Antonio Negri’s The Savage Anomaly. The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (1991) offers a detailed study of Baruch Spinoza’s works along with a comprehensive analysis of Spinoza’s historical and social background. Spinoza is an anomalous philosopher and only in the Lowlands was it possible that his thought could be produced. During those years, the Dutch are, after all, an anomaly as well, since “it is a bourgeois revolution but in an anomalous form, not protected by an absolute Power but developing absolutely in the vastness of rule and savage reproduction” (7). The XVII century was anomalous too. Those were the years when capitalism developed. And, of course, capitalism is also an anomaly. Hence, what anomalies teach us, is that what moves the world is the way to deal with crisis, philosophically (Spinoza), politically (Lowlands) and systematically-economically (capitalism). While the politics of the state and the system and economy of production became an appropriation of the crisis where potestas held sway, through Spinoza, a thought capable of rendering visible the possibilities of being’s potentia started a never-ending formation of the multitudo, “a genealogy of collectivity, as a conscious articulation and constitution of the whole, the totality” (21).
As Michael Hardt introduces the distinction between potestas —that which “denotes the centralized, mediating, transcendental force of command” (xiii)— and potentia —”the local immediate, actual force of constitution” (xiii) in Negri’s work, one can hardly not think that The Savage Anomaly is also a book that depicts the story of captures and escapes of the constituent power (potentia). That is, the book illustrates how potentia is an accumulation and progression of affects via the conatus, apetitus, and cupiditas in a mechanism of liberation (157), while potestas is an accumulation of reactive captures, of internalization of crisis for the sake of transcending a limit, using exchange as a force that produces value, hierarchy and command. Potentia is active, and the market and the state live on mystifying potentia in potestas (72). With this in mind, the Spinozan anomaly is an invitation to see in the crisis not an opportunity for reinstituting a teleology or a “nomos” but of seeing the crisis as a chance for ethics, that “must course throughout the world of imagination and the passions to make itself the material and constructive force of the reconstruction of the world” (84). Potentia, then, construcs and reconstrucs the world. That is why only through metaphysics a political an ethical stance is possible, since being is always active and immediate.
We see metaphysics in Spinoza, and in Negri, yet in neither of them this ontological reflections lose their ties to materiality. Potentia and potestas are inherent to all bodies, one as creative and virtual, the other as imposed and oppressive. The political implications of Spinoza, then, should be put into work on a canvas that focuses better on the ways of liberation and less in the ways of oppression. Thus, what is at stake is the analysis of the contracts, pacts, and all the ways into which the “limitlessness of sovereign power [potestas]” mystifies the dynamic and constitutive inferences of the multitudes. This analysis would be one that puts science “as a non-finalized essence, as an accumulation of liberatory acts” (214). What matters is to follow “the development of subjective power, in the process of the destruction of the theological illusion, [that] gathers together all that has accumulated in being, all that being has produced, historically, by means of and against the mystification, towards a greater human sociability, and reappropriates it, redefines it” (227). The task then is for autonomy, liberation and affirmation of existence. Bliss in the multitudo, that is where all the affects are being gather, where they accumulate without being hierarchized. If the constituent process of potentia is counting on an accumulation that leads towards composition and not towards value and hierarchy, how would these accumulations would differentiate between each other now that we are reaching again (more) anomalous times?
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