounter) becomes the vector of deterritorialization, thus retroactively positing the consistency drawn between milieus as their 'territorialization', as the becoming-expressive of the habitual functions, and the emergence of partial surfaces, membranes, which give body to limits.

This incorporeal transformation of milieu into territory occurs only when the threshold qua problematic point is treated not as some external threat to the consistency of the milieu, but rather as intrinsic and constitutive of that consistency, a 'positive principle of non-consistency'. If the milieu is defined by a warding off of problems - a denial of the consistency of the milieu itself as problematic and unstable, endlessly caught in a coming-to-itself (positing of its constitutive limit) coterminous with a leaving-itself or becoming-other (passage to the limit/confrontation with the threshold of consistency) - the territory is born of a simple 'change of emphasis': the problem is posited as constitutive/productive, the entire habitual field is reoriented in relation to this problematic status.

Insofar as the entirety of the encoding is mobilized in a passage to the limit, the passage itself, in the mode of a fleeing or escape, a passage across the threshold indistinguishable from the threshold itself posited as such, is endlessly displaced within the field, potentially appearing anywhere, amongst any conjunction of elements/functions. The problematization of the field thus involves a displacement of the paradoxical element (line of flight, aleatory point) within the field such that the elements and functions are subject to a continuous variation or redistribution. A materialism of the problem, therefore, should acknowledge the ontological status of the problem as the line of flight, the drawing of limits which territorializes or individuates the pure multiplicity of milieus by virtue of an incorporeal surface, a body without organs, tearing asunder coded elements and functions which are then arranged in relation to the problematic points (thresholds) which, by chance, present themselves in the passage to the limit.

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The point here is that the vulgar, physical materialism in which all that exists is empirical (perceptible) phenomena enchained by causal determination does not go far enough. In this view, reality appears to us as incomplete, plagued by misunderstandings, errors, illusions, et cetera, only insofar as we possess finite, imperfect epistemological relations to it. So reality is an ontologically complete and consistent 'mechanism', everything can be explained immanently within the material world without reference to any divine or supernatural beyond; unfortunately, this view nonetheless presupposes a perfect, untainted intellect, unbound by finite epistemological limitations, which has total access to the complete chain of causes.

Even if we have no conceivable way of occupying such a position, or we deny that there is any (divine) observer occupying it, this vulgar materialism still presupposes that such a position exists in principle. In this sense, the incompletenesses of reality as we experience it, the problems which intervene and disturb the consistency of our world(s), are only epistemological, symptoms of our finitude and embeddedness, which can be progressively overcome through scientific rigor, increasingly approximating the 'ideal', untainted prerogative. Existence is posited as complete, consistent, only insofar as we rely on a constitutive exception by reference to which we can explain apparent inconsistencies (problems) as illusions resulting from a false identification with the exceptional point.

Deleuze's point, if we may put it in these terms, is precisely that this incompleteness is not epistemological, that there is no exceptional point of clarity from which all problems will be recognized as illusory. He is far more radical, asserting that materiality must be extended to the problems themselves, that the inconsistencies we confront must be included in materiality. This means that for Deleuze, the ontological itself is incomplete, inconsistent, problematic. There is no exceptional point unencumbered by the limitations of finitude. In this way, we do not reduce all problems to the central problem of the inadequacy of our knowledge; rather, problems attain a primary ontological status. This status is precisely that of the threshold posited in the passage to the limit constitutive of the consistency of any arrangement; it is the force of deterritorialization which retroactively territorializes the milieu from which it departs; it is the incorporeal transformation of the ordinary into the singular, of delimited coagulations of flows into the unlimited becoming of virtualities.