Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)
Antonio Negri
Language: English
Pages: 152
ISBN: 0231160461
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Antonio Negri, one of the world's leading scholars on Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and his contemporary legacy, offers a straightforward explanation of the philosopher's elaborate arguments and a persuasive case for his ongoing relevance. Responding to a resurgent interest in Spinoza's thought and its potential application to contemporary global issues, Negri demonstrates the thinker's special value to politics, philosophy, and related disciplines.
Negri's work is both a return to and an advancement of his initial affirmation of Spinozian thought in The Savage Anomaly. He further defends his understanding of the philosopher as a proto-postmodernist, or a thinker who is just now, with the advent of the postmodern, becoming contemporary. Negri also connects Spinoza's theories to recent trends in political philosophy, particularly the reengagement with Carl Schmitt's "political theology," and the history of philosophy, including the argument that Spinoza belongs to a "radical enlightenment." By positioning Spinoza as a contemporary revolutionary intellectual, Negri addresses and effectively defeats twentieth-century critiques of the thinker waged by Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben.
civil subjects to the sovereign. It is a strange thing, this transfer of the potency of the citizens to the sovereign. Why does that have to happen? Because of the English civil war? But isn’t it precisely with Leviathan, which enables sovereign power to come into existence, that civil society itself is enabled? So then how can there be a civil war prior to civil society? And as if that fairytale weren’t enough, Hobbes can always fall back on the divine potency that overrides and legitimizes the
paradoxically clamped and restrained. After Marx, the alternatives to communism will often attempt to realize themselves on the terrain of immanence as well. Transcendence appears to be permanently ruled out. Even the grand synthesis of Hegel (transcendental from the start and before very long transcendent too, following the rhythm of the absolute spirit) is caught up in the whirlwind of the materiality of historical processes—of struggle, resistance, revolution—in which the political theorists
affirmation—that is, “nor will there ever be a sovereign power that can do all it pleases”—remains true despite all. Even in the unitary constitution of the multitude for the purpose of constructing the law, in the movement that transforms the multitude of singularities into power that constitutes juridical authority and functions as interpretative source in its development—well, even in this case, the opening-up of the concept of multitude to the movement of the singularities (and vice versa)
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