The Savage Anomaly. The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphisics and Politics (Tdr. Michael Hardt)

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?  

Notes on The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1975) by Étienne de la Boétie (trans. Harry Kurz)

Written in 1548, but published in1572, Étienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr’un, or The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Volumtary Servitude (1975) as Harry Kurz translates the title, opens what would be centuries later a thought worried about the self, the masses and the figure of the sovereign. De la Boétie starts his essay with a quote from the iconic figure of Ulyses, the one who judges as Zeus. Ulysses, arguably, the cleverest character in Homer’s Iliad falls in a complicated predicament. When saying that it is possible to have several lords and “let one be master, let one alone be king”, according to de la Boétie, Odysseus forgets that “as soon as he [a man] acquires the title of master, becomes abusive and unreasonable” (45). To be at the service of a tyrant, or in general of a sovereign, is a disgrace because we never know what to expect from this figure since it “is always in his power to be cruel whenever he pleases” (46). Thus, a sovereign is always ambivalent in its affective and coercive power. If the tyrant is precisely the one who is against oneself (contr’un) because he is the one that brings more suffering than joy to the life of its ruled ones, why does one prefer to serve voluntarily a tyrant? 

A tyrant could be anyone with “rare” qualities. The masses find quite often, argues de la Boétie, a personage that “has shown rare foresight in protecting them in an emergency, rare boldness in defending them, rare solitude in governing them, and if, from that point on, they contract the habit of obeying him and depending on him to such an extent that they grant him certain prerogatives” the masses move this bonhomme from “a position in which he was doing good and advance him to a dignity in which he may do evil” (47). That “rare” but good person becomes hesitant. The sovereign, then, is someone whose good will could turn bad at any moment. From all the affects that the figure of the sovereign expels towards its ruled ones, fear and doubt become crucial. Once one lives in fear, one does not find oneself alone. As the tyrant affects the multitudes with fear and doubt, he also turns the masses in addicts of this way of being. Soon it is not the minority who has the vice of lacking “the desire to rise against him [the tyrant]” (48) but the majority. Habit kills desire of uprising and perpetuates fear. In the realm of the master, man becomes like a racing horses who “learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings” (65). If all animals resist their capture and training, humans are an exception, since we enjoy in repetition, in the perpetuation of sameness via tradition or habit. 

For de la Boétie there is nothing worse than to live under the shadow of a tyrant. “What condition is more wretched than to live thus, with nothing to call one’s own, receiving from someone else one’s sustenance, one’s power to act, one’s body, one’s very life?” (80). One sabotages oneself. While being captured in the shiny tricks of the tyrant one does not realize that one receives “a portion from their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them” (70). That is, everything that the ruler gives presupposes that the master took it away from its serfs, or rather, that the serfs happily give it to the master so the master would reintroduce it to the serfs. The voluntary servitude soon becomes a form of self-deception that desperately needs to be reproduced.

We behave like fools, as “the moth, [who] intent upon desire, seeks the flame because it shines, and also experiences its other quality, the burning” (84). Desire moves us and we cannot escape its force of attraction. While hunger could be satisfied by the power of the tyrant, liberty, the food for the will, is an affect that haunts the tyrant. Hence, the tyrant is a perverse that seeks only a messy disposition of desire, one that precisely allows its persistence while increases the sufferings of the masses. When oneself finally frees from the tyrant, perhaps others would join. Yet, if oneself becomes its only master, how would oneself would look to the others without seeing its own desire? Wouldn’t it be that desire is our only master, our force of creation, withdrawal and persistence?

Notes on Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (2018) by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

World literature is one that is read using a “distant reading, in which a comparatist reads only what individual experts in the national literatures produce” (189). This is the method that Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado uses in his Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (2018). Sánchez Prado displays virtuously an erudite monograph about 7 mexican authors (Sergio Pitol, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, Carmen Boullosa, Ana García Bergua and Cristina Rivera Garza). Strategic Occidentalism “is understood as the way in which specific writers, particularly from a ‘semiperipheral tradition’ like Mexico’s, adopt a cosmopolitan stance to acquire cultural capital within their national tradition” (19); that is, an strategy of appropriating of the cultural means of production, value and work in the literary field that certain authors perform. For Sánchez Prado, then, the seven writers that he studies (among others) resist certain imperatives of writing. That is, Pitol resist the “hegemonic” imperative of writing nationalist narratives; the “Crack” writers (Volpi, Padilla and Palou) resist the ‘magical realism’ imperative of following the steps of “Boom” writers; and the three female writers that analyzed at the end of this book (Boullosa, García Bergua and Rivera Garza) resist the imperative of the market when offering non-stereotyped female narratives. 

A “world literature” needs to acknowledge that “the limits of one’s material access to the world” (15). For this reason, Strategic Occidentalism offers “the product of concrete cultural labor —including material practices of translation, cultural contact, and publishing— that must be [are] accounted in their full historicity” (15). The book addresses authors that have paved the way for the success of prominent Latin American writers, such as Roberto Bolaño. Hence, Bolaño as part of the so-called “world literature” is not but the successor of a series of writers, specially Mexican writers —in Sánchez Padro view—, that already were participating and negotiating their place in the literary world and in the “world literature”. 

As much as Sánchez Prado offers a flair erudition of the critical reception of the writers that he studies and maps the cultural field of the second half of the XX century in Mexico, he forgets a key figure in the foreground of the reproduction and production of cultural capital: the state. The authors analyzed in Strategic Occidentalism appropriate the objectified and the institutionalized states of cultural capital yet the embodied state of cultural capital, that is the “long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body” (Bourdieu 17) is not addressed. While Sánchez Prado recognizes this (186), it is uncertain that the resistance to the imperatives of the market, whether these are to write in a nationalistic, magical realism or stereotyped gender manner, happens only through the appropriation of the literary public sphere, especially if a Mexican world literature “will invariably play an important role in countering stereotypes against Mexicans” (193) coming from the, now defeated and dented—and yet scary— figure of president Trump.

Notes on Capitalism and its Discontents: Power and Accumulation in Latin-American Culture (2017) by John Kraniauskas

The essays compiled in John Kraniauskas’ Capitalism and its Discontents: Power and Accumulation in Latin-American Culture (2017) depart from the understanding that Marx’s “so-called” primitive accumulation is a repeated process throughout modernity (and postmodernity) and not a singular an “original” one. Capitalism has spread all over the world not by the expansive force of the “primitive” accumulation, that process “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire”, but rather because of the compulsive necessity of capitalism of reproducing its “mythological” origin. If modern history is an accumulation of photographs, whilst revealing them it also comes to sight the existence of a “[colonial] unconscious” (15) and also, I would say, “an accumulative one”. Early modernity found ways of disavowing capitalism and state logics. Both Benjamin and Mariategui, as Kraniauskas rightly points out,  read in Charlie Chaplin’s cinema “a kind of historical comedy of accumulation across nations and forms of labour” (24). The two authors laugh “at capitalism factory time” (27) by recognizing Chaplin’s performances a body “always at work, but also resisting subsumption and commodification in flight” (25) and a strong affective force that gathers bodies while dispersing the discipline of modern societies. The description of Chaplin’s body, as “always [being] at work, but also resisting subsumption and commodification in flight” is a thread shared by all the texts analysed by Kraniauskas. 

While cinema, at least Chaplin’s cinema, could reveal both a flight and a capture from capitalism regime of signs, literature is a disputed space. The literary form is related to the democratic processes in general, this also means that the “lettered city” served as both “public sphere” and also as nest of/for the “civil society”. Latin America particular case relies, following Kraniauskas, in the key role that the state has played in the region. That is Latin America’s “historical processes of commodification, that is, the ‘economic’ and its institutions (the market and civil society) [both spheres very close to the literary phenomenon], were subordinated to the institutions of the state” (xx). From this perspective, the Latin American “letrados” are not only dealing with capitalism but also with the state. 

Overall, capitalism is the regime of signs where the socius “not only produces but records too, bearing the marks of its history and origins whilst appropriating the history of others” (151). The radical change that neoliberalism offers to the double scripting of capitalism is not only that of a “violent form of disciplinary reterritorialization in which the [state] government idea of ‘poblar’ is revealed as ‘des-poblar’ and ‘re-poblar’”(210) as Kraniauskas signals when analysing Walsch “Carta abierta de un escritor a la Junta Militar”. Neoliberalism also “abrogates”. 

When analyzing The Wire, Kraniauskas repeatedly states that the shift from the M-C-M’ formula to the “abridged formula (M-M’)” does provide a clue of neoliberalism necessity of “‘freeing’ capital from its commodity basis” (193). In the case of The Wire, the switch from M-C-M’ to M-M’ is not possible since the commodity (drugs) of the criminal organizations cannot be replaced, abridged, yet, what could be thought from the recent theorized and conceptualized “narco-accumulation”?

The thing does not consist on saying that the shift to M-M’ is a way of understanding the world merely in terms of speculative capital, but rather, that capitalism dreams of abridging its processes of circulation (and accumulation). Capital in neoliberalism is completely presupposing all its formulation (let’s remember that the Marxian formulations could be as long as an element from the chain-formula could be bisected), it wants to appear fully formed and ready to go. If “C” is something that capitalism is disposing, both the components that bonded C also vanish (these are LF and MP). Capitalism reduces itself to its own reflection, its only sign to encode is itself superposed on top of the “flattened” history of others. But where did “C” go, or how was it “abridged”? Kraniauskas reflections not only suggest that the process of primitive accumulation is never original, but also that the state subordinates and captures not only the process of commodification but also the process of capitalism chain of equivalencies and production not only in Latin America. While the invisible hand holds capitalism missing “letters”, capitalism is now forging its sentences “with blood and fire” with no restrain, erasing and repeating its sentences as if an inner voice, or a voice from above/below, would be dictating it an aural test. As the state became immanent in affect, capital became obsessed with its writing and repetition as did the state before for itself. As both exchanged roles and re/de- territorializations, we still are always “at work, but also resisting subsumption and commodification in flight”, laughing less, but laughing still.

Notes on Literature and “Interregnum.” Globalization, War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America (2016) by Patrick Dove

Patrick Dove’s Literature and “Interregnum.” Globalization, War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America (2016) offers a vastly informed dialogue between key literarily figures of the XX century Latin American Fiction (Cohen, Aira, Eltit, Chejfec and Bolaño) and “a range of theoretical perspectives” (1), from Continenal philosophy, political thought, psychoanalysis, to sociology of globalization. With the Neoliberalism’s control over Latin America, and the rest of the world, it is obvious, that certain political and aesthetic concepts no longer work, if they ever did. Dove takes the challenge to describe, analyze and theorize “interregnum”, which is not to be understood as a “gap or a crisis that could potentially give rise to revolution” (11), neither a gap or interruption that belongs to the order of imperial history. Interregnum is “a need to fashion a new critical and theoretical vocabulary” (11), a concept under erasure, a la Derrida, because the stark neoliberal world needs new ways of reading it and at the same time requires us to keep in mind our previous grammars. 

When analyzing Amalfitano, one of the main characters of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Dove deepens in what we should be understanding as interregnum. The particularity of Amalfitano depends on the Duchampian “ready-made” that this character repeats. Dove sees in this gesture, “seen by very few” and likely “understood by no one”, a “reminder (if there is anyone who knows how to read it) that the here-and-now is always already different from itself, both because it is already marked by the remnants of a past that may or may not be legible to it and because it remains open to what is —perhaps— still yet to come” (254). Interregnum would be a place of suspension, where one, if one is able, could read the “reminders” of the past while also acknowledging one’s incapacity of changing the past and also one’s impossibility and renouncement of announcing or naming what is yet to come. Later on, Dove will complete that “interregnum”, as a possible alternative to the never ending of neoliberal accumulation —illustrated by Bolaño— that both announces the persistence of the old and yet announces something different to come, is “persisting within the ruins of the modern in a way that illuminates their ruination, albeit without being able to imagine or inaugurate a new order” (254). Interregnum, thus, is a thought that renounces to continue in the logic of instrumentalization and commodification of capital but persists in interrupting the logic of Neoliberalism (capitalism).

The Heideggerian spirit of interregnum knows very well that thinking “cannot think its own origin in the world, [since it is] the call to which it is itself a response” while also being “likewise unable to disown its debts and separate itself from the specific ways in which it is enjoined to wonder and ask questions about things” (36). Thought is always within being. What would happen if we were to think capitalism and neoliberalism as “thinking” a la Heidegger? Would this mean that at the limit (if it has any) of capitalism the state is merely waiting as a Stimmung to intervene and regulate the “free” and chaotic flows of capital? If so, the waiting of the state is everything but an absence, since by disavowing its “will”, the state implants its immanent and affective sway over capital. The state operates from a place where it rejoices watching how his “fruitful” exception allows all types of accumulation, as it was in the beginning of its relationship with capitalism and as it is now. With this in mind, would interregnum be pointing to the elastic void that expands and shrinks in-between capitalism and the state as the void between literature and philosophy?

Notes on Liberalism at its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text (2009) by Ileana Rodríguez

“Thus, for liberalism to ever be universal, it must achieve the impossible: obtain global consensus on the meaning of civil society, the public sphere, and the state. To do so, it must engage with concrete communities and mediate the relations they establish among themselves socially. If liberal ideology can do this, it will become truly liberal politics” (5). This is how Ileana Rodríguez’ Liberalism at its Limits. Crime and Terror in The Latin American Cultural Text (2009) closes its introduction. These statements illustrate what comes after one of the main tasks of the book. That is, once the limits of liberalism have been pointed out, then there must be a reform, so that liberalism would finally “obtain consensus” on the meaning of the civil society, the public sphere, and the state. The problem for Rodríguez is not that liberalism has, as it does, disrupted the way politics are played around the world, especially considering the North American liberalism and its never-ending pas de deux with the Latin American liberal states, but that liberalism has never fully been able to produce meaning, consensus. This means, of course, that liberalism has been mistranslated. That is why in the “prose of globalization” (3) liberalism has never fully produced global civil societies, public spheres and states in Latin America. Hence, for critical thought, the task is only to respectfully correct the cultural text by intervening the three key semantical and syntactical components that have been mistranslated, wrongly used. 

Guatemala, Colombia and Mexico, each country provides for Rodríguez an example of a “historization of liberalism that will allow us to understand why so-called cultural minorities do not fare as well as so-called cultural majorities” (31). Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial, La nieta de los mayas, shows how civil society can negotiate opening its porous walls. This text, and Menchú herself, did in the sphere of civil society “either push the borders and seams of liberalism and make it more inclusive or to demonstrate the aporetical nature of the model [liberalism]” (160). Nevertheless, the Colombian and Mexican examples —testimonials from two of the periods of violence in XXth century Colombia (“La Violencia” and “el sicariato”) and from the “feminicidios” in the border town Cd. Juárez, Mexico— do not achieve any inclusion or reform into the liberal arena. We face directly failures, not of liberalism, but failures of state(s) and of a labor system(s) that both produce bodies for a delirious devouring capitalist machine. 

If the grammar of liberalism does not make sense in the context of Colombia and Mexico (and arguably neither in Guatemala), why stick to it for reading Latin American cultural texts? Rodríguez acknowledges that the limits of liberalism are a burden. Rodríguez’ burden and of any liberalist hermeneutic, “is to make sense of a critical analysis that simultaneously invokes and rejects the intervention of these categories [civil society, the state, public sphere] in positing the Mexican state” (155), the Colombian and the Guatemalan state accountable for their failures. The state, itself, is the one to blame, for sure. Yet, following Rodríguez idea of Liberalism as a mistranslated politics, what could be wrong when one is trying to learn the grammar of a foreign language? 

Liberalism main purpose is to turn the state neutral (10), to let everyone, but not all, do what they want, to build an immune state to the exterior while also creating a right, fair and free civil society. In a sense, the Latin American liberal states can only play a “skewed and bizarre performance” (9) in the global political theater. This role, paradoxically, shows signs of true liberal states within Latin America, where these states’ neutrality happens to be successful, by allowing violence to be its only rule; where there is no direct intervention of any foreign state except when cheap labor force needs to be negotiated or druglords attempt to poison the youth of the world; and where critical reason can only “respectfully” approach with a disempowered responsibility to the Global South’ cultural texts and try to write with light beautiful thoughts on a bright light sky, merely just style corrections in the prose of the global world we live in.