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Jason Read The Politics of Transindividuality
Jason Read The Politics of Transindividuality
Historical Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
The Politics of
Transindividuality
By
JasonRead
leiden | boston
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Contents
Acknowledgements 10
List of Abbreviations 11
Conclusion 286
To risk a term that will be defined over the course of this book, thinking
and writing is a necessarily transindividual process, encompassing the
perspectives and points of view of many even as it unfolds in a singular
text. Many people helped make it possible for this book to exist. The
following is a partial list. This book benefits immeasurably from numerous
conversations with Fouad Kalouche, Jackson Nichols, and Nigel Stevens.
Amanda Jennifer Pleau provided support, encouragement, and patience
for which I am eternally grateful. Bill Haver read an early version of the
manuscript and provided the necessary encouragement and provocations
to push it towards completion. Warren Montag, Hasana Sharp, Ted Stolze,
Vittorio Morfino have shaped my understanding of Spinoza more than
they know. During the years in which this book was conceived, planned,
written, and edited, I have had the benefit of being the member of an
informal Political Theory reading group, the members of that group, Brian
Duff, Jill Gordon, and Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr. all deserve my thanks for
sustaining an engaging intellectual atmosphere. I would also thank my
colleagues and students at the University of Southern Maine. Georges
Caffentzis, Shelton Waldrep, and Michael Hillard, and Jane Kuenz have
maintained an atmosphere of inquiry in the face of a higher education
system in crisis. Jake Lowry, Kevin Gulliver, Patrick O’Connor, and Kaye
Kunz have rekindled my love for Spinoza, Hegel, Marx and the political
potential of philosophy. I thank the editorial board of Historical
Materialism, especially Peter Thomas, Sebastian Budgen, and Alberto
Toscano for taking an early interest in this project. Portions of this book
were presented at various conferences and as keynote addresses at such
institutions as Hosei University in Tokyo, crmep at Kingston College, the
Marxist Literary Group; Historical Materialism (in London, New York, and
Toronto), University of Essex, Michigan State University, Bartelby
(Bologna), Colby College, McGill College, Millersville University, and
Memphis State University. With that list of institutions there comes a list
of friends, comrades, and colleagues all of whom have affected and
transformed this book. They all deserve thanks. The following is not meant
as an exhaustive list: Philip Armstrong, Joshua Clover, Andrew Culp, Anna
Curcio, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Eugene Holland, Yutaka Nagahara,
Matteo Pasquinelli, Nina Power, Giggi Rogerro, Greg Seigworth, Jason
Smith, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Robert Wells.
List of Abbreviations
All citations in this book are included in the footnotes according to the
author/ date method. The one exception to this is Spinoza’s Ethics, which
is cited in the text according to the standard method outlined below.
Spinoza’s Works
∵
The current historical moment can be described as the predominance of
the individual over the collective. The individual reigns supreme in politics,
as an ethic of individual rights and freedoms displaces any project of
collective liberation. In economics this is even more the case, as the utility
maximising individual of neoliberal economics trumps not only any other
idea of economic relations, but subsumes all social relations. Traditions
and institutions have been stripped bare, revealing the calculating, self-
interested individual that always supposedly lurked underneath.
Individual self-interest has become the template through which all actions
can be interpreted. The political and economic assertion of the individual
is completed by a cultural ideal of complete and utter self-expression and
independence. To deny this dominance, to assert that there might be
other forces at work politically, other causes to be considered
economically, and other values to aspire to ethically or culturally, is to be
branded as a collectivist, to be burdened with the ghost of the past
century’s crimes and catastrophes. The individual has become not only
the basis of political, cultural, and economic understanding but also the
extent of all of our aspirations; the individual is both methodologically and
prescriptively dominant; it is simultaneously all one needs to make sense
of the world and the best that one could hope from it.
This complete and utter assertion of the dominance of the individual,
politically, economically, and ethically is haunted by the spectre of its own
impotence. Forces beyond its control constantly risk dwarfing it. The
names that are most often used to reflect the economic, social, and
political changes of the past few decades, such as globalisation,
financialisation, and various invocations of technology, media, and the
Internet, have, as something of a common denominator, an inability to
name organisations, ideologies, or goals, or any practice or subject
orienting the changes. In its place we get the imper-
more that society is connected, related, the more that relation appears as
isolation. This contradiction perhaps sounds more like a paradox: how can
development lead to isolation, connection to fragmentation? It is possible
to read much of the critical concepts of Marx’s thought from alienation to
commodity fetishism as an answer to this question, as different ways of
grasping the general conditions for such isolation. Second, Marx
supplements his historical argument with something that, depending on
how one wanted to read it, could be considered a philosophical
anthropology or ontology. Drawing from Aristotle’s famous definition of
man as a political animal, Marx turns not to the polis as a necessary
condition of human existence, but to the fact that individuation can only
take place in the midst of society. Politics, or society, is a necessary
condition not only for individual existence, securing and protecting
humanity from dangers it is not prepared to face as a collection of
individuals, but also for individuation. It is only through politics, through
society, that anything like individuation is possible. Marx underscores this
fact through his reference to language, which is the collective condition
for individual expression and articulation. Individuation is not opposed to
society, but only develops through it. One does not need a desert island
to become an individual, but, on the contrary, an entire city.3
Of course Marx’s critique of bourgeois individualism could be
understood as a valorisation of the collective over and above the
individual. Such a reading would place Marx solely within the holistic side
of the collective-individual divide. Two things prevent Marx from being
aligned with such a view. First, Marx is just as much a critic of society
understood as something standing above the individual as he is of the
individual as something standing outside of society. As with the critique
of bourgeois ideology, this is as much a critique of the perspective of
political economy and of capitalist social relations. It is a critique of the
way things appear in capitalist society, and the social relations that
produce this appearance; or, framed differently, it is a critique of social
relations in capitalist society, and the discourses, such as political
3 Marx’s idea of individuation through social relations has an odd precursor in Descartes.
In the Discourse on Method, Descartes reflects on his urban social conditions as a
combination of individuation and socialisation. As Descartes writes, ‘I have been able
to live as solitary and as retired a life as I could in the remotest deserts – but without
lacking any of the amenities that are to be found in the most populous cities’ (Descartes
1988, p. 18).
transindividuality (a concept for marxism) 5
The general structure of this book is composed of four chapters and three
excurses. The first chapter is situated between two general philosophical
problems. First, it reads Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx as transindividual
thinkers, focusing on their specific manner of articulating an ontology,
politics, or critique of political economy that focuses on the constitutive
nature of relations. In examining these different precursors to
transindividuality, the common thread, the point of contact that keeps
this from simply being a survey of different approaches, is the critical
nature of their account of transindividuality. Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx all
develop a critical perspective with respect to the reigning ideas of
individuality at their time. The objects of this critique change according to
14 introduction
which Marx could not anticipate. Taken together, Stiegler and Virno draw
a picture of the increasing commodification of the pre-individual, as the
basic factors of experience, affects, sensations, and desires, are bought
and sold, and an increasing exploitation of the transindividual, as the
fundamental relational and individuating aspects of human existence,
from knowledge to affects, become part of the production process. As
much as these different pictures could be divided along the lines of
consumption and production, as two conflicting individuations, they
converge on the same constitution of political subjectivity, with very
different effects.
Excursus Three is dedicated to the work of Maurizio Lazzarato.
Lazzarato’s works mirrors that of Stiegler and Virno in that it is dedicated
to comprehending the contemporary transformations of capital through
a philosophy and ontology that overcomes the divide between individual
and collective. Unlike Stiegler and Virno, however, Lazzarato’s point of
reference is not Gilbert Simondon but Gabriel Tarde. Tarde’s focus on
imitation and invention as fundamental aspects of social existence makes
it possible to engage with the intersection between individuation and
social structures. As much as Lazzarato’s work functions as an important
point of contrast with those that draw from Simondon, the focus is less
on comparing and contrasting different social ontologies than on the
manner in which Lazzarato articulates politics and political economy.
Lazzarato develops a concept of ‘noopolitics’ – the politics of thoughts,
habits, and beliefs. Noopolitics, as Lazzarato sees it, is integral to
contemporary capitalism.
Chapter 4 functions as a concluding chapter, drawing together the
different approaches and understandings of transindividuality into a
coherent set of problems. In doing so, it brings together the two major
themes of the book, the politics and economics of transindividuality. The
final chapter ties together the different excurses as well, drawing together
the specific examinations of Balibar, Lordon, and Lazzarato with the
general examination of the politics and economics of transindividuation.
The central question is not just what does the relationship between
politics and economics look like with respect to transindividuality, but
what does transindividuality offer for a thinking of politics? Following the
work of Yves Citton, and drawing together elements of Spinoza, Marx, and
Balibar, I argue that transindividuality constitutes a new orientation in
thinking about both economics and politics, focusing less on the idea of a
18 introduction
Philosophical Practice
reading, whatever that might mean, of Spinoza, Hegel and Marx. (I will
turn to Balibar’s particular use of transindividuality in the excursus that
follows this chapter). My goal is simultaneously larger, encompassing
multiple engagements with Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, and more
restricted, since it is an attempt to place these three different thoughts of
transindividuality together, to follow a singular concept, a concept that
will be simultaneously defined and problematised in this inquiry. It is not
a question of a tradition, at least in the strong sense of the word, even
though the influences between these thinkers are undeniable, but of a
particular practice of philosophy. 12 It is a matter of a practice of
philosophy in two senses: First, it is an engagement with the specific
practice of philosophy of each of the philosophers, the way that they each
develop this account of transindividuality against individualist ontologies,
anthropologies, and understandings of social relations. To the extent that
these three thinkers articulate a concept of transindividuality, they do so
critically, through a critical engagement with the predominance of the
individual in ontological, political, and economic thought.
The model of criticism I am referring to here is less Kant’s
transcendental critique than it is Marx’s critique of German Idealism in
The German Ideology. In that text, Marx does not just denounce idealism,
declaring it to be false, but demonstrates how, through the material
process of history, it comes to appear that ‘consciousness determines
life’. 13 Idealism, and the idealist interpretation of history, must be
understood to be an effect of history, a product of the division of mental
and manual labour, rather than the motor of historical change. Thus, in
this case, it is not enough to simply denounce the limitations of an
individualistic understanding of social relations, and propose an alternate
ontology of transindividuality, to resort to a sterile opposition of true to
false, it is necessary to explain how the latter paradoxically constitutes the
former. How is it that through social relations, through transindividuality,
people come to see themselves as a kingdom within a kingdom, and posit
society as nothing other than the sum total of self-interested competitive
relations. In other words (Marx’s to be precise), how the most developed
social relations produce the most isolated individuals.14 This perspective
is not limited to Marx, and can be found, in different ways, in all three of
the philosophers considered here: Spinoza shows how the inadequate
idea of the autonomous individual, the kingdom within a kingdom, is a
Spinoza
Theologico-Politicus and the Political Treatise, and vice versa. Negri has gone the
furthest in this direction, proclaiming that ‘the real political science of modernity lies
in metaphysics’ (Negri 1999, p. 305). Negri applies this idea first to Spinoza, arguing
that ‘Spinoza’s true politics is his metaphysics’ (Negri 1991, p. 217). In other words,
Spinoza’s politics are to be found not in the formative Tractatus Theologico-Politicus or
in the incomplete Political Treatise, but in the Ethics, in the description of modal life.
Later, in Insurgencies, he argues that Marx’s politics, his understanding of democracy,
is to be found in his mature works, in Capital and the Grundrisse, specifically in the
theory of living labour. Living labour, in positing the constitution of the world, is
simultaneously Marx’s politics and metaphysics. For more on Negri’s reading of the
relationship between politics and metaphysics, and how it relates to Althusser’s idea
of philosophical practice, see Read 2007.
6 Bosteels 2011, p. 47.
7 Althusser 1997, p. 7.
its primary critical target is the anthropological and teleological
conception of God, ‘that God himself directs all things to some certain
end’. Spinoza has already, in Part One, developed an alternative ontology,
one which posits God as the immanent cause of nature, as a power
already actualised in nature, leaving no room for God acting miraculously
with an end in view. However, it is not enough to simply dispense with
this image, to confront it speculatively, as the true opposes the false, but
its genesis must be critically articulated. Doing so necessitates an
understanding of human thought and desire, ‘even if it is not the place to
deduce these things from the nature of the human mind’ (EIApp). Such a
critique is pre-emptive, at least partly so, in that it begins to develop the
theory of the conatus and the conditions of knowledge prior to the
demonstration of the property of the mind and desire in Parts Two and
Three. This apparent disorder, in which polemic gets ahead of, and is thus
separable from, argument, reveals itself to be a different order, a different
practice of philosophy: critique cannot be separated from construction,
pars destruens from pars construens.16
As I have already noted, this pre-emptive critique takes as its
foundation ‘what everyone must acknowledge’, that people are ignorant
of the causes of things but conscious of their appetite, their tendency to
seek their own advantage. This foundation explains the apparent facticity
of freedom, that we experience no compulsion, no necessity, when we
decide to do this or that. 17 For Spinoza, this fact is a fundamental
prejudice, and not a fundamental axiom; it is a necessary limited
perspective of ourselves and our relation to the world. This prejudice
16 Negri argues that Spinoza’s thought is one in which the critical dimension, pars
destruens, is immediately constructive, pars construens, constructing a new
ontology and politics (Negri 1991, p. 84).
17 Citton 2006, p. 14.
24 chapter 1
leads to a view in which the entirety of the world is viewed in terms of its
relation to final causes, to human purposes. The individual who believes
him- or herself to be free constitutes a world, a world seen as made up of
objects that advance or hinder our desires, and are seen as intrinsically
good or bad. This judgement comes prior to our understanding. God
enters the picture as a supplement to this limited grasp of the world:
when nature helps or limits my intentions, it appears as if I am the
beneficiary or victim of some other intention, some divine intervention.18
It is possible to call this, following Althusser, a ‘spontaneous philosophy’
in that it is based less on an explicit doctrine or text than on the immediate
practical comportment of individuals. 19 This philosophy starts with the
individual, with the subject, seen as independent of all other causes and
relations. God (or perhaps even the gods) is simply that point where this
individual, this particular appetite, confronts a world that unexpectedly
frustrates or assists its particular striving. This individual acts with an end
in view, attempting to realise his or her desire. Things in the world,
objects, are interpreted according to this intention, ‘they believe all things
have been made for their sake’, understanding them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in
terms of how they help or hinder these intentions. Ultimately, the things
that help or hinder these individual intentions are seen to be the product
of another intention, another will, however mysterious. Intention,
appetite, and desire form the grid of intelligibility of the world. ‘And since
they had never heard anything about the temperament of these rulers,
they had to judge it from their own’ (EIApp). The gods, or God, emerge
from this as a projection of the individual’s intention reflecting its
constitutive limits, the impossibility of making sense of the world
according to one’s conscious appetite.
Once this idea of God emerges from an ignorance of the world, from a
world seen under the illusion of finalism, of ends and values, it has its
effects on knowledge and action.12 The effect becomes a cause. Spinoza
makes the distinction between prejudice (praejudicia) and superstition
(supersitio), the first of which defines this initial ignorance of the causes
of things, including our desire, while the second refers to this ignorance
as it is reinforced by its social dimension, by a doctrine of ignorance and a
practice of belief.13 Prejudice is transformed into superstition once the
social dimension enters this horizon of ignorance and desire, once this
belief in final causes becomes something that people try to exploit and
develop, convincing others of their interpretation.
‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’. In that text, Althusser
uses the term the obviousness or naturalness of certain ideological conceptions
despite the fact that they are created, the product of history. As Pierre Macherey
clarifies: ‘The spontaneous is never but a “spontaneous” in scare quotes, that is to
say a false spontaneity which is in reality the result of a manipulation, an artifice, an
editing’ (Macherey 2009a, p. 21). It is possible to argue, as I am suggesting here,
that the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics is the first critique of the spontaneous
philosophy of theology.
12 Alexandre Matheron has coined the term ‘finalism’ to refer to this idea, outlined in
the Appendix, that objects have their intrinsic values, are good or bad in themselves.
As Matheron argues, stressing the radical nature of this critique, in that the terms
given here, the free subject and world of objects, defines much of metaphysics as
well as theology (Matheron 1969, p. 107).
13 As Pierre Macherey argues, the Appendix can be understood as something of a
practical demonstration of the implications of eiip36: ‘Inadequate and confused
ideas follow with the same necessity as adequate or clear and distinct ideas’
(Macherey 1998a, p. 206).
The priority is less a temporal one, positing a history of religion in which
the ignorance of individuals is socially organised into religion, than a
logical one, whereby superstition rests on the inadequate nature of finite
knowledge, and ultimately on finitude itself.
The argument of the Appendix demonstrates how an image of
ourselves (and the world) emerges from our particular activity, our
particular striving in the world, and in turn acts on the world. Finalism, the
idea of a world structured in terms of means and ends, God, and the free
subject, are initially effects of the limited grasp of the world, of the
ignorance of the causes of things, but they become causes in turn. Spinoza
writes: ‘This doctrine concerning the end turns Nature completely upside
down. For what is really a cause, it considers as an effect, and conversely’
(EIApp). What he is referring to here is the way in which final causes,
desires and intentions are, in every theology and metaphysics, made to
be explanatory causes of the world, when they are nothing but effects.
Final causes are not the origin of the world, but are an effect of a particular
way of viewing the world, a particular temperament. This effect in turn
acts as a cause, reproducing itself as a particular temperament and way
of thinking. The anthropological-theological perspective (and its various
offshoots) views effects as causes, but superstition as a practice is an
effect that becomes a cause. The imaginary causality becomes the real
26 chapter 1
that judgement or evaluation, which sets up god and man in specular identification.
As Spinoza writes with respect to the gesture of projection, from an inadequate idea
of the human body to an inadequate idea of God that constitutes anthro-theological
imaginary: ‘they necessarily judge the temperament of the other from their own
temperament’ [ex suo ingenio ingenium alterius necessario judicant]. As Balibar
writes, ‘By ingenium, we should understand a memory whose form has been
determined by the individual’s experience of life and by his or her various
encounters, and which, as a result of the unique way in which it has been
constituted, is inscribed both in the mind (or soul) and in the dispositions of the
body’ (Balibar 1998b, p. 29).
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 27
p. 246. Negri has insisted that the emphasis on the constitutive dimension of
theology, its constitution of practices and a world, is what distinguishes Spinoza’s
critique from the generic enlightenment critique. ‘The instrumental paradox of the
“libertine” critique of religion is accepted here (imagination is illusion) in the
inverted form that really constitutes it (and illusion constitutes reality). But the
Spinozian inversion of the constitutive function evades the skeptical danger and
every skeptical temptation. Constitutive activity in fact, is not a simple political
function, it is not double truth; it is, rather, ontological power’ (Negri 1991, p. 95).
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 29
35 Gilles Deleuze has perhaps done the most to develop the idea of Spinoza’s voices, the
different tones and significations that separate the polemics of the scholia and
appendix from the order of propositions and demonstrations (Deleuze 1997, p.
146).
36 Spinoza’s denial of any substantial definition to man, ‘The being of substance does not
pertain to the essence of man or substance does not constitute the form of man’
(eiip10), has fueled accusations of ‘acosmism’. The flipside of this is a strong
tendency towards nominalism, of singular things, in which all that exists is the
individual. Spinoza asserts simultaneously that all is substance and that all is
individual, making possible the assertion ‘Substance, that is individuals’. Or, as
Vittorio Morfino has argued, substance is perhaps best thought of as nothing other
than relation (Morfino 2014, p. 58).
30 chapter 1
37 Balibar 1997b, p. 4.
38 Balibar 1998b, p. 107.
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 31
the sheer plurality of human desires: the drunk who desires drink, the
ambitious man who desires glory, the philosopher who desires wisdom,
all have to be considered as singular modes of desiring and existing, as
essences. The plurality of different essences is not simply given, it is not a
‘spiritual animal kingdom’ of different natures, but it reflects the way in
which these different natures have been determined, affected. All
striving, all desire, is doubly determined: determined to preserve and
maintain itself, and determined by its particular affects, its objects and
history.39
The primary affects, joy and sadness, make possible love and hate. Love
and hate are defined as nothing other than ‘joy with the accompanying
idea of an external cause’, for the former, and ‘sadness with the
accompanying idea of external cause’, for the latter (eiiip13s). The ideas
of love and hate begin to constitute objects, objects that are defined not
by any of their intrinsic qualities (they are not good or bad), but by their
relations. What causes joy or sadness does so solely because something is
perceived to be the cause of my joy or sadness. Whether the perceptions
reflect some quality of the object, its capacity to actually cause pain or
pleasure, or some purely contingent or imagined aspect, is beside the
point. Whatever causes joy is loved, and vice versa, rightly or wrongly.
There is thus an irreducible historical dimension to the affects, objects
that are perceived as the cause of joy or sadness become objects of love
and hate: this history determines the object, giving it qualities, and desire,
giving it goals to strive towards. As Spinoza writes, ‘it is clear that we
neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we
judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good
because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it’ (eiiip9s). The object
and individual are constituted by their history. Thus, there are as many
affects as there are objects, love and hate are purely nominalist terms that
reflect a plurality of possible objects (eiiip56), and, conversely, there are
as many affects as there are individuals. The affects individuate both the
‘object’ – the thing (or person) loved or hated – and the ‘subject’ – the
person loving, hating, hoping, fearing, etc. The multiplicity of different
affects, different loves and hatreds, and different individuals would seem
to tend towards an absolute nominalism, a world of singular loves and
hatreds. However, beyond the primacy of the singular object or the
individual, what Spinoza’s text affirms first and foremost is the primacy of
relations, the similar structuring principles: that is why the affects are
defined twice, first in terms of the relations that constitute them, and
secondly in terms of their generic definitions.40
Spinoza can be understood to be offering a critique of both the idea of
a subject, understood as a universal capacity of will and knowledge, and
an object understood as a thing made of determined, intrinsic qualities.35
In the first case, that of the subject, we have instead the conatus which
does not exist outside of its particular determinations, its particular
striving.41 There is no will in general, just specific acts of willing. While in
the second, the object, the thing, has to be viewed in terms of its history,
its affections and associations.37 It would appear, at least initially, that
this relational dimension would apply only to inadequate ideas, ideas in
which situation and circumstances, effects and causes, are muddled. Such
ideas give us not so much an object, but a confused encounter between
our body and another body in which it is impossible to determine where
one ends and another begins. As we will see, however, adequate ideas are
no less relational, are common.42 The difference is not between what is
relational and confused, and singular and adequate, but rather in how the
relations are determined or grasped: according to ‘the common order of
nature’, or according to their internal conditions of causal production.43
The concepts of subject and object are, like the universal and
transcendent ideas, too broad and imprecise, and must be replaced by the
actual conditions and relations that constitute the specificity of a given
conatus, a given striving, or a singular thing.
The overlapping constitution of objects and subjects, of things and
desires, can perhaps be best seen in the ‘imitation of affects’. This
imitation crosses the divide that separates subjects and objects,
imagination and reason, taking on different modalities and relations. The
ground of this imitation is given in the imagination, in the fact that we
‘imagine a thing to be like us’, from that initial similitude we then take on
the affects of this similar thing or person. As Spinoza initially defines this
‘imitation’:
This imitation undoes the opposition of self and other, undoing the divide
between ego-centrism and altruism, or self-interest and disinterest.44 Pity
is not a purely disinterested concern for another, but one of the many
effects of the general tendency of the conatus to increase joy and
decrease sadness.45The image or idea of the other’s sadness saddens me,
pushing me to dispense with it. (Of course, pity is still grounded in
sadness, in passivity, which is why Spinoza rejects it as a basis for ethics,
but it cannot be grasped according to a rigid divide between self and
other). Ambition, the striving that others desire what I desire, love what I
love, also crosses the division between self and other. My affects are
increased by the affects of others, by what they love. I want others to love
what I love, and I love something more when it is loved by others. This
relation is not a relation of recognition between subjects; it is not a
relation between individuals qua individuals, but rather one between the
constitutive transindividual conditions.46 I relate to others not as bounded
totalities, as persons, but in and through the objects and affects that move
them.
Ambition is the constitution of sociality, of society constituted by
shared loves and hates, which is to say that it is a constitution of an object
as much as a collective or individual desire.47 If I desire that others love
something that cannot be shared, as in the case of a possessive lover, then
my desire that others love it will be as much a source of conflict as
agreement. Thus, ‘while they rejoice to sing the praises of the thing they
love, they fear to be believed’ (eivp37s1). Thus, in ambition we see two of
the defining characteristics of Spinoza’s account of the affects: imitation
and vacillation. Affects constitute collectivities, objects, and
individualities, but they do so ambivalently, defining the common terrain
that constantly divides between love and hatred, agreement and conflict.
Ambivalence is not due to some instability of the affects themselves, but
to the fact that the same thing, the same object or person, is often the
47 In the Political Treatise, Spinoza writes: ‘Since men, as we have said, are led more by
34 chapter 1
cause of both joy and sadness, hope and fear. Our affective relations are
ambivalent, complicated by the fact that what is the cause of joy is often
the cause of sadness, and whatever we love is often loved or hated by
someone else.44 The complexity of things and the historicity of
encounters inscribe a sadness in the heart of joy and a hatred at the core
of love. The vacillation of the affects is an effect of difference over time
and space; it stems from the fact that relations are primary to objects or
subjects.
The relation of the affects, with their various imitations and vacillations,
offers the clearest illustration of the transindividual constitution of
individuality and collectivity in Spinoza: it is through the affects that we
can see that the individual, both the individual person and object, cannot
be separated from relations with others, nor can the collective, nation or
class, be thought of as anything other than a particular relation of
strivings. However, it would appear that sociality is identified primarily
with passivity, with determination by others, and activity with
individuality, with autonomy. This would seem to be the sense of one of
the opening definitions, which identifies freedom as something acting
from its own nature, and determination by another as compulsion (eid7).
It is possible to read Spinoza this way, and the figures of the sage would
seem to suggest an ‘ethics’ of extricating oneself from the connections
and relations with others, thus reading Spinoza according to a long-
standing tradition which has equated the affects (or emotions) with
collectivity and reason with individuality, the madness of crowds and the
solitary genius (ultimately mapping both onto the division between
nature and culture). However, doing so obscures the novelty of Spinoza’s
particular thought of transindividuality. It could be argued that reading
Spinoza according to the division between
passion than by reason, it naturally follows that a people will unite and consent to
be guided as if by one mind not at reason’s prompting but through some common
emotion, such as a common hope, or common fear, or desire to avenge some
common injury’ (2000, p. 64).
44 Macherey 1995, p. 195.
the individual and the collective, seeing him as either the champion of the
individual versus collective, or vice versa, reflects more the dominance of
this particular opposition within the history of philosophy than anything
about his text.48
48 Contemporary Spinoza scholarship is split between those who assert the irreducibly
individual basis of the conatus, of the individual striving, and those who assert the
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 35
primacy of the multitude, or nature, as a body encompassing all bodies. Balibar has
argued that these interpretations crystallise around the line from the Political
Treatise which describes ‘the power of the multitude guided, as it were, by one
mind’ [potential multitudinis, quae una veluti mente ducitur] (Spinoza 2000, p. 48).
Some, such as Lee Rice, see this as merely a metaphor, stressing the ‘as if’, while
others, such as Negri and Matheron, argue that the multitude can be considered an
individual in terms of its striving, conatus, and relations. Balibar’s solution,
consistent with his reading of Spinoza as a transindividual thinker, is to examine the
mutual constitution of the individual and the multitude (Balibar 2005, p. 94).
36 chapter 1
What about adequate ideas, however, those ideas that express their
cause? Are they not individual, the products of a single mind, situated
outside of the collective economy of ambition? Spinoza’s use of the term
‘common notions’ suggests otherwise, that common notions are notions
in common. All common notions, all ideas, inadequate and adequate,
arise from the encounters of two bodies. Inadequate ideas fail to
comprehend this relation, confusing the body affected with the body that
is doing the affecting, seeing ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as an intrinsic quality of the
object, rather than a product of our own determined relations with the
object. Adequate ideas, common notions, begin to grasp this relation not
as a muddled effect of an encounter, but instead comprehend the actual
commonality, the actual relations that constitute the two bodies. This
relational dimension of common notions deepens if we take into account
one of the defining differences of inadequate and adequate ideas: the first
are determined by the ‘common order of nature’, while the second are
produced through the mind ‘regarding a number of things at once’ in
order ‘to understand their agreements, differences, and oppositions’
(evp39s). Confused ideas and adequate ideas both entail relations, the
difference is whether or not they express them, whether or not they grasp
the actual basis of their relation, their common nature. The lowest order
of knowledge, the ideas that define superstition, are seen as absolutely
singular, left as objects of pure wonder (eiiip52).49 It is not just that ideas,
inadequate or adequate, express relations, that there are relations
internal to thought, but that these relations cannot be separated from
social relations in general. For Spinoza, a body that has done many things,
an individual that has experienced many things, is capable of more ideas,
of more adequate ideas (eiip13s). The social dimension of common
notions is foregrounded in the TheologicalPolitical Treatise, not just in
terms of its argument for the freedom to philosophise, but also in terms
of its understanding of the constitutive nature of the social order for
thought.50
Passivity and activity, affects and desire, imagination and reason, are
the product of relations, since every affect, every idea, encompasses at
least two ‘things’, two bodies, two affects. Moreover, every individual and
every collective is nothing other than the combination of these relations,
54 The universal idea of ‘man’ is passive, a product of the excess of images over the
to man than man’ (eivp37s2). This idea of man does not produce the
ambivalence that determines the affect of ambition. Individuals guided by
reason actually agree with each other, add and assist each other, rather
than strive to orient their actions around an impossible object of what the
others want. Moreover, reason as an object of desire is truly common; not
only can it be shared by all, but its worth increases with the number of
people who participate in it (eivp36).55 Reason is not scarce, not finite, and
is actually increased by others thinking the same thing. Men under the
guidance of reason can overcome the contradictions of ambition and
actually desire that others desire what they desire.
These two different foundations of the city, these two different geneses
of sociality, one based on the affect of ambition and the other based on
reason, are not two different options: there is not a city of affects and a
city of reason supplanting each other as two different phases, two
different orders. Spinoza’s text presents them as two different
demonstrations of the same thing, suggesting the coexistence of these
two different constitutions of society. As Balibar writes, ‘Sociability is
therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence,
both of which have real effects’. 56 We are always dealing with both
affects, with ambition, and reason, with a city founded on a projection of
our ideas of man, and a city founded on our rational utility. While there is
no telos, no necessary progression by which the city founded on reason
(a democracy) necessarily displaces a city founded on superstition and
affects, that does not mean that the relation is entirely static. The
particular combination of reason and affects defines the nature of a given
city, and its particular history. There is no more one generic essence of the
city’s striving than there is an essence of man’s singular striving. The
striving, the particular relations that constitute the city, the collective,
must be thought from the singular case, from the specific way it is affected
and determined.57 There is thus a history, but this history must be thought
55 It is for this reason that Negri argues that Spinoza’s politics can be understood as being
based on the construction of the common rather than the universal (Negri 2010, p.
136).
56 Balibar 1998b, p. 88.
57 Étienne Balibar has argued that the Theological-Political Treatise offers a dialectical
from the singular case, from the particular way in which any given city
combines ambition and reason, affects and knowledge.
Ambition and reason are two different ways of the community
preserving itself, just as affects and reason, appetite and desire, are two
different ways of the individual preserving him- or herself. That there is
an overlap between the individual and the collective, the self and the city,
is not surprising. After all, as we have seen with the idea of temperament
[ingenium], the individual and the collective are constituted through the
same basic relations, affects, ideas, and desires. However, such an
understanding of society risks eclipsing the very transindividual relation
that we are seeking, in that it risks making the individual nothing other
than an effect of the city, the same affects, the same ideas, on a smaller
scale, or, conversely, it makes the city nothing other than the projection
of the different institutions that constitute it.58 Spinoza underscores the
impossibility of this in at least two places. First, it is impossible to
constitute a city entirely founded on superstition, on the imagination and
the affects. To do so would require the total control of the experiences
and ideas of all the individuals, to make all of their imaginary associations
and affective vacillations the same as the social imaginary. 59 Right is
coextensive with power, and every state must confront the irreducible
singularity of the conatus, of desires and ideas. There is an irreducible gap
between the character, the ingenium, of the individual and that of the
collective. Attempting to annul it only makes it more powerful. Second,
and conversely, a city entirely founded on rationality is also impossible.
The idea of such a city overlooks the finitude of man, the inability to know
or control the future. Between these two extremes, between the
constitution of total imaginary subjection and a free society of sages,
states and individuals are constituted as a combination of affective and
rational aspects.
Spinoza’s critical transindividual perspective begins by demonstrating
that the idea of an autonomous individual is itself the product of an
originary ignorance. Human beings are not a ‘kingdom within a kingdom’,
but continuously affect, and are affected by, their relations with others
and the world. This ontological or anthropological critique of the
independent individual is followed by a political or social analysis that
illustrates how it is that affects, imagination, and reason constitute every
individual and collective. The affects and intellect, imagination and
reason, combine in every individual and collective, but they do so
Hegel
In shifting our attention from Spinoza to Hegel, the obvious place to begin
would seem to be Hegel’s formulation in the Phenomenology of Spirit that
‘Selfconsciousness is desire itself’.61 Such an assertion crosses the same
terrain as Spinoza’s articulation of conatus, essence, desire and
consciousness, making it the point of both proximity and difference. Once
this formulation is coupled with Hegel’s subsequent statement that ‘Self-
consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-
consciousness’, it is possible to see the strong transindividual basis of
Hegel’s understanding of desire, a transindividual conception that can be
juxtaposed to Spinoza’s. 62 In each case, desire, consciousness, and
relations are combined in a redefinition of thought and existence that can
be defined as transindividual.
The two statements cited above, and the dense logic which connects
them, are found in the passage known as ‘Lordship and Bondage’, or the
Master/Slave dialectic. This passage is perhaps the most well-known of all
of Hegel’s writings, and this notoriety, along with the tendency to treat it
as a separate treatise on humanity and politics, poses several problems.
First, there is the difficult question of its place within the logic of the
Phenomenology itself. The section on ‘self-consciousness’ marks the
transition from consciousness, the attempts to know an object, to Reason
on the path to spirit. For Hegel, consciousness cannot grasp itself as some
other thing in the world, nor can it simply be a meta-reflection,
consciousness of consciousness. 63 It thus requires a transindividual
dimension, a constitutive dimension of relations. The presence of the
transindividual dimension raises questions about the role of sociality in
Hegel’s thought. Secondly, it marks the first place where concrete figures
and a quasihistorical content enter into the Phenomenology. The fact that
Hegel could be talking about ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’, as well as some
forgotten historical moment of domination, not to mention the way in
which the passage includes work, death, as well as desire, opens up the
possibility of a historical or anthropological reading of this passage.64 This
is the possibility actualised by Alexandre Kojève, whose powerful but
interrupted reading of this passage is incredibly influential, defining a
central passage in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Kojève’s
interpretation shifts the passage from its place within the development of
the Phenomenology to a set of questions about the role of desire, work,
and death in the constitution of human existence and history. Kojève’s
influential reading is interrupted because it more or less starts and begins
with this passage, making provisional statements in a dialectical
development of statements into independent theses and conclusions. The
limitations of this anthropological reading must be traversed rather than
avoided, since they are all drawn from the aspects that constitute so much
of the passage’s appeal, and influence, for rethinking relations. The
passage is situated between the anthropological invariants that illustrate
it and the dialectical presentation that animates it.
In its presentation in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the passage on the
master and slave is situated between consciousness and self-
consciousness.65 Consciousness, the reflection on an object, loses itself in
the object, revealing nothing of its nature. In contrast to this, self-
consciousness must be active; this is the fundamental engagement with
desire. Desire, for this or that thing, for food or water, reveals very little,
only that self-consciousness is a living thing. The object still asserts its
independence, its contingency, as these desires are satisfied only to
return again. The desire for another self-consciousness, what many call
66 Kojève 1980, p. 7.
67 Russon 2001, p. 54.
44 chapter 1
the material world. With respect to recognition, the master finds herself
in a position that is the opposite of what was first intended. The master
becomes a master through struggle, through the assertion that
recognition, being seen as an independent consciousness, is more
important than life, but ultimately finds herself recognised by one that she
cannot recognise in turn. It might be possible to say that the opposite is
true of the slave, namely that she first chooses life but ends up finding
recognition through the master. However, such a neat reversal is not
possible; the slave never receives recognition from the master. The
dialectical reversal of this passage, the point where the master is revealed
to be a slave, and vice versa, turns as much on the relation to the object
as to the relation to the other: the master is a slave, not just because he
is recognised by one who he cannot recognise, but because his relation to
the object is as a pure object of desire, absolute mediation in its
immediacy, while the slave works on the object. As Hegel writes, ‘Work,
on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other
words, work forms and shapes the thing’.68 This work coupled with the
fear of death proves to be another direction for recognition, at least in
part: the slave is not recognised, but comes to recognise him- or herself
through a world that is the product of labour. Labour constitutes another
basis for recognition. Whereas the opening of the passage began with a
rigid division between appetite and desire, between relations with the
world of objects and the world of subjects, desire for things and desire for
recognition, the overturning of the relation of master to slave obscures
this very distinction. What is important to Hegel is less the sharp division
between the desire for recognition, what we might want to call
intersubjectivity, and the relation with things, and more the fundamental
negation of one’s determinate condition: to be recognised is to be seen
as something more than this determinate existence, a point that can be
arrived at through the instability of fear and the determination of work as
much as it can through recognition.69
Labour is the externalisation of self, the remaking of the world
according to one’s conception and ideas. It is the constitution of the world
in one’s image. However, Hegel’s interest in work, an interest that runs
throughout his philosophical system, exceeds this subjective dimension.70
All work on an object must contend with the matter of that object,
contending with its particular properties and qualities. These qualities
It would at first appear that the master has won out in this respect, for he
has placed the bondsman, or slave, between himself and the object: the
slave does all the work; the master receives all of the enjoyment.
However, this consumption leaves the master in an almost animalistic
state with respect to desire, knowing only his hungers and thirsts and
nothing of the world around him. The master has become dependent,
dependent on recognition from one that he cannot recognise, and his very
fundamental desires, desires for food and shelter, reflect this
dependence. The master has overcome the independence but not the
contingency of the object. If self-consciousness is desire, not just desire in
terms of its supposed essence, but also in the way that it is articulated and
actualised in relations, then the master comprehends little of herself,
neither her relations with others or with objects reveals her potential.
Ultimately, it is the figure of the impoverished self-consciousness of the
master and the revolutionary potential of the slave that make this passage
so evocative, making possible its multiple reinterpretations and
reinscriptions into the history of class struggle and colonial struggle.77
There is an affective dimension to the second sense of recognition, the
recognition through the relation with objects, which cannot be ignored.
Work itself would not liberate the slave from an attachment to a
determinate mode of life, to its animalistic existence if it was not coupled
with fear. As Hegel writes,
This fear, the fear not of this or that thing but of death, the absolute
master, is necessary to constitute the detachment from a determinate
as we shall see, the narrative direction of this history, its causality or telos,
begins to separate the two as well.
As much as this passage from the Phenomenology can be understood
as an account of the human condition, anthropogenesis, or as the
template for a philosophy of history, it could also be understood as
another critical account of transindividuality. It can be understood to be a
critique of every would-be lord, every attempt to grasp the self outside of
a constitutive relation with others (and with them the material basis of
existence). The lord and bondsman, master and slave, can be understood
critically as two different extremes of human existence: the master is
symbolic of an attempt to live a life without attachment, as desire in its
pure negative dimension; in contrast to this the slave is life in its
materiality and particularity, this particular life without the capacity to act
on or transform itself. One is without relations, the other is defined
entirely by his or her relations. Each of these proves to be untenable: the
master’s life proves to be more attached to existence than it would first
appear, and the slave’s life necessarily goes beyond its limited survival,
projecting its consciousness through labour and work. (The mutual
undoing of each of these figures of consciousness could also be
understood as an assertion of the necessary unity of mind and body: the
master initially tries to live only as mind, as consciousness, passing off all
bodily engagement to the slave, while the slave lives as pure body. That
each of these proves to be untenable could be understood as the
assertion that human existence is necessarily mind and body, recognition
and labour).81 It would be more premature than pre-emptive to refer to
this particular dialectical resolution as transindividual. It is more
intersubjective, framed by recognition, by the particular relation between
two consciousnesses, or by consciousness and its object, than by the
relation between the individual/individuation and the relations that it
constitutes and constitute it.82 As much as the dialectic of recognition and
misrecognition splits in two, giving us the relation to the other and to
work, suggesting that it is more than intersubjectivity that is at stake, the
limit of any interpretation of Hegel that remains stuck on this passage is
to reduce transindividuality to intersubjectivity. Such a reading reduces
transindividuality to a binary relation of recognition or misrecognition.
Of course, Hegel’s own text would perhaps stand as the clearest
warning against such an interrupted reading. Hegel concludes this section
not with anything resembling the end of history (as universal recognition
87 Hegel 1977, p.
252.
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 51
to the service of the state, the second to wealth. The conflict has to do
with the way in which universality and individuality appear in each
activity. At first it would appear that service of the state is ‘simple
substance’ and ‘universal work’, a work in which individuality is
suppressed in favour of the immediacy of the universal.90 Wealth is the
reverse of this; the enjoyment of the individual is immediate. As Hegel
indicates, however, prefiguring his engagement with political economy in
the Philosophy of Right, the pursuit of self-interest through work cannot
help but ‘produce universal labour and enjoyment for all’.89 Similarly, the
selfless dedication to the state, to the universal interest, can appear as
nothing other than the pursuit of one’s individual interest. The duality of
individual and universal, the individual in the universal and the universal
in the individual, is not how things appear, however, to the particular
consciousness involved. For each of these figures of consciousness, one
appears as good, the other as bad. It is always possible to see each of
these actions in antithetical ways: state power can appear as the true
universal, or as an oppressive and indifferent rule that suppresses every
individual, while wealth can likewise appear as either universal activity or
selfish interest. It is possible to see in each of these activities either the
universal or the individual, either something ‘good’, something through
which subjectivity can recognise itself, or something ‘bad’, something
hostile to itself and its interest. The duality of the action concerned,
wealth and state power as individual or collective, contrasts sharply with
the singularity of the judgement, thus making it possible to see a critique
of moralising understanding of action, framed in terms of the good and
the bad, individuality or universality. In the passage on Culture in
question, the simple opposition between state service as good and wealth
as bad, or vice versa, eventually gives way to two different figures of
consciousness: the first, the noble consciousness, sees the universal, or
the identity of self and universal in every action, while the latter, the
ignoble consciousness, sees only difference, the rift between the
individual and the universal, the corruption of every action.90
different from what one intends. The first language, that of service, is the identity
of the universal and particular; the second, flattery, subordinates the universality of
the promise to particular intentions.
91 Hegel 1988, p. 34.
54 chapter 1
but it is also that which any individual struggles against.92 This basic logic,
in which the struggle is never as simple as the struggle of the individual
against society, but of individuation against its very conditions, permeates
the entire articulation of spirit. In the Phenomenology, this struggle passes
through the history of faith, enlightenment, and religious representation,
eventually arriving at absolute knowledge, the recognition of the ‘I in the
we’. The emphasis is on historical progression.
All of these themes – work, alienation, recognition, state power, and
economic activity – return in the Philosophy of Right. Now, however, the
emphasis is no longer on the historical development of spirit, of
transindividuality from its implicit condition as ethical substance to its
conscious articulation as project and concept, than on its politics, its
transformation from substance to subject. It is not a matter of charting
the development of spirit as the condition for the transindividual
individuation, but of articulating the proper institutional organisation, an
organisation that can make it both the condition for individual freedom
and collective cohesion. Most importantly, it is in the Philosophy of Right
that we approach something close to Spinoza’s Appendix to the Ethics:
not only a critical engagement with a particular individualistic idea of
subjectivity, but a critical genesis of the constitutive practices and
relations that produce such a perspective. That Hegel’s most critical
remarks about individuality appear in a work of political philosophy
reveals the shifting objects of Spinoza and Hegel’s critique; what Spinoza
addressed as a general tendency to posit man as a kingdom within a
kingdom, a tendency reinforced by religion, is for Hegel the specific
product of modern existence under the nascent market. The
Phenomenology offered a general account of the transindividual account
of subjectivity, but the Philosophy of Right offers not only Hegel’s specific
understanding of the politics of transindividuality, but also his
development of transindividuality as a critical perspective. Through
reading these two texts together, reading the critique and theory, it
becomes possible to grasp the transindividual dimension of Hegel’s
thought.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is concerned with the question of right, with
the justification of the state in terms of the manner in which its
fundamental institutions and structures make possible freedom. Freedom
is understood not just in terms of individual autonomy, the capacity to
choose this or that, but the capacity to choose the conditions for such
is described as ‘the principle if not exclusive site of collective social experience’. The
family functions in the social imaginary as the locus of intimacy and solidarity, while
simultaneously corrupting such affects, limiting them to a projected narcissism: care
for ‘my’ family is little more than care for myself. The family is the common
presented on the dominance of the same, the rule of identity. In a similar fashion,
the corporation represents the collective dimension of work. Work, even work in
capitalism, entails a development of humankind’s co-operative powers, but in
capitalism these powers are often misrecognised as the power of capital itself.
Finally, the nation is perhaps the most fundamental corruption of the common:
fundamental because insofar as political action takes the nation as its unquestioned
site, it remains the unsurpassable idea of collectivity that functions as the basis of
all politics, the only alternative to the individual. Family, the corporation (or capital),
and state are corruptions of the common: the common is expressed in each as a
necessary condition, but in such a manner that its expression is subordinated to
hierarchies and exclusions that restrict its capacity (Hardt and Negri 2009, p. 160).
100 Hegel 1991a, p. 199.
101 Hegel 1991a, p. 47.
As much as Hegel’s treatment of civil society is simply the middle term
in the passage from the substantial basis of the family to the universality
of the state, the stakes of this section are greater. It is in this section that
Hegel engages with not only political economy, the works of Adam Smith,
as the specific science of need and work, but also the particular
philosophical anthropology underlying political economy, its
58 chapter 1
understanding of the limits of this perspective, its inability to grasp its own
constitutive relations. Civil society is placed between the family and the
state, it ruptures the former’s affective immediacy, the bonds of love, but
its isolated self-interested subjects require other bonds, other relations in
order to eliminate conflict and contingency.
This education, the transformation of the perspective of civil society,
takes two paths that have already been outlined by the Phenomenology:
the first is through consumption; the other is through work. In the first,
need moves from its immediacy and contingency, determined entirely by
location and climate, to universality and sociality, through the work of civil
society itself. As needs and the possibility of meeting them multiply
through the work of civil society, the drive to make profit and exploit
others, they necessarily become more conscious, intelligent, and free. As
Hegel writes,
99 This is a remarkable shift from the Phenomenology’s evocative image of the ‘Master’
whose consumption tells him nothing of himself and the world. It remains to be
seen if this shift is one of a political motivation, Hegel’s identification with the
bourgeoisie, or if it is a reflection, conscious or unconscious, of the development of
capital in the years since 1806. Perhaps, Hegel was beginning to glimpse the
emergence of what we call ‘consumer culture’, in which identity is shaped less by
the struggle for recognition than by the choices of consumption.
100 Jameson 2010, p. 106.
102 Marx famously criticised Hegel’s Phenomenology for only grasping labour as abstract
labour. As Marx writes, ‘He grasps labour as the essence of man – as man’s essence
which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour.
Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The
only labour which Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental labour’ (Marx
1964, p. 177). In contrast to this, Jameson argues that Hegel’s conception of work is
a handicraft ideology (Jameson 2010, p. 68).
62 chapter 1
the individual as producer and produced, as cause and effect, can be seen
as perhaps intrinsic to work itself, or the limitations and merits of Hegel’s
approach. What is crucial, however, is the way in which this tension
unfolds in Hegel’s dialectic, as individuation and socialisation are brought
together to define a particular account of transindividuality.
Both consumption and work begin to overcome the immediate and
natural particularity of individuality, the self-interest of civil society, but
they do so in opposed, even contradictory, ways. 103 They are both
transindividual individuations, the one pushed towards particular self-
expression, the other towards interchangeability: consumption is the
moment of individuation, of differentiation, the particular in the
universal, while labour is the moment of discipline, the universal in the
particular. There is still a contradiction between consumption and
production, but it is not the stark contradiction between the emptiness of
the lord’s desire and the realisation of the bondsman through labour. It is
no longer the difference of two different conceptual personae, of master
and bondsman, but two different facets of individuation in civil society.104
Their sense is somewhat opposed to the meaning that Hegel gave them
in the passage on self-consciousness; work is no longer a recognition, the
basis for the slave’s formation of self-consciousness, but is subject to the
‘division of labour’ which makes work more and more unconscious and
mechanical, eventually displacing the worker in favour of the machine.
Consumption, as we have seen, is no longer the emptiness of the master’s
desire, but is the basis for a social and reflective constitution of
individuality. The difference between work and consumption threatens to
divide civil society, making it difficult to think of it as a single institution
dominated by a central set of practices and perspectives. Unlike the
family, which is defined by a single affect and attitude, that of love, civil
society cannot entirely be subsumed under the attitude of interest, as this
interest is split between its socialisation in production and
consumption.113 It is easy to identify consumption with individual self-
interest, but the connection between self-interest and work is harder to
maintain. As Hegel writes, describing this division, ‘In these opposites and
103 As Jacques Rancière writes, ‘But the civilization of work immediately backfires on the
worker. It proves its excellence in producing “commodities” that can develop the
universal sociability of cultivated life but at the price of fixing more firmly in their
place artisans destined for the simple reproduction of their work capacity and the
solitary repetition of a machine-like gesture’ (Rancière 2004, p. 208).
104 Jameson 2010, p. 112.
logic.108 (This division also seems to repeat the general articulation of the
entire section on Ethical Life, repeating the relation between family, civil
society, and the state, making agriculture the ‘family’ of civil society and
civil service its ‘state’). However, such criticisms, while arguably well
founded, risk obscuring Hegel’s fundamental point about the relationship
between labour and individuation. The different estates are defined by a
particular kind of work, by a particular relation to a resource, which in turn
defines a particular perspective and social relation. The agricultural estate
is characterised by natural substance, by its contact to earth and the
seasons; the estate of trade and industry by its individuality and self-
reliance; while the estate dedicated to civil service is the universal, the
general interest personified. Hegel’s estates, or classes, are not just
defined by economic standing, but by the way in which work, and a
particular activity determines and shapes a particular kind of
individuality.118 Thus, it is possible to see estates as mediating between
the division between consumption and labour, between individuation and
education. Moreover, they work against the centrifugal force of civil
society, its reduction into isolated competitive individuals, providing a
centripetal basis of belonging. Hegel’s ‘classes’ do not determine a history
of conflict, of class struggle, but rather overcome the latent competition
and division at the heart of civil society.119
The contradiction between Hegel’s two perspectives on labour – labour
as an externalisation of individual thoughts and desires, and labour as
education and formation of the individual – now get displaced across the
different estates. The estates are distinguished by the type of work they
do, in terms of its form and content, which, in turn, shapes a particular
formation of individuality. We could say that the estates do two sorts of
work: they work to produce particular goods and commodities, but they
also work to maintain a particular social relation. It is not just that the
agricultural estate provides food and other necessities drawn from the
land, but it provides a particular kind of grounding in tradition and
belonging. The estates thus could be seen as a displacement of the already
stated tension between two different dimensions of labour, a tension that
is split between its traditional and modern dimension as well as its
expressive and transformative aspects. In order for them to provide
substantiality, particularity, and universality they must remain
108 Part of Marx’s argument in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
is that it subordinates politics to the relations of the logic. As Marx writes, ‘What is
essential
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 65
unchanged, the farm cannot become a business. (Nor can the universal
estate, the estate of
to determinate political realities is not that they can be considered as such but
rather that they can be considered in their most abstract configuration, as logical-
metaphysical determinations’ (1970, p. 19).
118 Hegel’s idea of the estates could be understood as a concept of class composition.
For class composition, see Excursus Two.
119 Lefebvre and Macherey 1987, p. 44.
civil service, become burdened by the particular interest of the business
world). Hegel’s remark illustrates this tension:
109
Hegel 1991a, p. 236.
121 Hegel 1991a, p.
239.
66 chapter 1
just that they lack the means to take care of basic needs, but that they
lack the sense of belonging and integrity that comes from work. 110The
rabble are defined negatively in terms of both their relation to society and
themselves, they lack respect both for authority and for themselves. They
are a class that is not one, not held together by any ideal. The rabble
illustrates another aspect of the contradictory status of work, not the
contradiction of its aspect of externalisation and its educational or
formative aspect, but rather its social contradiction between its ethical
dimension, its role in forming habit and character, and its economic
aspect. This contradiction comes to light in any attempt to resolve the
problem of the rabble. As Hegel writes:
If the direct burden [of support] were to fall on the wealthier class,
or if direct means were available in other public institutions (such as
wealthy hospitals, foundations, or monasteries) to maintain the
increasingly impoverished mass at its normal standard of living, the
livelihood of the needy would be ensured without the mediation of
work; this would be contrary to the principle of civil society and the
feeling of self-sufficiency and honour among its individual
members.111
110 Hegel’s description of the ‘rabble’ as a group that is without a place in society echoes
a long tradition of anxiety about ‘vagabonds’, those displaced from the declining
feudal order. As Robert Castel describes this anxiety, ‘The two consecutive criteria
of vagabondage are both made explicit here: the absence of work, that is to say the
“idleness” associated with a lack of resources, and the fact that they “cannot be
spoken for” that is as much to say, without communal belonging … This individual
with neither work nor wealth is also a man without a master and without hearth or
ties’ (Castel 2002, p. 64).
111 Hegel 1991a, p. 267.
side of the relation has disastrous effects for the other side. 113 It is
impossible to have work as an ethical task of discipline without effects on
the economy, just as it is impossible to provide needs without
undermining the ethical dimension of work. Thus, Hegel concludes,
‘despite an excess of wealth, civil society is not wealthy enough’.114
Hegel’s solution to this contradiction is colonialism, the exporting of
this contradiction, in the form of excess workers and surplus goods, to
other shores. ‘Civil society is driven to establish colonies’.115 Before we
even get to the state, the state goes beyond itself, colonising other shores.
Hegel is profoundly ambiguous about this point, even including a note
that argues that these colonies will eventually revolt and overthrow their
master – arguing that this revolt will in time benefit the masters
themselves. Hegel returns to the relation of masters to slaves, but now
this dialectic has been moved from the supposed beginnings of human
history to the historical moment of its articulation (from speculation
about the origins of man to modern man reading about the revolts in Haiti
in the daily paper).116 While Hegel’s discussion of the rabble, colonialism,
and even colonial revolt begin to suggest an engagement with the ‘bad
side’ of modernity, the disruptive force of capital and the violence
necessary to European modernity, it is precisely this bad side which
defines history’s progress, provoking a higher social order than civil
society.117 Civil society poses problems that it cannot solve. The estates
(and later the police and corporations) work to resolve some of these
problems, mediating the contingency of particularity that plagues market
relations, but any solution to these problems demands a higher order of
113 Michel Foucault offers an interesting account of this contradiction of labour in his study
of the ‘Great Confinement’. As Foucault argues, work was seen as a cure for
madness and other moral failures, which stemmed from idleness, but this focus on
the ethical dimension of work, its role as discipline and formation of character, often
contradicts its economic dimension, its role in prices. As Foucault writes, ‘The
classical age used confinement in an equivocal manner, making it play a double role:
to reabsorb unemployment, or at least eliminate its most visible social effects, and
to control costs when they seemed likely to become too high; to act alternately on
the manpower market and on the cost of production … What appears to us today
as a clumsy dialectic of production and prices then possessed its real meaning as a
certain ethical consciousness of labor, in which the difficulties of the economic
mechanisms lost their urgency in favor of an affirmation of value’ (Foucault 1988, p.
54).
114 Hegel 1991a, p. 267.
social belonging, demands the state. The state is not just an institution
with more resources, capable of forming colonies and monitoring
commodities for adulterated products, but it is a fundamentally different
way of viewing social relations. With the state, the universal is not just
produced by the sum total of different particular interests, the way the
market and its invisible hand unreflectively produce the universality of
needs, but is itself conscious and explicit.
Hegel’s discussion of the development of the state out of civil society is
not just an account of how it is that particular institutions become
necessary, but how these institutions and their transitions are perceived
by those who pass through them. It is as much a development of
consciousness, of a particular individuation, as it is the development of
laws and institutions. Civil society produces an individual driven by his or
her particular interest, a particular interest that is seen as necessary and
good. The education of universality ultimately undoes this perspective:
work and desire remain all too subject to the contingencies of early
capitalist existence, the contamination of commodities and uncertainties
of the labour market, and the self-interested individual must ultimately
recognise itself in the structures and institutions of the state. It must
consciously will the universal, rather than see it as simply the means to its
particular end. The family, civil society, and the state are each defined not
only by their particular relations, but their particular way of viewing social
relations. They are each transindividual individuations. The first, the
family, is grounded on affects, and does not see a distinction between
rights and obligations, self and other. Civil society disrupts this immediate
identity, making possible a perspective of isolated self-interest (as much
as this self-interest is mediated and tempered by the belonging that
defines the estates). The state is universality, the recognition that the
particular, the individual, only has its being, its existence, through the
universal. These different ways of viewing society, of viewing social
relations, are hierarchical as well as linear: as much as the first two are
necessary, creating the biological individual, and disciplining and shaping
his or her habits, it is only in the state that sociality becomes explicit and
conscious. Each stage follows the previous one, resolving its particular
tensions.
Hegel’s account of the state arrives at a point that is very similar to
Spinoza’s, but by fundamentally different means. In each case it is a
manner of working out a conflict of particularity and universality.
Particularity and universality are not the individual versus society:
particularity, in the case of Spinoza’s understanding of ambition and
Hegel’s understanding of civil society, is not the individual outside of social
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 69
121 Pierre Macherey has argued that the difference between Hegel and Spinoza is
ultimately one of teleology, insofar as Spinoza offers a non-teleological dialectic
(Macherey 1979, p. 259).
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 71
Marx
122 Of course, the influence of Hegel on Marx is well documented. The literature on this
relation is immense, comprising multiple positions, and at times it seems as if the
question of their relation is the only philosophical question that Marx merits. By
contrast, the relation between Spinoza and Marx is more indirect and less
documented. The young Marx’s notes on the Theological-Political Treatise have
been reprinted. However, as Vittorio Morfino has argued, these notes are nothing
more than a scholarly residue (Conference Presentation, Historical Materialism).
The relation of Spinoza and Marx is more one of overlapping problematics than
direct influence (Fischbach 2005, p. 29).
72 chapter 1
One of Marx’s earliest texts, ‘On the Jewish Question’, already begins
to foreground both of these questions. While the text’s stated topic is the
status of Jews in Prussia, it begins to lay the groundwork for a critique of
civil society and the state based on their respective individuations. The
connections of this early text with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right are
apparent; both texts deal with the split between the state and civil
society. However, as much as Marx works from this basic distinction
between civil society, understood as dominated by particular and
egotistical interest, and the state, as the universal, a split between man
and citizen, he changes the parameters of this problem. The parameters
are changed by examining the limits of political emancipation, the extent
to which the state can liberate society from the conflicts and hierarchies
of civil society. Political emancipation, the emancipation of politics, of the
state, from birth, rank, education, and occupation does not dispense with
these divisions and hierarchies, but lets them continue to exist in a private
manner. They are still the basis for exclusion; they have simply been
privatised, left to have their effects without state sanction or censure. This
is in some sense a progressive step, especially compared to the feudal
state, which gave official political status to such differences of birth and
rank, but it has intrinsic limitations. These limitations manifest themselves
not just in the partial nature of the solution, in which the state partially
emancipates man, but also in the split that the state manifests in
collective life. As Marx writes,
Where the political state has attained its full development, man
leads not only in thought, consciousness, but in reality, in life, a
double existence – celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political
community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in
civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other
men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and
becomes the plaything of alien powers. The political state, in relation
to civil society, is just as spiritual as in heaven in relation to earth.123
There is once again a split between particular and universal, reason and
imagination, but each are constitutive of existence, or thought and life.
However, Marx argues that this dual existence is not equal or harmonious.
It is not, as it was with Hegel, a matter of the particular interest eventually
recognising its limited grasp of social relations, the need for a perspective
beyond that of the contingent intersections of individual self striving, but
of the particular remaking the universal in its own image.124 Marx subjects
the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789’ to a critical
reading in which the individual of civil society, and the importance of
private property, reveals itself to be the subtext underlining and
undermining the ideals of the citizen. While Article Six of the Declaration
states: ‘Liberty is the power which man has to do everything which does
not harm the rights of others’, Marx declares its implied content as ‘liberty
as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and
man, but rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of
such separation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into
himself’. All of this culminates in security, which Marx argues, ‘is the
supreme social concept of civil society, the concept of the police’. At the
heart of the ‘Declaration’, Marx finds an inversion: rather than individual
life, the private life of the bourgeois citizen, functioning as a means to
political life, life in common and relation with others becomes a means to
individual life. The subject of the declaration of rights is not humanity, or
even the somewhat circumscribed figure of the citizen, but the property
owner. As Marx writes,
124 Marx’s basic criticism of Hegel, at least at this stage, namely that the passage from civil
society, from particular interest, to universal interest cannot take place so easily, is
one of the central themes of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Much of
Marx’s criticism focuses on the ‘universal estate’ and the corporation, the pivots
between the particularity of civil society and the universality of the state. Marx
argues that Hegel fails to see how much the particularity and self-interest will affect
the supposed universality of the state, proposing that it will result not in the
generalised bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the universal estate caught up in its
particular rules and the particular interest of its participations. ‘The corporations
are the materialism of bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy is the spiritualism of the
corporations’ (Marx 1970, p. 45).
125 Marx 1978, p. 43.
126 Marx’s argument, which sees the rights of egotistical man behind every citizen, is
image is not only in contrast with the actual relations of competition and
hierarchy, but it ultimately reinforces them, providing their ideological
alibi.
Marx contrasts this limited political emancipation with human
emancipation, an emancipation that does not just declare the social
difference of rank, birth, and occupation to be politically invalid, but
actually overcomes those very divisions. This requires the destruction of
the abstract citizen, an overcoming of the division between universal and
particular. This takes place when man ‘has recognized and organized his
own powers as social powers so that he no longer separates this social
power from himself as political power’.127 In a word, man must become
‘species-being’ [Gattungswesen]. Species-Being here designates less a
supposed essence, some definition of man as the being who makes his
species his object, than a project, a project in which one directly lives
one’s collective and individual powers, rather than externalise them into
a state.128
‘On the Jewish Question’ articulates the three basic components of
Marx’s critical account of transindividuality. It is a critique of the
bourgeois individual, the isolated subject of civil society, as is well known,
but it is also a critique of the state, of the abstract universal. These are not
two separate critiques for Marx, but are part and parcel of the same
critique: it is because society is divided, fractured between competing and
hierarchical social interests, that the state can emerge as ‘illusory
communal life’.129 It is also because of these very divisions that communal
life can, at this stage, only ever be illusory, at best a kind of earthly heaven
for beautiful souls, and at worst a universal which is nothing other than
the cover for the interests of a particular class. Its terms are in some sense
drawn from Hegel, but what it contests is precisely what Hegel takes for
granted: the idea that one can pass easily from civil society, from an
individuality constructed in terms of self-interested market relations, to
the universality of the state, a universal which would be concrete, the
recognition of the constitutive nature of social connections.130 The path
Rancière argues, ‘In a word, Marx turns a political category into the concept of the
untruth of politics’ (Rancière 1999, p. 82).
127 Marx 1978, p. 46.
130 Balibar 2010b, p. 172. Balibar agues that this interruption makes possible a reading of
Marx’s entire corpus. As Balibar writes, ‘One might go even further and assert that
the nature of a great philosophy is not only to incomplete itself but to incomplete
others, by introducing itself or by being introduced in their writing: thus from the
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 75
In this context it is not ‘civil society’ that is being criticised, but the
capitalist mode of production, or, more precisely, the sphere of
circulation. It is in this sphere, the sphere of commodity exchange, where
buyer and seller meet as isolated individuals, that we get the free trade
vulgaris’ conception of society.134 Where Hegel had identified civil society
with one single idea and attitude towards social relations, that of isolated
individuals pursuing their own social interest, Marx argues that the
capitalist mode of production has to be understood as divided between
two different spheres, each with their corresponding idea, their
corresponding individuation: there is the sphere of exchange and the
hidden abode of production.
Initially, the difference between these two spheres is between a sphere
of equality and a sphere of difference. In the sphere of exchange,
individuals confront individuals as equals, isolated and separate. In
contrast to this exchange of equality, the hidden abode of production,
where capital is made and labour power sold, is defined by a fundamental
132 Franck Fischbach has argued that what links Marx and Spinoza is a shared sense of
alienation, alienation not as the loss of self, of one’s particular identity, but as a loss
of connection to nature (Fischbach 2005, p. 14).
133 Marx 1977, p. 280.
134 The way that the market, or the mundane acts of buying and selling, produces its own
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 77
ideology of free and autonomous individuals meeting only through their self-
interest, challenges the very idea of ideology as a concept dependent on a division
between base and superstructure. As Jameson writes, ‘the ideology of the market
is unfortunately not some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or
embellishment that can be removed from the economic problem and then sent over
to some cultural or superstructural morgue, to be dissected by specialists over
there. It is somehow generated by the thing itself, as its objectively necessary
afterimage; somehow both dimensions must be registered together, in their
identity as well as their difference’ (Jameson 1991, p. 260).
147 As Žižek writes, relating this exception to Marx’s critique of Hegel, ‘This is also the
logic of the Marxian critique of Hegel, of the Hegelian notion of society as a rational
totality: as soon as we try to conceive the existing social order as a rational totality,
we must include in it a paradoxical element which, without ceasing to be its internal
constituent, functions as its symptom – subverts the very universal rational principle
of this totality. For Marx, this “irrational” element of the existing society was, of
course, the proletariat, “the unreason of reason itself”, the point at which the
Reason embodied in the existing social order encounters its own unreason’ (Žižek
1989, p. 22).
148 Marx 1977, p. 280.
The fundamental problem is that what the worker is selling is not a thing
at all, but labour power, time, and thus this conflict is not some kind of
haggling or search for bargains in the sphere of circulation, but a conflict
over labour within the hidden abode of production. ‘There is here
therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal
78 chapter 1
writes, ‘The difference between the individual as person and what is accidental to
him is not a conceptual difference but a historical fact’ (Marx and Engels 1970, p.
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 79
194). This leads to the possibility of what Balibar refers to as the historical modes of
individuation (Balibar 1970, p. 283).
139 Marx 1973, p. 156.
140 Hervé Touboul has argued that there is a tension in Marx’s thought between a sort of
nominalism, in which the individual is primary, seen most clearly in The German
Ideology in which ‘real individuals’ are identified as the premise of all history, and
an emphasis on social relations, in which individuals are merely bearers (Touboul
2004, p. 30). While this tension can be seen in the extreme division of such
interpretations as Michel Henry and Louis Althusser, it overlooks the transindividual
dimension that I am attempting to bring out here.
141 Marx 1977, p. 320.
80 chapter 1
145 As Balibar writes, ‘If we want to understand the conclusions Marx is aiming at, we must
give this proposition its maximum strength. Not only does labor become historically
“socialized”, a transindividual activity; essentially it always was one, inasmuch as
there is no labor without cooperation, even in the most primitive forms’ (Balibar
2002, p. 309).
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 81
149 This idea of a society split between individuals who are isolated, cut off from relations,
and an increasing massification of their powers, into something alien, can be traced
back as far as The German Ideology. As Marx writes, ‘Thus two facts are here
revealed. First the productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite
independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals: the
reason for this is that the individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in
opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are only real
forces in the intercourse and association of these individuals. Thus, on the one hand,
we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material
form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private
property, and hence of the individuals only insofar as they are owners of private
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 83
property themselves. Never, in any earlier period, have the productive forces taken
on a form so indifferent to the intercourse of individuals as individuals,
84 chapter 1
because their intercourse itself was formerly a restricted one. On the other hand,
standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of the
individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and who, robbed thus
of all real life-content, have become abstract individuals, but who are, however,
only by this fact put into a position to enter into relation with one another as
individuals’ (Marx and Engels 1970, p. 190).
164 Marx 1977, p. 477.
between these two spheres is also the domination of one sphere by the
other: the heavenly state was entirely subordinated to bourgeois
individual interest, in the case of the ‘Jewish Question’, and in Capital the
hidden abode of production is itself dominated by the maximisation of
value that defines not so much exchange but capitalist valorisation.
Conclusion
150 With respect to Spinoza and Marx, Negri argues that this critique of representation is
the proper terrain for examining their connection. ‘In other words, in the
postindustrial age the Spinozian critique of representation of capitalist power
corresponds more to the truth than does the analysis of political economy’ (Negri
1997, p. 246). Spinoza and Marx start from an immanent constructive principle,
conatus and ‘living labour’, and their fundamental task is to comprehend how this
activity is inadequately grasped as a power of some entity, God or Capital.
transindividuality as critique: spinoza, hegel, marx 85
151 This can be seen in the history of reflections on ideology or fetishism in Marxism, which,
at least on this reading, can be understood as transindividuations. Althusser’s
assertion that ideology is omni-historical could thus be understood as a turn of
Marx’s thesis towards Spinoza. For Althusser, ideology is the general name for the
first kind of knowledge.
86 chapter 1
152 Balibar makes it clear that as much as he has borrowed the term from Simondon, his
actual understanding of the problem stems more from Spinoza (and subsequently
Hegel and Marx) than Simondon (Balibar 1996a, p. 37).
citizen, of humanity and the citizen, is debatable to say the least. Charles Mills and
Carol Pateman have argued that the central figure of this anthropology, the social
contract, should be understood as a ‘racial’ or ‘sexual’ contract, in which the exceptions
constituted the rule. In other words, and taking the American experience as central, ‘all
men are created equal’ is possible as an assertion of a legal and social order once a
large portion of the population was excluded from the definition of men.
90 excursus one
9 Balibar 1994a,
p. 58.
transindividuality as politics in the thought of étienne balibar 91
160 As Balibar writes, ‘It then becomes impossible in practice, and more and more difficult
even to conceive of in theory, to pose on one side a right of property that would
deal only with things, or with the individual concerned with the “administration of
things”
92 excursus one
of recognition and relation. These two theses cut two ways: first, against
any attempt to naturalise race, nation, or economy, as something simply
given, or reducible to psychological tendencies, as in many commonsense
definitions of racism or nationalism; second, against any understanding of
the economy or the nation that posits it simply as an institution or
structure that leaves individuals unaffected. At first glance, it would
appear that nationalism and racism are purely psychological attitudes, an
excessive attachment to the state and a
(with the societas rerum of the jurists of antiquity), and on the other side a sphere
of the vita activa (Hannah Arendt) that would be the sphere of “man’s power over
man” and man’s obligations toward man, of the formation of “public opinion”, and
of the conflict of ideologies. Property (dominium) reenters domination (imperium).
The administration of things re-enters the government of men’ (Balibar 1994a, p.
222).
private prejudice against this or that group.161 Against this psychological
reduction of nationalism, Balibar argues that the nation involves an
organisation of the fundamental aspects of collective and individual
identity, specifically the role of language and education in forming
national and individual identity.162 In a similar manner, Balibar argues that
racism must be understood as an attempt to represent and make sense
of social divisions and conflicts. Race justifies and effaces the hierarchies
of the social order, making it appear to be an effect of the natural
difference of bodies. Class would appear to be relegated to the other
extreme, to an economic classification, one that leaves individuality
relatively untouched. However, class is not just income, but an
organisation of one’s basic place in the world, one’s fundamental mobility
and security.163 Race, sex, and national belonging are not private, intimate
aspects of identity, nor is class public, existing only at the level of the
collective. If racism and nationalism cannot be situated in some psychic
interior space, and if the economy cannot be relegated to an external
base, acting on subjectivity only at a distance, then they cannot be
161 As Balibar argues, there is a tendency to see race as merely psychological and
individual, as not necessarily organised or structured (Balibar 1991d, p. 18).
Conversely, there is a tendency to see nation, and nationalism, as well as class, as
structuring society, but not necessarily individual sentiment and subjectivity
(Balibar 2004, p. 17). Transindividuality dispenses with both of these ideas, positing
the individual as the individual of the collective and the collective as nothing other
than individuations.
162 Balibar 2004, p. 28.
Such a thesis may and must seem blunt and debatable when looked
at from a static perspective, if one reasons only in terms of given
structures and ‘correspondences’ between these structures.
However, the thesis can become singularly more explanatory if the
notion of ‘determination’ is given a strong sense, that is, if it is
considered as the conduction wire to analyse transformational
tendencies of the market and bourgeois state in the past two
centuries or, even better, following the best ‘concrete analyses’ of
Marxism, to analyse the critical conjunctures which punctuate this
tendentious transformation and which precipitate its modifica-
tions.167
170 Louis Althusser’s posthumously published manuscript Sur la Reproduction, from which
the well-known piece on ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ is drawn,
contains a thorough investigation of this movement by which elements of the
production process, such as the division between mental and manual labour,
function as ideology, and ele-
96 excursus one
I even think that we can describe what such a schema would ideally
consist of. It would not be the sum of a ‘base’ and a ‘superstructure’,
working like complement or supplement of historicity, but rather the
combination of two ‘bases’ of explanation or two determinations
both incompatible and indissociable: the mode of subjection and the
mode of production (or, more generally, the ideological mode and
the generalized economic mode). Both are material, although in the
opposite sense. To name these different senses of the materiality of
subjection and production, the traditional terms imaginary and
reality suggest themselves. One can adopt them, provided that one
keep in mind that in any historical conjuncture, the effects of the
imaginary can only appear through and by means of the real, and the
effects of the real through and by means of the imaginary; in other
words, the structural law of the causality of history is the detour
through and by means of the other scene. Let us say, parodying Marx,
that economy has no more a ‘history of its own’ than does ideology,
since each has its history only through the other that is the efficient
cause of its own effects. Not so much the ‘absent cause’ as the cause
that absents itself, or the cause whose effectivity works through its
contrary.21
ments of ideology, such as the ideology of the juridical subject, enter directly into
the work relation through the labour contract. This ultimately scrambles any
division between base and superstructure as inside or outside of the labour process
(Althusser 1994, p. 236).
21 Balibar 1995a, p. 160.
The detour that Balibar is referring to here is not, as is often the case, a
matter of scrapping the entire problematic of the mode of production in
favour of an analysis of ideology, but an examination of the way in which
ideology functions within the mode of production itself, as well as the way
in which mode of production functions in ideology. That they both short-
circuit each other means that there can be no direct causality from one to
the other, that politics is always of the other scene, the effects of
economic divisions on political identities and collectivities, and vice versa.
Balibar’s use of the terms ‘reality’ and ‘imaginary’ to describe the two
overlapping individuations, of the mode of production and mode of
subjection, suggests Spinoza’s dual foundations of the city in Part Four of
transindividuality as politics in the thought of étienne balibar 97
the Ethics. While it is true that Balibar places this passage, and its dual
demonstration of the city, from both imagination and from reason, at the
centre of his interpretation of Spinoza’s political anthropology, so much
so that it informs his own understanding of the conflictual imaginary and
real basis of political, social, and economic individuations, it is not a
matter of simply transposing the distinctions of real and imaginary to base
and superstructure. Spinoza’s distinction is between an imagined
identification, the imagined similarity of the other’s passions and desires,
and a real utility, the understanding that ‘nothing is more useful to man
than man’ (eivp37s2). In interpreting the relation between the imaginary
and rational constitution of the state, Balibar stresses the opposition
between imaginary identification and real agreement, arguing that the
latter is predicated on difference, on different people with different
abilities and skills. ‘Man is more useful to man’ only insofar as human
beings differ from each other. We imagine others to be like us, but our
political and social relations, the extent to which we are useful to each
other, are necessarily predicated on difference, different skills, abilities
and talents.171 It could be argued that real agreement, with its emphasis
on interest, the striving to persevere, and the utility of difference, is the
economy, and that politics, with ambition and the ambiguous task of
managing collective identities, is politics.172 Balibar argues, however, that
what is missing from Spinoza’s account of an economics of utility – the
usefulness of man to man – is any account of exploitation.173 Utility and
ambiguous identification cannot simply be relegated to the separate
realms of economy and politics but cut across both spheres, which is why
‘imaginary’ and ‘reality’ are at work in each. There is an ideology of the
economy, an imaginary of economic relations, just as there is a real basis
for political relations and economic relations. One divides into two:
economics and politics are both real and imaginary.
While Spinoza’s dual foundations of the city cannot be immediately
connected to base and superstructure, economics and politics, it does,
however, prove useful for understanding politics, the state. Its
constitutive ambiguity is not that of the tension between economics and
politics, but within political belonging and individuation itself. The state,
especially the modern state, which has inherited the ideal of the citizen,
of a universal dimension, is always split between nation and state,
race, which it can never fully extricate itself from.177 For Balibar, race is
not just a matter of a fictive unity, as a definition of belonging, but is also
integral to the manner in which modern democratic societies deal with,
or represent, the persistence of hierarchy and division. Hierarchy and
division are always a scandal to a society organised according to the
citizen, to an individuation of the citizen. There is thus also a proximity of
race to class; class can always be racialised, not in the sense that it is
ascribed to different races, but rather that it becomes attached to a rigid
and permanent division in society. The division of mental and manual
labour is inseparable from a division of society into ‘mind men’ and ‘body
men’, with all of the expected ambiguous connections to animality. 178
Race reinscribes social divisions on divisions of the body, making social
hierarchies justified and visible at the same time. Race (and the
racialisation of class difference) resolves the incomplete nature of the
democratic revolution; it is the revival of anthropological difference in
societies that have declared such differences to be null and void. 179 As
much as race plays a fundamental role as an alibi, explaining the
persistence of inequality in a society that claims to be equal, it also plays
an important role in the social imaginary. Race is an inadequate idea of
social belonging and social division. As Balibar writes,
I shall therefore venture the idea that the racist complex inextricably
combines a crucial function of misrecognition (without which the
violence would not be tolerable to the very people engaging in it)
and a ‘will to know’, a violent desire for immediate knowledge of
social relations.180Racism is an imaginary, an inadequate idea in the
full Spinozist sense of the term; it is both immediate, combining
affect and imagination, and fails to comprehend its causes. It offers
an immediate understanding of society, a transparent account of the
social divisions and conflicts mapped onto the most superficial signs
of bodily or cultural difference.
Race, nation, and class are all intersecting transindividuations,
intersecting constitutions of collectivity, of groups, but also individualities,
with their corresponding habits, beliefs, and idioms. Their specific mode
of articulation depends on the given overdetermination of class conflict,
racial history, and national ideology that situates a particular conjuncture.
(Sexual identity, or sexual difference, also could be argued to belong in
this list, but Balibar tends to treat sexual difference as something that
modifies the other collective identities, particularly race, rather than a
conflictual identification on its own terms. This is perhaps due to the fact
that sexual identity is less the basis of a specific community than a division
that exists within every community). This is an overdetermination in
which ‘the lonely hour of the last instance never arrives’, to use
Althusser’s formulation, but one in which ‘the determining factor, the
cause, is always at work on the other scene’. 181 The economy acts on
politics in and through the transformation of symbolic, or imaginary,
constitutions of collectivity, including the constitutions of class, of
economic belonging and division itself, and these divisions and conflicts
ultimately have real economic effects. These are the two modes,
discussed above. However, this dialectic of causes and effects plays out
against the backdrop of the history of the anthropological divisions that
make up the major history of politics – a division that sets the modern
figure of the citizen against all anthropological divisions.
It turns out that ‘one divides into two’ with the citizen as well. For
Balibar, the citizen, the subject of revolutionary democracy, is split
between its constitutive dimension and its insurrectionary dimension.182
It is at the basis of state authority, but it is so only in its capacity to
constantly contest, to revolt once again. The citizen is always both
foundation and rebellion, the ground of authority and its contestation. It
is with respect to this latter insurrectionary dimension of citizenship that
we get a sense of the politics of transindividuality in Balibar’s thought. The
formulation that Balibar provides for this insurrectionary dimension is
equaliberty, a combination of equality and liberty. This awkward
neologism contests a longstanding ideological divide in modern politics:
modern politics, especially in its cold war variant, has often been based
on the idea that there is a sort of zero-sum game for equality and liberty.
The more equality there is, the less liberty there is, and vice versa. The
free world was opposed to actually existing socialism: in the first, freedom
had inequality as its necessary corollary, while in the second, equality
could not be realised without the restriction of freedom. In contrast to
this ideological zero-sum game, Balibar argues that actual progression of
politics of civility. 188 If the first politics has to do with the material
constraints of the labour process, and the second has to do with the legal
and institutional definitions of citizenship, this last figure concerns the
imaginary identifications and affective relations that define the
belongings of race, nation, and sex. Thus, rather than understand the
politics of transindividuality as a constant short-circuit between the
economic and political, the worker and the citizen, it is one in which the
worker and citizen are in turn short-circuited by these identification. A
politics of the other scene in which the other scene is always absent, felt
only in terms of its effects.
This schema of scenes and their effects is not static, but the general set
of relations from which history can be conceptualised. Taking a cue from
Balibar’s three major epochs, we could say that the problem of the current
conjuncture is both the problem of the relationship between the first and
second epoch, of the relation between the long history of exploitation and
oppression based on race, class, and nation, and the constitution of
equaliberty, as these remnants of anthropological difference continue to
undermine and complicate the latter. As much as these past exclusions
and exploitations are never entirely sublated, never entirely overcome,
we also confront the new transformations of political anthropology. These
transformations concern both sexual difference, as that which necessarily
exceeds any universality, and the labour process, as the division of manual
and mental labour is deepened and transformed by the rise of digital
knowledge production, calling into question the separation between
technology and politics. The transformation of the labour process cannot
be examined in isolation: the destruction of economic individuation has
effects not only on political subjectivity, but also on race and nation. The
increasingly globalised world and the porous nature of every political
boundary have led to a proliferation of new, virulent political imaginaries,
new attachments to race and nation, what Balibar calls cruelty. Cruelty is
a particular form of violence, irreducible to either revolutionary violence
or counterrevolutionary suppression, to the politics of emancipation or
transformation. Balibar identifies two intersecting forms of cruelty: the
first is ‘ultra-objective’, and it defines the impersonal markets and
economic forces which render entire populations expendable, disposable,
without a definite plan or decision; the second is what he calls ‘ultra-
subjective’, the violence aimed at populations defined racially, nationally,
or ethnically as an existential threat.189 As Balibar writes, ‘At the moment
Let us nonetheless note here that, if these epochs succeed upon one
another, or engender one another, they do not supplant one another
like the scenes of a play: for us, and consequently in our relation to
the political question, they are all still present in a disunified totality,
in a noncontemporaneity that is the very structure of the ‘current
moment’, which means that we are simultaneously dealing with the
state, with the class struggle, and with anthropological difference.192
man and ‘his tools’ to a part of the machine, a conscious organ of a greater
machinery.201 Despite the proximity of his understanding of technology to
that of Marx, Simondon argues that alienation needs to be expanded
beyond a purely economic meaning.7 For Simondon, alienation is not
limited to the question of ownership of the means of production, but
includes the entire psychological and social relationship with activity.8
This psychological and social alienation stems from a division that is at the
heart of technology, a division between the part, the immediate task, and
the ensemble, the totality. The alienation thus follows a division between
mental and manual labour, between those who grasp the specific
elements of the process, and those who grasp the overall ensemble of
technology. It is an alienation of both capitalist, or manager, as
personification of the process, and of the worker, as personification of the
part, the specific use of this or that part of the process.9 For Simondon,
alienation follows the basic trajectory of western society, according to
which a basic unity of form and matter, sense and utility, a unity which
can be found in the primitive relation with magic, is increasingly
differentiated into different spheres, such as technology and religion,
following a logic of specialisation. The machine, with its division between
conception and execution, is situated at the end point of this process. As
the machine separates part from whole, form from matter, and
conception from execution, it leaves both sides of the relation partial and
incomplete.10 This fundamental alienation is the alienation of grasping
only one part of this intersection, seeing the part without grasping the
whole, or understanding the totality without grasping the parts. The
worker and the technician are both alienated from the totality of the
labour process.11 As Simondon writes, ‘The figure of the unhappy
inventor came about at the same time as that of the dehumanized worker;
it is its counter-type and it arises from the same cause’.12
As much as it is possible to trace the history of transindividuality back
to the distinction of tool and machine, both of which offer very different
under-
201 Marx develops a general schema of the labour process in Chapter Seven of Capital. It
is defined as a process in which the worker transforms objects through the
intermediary of tools. Marx’s understanding of the tool here is Promethean. As Marx
writes, ‘Thus nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his
own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible’ (Marx 1977, p. 285).
However, the subsequent chapters
112 chapter 2
Deleuze and Guattari shift the problem from one of the history of
technology to one of political and social organisation. It is a question not
just of the technical machine, but also of the role that individuals play in
the larger social machine. This disrupts the implied progression from tool
to machine; as they argue later, the progression from ‘machinic
world is the collective world, which is not adequately thought from the
social nor from the psychic’.208 The technological world is transindividual
in that it forms the basis of both individuality and collectivity, of psychic
phenomena and social structures. It is in this obscure zone that everything
happens, that new technologies are constituted and new collectivities
emerge. Thus, in Du mode d’existence des objet techniques,
transindividuality emerges as a conclusion, as a way to think together
creation and use, individuality and the collective. It does so because
technology calls into question the putative stability of the individual. It
does so, first, as we have seen, by calling into question the unity of the
relationship of individual and tool, situating both within a larger process
that exceeds them. Technology is the source of both our idea of the
human individual, the toolmaking animal standing above all of nature, of
its undoing in the great machine, real and symbolic, that reduces human
beings to mere appendages, a cog in the machine. It is the alpha and
omega of the anthropological schema. This undermining of the individual
person is further called into question by the individual status of the
machine. It is notoriously difficult to define the individual device, or
machine; beyond the so-called simple machines, any technological device
is made up of multiple components. It is often difficult to draw a line of
demarcation between one device and others. Moreover, the history of
technology presents us with both lineages, long trajectories of
development, and isolated inventions. Its history, like perhaps all history,
is one of gradual perfections and radical events. As the machine develops,
its history seems to be determined less by the inventions of individuals
than by its own particular perfection and development; it seems to be less
the creation of individuals than its own process of individuation. 209 A
philosophy of technology puts the individual into question, not just the
individual person that it displaces and decomposes, but the individual
thing or object. Thus in Simondon we find a trajectory from a philosophy
of technology to a general problem of individuation. This shift and
enlarging of the initial problematic is not a radical break; the general
problems of technology and alienation persist throughout Simondon’s
writing on individuation.
Simondon’s writing on individuation returns us to the obscure zone of
form and matter, part and whole, but now this obscure zone is a zone of
incomprehension as much as alienation. The central critical point of
Simondon’s work on individuation is that individuation cannot be
which exists prior to it. This is what Simondon refers to as the pre-
individual. The pre-individual is less a thing, some fundamental atomistic
reality that provides the basic building block of reality, than it is a relation,
or relations. What is pre-individual for Simondon exists in a metastable
state, in a relation of flux or tension. The clearest example of this, and the
central terrain of Simondon’s examination of physical individuation, is the
way in which crystals are the crystallisation of a solution, which is to say
the individuation of conditions, compounds, and elements that exist
initially in flux. What is called pre-individual exists primarily as metastable
state, as a set of possibilities and relations: it is a reserve of becoming, not
a definite being. 213 Individuation is in part the reconciliation of the
tensions and potentials of this metastable state. However, it can only ever
be partial; individuation does not entirely resolve the pre-individual
dimension, nor does it fully individuate or incorporate its conditions. That
is to say, the pre-individual is not so much prior, understood as something
that comes before individuation, than it is that which exists alongside
individuation as a different phase. The persistence of the pre-individual in
the individual, the unresolved metastability of the stable body, becomes
more and more significant as we cross the threshold from the physical to
the biological. A physical thing is by and large inert, it is the product of
individuation, a geological or other process that constitutes it, but once
constituted it does not individuate itself. The living thing, however,
including the human being is not just a result of individuation, it is a
‘theatre of individuation’, actively individuating itself as much as it has
been individuated.214 Biological individuation is never complete, except
perhaps in death, and this incompletion means that the living thing carries
with it its own pre-individual phase, its own metastability. As Simondon
writes, in a passage that echoes what we have already seen in Spinoza,
Hegel, and Marx, ‘The individualization of the living is its real history’.215 It
is a history that is never complete; the last chapter can only be written in
death. It is precisely this incompletion that is carried over into psychic and
collective individuation, defining their specific modality.
The specific pre-individual relations that constitute the bases for
psychic individuation, for the individuation not of the human individual as
living organism, but as a specific individual in terms of character and habit,
are sense and affect. Sense and affect are pre-individual, less discernible
states than tensions and possibilities, and as such they constitute the two
major axes, one oriented towards the exterior world (space), the other
towards the interior world (time), through which the individuation takes
place. To argue that they are pre-individual is to argue that they are not
immediately experienced as the perception of individual things or of
defined emotional states, but of relations defined by constitutive
tensions. In sense, what is perceived is neither form nor matter, neither
intelligible totalities nor raw flow of experience, but information. This
information is always supersaturated, there is always more colour, sound,
shapes, images, lines, smells, and so on, than we can perceive.216 What we
perceive, what becomes discernible, refers us back to a vital subject, to
desires and actions. Perception, the constitution of discernible objects
and forms, is a product of this relation between subject and world: it is a
transductive individuation in which both the world and subject are
individuated. 217 The contradictions and complexities of sense are
overcome as discernible things just as the living individual takes on
distinct goals. A similar process defines affect. In affect, the problematic
dimension is torn between the polarities of pleasure and pain, which
define the basic orientation of affect, a polarity that shifts in different
relations and different situations. Pleasure and pain are always shifting,
always relative to specific relations and situations. In order for this flux to
become stable, for distinct emotions to emerge from this flux of pleasure
and pain, there must be unity and individuation.
Sensation and affects are increasingly individuated, as their tensions
give way to discernible perceptions and emotions. As Simondon writes,
‘Emotions are the discovery of the unity in living just as perception is the
discovery of unity in the world; these two psychic individuations prolong
the individuation of the living, they complement it, and perpetuate it’.218
Affects and sensations are individuated into emotions and perceptions,
an individuation that transforms both the world, creating distinct things
with corresponding evaluations, and constitutes an individual from the
inchoate perceptions and desires. In Simondon’s terms, they constitute a
subject. Simodon’s use of this term is somewhat eccentric to the history
of philosophy. For Simondon, the term subject is primarily used to express
that the process of psychic individuation, the individuation of affects and
senses into emotions and perceptions, is never complete. There is a
dimension of pre-individual, of unresolved affects and sensual excess, at
onto such ideas as spirit and nature. As Simondon argues, with some
reservation, the entire series of phases from the pre-individual to the
transindividual can be mapped onto nature, individual, and spirit:
in the terms nature and spirit, but also the teleology that runs from the
other: nature is the raw material, the undefined precondition of spirit.
This obscures one of Simondon’s other central points, that as much as the
pre-individual functions as the basis of the transindividual, it does so as
something of an immanent cause, coexisting with that which it causes.234It
is not a matter of a gradual individuation from pre-individual to
transindividual passing through the individual as its mediation, but of the
intersection of different individuations, psychic and collective. To put it
otherwise, if the pre-individual constitutes the affective, emotional, and
perceptual basis for the individuation of both subjects and collectivities,
then this pre-individual dimension is not some nature, outside of culture
and history, but is also a part and product of culture and history. It is both
the condition and effect of collective and individual individuations. The
linear progression from nature to spirit, a progression that passes through
the work and constitution of the individual, needs to be placed back onto
a rectilinear trajectory in which nature is becoming spirit and spirit is
becoming nature. Individuation is a relation not just with nature, but also
with technology, society, and history.
Individuating Simondon
the very terrain of these neologisms, to break with the old language of
nature and spirit, while at the same time rewriting it according to the
problem of individuation.
Toscano argues that Paolo Virno’s engagement with Simondon is
predicated on interpreting the pre-individual as a kind of individual
potential. The three formations of the pre-individual that Virno outlines –
language, habits, and the mode of production – all constitute a kind of
reservoir of capacities. It is possible to say, as Antonio Negri has argued,
that Virno views the pre-individual as a kind of faculty, as some ahistorical
aspect of subjectivity. 236 Toscano’s interpretation and Negri’s critique
underscore the question of the anthropological dimension of the pre-
individual and the transindividual, raising the following question: Is the
former simply another word for the basic components of human nature,
sensation, thought, and language, and the latter just another term for
culture? Culture would be nothing other than an interpretation, and thus
the individuation, of a given natural faculty. Virno’s response, albeit
indirectly, is to rethink the relationship between the components of
human existence and their cultural transformation. The basic components
of human existence, language, customs, and habits, are, as Virno argues,
both historical and natural.237 They are natural because they have at their
basis certain natural components of humankind as homo sapiens,
whether it be the basic physiology that makes speech possible or the lack
of instinctual determination that makes habits, customs, and culture
defining aspects of humanity. These aspects of human existence have
nature as their precondition, but they can only be realised historically, in
the formation of specific languages and cultures. Reframing this in
Simondon’s terms we could say that natural, or physiological,
individuation is undetermined, inherently problematic; it sets the terms
that become the basis for psychic and collective individuation. Languages,
cultures, and habits are individuations of this natural potential, a potential
that is made of both positive characteristics, such as the biological
capacity for speech, and a lack of characteristics or determination. ‘The
collective is the sphere in which the pre-individual becomes the
transindividual’.238 Virno’s historico-natural institutions, such as language,
fashion, and customs, are simultaneously pre-individual and
Virno 2008, p.
46.
‘the obscure zone’: individuating simondon 125
Simondon, ‘The convergence of these two analyses is made all the more
remarkable in that Simondon denies all debt towards Spinoza, who he, in
a traditional manner, sees as a pantheist philosopher, abolishing the
individual as such’.255 This overlap deals primarily with transindividuality,
but it is not limited to it. It is even possible to speak of a general overlap
between the two thinkers, or at least their reception, since the concept of
transindividuality has become a standard terminology in readers of
Spinoza from Yves Citton to Antonio Negri and it is not uncommon for
readers of Simondon to invoke Spinoza’s relation of natura naturans and
natura naturata to describe the process by which an individual is both the
effect and cause of a process of individuation. As Balibar argues, Spinoza’s
understanding of nature as simultaneously natura naturata, or nature as
effect, and natura naturans, or nature as cause, posits nature as
necessarily made up of both individuals and the process of
individuation. 256 It is in some sense Simondon’s concept of
transindividuality that has made possible a reading of Spinoza that neither
is one of individual striving nor reduces individuality to a part of the
totality of nature.
Simondon sees that Spinoza is a critic of the individual, both in terms of
the isolated individual and in terms of the anthropocentric conception of
God. However, Spinoza’s solution to both of these problems is to situate
them in terms of the immanent relations that constitute and exceed them,
articulating a concept of nature as that which exceeds and constitutes
individuals. For Simondon, however, this nature remains all too individual.
Spinoza’s error is ‘not anthropomorphism, but the individuation of the
transindividual’. 257 Spinoza has dispensed with the man as a ‘kingdom
within a kingdom’ as well as the anthropomorphic god, but the
individuality understood as the general intelligibility of what exists is much
more difficult to evade. Spinoza has dispensed with God’s semblance to
human beings, God’s anger has been reduced to a literary allusion, and
even God’s wisdom and power are radically redefined as nothing other
than the immanent unfolding of nature. However, in doing so, nature, or
Simondon 2005, p.
326.
‘the obscure zone’: individuating simondon 133
258 This becomes clearest in the passage that Simondon dedicates to Spinoza in Historie de
la notion d’individu included as the appendix to L’individuation à la lumière des
notions de forme et d’information (Simondon 2005, p. 448).
259 Balibar 1996, p. 36.
260 Antonio Negri argues that this tendency to think in terms of unity could be understood
as the ‘Judeo-Christian’ tendency. ‘Yet this formidable mixture of the critical and
constructive elements does not manage to avoid in a definitive manner that point
of the Judeo-Christian tradition in which all experience is brought back to unity. To
expropriate God of its creativity is not decisive, if we allow creativity to be defined
by the unity of the creative project. By doing so we make the divinity worldly but do
not eliminate it’ (Negri 1999, p. 308).
134 chapter 2
affects. 261 For both Spinoza and Simondon, affects are the basic
constitutive elements of transindividuality. They are the conditions of the
constitution of both collective identity and individual striving. With
respect to the former, Spinoza’s assertion of the affective foundation of
collectivity articulates the same basic problem in Simondon. As Spinoza
writes,
Since men, as we have said, are led more by passion than by reason,
it naturally follows that a people will unite and consent to be guided
as if by one mind not at reason’s prompting but through some
common emotion, such as a common hope, or common fear, or
desire to avenge some common injury.262
266
Simondon 2005, p. 268. 82
Simondon 2005, p.
486.
138 chapter 2
267
Simondon 2005, p. 281.
268
Simondon 2005, p. 323. 85
Simondon 2005, p.
322.
‘the obscure zone’: individuating simondon 139
273 Ibid.
‘the obscure zone’: individuating simondon 141
274 Althusser has argued that one of the central ideological functions of classical political
economy is the manner in which it equivocates between biological need and the
needs of the economic system (Althusser 1970b, p. 179).
275 Simondon 2005, p. 486.
142 chapter 2
distribution of social roles. Although the two critiques are not radically
distinct, what unifies biology and society, or a certain conception of
society, is the functional basis of individuation. The critique of this basis is
thus central to both elaborating the nature of the transindividual,
differentiating from a more conventional notion of society, and
elaborating the point of contact between Simondon and Marxist thought.
As we have already seen, Simondon argues that both psychology and
sociology are ill-equipped to grasp the reality of the transindividual, which
continually passes through the psychic and the social. For Simondon,
sociology can be identified with the ‘inter-individual’, with the tendency
to grasp social relations according to the functional integration of tasks
and duties. Simondon often frames this idea of the inter-individual
through the idea of work, which relates already constituted individuals
through their specific individuations, individuations of skills, tasks, and
functions. 276 Simondon’s point here is twofold. First, it allows him to
differentiate a natural sociality, a sociality at the level of biological
individuation, the individuation of the living being according to its
perceptions and instincts from other dimensions of society. This sociality
is thus similar to that which is found in various forms of social or
gregarious animals, such as ants.277 The natural sociality is not set apart
from the human, as Aristotle differentiates the gregarious animals from
the political animal that is man, but is internal to it. There is a natural
sociality to human social relations, just as there is a biological
individuation to human psychic and collective individuation. ‘Natural’ is
not meant in a normative sense, but in a descriptive one. Simondon also
refers to this sociality as ‘objective’, stressing that ‘subjective’ sociality
necessarily follows it, as psychic (and collective) individuation follows
biological individuation. The sociality of work closely follows this natural
difference. Human sociality cannot be reduced to this individuation, and
must stem from its unresolved tensions and problems. A society is always
more than a relationship of natural dependence, just as subjectivity is
always more than a system of needs. 278 As long as one focuses on the
social relations of functions and tasks, relations that pass through already
constituted individuals, one will miss the transindividual.
Transindividuality is not a relation that passes through already constituted
individuals, as is the case with intersubjective recognition, but passes
through the pre-individual aspects of individuality, affects and
Marxism: one that makes labour the object of its criticism, and a second
in which labour is the subject of its criticism.283 To make labour an object
of critique is to criticise the reduction of all human activities to labour. It
is to criticise the instrumentality and teleology implicit in the idea of
labour. Such a criticism is situated against the idea that human beings are
primarily ‘homo laborans’, and seeks to undercover the historical,
political, and cultural transformations that have reduced human beings to
‘organs’ of labour. While a critique articulated from the standpoint of
labour takes labour for granted as a fundamental element of existence,
making it the basis of an ontology or anthropology, and from this criticises
the relations of distribution that exploit labour, alienating it from its own
activity. Labour is assumed to be productive, and creative of value, and
the critical question is how this power is turned against it. These two
critiques are assumed to be fundamentally opposed. A heterodox
tradition, starting from Italian Operaismo, and continuing through
Autonomia and other strands, has insisted on taking labour as both the
object and subject of critique. As Mario Tronti argues, the ‘working class’
must struggle against itself, against its constitution as abstract labour
power as much as it must struggle against capitalism, against the
exploitation of labour power.284
One name for this conception of labour as simultaneously subject and
object of critique, at least as it has been developed in the work of Antonio
Negri, is ‘living labour’. The term ‘living labour’ has a primarily rhetorical
function in Marx, juxtaposing the life of labour against the dead weight of
capital, separating living labour from capital’s vampire power, but, as
Negri argues, this rhetoric of life against death also touches on its
conceptual determination.
Living labour is defined primarily as activity, first and foremost it is this
active, subjective dimension that sets it apart from the dead labour of
capital, as well as everything it produces. It might be useful to consider
living labour as transversal to the more well-known definitions of abstract
and concrete labour, whereas the former stresses the abstract and social
dimension of labour and the latter stresses its concrete dimension, living
labour stresses its relational and antagonistic dimension. As Negri writes,
One must look carefully at this nucleus of living labour, this creative
tension that is at the same time political and economic, productive
of civil, social, and political structures – in a word, constituent.
Living labour is transindividual, not just in the immediate sense that for
Marx all labour is transindividual, encompassing skills, habits, and
relations that exceed the individual, but also in the more precise sense
that it exceeds the intersubjective functionality of work. 286 It is always
collective, producing social life, but cannot be separated from the
singularity of a living body. Living labour is not the work that defines one’s
place in society understood as the sum total of intersubjective relations.
It passes beneath intersubjective recognition, constituting the basis for
the activity that makes, contests, and remakes structures and institutions.
Thus, as with Simondon’s critique of determinism and society, the critique
of work, of a sociology of work, may break with a certain dominant image
of Marx, one grounded on economism, determinism, and the valorisation
of work, but in doing so it only brings Simondon’s thought closer to other
aspects of elements of Marxist thought. Transindividuality makes it
possible to conceptualise or at least name a particular paradox that we
grasped in the last chapter: Marx must criticise capitalist society’s
tendency towards isolation and individuation while simultaneously
recognising that the collectivity put to work by capital, that of the
combined species-being of humanity, is always already structured by
capitalist functionality. Transindividuality makes it possible to posit a
commonality that is irreducible to this functionality.
As with Simondon’s critique of Spinoza and Hegel, the task here is not
to pass final judgement on the correct or incorrect nature of this
assessment, but to use Simondon’s critique to underscore one of the
fundamental problems of articulating the concept of transindividuality. If
the fundamental problem that Spinoza indicated was that of the
annulment of the individual into some larger individual, the pantheistic
god or nature, and that of Hegel was the reduction of the transindividual
to intersubjectivity, to the relations of recognition, what then is the
fundamental problem that can be indicated through this reading of Marx?
At first glance it would seem to be similar to Hegel, as with Hegel the
problem is the reduction of the transindividual to the intersubjective, to
the relation between already constituted individuals, only now these
both the level of production and consumption transform the basis of the
habits, perceptions, and affects that constitute transindividuality. This
shift will be both a displacement, a shift of an ontology onto the terrain of
social reality, and a reorientation to the current conjuncture.
excursus two
The terrain of affects, or the emotions, do not just mark a point where
Spinoza and Simondon’s concepts of individuation intersect, but are also
a privileged point of entry for articulating the ontological and political
dimension of transindividuality. By examining the affects, it is possible to
map out what is at stake in viewing social relations from the perspective
of the transindividual. Or more to the point, one sense of what is at stake
with respect to transindividuality, since as Simondon argued in the
previous chapter, there are multiple transindividual relations, stemming
from productive relations, knowledge production, and affective
sensibilities. Neither affects, the imagination, nor knowledge are
sufficient causal conditions for a transindividual account of subjectivity,
but they are each transindividual. Bringing Simondon and Spinoza
together with respect to the affects also makes it possible to draw
together two distinct accounts of transindividuality as they converge
towards a common object, the critique of the contemporary structure of
capitalism, something which will be examined more thoroughly in the
next chapter.
While affects might at first appear to be highly individuated, even
personal and idiosyncratic, a more sustained examination clarifies that
they are a terrain of individuation. Affects are not only profoundly
individual, but individuating, as each individual can be defined by their
particular love, hates, and desires. Affects are both causes and effects of
individuation, constitutive of and constituted by the process of
individuation. As such every affect is simultaneously collective and
individual, not just because the general affective comportments – love,
hatred, hope, and fear – constitute a shared set of orientations, but that
the objects of these affects do not exist as isolated objects but only in and
through their constitutive relations. Affects or emotions are also collective
not just in that they refer to shared terminology and experience, but also
insofar as their objects are collective as well. Objects of love and hate
define communities as much as individuals.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the similarity between Simondon
and Spinoza in terms of affective individuation is undercut by a
terminological difference. In Simondon, emotions are individuations of an
152 excursus two
the term affect (affectus) consistently, as affects define both the generic
capacities and their specific individuations. Spinoza’s consistent use of the
term, his lack of a distinction between emotions and affect, is part of a
general consistency, an immanent ontology, which makes human
relations a part of the immanent relations of nature. For Spinoza, the term
‘affect’ and the understanding of individuals as a capacity to affect and be
affected refer not just to human or animal emotional life, but also to the
entirety of finite existence, the entire world of modes. As much as affects
individuate both collectives and individuals, defining their particular
conatus, the general capacity to affect or be affected is common to every
finite thing. It is yet another example of Spinoza’s critique of the
fundamental humanism that sees man as a ‘kingdom within a kingdom’,
that is, defined by fundamentally different relations and rules than the
rest of nature. Simondon’s terminological division between pre-individual
affects and individuated emotions has been utilised and developed by
writers who have explicitly developed the idea of affect as something that
is at once less individuated than emotion, on the order of the pre-
individual, and more subject to historical and political organisation, more
on the order of the transindividual. This distinction has been given its
clearest articulation in Brian Massumi’s work. As Massumi writes,
become known as one of the other central theses of Italian Marxism, ‘the
autonomist thesis’. This thesis, which argued that working-class resistance
precedes and prefigures capitalist domination, is transformed into an
ontological postulate in Negri’s reading of Spinoza. As Negri argues,
Spinoza’s philosophy is one in which every figuration of power understood
as transcendence or potestas, specifically the power of God understood
as ruler, must be understood as an expression or articulation of power
understood as potentia, the immanent power of striving. 301 Spinoza’s
destruction of any transcendence, any order of power (potestas) that
would stand apart from and over that which governs is added to Marx’s
fundamental assertion that labour produces capital. The result of this
reading of Marx with Spinoza is that production, the forces of production,
is expanded beyond labour power to encompass the productive nature of
the affects and imagination. As Negri writes, framing Spinoza’s
transformation through the familiar Marxist terminology, ‘the forces of
production produce the relations of production’. 302 The relations of
production, the legal and political structures of society, are nothing other
than the organisation of conatus, productions of desire. Negri’s emphasis
is on a reading of Spinoza that stresses the constitutive dimension, its
capacity to create, and thus undermine, the various institutional
representations of power. However, as Orlean and Lordon argue, it is
precisely because the conatus constructs these representations, creates
the images of power, that constitute religion and the state, that mean that
its composition cannot be considered as a pure expression of its power.
The imaginary constitution cannot be separated from its misrecognition,
the inadequate grasp of its own power. As we saw in Chapter 1, Lordon
and Orlean’s concept of ‘immanent transcendence’ is meant as a
rejoinder to Negri’s concept of immanent organisation. The relations of
production constitute the forces of production, but never under
conditions of their choosing. Negri’s engagement with Spinoza expands
the terrain of composition; it is no longer value that is constituted by
labour power, but sociality as such that is constituted by the imagination
and affects. In contemporary capitalism, striving produces social relations.
Negri’s turn towards Spinoza, expanding composition to encompass the
imaginative and affective composition of the social structure, is further
reinforced by the works of such writers in the autonomist tradition as
Franco Berardi, Paolo Virno, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Maurizio Lazzarato,
all of whom consider composition to encompass the affects and
303 The use of the term ‘overdetermination’ refers to Althusser, whose own work on
structural causality can be understood as another attempt to ground a social theory
on Spinoza’s ontology. The emphasis is less on the conatus, the striving, and more
on immanent causality, the mutually determining causal relations.
304 Negri 1997, p. 246.
158 excursus two
honour, and love, to knowledge and the intellectual love of god. The latter
is, of course, free of the ambivalence and uncertainty that defines (and
plagues) the affective relation to other objects of desire; knowledge and
the intellectual love of God are both constant and infinite. This trajectory
follows the overall ethical orientation of Spinoza’s Ethics, a direction
intended to move from sadness and impotence to beatitude and power.
A compositional analysis is possible, however, focusing on the historical
transformation of the objects of desire. The impetus for this
historicisation is to be found in Spinoza’s account of affects, which
stresses the constitutive relations over the constituted terms, thus
opening up the possibility of reworking its analysis in different affective
terrains. The map of this difference can be found in the closing passages
of Part Four where Spinoza makes a reference to money. Money is, of
course, finite and inconstant, but the thing that makes it something of an
exception within Spinoza’s list of the unstable objects of desire is its
capacity to function as the precondition of other objects. Money functions
as an affective general equivalent, an object that functions as the
necessary precondition of any other object of desire. One can also add to
this function Spinoza’s fundamental point regarding desire, ‘that we judge
something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire
it’ (eiiip9s). Money becomes a good because of its relation with all of the
other possible objects of desire. As money it becomes the means to
realising all other possible goods, ‘it occupies the mind of the multitude
more than anything else’ (eivappxxviii). The desire for money is a common
affect, capable of unifying the multitude more than reason.305
Spinoza offers an affective genesis of money, but it remains only one
desire object for him, one desired good among others. It is for this reason
that Matheron situates Spinoza in a feudal affective economy in which
admiration, esteem, and glory are just as powerful as the desire for
money, if not more so.306 One can contrast Spinoza’s understanding of
money, which as much as it occupies the mind of the multitude is still
situated alongside other desires, other loves such as glory, with Marx’s
treatment of money in an early text on ‘The Power of Money in Bourgeois
Society’. This text is also written in a register that is primarily affective and
anthropological, situating money alongside the other things that human
beings strive for. Marx’s assertion in those collected manuscripts, namely
that humankind’s passions have an ontological rather than simply an
No doubt the demand also exists for him who has no money, but his
demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or
existence for me, for a third party, for the [others], and which
therefore remains even for me unreal and objectless. The difference
between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand
based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference
between being and thinking, between the idea which merely exists
within me and the idea which exists as a real object outside of me.308
Marx 1973, p.
222.
310 Lordon and Orlean 2008, p. 222.
affective composition 161
forms.311 Money expands beyond its limited role in the Ethics, relegated
to a remark in the Appendix to Part Four, but it does so on grounds
developed by Spinoza in which relations to objects are situated within the
changing relations of power and affects.
The relation to the second axis, that of hope and fear, is no less complex
than the relation to the object of desire. The initial definitions are fairly
basic: hope and fear are either an inconstant joy or sadness ‘which has
arisen from the image of a future or past whose outcome we doubt’
(eiiip18s). At the most basic level, hope and fear constitute another
extension of joy and sadness, extended now not just to some object, as in
the case of love and hate, but to an object or outcome that is or is not
certain. Hope and fear constitute an extreme point of vacillation of the
affects, the point where one affect slides over into the other; there is no
hope without fear and no fear without hope. Hope and fear are the
affective relation to the future, to events that we can neither confidently
predict nor definitely preclude. In the Theological-Political Treatise,
Spinoza situates hope and fear, the general uncertainty of the future, as
the necessary precondition of any superstition or religion, arguing that if
men were able to exercise complete control over fortune, they would not
be subject to the vacillation of hope and fear. This uncertainty is part of
the fundamental condition of humanity. However, this fundamental
condition is subject to two fundamental variations. First, there is the
history of superstition itself. Hope and fear send us looking for signs,
viewing the past for some sign of the future. This uncertainty of the future
is the anthropological condition of superstition. The different religions,
which are also different systems of signs, establish different protocols for
grasping the present on the basis of the future. The different religions are
made up of not just signs and texts, but also protocols of interpretations,
ways of making sense of signs. 312 They are both products of a certain
affective orientation, grounded in a basic uncertainty and conditions for
its dissemination. Hope and fear are not entirely limited to the realm of
religion, not entirely a matter of scripture and its interpretation, but are
also profoundly affected and transformed by the overall social relations
that determine their outcome.313Matheron has argued that the affects of
hope and fear can themselves be historicised according to the general
transformation of social relations, of the mode of production. An
individual or society that is living hand to mouth, in a basic relation of
and need, for money. There is thus an affective split at the core of the
labour process, between the possible love of my own activity and its
results. What we could call the affective composition of labour is how, at
a given moment in time, these two aspects are valued or devalued, how
much joy is sought in the activity of labour itself, or how much is sought
in terms of the accumulation it makes possible. This shift between activity
and object is complicated, being both cause and effect of the changing
relations of hope and fear in a given historical moment.
Lordon offers a sketch of this history of the affective composition of
labour, framed in terms of the shift between Fordism and post-Fordism.
We will examine this transformation in the next chapter, as a similar
economic argument underlies both Bernard Stiegler’s and Paolo Virno’s
engagements with transindividuality as a critique of political economy.
The first period, that of Fordism, is defined by its intersecting
transformations of both the separation of activity from value and the
affective investment of consumption. Labour is simplified and
fragmented, stripped of pleasures and mastery. The division of labour pre-
exists Fordism, but is intensified with the assembly line. What really
begins to define Fordism is the combination of the fragmentation of
labour with the pleasures of consumption. Ford’s famous ‘five dollar day’
increased the spending power of consumers.328 The affective composition
of Fordism could be described as a fundamental reorganisation of
conatus, of striving, away from labour, from activity, and towards
consumption. As Stuart Ewen states, summarising this transformation,
‘Scientific production promised to make the conventional notion of the
self-reliant producer/consumer anachronistic’.329 The worker’s activity is
fragmented, made part of a whole that exceeds it, becoming as much
passivity as activity. The sadness of work, its exhaustion, is compensated
for with the joys of consumption. This transformation from an affective
investment in work to an affective investment in consumption could also
be described as a shift from active joy, joy in one’s capacity to act and the
transformation of action, to passive joy.
Pascal Sévérac has argued that passive joys, joys that register an
increase in one’s power that one is not the cause of, function as a
fundamental barrier to becoming active. 330 Sévérac thus fundamentally
modifies a general picture of Spinoza’s affective politics. It is not a matter
of an opposition between sadness and joy, passivity and activity, as
thinkers like Deleuze often present it. For Sévérac, this division, which
culminates in the idea of a force separated from what it is capable of, too
readily reproduces the idea of a loss of essence. An attentiveness to the
idea of passive joy, a joy that one is not the cause of, fundamentally
transforms this stark opposition. All the various modes have their specific
joys and loves; Spinoza is attentive to the particular pleasure of the drunk,
and other passive joys, such as those of the infant or the gossip.331Sadness
is not a necessary component of passivity. This is not to say, however, that
all joys are equal. There is still a fundamental inactivity, a pathology, to
these joys, which earns them the name ‘passive’.44 Sévérac’s reading has
two primary effects for an understanding for the affective composition of
labour. First, it offers clarification for what is meant by activity; activity is
not some specific action, but is the capacity to transform the very
conditions of activity. Active joy is not a norm, but the capacity to create
new norms. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Sévérac argues that
passive joys function as a barrier to becoming active. This argument is
based on Spinoza’s understanding of the partial nature of passive joys.
Spinoza argues that such joys can be excessive because of their
attachment to one ‘part of the body which is affected more than the
others’ (eivp44s). As Sévérac argues, parts in this sense can include not
just the body’s organs, such as those of taste or sexual pleasure, but also
the impressions and memories, and their corresponding ideas. Just as
passive joys focus on one part of the body, so passive ideas are isolated
from the common relations of ideas. Passivity is not necessarily a sadness,
an alienation; it is the fixation on an idea or memory, even one that brings
us joy, that is outside of one’s control. It is from this perspective that it is
possible to think of not only the passivity at the heart of the fixation on
money, an idea and passive joy, but also the pleasures of consumption.
These pleasures are not only passive, subject to the marketing and control
of others, but also partial, engaging this or that pleasure rather than the
capacity to produce and transform the very possibility of becoming active.
As Lordon argues, ‘Subjection, even when it is happy, consists
fundamentally in locking employees in a restricted domain of
enjoyment’.332
The Fordist compromise can thus be distinguished from later, post-
Fordist, articulations of affects, transformations that can also be
fear, as any tie, any relation, could possibly alter one’s future. This
precarious investment in relations with others is further complicated by
the proliferation of technologies of sharing and surveillance that make
self-presentation not just an isolated moment, for the workday or job
interview, but a constant task. The networking, flexibility, and constant
self-surveillance of the job search become a defining characteristic of
contemporary labour. All the while this characteristic is purported to be
not a repression of one’s fundamental self and identity, but its
expression. 340 It is not just that the networking and the labour of
appearing motivated, engaged, and enthusiastic has to be a kind of deep
acting, demanding a great deal of commitment, but that the workplace
also encompasses those activities and relations that would seem to be
outside of it, increasingly trying to make leisure, play, and creativity part
of its structure. As Nina Power argues, ‘The personal is no longer just
political, it’s economic through and through’.341
The division between Fordism and post-Fordism sketched above is not
meant as a decisive or even adequate description of the economic shift of
the last several decades. It is necessarily schematic, perhaps overly so. In
a later volume, La Société des Affects, Lordon augments this schema by
turning to two of the final propositions of Part Three of Ethics. In those
final passages, Spinoza argues that there are as many loves and hates ‘as
there are species of objects by which we are affected’ (eiiip56), and that
‘each affect of each individual differs from the affect of another as much
as the essence of one from the essence of the other’ (eiiip57). The
multiple objects, and multiple strivings, constitute the basis for multiple
affective compositions, each shifting and ambivalent as the same object
is both the object of love and hate, and the same individual comes to hate
what they once loved. Rereading these propositions back into the
schematic history of different affective modes of production does not
dispense with the latter, shattering it into a pure multiplicity where a
thousand flowers bloom. Rather, these differences, variations of love and
hate, must be understood as variations on a dominant theme. As Lordon
argues, there will always be bosses who are kind and generous, and work
situations that engage a broader range of activity, but these differences
and deviations are ultimately just different expressions of the same
fundamental relation. The nicest boss in the world cannot fundamentally
alter the fundamental structure of Fordist or post-Fordist labour
conditions; the affective engagement at the level of individual intention
does nothing to alter the basic relation with the activity and object.342 This
affective veneer, the work of human relations, is not inconsequential:
more than the role it plays in motivating individual workers, the real work
it does is in producing the appearance of difference, a society of individual
actions rather than persistent structures. Much of the quotidian criticism
of work, or of capitalism in general, focuses on the differences: we
complain about this boss, or protest against this big corporation for being
particularly offensive, but do not address the fundamental relation of
exploitation or the profit motive which exceeds the different ways in
which it is instantiated. The plurality, a plurality dictated by what Spinoza
would call the order of nature, the different ways in which things have
affected us, takes precedence over the perception of common relations.
To this emphasis on plurality as a perpetual alibi, we can add another
thesis from Spinoza. As Spinoza argues, we are more likely to hate or love
an act that we consider to be free than one which is considered necessary.
On this last point, Spinoza’s affective economy intersects with one of the
central points of Marx’s critique of political economy, that of fetishism,
which could in part be summed up as perceiving the capitalist mode of
production as necessary and natural rather than the product of social
relations. The naturalisation of the economy, its existence as self-evident
natural laws, makes it difficult for us to hate it, to become indignant. The
affective economy of capitalism is one in which it is easier to become
angry at and grateful for the deviations, the cruel bosses and the
benevolent philanthropists, while the structure itself, the fundamental
relations of exploitation, are deemed too necessary, too natural, to merit
indignation.
Lordon, like Balibar, understands Spinoza’s definition of desire as
‘man’s very essence’ to be the basis for a transindividual articulation of
the individual. In each case, the essence of man is nothing apart from its
specific affects and relations. For Lordon, these relations are determined
primarily by the economic structures from wage labour to labour
regulations that orient striving, resituating the goals and objectives of our
primary desires. In contrast to this, Balibar argues that transindividuation
always passes through the other scene, as the mode of production
determines and is affected by the mode of subjection.
Lordon acknowledges that economy cannot function without the
particular characters and individuals, both real and imagined, that
populate it, from the successes and failure of parents and co-workers to
that of the entrepreneur.343We could argue that this was already apparent
in Marx’s critique of ‘so-called primitive’ accumulation, which was as
much a critical engagement with a particular narrative of capitalist
accumulation, one predicated on saving versus squandering, as it was an
account of the genesis of capitalist subjection. 344 For Lordon, the
imagination functions less as an ‘other scene’, as a fundamental
displacement of the economy, than as a sort of supplement that continues
through the same fundamental process. The order and connection of the
orientation of desire and the imagination is the same. In each case it is a
matter of a kind of canalisation of desire, as narratives respond to and
reorient desires. As Yves Citton, who Lordon draws from on this point,
argues, narratives and stories structure the orientation of desire,
providing scenarios through which we understand existence, while
simultaneously being structured by desire; a narrative that did not
animate desires, did not invoke passion, would never be read or
imagined. 345 In this view, capitalism is less a mode of production, a
narrowly economic set of relations determining how goods are produced
and distributed, than it is an entire reorganisation of desire. Lordon
describes the ‘symbolic violence’ of the imagination as follows:
desire, and does not exist outside of it. This does not mean, however, that
everything is locked in the same cycle forever reproducing itself.
Transindividuality makes it possible to grasp the tensions and ambiguities
of affects that open up the potential for transformation. At the same time,
it is not clear that the economy can be understood only through its
organisation of affects, or whether or not transindividuality can be
reduced to the affective dimension. In the next chapter, we will turn to a
more thorough engagement with the economy, and its transformations,
with Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, ultimately returning to the larger
question, namely that of the different dimensions of transindividuation,
political and economic, in the final chapter.
chapter 3
Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy opens with a claim
about the status of political economy. Stiegler claims that ‘philosophy of our
time has abandoned the project of a critique of political economy, and this
constitutes a disastrous turn of events’.347 It is precisely this abandonment
that Stiegler aims to rectify. However, Stiegler is not calling for a return to
Marx in anything remotely resembling an orthodox form, and Stiegler’s work
is as much a critique of Marxism as it is an engagement with the failings of
contemporary philosophy. Stiegler’s understanding of the economy is less a
matter of a base determining a philosophical superstructure than it is a
matter of grasping a fundamental aspect of contemporary individuation. The
economy does not constitute a base upon which a superstructure could be
erected, but functions transversally, cutting through the entire relation of
individual and collective identity. ‘Political economy is a way of organizing
transindividuation not only at the level of symbolic exchange, but also at the
level of the exchange of commodities’.2 In order to understand this it is
necessary to recast our understanding of political economy, to rethink what
is produced and circulated along with commodities and money.348
Stiegler’s redefinition of the relation between transindividuation and
political economy is itself predicated on two transformations of Simondon’s
conceptual articulation. First, Stiegler stresses the essentially temporal
character of every transindividual individuation. Every individuation is a
process, a movement from an initial metastable condition, defined by
tensions and relations, towards a future, a future posited less as an endpoint
than a telos. It is a process, as Simondon argued, but one framed between
memory, the past, and the future. This process defines both the
individuation of subjects and collectives, as well as their mutually
constitutive intersection. Simondon argues that transindividuation can be
grasped as the intersection of the temporality of the individual and the
collective, the interweaving of the individual’s timeline, striving and goals,
superstructure in which the former determines the latter, but he stresses that this division
has become increasingly untenable in the age of contemporary, or hyperindustrial
capitalism (Stiegler 2004a, p. 70).
the hidden abode of individuation 179
355 ‘Although the role of our anatomical and physiological heritage is undoubtedly decisive,
we must finally conclude that spontaneous behavior in the human species is overlaid
by behavior acquired by the social community’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, p. 231). Leroi-
Gourhan thus articulates two of the fundamental ideas of transindividuality expressed
in our readings of Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, in which there is no natural basis for social
institutions (or, as Spinoza writes, ‘nature creates no nations’), but these institutions
are in turn the basis for individuation.
356 Stiegler 2011a, p. 75.
the hidden abode of individuation 181
Stiegler’s assertion evokes without citing the philosophy of the tool (or
machine) that we have already seen at work in both Hegel and Marx, in
which the tool is understood as a process of transindividuation, a process in
which individual skill intersects with general social knowledge and
competence. However, what is more important for Stiegler is the
fundamental assertion that there is no transindividuation, no constitution of
an ‘I’ and a ‘We’ without the transductive constitution of ‘what’, the
formation of a materialised memory in machines, tools, and texts.358 To say
that this is a transductive relation is to argue that there is not a causal
relation between the two. It is not a matter of technology structuring society
or society determining its technology; rather, the relation is one of mutual
individuation, the formation of a culture and the formation of a technology.
As much as we inherit the material inscription of memory, we also produce
our own, we write to learn and remember, participating in our own
individuation.
In arguing for the primacy of the inherited memory, the memory of texts,
tools, and artefacts, Stiegler actively problematises the phenomenological
conception of memory, the role of living memory. Stiegler’s broad series of
references and influences draws from Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of
Husserl and Heidegger’s understanding of temporality and history, arguing
that both overlook the inherited memories of traces and texts, which is the
precondition for history and biography, collective and individual memory.
According to the schema outlined by Edmund Husserl, living memory is
formed between primary retentions, the retentions that constitute even the
most immediate experiences, and secondary retentions that are memories
of specific experiences.359 Primary retentions retain the particular notes and
melodies that make music possible, while secondary retentions are the
memories of hearing a specific song. The process of forming memories is a
process of individuation (an individual is its history, as Spinoza, Hegel, and
357Stiegler2009, p. 68.
358Stiegler2008a, p. 7.
359Husserl 1991, p. 47.
182 chapter 3
I only think differently from others, I only feel differently from others, I
only desire differently from others, I only see differently from others –
in short, I only exist – because the retentional process in which I consist
is unique, and because this retentional process is also a protentional
process, that is, it is a process that constitutes horizons of
expectations.360
[T]he citizen is one who decides on the textualized law’s meaning, and
who in the same gesture self-affirms as this particular citizen, exposing
the to-come of that particularity relative to the community as endlessly
altering itself and thus affirming itself as différant from all others –
including the reader in any past guise.367
The reading and writing of the law opens up a relation not just between the
individual and the collective, an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ framed between the tension
of the general inscription and singular interpretation, but also between the
past and the future. 368 The history of the citizen, of its particular
grammatisation, is a history in which law is constantly reinterpreted in the
name of justice. This reinterpretation crosses divides that are simultaneously
temporal and generational, as new interpretations presuppose a new
generation, a new reading. Thus, citizenship requires two things, both of
which mark it as a particular, albeit long, epoch in the history of
individuation: first, there is the grammatisation, the inscription of law itself,
which makes it capable of being read, but second is the ideal of justice, as
something which exceeds the law, legitimating an interpretation. The citizen
is situated between the letter and the spirit of the law. These two are in a
constant relation of conflict and determination, whereby laws delimit justice
and justice calls the limits of the law into conflict, a conflict framed by the
materiality of the law and the ideality of justice. 369 The citizen is
transindividual individuation that is neither entirely spiritual nor entirely
material, but the constant tension of the one with the other, material
inscriptions and interpretations, the letter and the spirit. 370 Since its
inception, the citizen has been generally understood as a combination of
giving and receiving orders (as in Aristotle), or sovereign and subject (as in
the case of Rousseau).371 This political duality of command and obedience,
of giving and receiving the law, is, in Stiegler’s interpretation, nothing other
than the temporal relation of reading and writing, of inheriting memories
and creating new interpretations. Stiegler, like Balibar, defines the citizen as
Beyond the break with the past, the primary significance of the industrial
revolution is its effect not on writing, laws, and the individuation of the
citizen, but on the habits and comportments of day-to-day existence, the
memory that is materialised in tools and machines. Stiegler reads Marx
through Simondon to examine the industrial revolution through the process
of ‘proletarianisation’: proletarianisation is the loss of individuality, of the
382 Stiegler 2010b, p. 36. Stiegler’s invocation of a connection between Plato and Marx calls
decree, who thus will never lose them except within the rules; the absolute
dispossessed whose infinite possibilities should discourage the mediocre and artisanal
aspirations of others; the pure autodidact whose virtual omniscience disqualifies the
twaddle of working men’s doxa and bars the road to autodidacticism’s jacks of all
trades’ (Rancière 2004, p. 36).
383 Stiegler 2012, p. 208. 41
Stiegler 2012, p.
207. 42 Stiegler 2012, p.
196.
the hidden abode of individuation 189
articulate the constitution of consumer society. At first glance, the use of the
term proletarianisation to describe the transindividuation of the consumer
would seem to be an analogy with the transformation of the labour process:
if proletarianisation is the loss of skills, talents, and knowledge until the
worker becomes simply interchangeable labour power, then the broader
proletarianisation of daily life is the loss of skills, knowledge, and memory
until the individual becomes simply purchasing power. 386 Stiegler’s use of
proletarianisation is thus simultaneously broader and more restricted than
Marx, broader in that it is extended beyond production to encompass
relations of consumption and thus all of life, but more restricted in that it is
primarily considered with respect to the question of knowledge. The transfer
of knowledge from the worker to the machine is the primary case of
proletarianisation for Stiegler, becoming the basis for understanding the
transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the
knowledge of play from the child to the videogame. 387 Stiegler does not
include other dimensions of Marx’s account of proletarianisation,
specifically the loss of place, of stability, with its corollary affective
dimension of insecurity and precariousness. On this point, it would be
difficult to draw a strict parallel between worker and consumer, as the
instability of the former is often compensated for by the desires and
satisfactions of the latter. Consumption often functions as a compensation
for the loss of security, stability, and satisfaction of work, which is not to say
that it is not without its own insecurities especially as they are cultivated by
advertising.388
386 Ibid. Stiegler’s critique reiterates much of the critique of ‘consumer society’ and the
commodification of daily life as it has been developed by Debord, Lefebvre, and
Baudrillard, specifically the idea that the exploitation of ‘buying power’ is the corollary
of the exploitation of labour power that finds its expression in the early works of
Baudrillard. Baudrillard, like Stiegler, understands the formation of the consumer to be
analogous to the constitution of the proletariat. As Baudrillard writes, ‘It is difficult to
grasp the extent to which the current training in systematic, organized consumption is
the equivalent and extension, in the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century
long process of the training of rural populations for industrial work’ (Baudrillard 1998,
p. 81).
387 Stuart Ewen’s influential study of the history of consumerism argues that there is a
historical connection between the deskilling of work in the Fordist production process
and the deskilling of consumption, as the mass-produced goods of an industrial
economy no longer allowed for tinkering (Ewen 2001, p. 106).
388 Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and a pioneer of public relations, is a central figure for
down, pick it up, read it quickly or slowly, and even inscribe on the margins.
These differentials of intervention, of reading and reinscription, are the
conditions of different transindividual individuations, different ways in
which the same book is traversed by different individuations, different
singularities. They are read differently by different individuals, and even
differently by the same individual, constituting a history of individuation.
Modern technologies, such as film, television, and streaming video, function
differently: they are not just read or consumed in time, but consume time.
Movies, television, and even YouTube videos are themselves temporal, not
just in that they can be measured according to their running time, but that
they structure time. ‘Cinema weaves itself into our time; it becomes the
temporal fabric of those ninety or fifty-two minutes of unconscious
consciousness that is characteristic of being, a film view, strangely
immobilized by motion’. 391 If we remember Stiegler’s fundamental point
that what we perceive and anticipate is shaped by past experiences, by
secondary and tertiary retentions, then the more an audience experiences
the same things, sees the same movies and programmes, the more it will
experience future things in the same way.392 Synchronisation makes possible
the programming of consciousness. For Stiegler, the most important passage
of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique is their invocation of Kantian schemata:
Stiegler is concerned less with the content of the culture industry, its clichés
and figures, than with its fundamental relation with the temporal synthesis,
the ability of the new industry to programme consciousness.394 This ability
to programme consciousness, to synchronise the memories of millions, is
further complicated by the emergence of ‘real time’ transmission. ‘Real
time’, the immediate transmission (or constitution) of an event to millions
of screens, synchronises the thoughts and ideas of millions of individuals.
Real time is the destruction of temporality, of the time of difference of the
397 Stiegler 2011b, p. 105. Stiegler perhaps overstates the role of the us in this use of cinema.
Stiegler does acknowledge the role of Russian thinkers in the formation of early
concepts of montage, paying special attention to the ‘Kuleshov Effect’ as a
demonstration of the shaping of primary retentions, experience, by memory (Stiegler
2011b, p. 15). The idea of constructing a memory, and engineering the attention and
psyche, was also a part of Soviet cinema. As Sergei Eisenstein wrote, ‘In our conception
a work of art is first and foremost a tractor ploughing over the audience’s psyche in a
particular class context’ (Eisenstein 1988, p. 62). Susan Buck-Morss has argued that
Hollywood and Soviet Cinema constitute two different constructions of mass
consciousness: one focused on the star as a mass object, the other on the masses as a
subject. As Buck-Morss writes, ‘If the Soviet screen provided a prosthetic experience of
collective power, the Hollywood screen provided a prosthetic experience of collective
desire’ (Buck-Morss 2000, p. 148). In contrast to this, Jonathan Beller has argued that
far from constituting two radically different projects, American cinema has
incorporated Eisenstein’s concept of montage in order to produce an economics and
politics of attention (Beller 2006, p. 119).
398 Stiegler 2011, p. 117.
the hidden abode of individuation 195
While this defines the initial identification of the movies with Hollywood,
Stiegler argues that the real political dimension of this third wave of
grammatisation, following writing and the industrial revolution, is found in
the decision of the us to control ‘hearts and minds’, the recognition that the
control over the radio waves and bandwidths was as integral to political
power in the twentieth century as control over the seas was to the
nineteenth century.399
The rise of the consumer as a figure for disindividuation, for the
dissolution of the conditions for transindividuation, underscores the fact
that as much as the rise of the new technologies of grammatisation could be
identified with the politics of Americanisation, both internally, defining a
politics of adoption for a nation of disparate ethnicities and languages, and
externally, in terms of the global dominance of the American way of life, they
exceed it. Stiegler argues that the technologies of the culture industry, or
what he calls hypercapitalism, which shape memory and experience, far
exceed any political project. A political project, whether it be one of the
citizen or the ‘American Century’, is always aimed at the constitution of a
‘we’, a collective, whereas capitalism, or the market, is driven by other
imperatives, imperatives that are at odds with political transindividuation.59
These imperatives can be grasped through Marx’s theory of capital, as much
as they point to its basic limitations. Capitalism in the twentieth century has
been confronted with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a tendency
that, as Marx argued, had to do with the changes in the composition of
capital from labour to machines.60 This change in the organic composition
of capital, the displacement of labour power by machines and technology,
decreases the rate of exploitation and profit. Labour becomes more
productive, producing more use values in a given amount of time, but this
overall productivity appears as a decrease of the rate of surplus value, labour
power, variable capital, and constitutes less and less of the production
process. The rate of profit declines as the overall volume of profit increases.
This tendency not only demonstrates how capital constitutes ‘the moving
contradiction’ undoing its basis in the exploitation of labour power, but it
also ultimately undermines the viability of capital, as lower rates of profit
undermine the very idea of investing to receive a return on capital. What
Marx did not grasp, according to Stiegler, is how this tendency could be
counteracted by the expansion of consumption, which maintains profit by
399 Stiegler 2011, p. 127. Stiegler’s rough periodisation of grammatisation in terms of three
196 chapter 3
epochs, the first defined by the long period of the citizen predicated on the extension
of writing, the second by the industrial revolution, and the third on hypermateriality
roughly models the periodisation which Maurizio Lazzarato adopts from Michel
Foucault. This periodisation is divided between the epoch of sovereignty, focused on
state power to subtract or destroy; the epoch of discipline, focused on the spatial
control of bodies; and the epoch of control, focused on action at a distance on a
dispersed public. Like Stiegler, Lazzarato gives central importance to the technological
elements of this transition, identifying control with technologies such as newspapers,
radio, and television that act directly on memory and minds (Lazzarato 2004, p. 85).
59 Stiegler 2010c, p. 129.
60 Marx 1981, p. 319.
expanding markets and forestalls crisis by integrating desires into
consumption.
people who buy the same thing, wear the same brands, are not a ‘we’, but a
statistical multiplicity, a ‘billions served’. The second is perhaps more
difficult to grasp; are we not in an age that is increasingly described as
individualistic, as dominated by competitive self-interest? Stiegler contests
this:
410 Leroi-Gourhan predicted a demise of the arts with the rise of these tertiary retentions.
‘Ten generations from now a writer selected to produce social fiction will probably be
sent on a “renaturation” course in a park a corner of which he or she will have to till a
plough copied from a museum exhibit and pulled by a horse borrowed from a zoo. He
or she will cook and eat the family meal at the family table, organize neighborhood
visits, enact a wedding, sell cabbages from a market stall … and learn anew how to
relate the ancient writings of Gustave Flaubert to the meagerly reconstituted reality,
after which this person will no doubt be capable of submitting a batch of freshened up
emotions to the broadcasting
the hidden abode of individuation 201
Balibar and Stiegler arrive at the same point, namely that as much as it is
possible to identify the citizen as a transindividual individuation, constituting
the ideal of equaliberty or recognition of I and we, this individuation has
been fundamentally altered by transformations in the economy, which are
also trans-
Let us nonetheless note here that, if these epochs succeed upon one
another, or engender one another, they do not supplant one another
like the scenes of a play: for us, and consequently in our relation to the
political question, they are all still present in a disunified totality, in a
noncontemporaneity that is the very structure of the ‘current
moment’, which means that we are simultaneously dealing with the
state, with the class struggle, and with anthropological difference.411
412Stiegler 2010c, p. 4.
413 Balibar 2004, p. 26.
the hidden abode of individuation 203
that for Virno they define work itself.417 For Virno, the defining characteristic
of the ‘hidden abode of production’, at least in its Fordist phase, is not so
much its asymmetry of force or its different individuation, but rather its
silence. The sign that hangs over its entrance is not ‘No Admittance Except
on Business’, but ‘Silence, Men at Work’ – at least until the end of Fordism.
These definitions of Fordism, like Marx’s descriptions of pre-capitalist
economic formations, function in Virno’s work only to underscore the
profound transformation of post-Fordism; they are the sketches of the
background against which the major concepts are drawn. Virno derives his
positive description of post-Fordism from the notebooks in Marx’s
Grundrisse that have been posthumously retitled ‘The Fragment on
Machines’. In this text Marx argues that capital, in the transformation of the
organic composition, a transformation that shifts productive activity
towards machines, makes the general social knowledge, what he calls ‘the
general intellect’, the primary productive force. As Marx writes,
For Marx, the development of this general intellect takes the form of
machinery, scientific knowledge, and technology. Thus, in the same
notebook, Marx describes a fundamental transformation in the status of
labour power; it ceases to be the motive, or even directive force, of the
new protocols and programmes, rather than a set body of knowledge. This
can be seen in the increased emphasis in job training literature on
professionalism rather than specialisation. As Virno writes,
of contemplation, of the bio theoreticos, a separate and solitary activity (“exile of the
alone to the alone”), but rather only with Averroism, that is, with the thought of the
one and only possible intellect common to all human beings, and, crucially, with
Dante’s affirmation – in De Monarchia – of the inherence of the multitude to the very
power of thought’ (Agamben 2000, p. 10).
85 Virno 2004, p. 100.
86 Virno 2004, p. 101.
87 Virno 2007a, p. 5. 88 Virno 2006, p. 37.
89 Virno 2004, p. 66.
Specialization is something impersonal, an objective requirement that
can be evaluated based on shared parameters. Professionalism on the
other hand is seen as a subjective property, a form of know-how
inseparable from the individual person; it is a sum of knowledges,
experiences, attitudes, and a certain sensibility. Correctly understood,
post-Fordist ‘professionality’ does not correspond to any precise
profession. It consists rather of certain character traits.421
429Virno 2003, p. 1.
210 chapter 3
or formal education, but in free time as well.430 To some extent, the very
appearance of this phrase begins to suggest that Virno’s second correction
is not entirely alien from Marx’s thought; there is already in the notebooks
at least a nascent idea of the general intellect as living labour, as a productive
activity. 431 However, the appearance of the formulation in the same
notebooks as Marx’s depiction of knowledge as a productive force makes it
possible to see both of these phenomena as connected. For Marx, this
connection is to be found in the most advanced period of capitalism that he
knows, that of the emerging factory, while for Virno they are best
understood to anticipate post-Fordism. Virno says little about the role of
transindividuality in co-operation and the labour process in Marx’s analysis
of capital, focusing on the shift to post-Fordism. More importantly, this
formulation of an individual that is simultaneously ‘individual’ and ‘social’
makes it possible to connect Marx’s thought with Simondon’s ontology. As
Virno writes, defining one by means of the other, ‘Social should be translated
as pre-individual, and “individual” should be seen as the ultimate result of
the process of individuation’.432
Virno’s translation of Marx’s terms into Simondon’s underscores the
specific way in which he is making sense of the latter’s ontology. Virno
argues that the pre-individual basis of individuation is made up of three
components – sensation and habits, language, and the relations of
production.102 The first of these is identified as natural, the second
historico-natural, and the last, the relations of production, is historical. Thus
it is possible to understand Virno as dividing the pre-individual between its
natural and historical components, splitting the difference between
Simondon’s formulation and Stiegler’s interpretation.433 Of all these terms,
the historico-natural is perhaps the most in need of clarification, especially
since it becomes increasingly central to Virno’s philosophical anthropology.
Language is historico-natural in that it is both the product of a natural
capacity (mouth, lips, tongue, brain), but this capacity can only take its
formation as a given historical actualisation, as much as nature describes the
capacity for language, any given language is the product of history.434 Virno
differentiates these component elements of the pre-individual, situating
some with nature and others with history, in order to unravel some of the
knot that ties nature and culture, materiality and spirit. However, Virno
maintains two of Simondon’s fundamental theses: first, that individuality is
never concluded, never finished, it is a process of individuation; and second,
that the collective is not the suppression of individuation, but a constitutive
element of this process.435 This collective in which individuals continue the
process of individuation, is itself an organisation of the pre-individual, as the
capacity for language becomes a particular language, and the biological
possibility of habits are organised in determinate habits and relations. As
Virno writes, ‘The collective is the sphere in which the preindividual becomes
the transindividual’.436 Most importantly, Virno utilises Simondon to make a
central point about contemporary production and subjectivity, overcoming
certain conceptual oppositions between the individual and the collective. To
argue that with the general intellect the generic capacities of intelligence,
knowledge, and communication come into the centre of the production
process is not to argue that human beings, individuals, become
interchangeable pseudopods of this generic capacity. What comes to the
fore in the contemporary productive process is neither some indifferent
generic capacity nor some highly individualised performance, but both at
once: it is the transindividual individuation, the intersection between the
singular and the common. For Virno, this intersection of singular and
common proceeds almost unproblematically, eschewing the tension and
even anxiety that characterises Simondon’s understanding of the link
between collective and individual individuation.
Virno shares the same fundamental thesis as Stiegler that contemporary
capitalism intersects with the fundamental aspects of individuation and
subjectivity in an unprecedented way. For both Stiegler and Virno, what we
are dealing with now is the immediate intersection of political economy and
anthropogenesis. For Stiegler, this intersection is framed through the
tertiary retentions, memories, inscribed in signs, tools, and stories that
define humanity. As consumer capitalism turned towards these inscriptions,
commodifying them through the culture industry, it commodified the
defining characteristic of humanity, the inheritance of transindividual
individuations. Both Stiegler and Virno understand humanity to be defined
by a particular lack of instinctual determination, but while Stiegler stresses
the creation and inheritance of a specifically human memory of
grammatisation, defined by tools and traces, Virno, drawing from Gehlen,
argues more forcefully for this indetermination being the defining
as the truth of all social systems, as the exploitaiton or competition that has
always existed finally revealed.444
as such. Historical ‘déjà vu’ takes place whenever the given instantiation of potentiality is
taken to be synonymous with potentiality itself, whenever a given transindividual
individuation is taken to be synonymous with transindividuality tout court (Virno 2006c, p.
21). Virno’s remarks on déjà vu as a kind of historical experience, an experience of the end of
history, helps shed light on two aspects of his historical argument that defines the current
historical moment of post-Fordism with a becoming actual of the generic potential of
individuation. First, the actualisation of this potential for individuation is paradoxical at best;
the actualisation of a potential as potential is not the same as a potential being completely
actualised. Its existence as potential, as possibility, must be maintained. There is, for Virno, a
fundamental difference between the potential of humanity becoming a productive force,
harnassed to the economy, and it becoming actualised. Second, and consequently, the
relationship between capitalism, or post-Fordist capitalism and this potential, must be
considered to be an ambivalent one, an ambivalence grounded on the actualisation of a
potential as potential (Agamben 1999, p. 183). This second point is important because it also
clarifies Virno’s own ambiguous relationship with the idea of a potential or faculty. Virno’s
critics, such as Negri, have often understood his articulation of language and habits as pre-
individual relations to be nothing other than a doctrine of faculties, of the innate components
of humanity that remain unchanged (Casarino and Negri 2009, p. 128). Virno has
endeavoured to distance himself from this understanding of human potential and possibility
through Simondon’s idea of the pre-individual. To posit the pre-individual components of
language, habits, and affects as historico-natural is to posit them as neither a faculty nor a
historical institution, but the unstable point where natural capacities intersect with historical
transformations. It is for this reason that the virtual, the potential to constitute new habits
and languages, can never become actualised.
444 This is Virno’s explanation of Jameson’s assertion, ‘It seems to be easier for us today to
imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the
breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our
imaginations’ (Jameson 1994, p. xii). Virno argues that the various invocations of the
end of history, or the impossibility of imagining any social relations other than the
current relations, constitutes a kind of déjà vu. Virno follows Bergson in understanding
memory to be constitutive of experience; there is a memory of a past that makes the
present as such possible. This is not so much a matter of a recollection that is internal
to experience as with Stiegler’s use of Husserl, but rather of a necessary temporal
difference, a difference between past, present, and future that is the basis for
experience prior to the experience of any specific past, present, or future. This memory
is split between temporal difference, a past that can never be present, and a memory
of the past (Virno 2006c, p. 26). Déjà vu is thus a matter of mistaking the memory which
is constitutive of experience for a memory of an experience. The same division
between a generic faculty and a specific instance defines history. Every historical
moment is a specific organisation of generic capacity, the capacity of language and
labour; these generic capacities are the condition of history but are never present
the hidden abode of individuation 215
Virno and Stiegler both draw from a particular philosophy of memory, Bergson or Husserl,
to articulate an understanding of the relationship between history and individuation. In each
case, memory becomes a way of making sense of history. Whereas Stiegler focuses on the
history of the tertiary retentions, their shift from writing to visual and digital recording, Virno
focuses on the relationship between the virtual, or the pre-individual, and its actualisation.
Virno follows an argument that is similar to that of Deleuze, who tried to develop an idea of
social relations based in part on Simondon’s idea of individuation, one which is also indebted
to Bergson as much as Marx. Deleuze argues that social relations, understood as primarily
economic, must be understood as a virtual problem, a set of relations, that are actualised in
every given society. This problem, what Deleuze calls an Idea, cannot be grasped in any given
society, but only in the moment of upheavel (Deleuze 1994, p. 193). What links Deleuze and
Virno is that in each case the goal was not the maintenance of some particular transindividual
individuation, such as that of the citizen, but of a revolutionary transformation of the very
conditions of individuation. This is a radically different reading of the conceptual logic of the
Communist Manifesto from the one suggested by Stiegler; it is not a matter of criticising what
is lost in the proletarianisation of the worker, but in what is gained as the contingency of pre-
individuality and the social nature of transindividuality are laid bare, stripped of any
mystification. In Virno’s
The difference between how Stiegler and Virno read The Communist
Manifesto, the former stressing proletarianisation, the later stressing the
relentless transformation of social relations, underscores a deeper
difference in how they understand the intersection between capitalism and
anthropogenesis. Stiegler argued that the intersection was primarily framed
through consumption, specifically the consumption of the culture industry
in which the media of film, television, and the internet fundamentally
transformed the tertiary retentions that formed the basis of
transindividuation, while Virno argues that this shift is primarily through
production, through the new productive processes of postFordism. This shift
can be seen in how they situate their analysis with respect to Horkheimer
and Adorno’s influential analysis of the culture industry. Stiegler argues that
this analysis needs to be deepened and radicalised: the schema that
constituted the generic characters and predictable plots of the culture
industry needs to be extended to schematisation, the synchronisation of
thought that constitutes the temporal objects.116 In contrast to this, Virno
argues that what defines and delimits Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of
the culture industry is its Fordist dimension, whereby the ‘spiritual
production’ of movies, television, and music were subject to the same
overarching logic of the assembly line, a logic that stressed mass production
and standardisation.117 Much of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument
hinges on this crucial point, namely that the products of culture in order to
be profitable must appeal to the widest possible audience, reducing
everyone to that audience. As Adorno writes, ‘The pre-digested quality of
the product prevails, justifies itself and establishes itself all the more firmly
216 chapter 3
later writings, this becomes the matter of a politics that would not attempt to
compensate for humanity’s constitutively undetermined pre-individual state by
imposing some new state, some new rule, as a kind of nature, but attempts to give free
play to the undetermined itself (Virno 2008, p. 64).
116 Stiegler 2012, p. 38.
117 Virno 2004, p. 59.
118 Adorno 1991, p. 57.
sumer goods, entertainment and distraction; it is no longer situated at the
relative periphery of the economy, placating and disciplining a largely
industrial base of workers; rather, it is now central to production. As Virno
argues,
For Virno, the culture industry must be considered an industry not just in the
sense that it continues and perpetuates the ‘proletarianisation’ of
production into consumption, replacing the basic and fundamental know-
how with standardised experiences and commodities, but in that it produces
the ‘means of production’ of other industries, it produces the capacity to
communicate, the knowledge and sensibilities, necessary for production
itself.
As Marx argued, and Virno repeats, the ‘social individual’, the knowledge
that becomes part of the production process is often produced outside of it,
in ‘free time’. As Marx writes,
Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has
naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he
then enters into the direct production process as this different subject.
This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the
process of becoming; and at the same time, practice [Ausübung],
experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as
regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the
accumulated knowledge of society.446
The consequence of this is that the very activities that were defined in
opposition to work have now been rendered productive. Virno cites
Heidegger’s two famous characterisations of ‘inauthentic life’, ‘idle talk’ and
‘curiosity’, framing them less in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity than
in terms of their understated sociological content. The groundlessness of
‘idle talk’ and ‘curiosity’ is defined less in terms of their fundamental
opposition to authentic existence than in their opposition to production. It
is precisely this that has changed with the integration of communication and
knowledge in the production process. ‘Idle talk’, which is nothing less than
the capacity of language to constitute its own ground, for speaking about
nothing to become its own something, ‘Things are so because one says so’,
and curiosity, the search for novelty for novelty’s sake, become productive
paradigms in the age of postFordist production. 447 It is precisely such
groundless, or self-grounding, language, and persistent search for novelty,
that is put to work by contemporary post-Fordist techniques of marketing
and production. 448 As Virno writes, ‘Rather than operating only after the
workday, idle talk and curiosity have built their own offices’.449 Marketing
could not exist without idle talk and curiosity, without statements becoming
their own basis and the ceaseless desire for the new. It is not just the
technologies of the culture industry, the screens and computer interfaces,
that have migrated into the production process, but the sensibilities and
capacities: the attitudes and comportments that were defined by their
independence from work have become part of it.
As it stands, ‘publicness’ exists in the private sphere under the rule of capital,
where it is subject to hierarchy and domination of exploitation, and in turn
the ossified official public sphere, the sphere of political decision and action.
Thus, to return to the contradiction Marx glimpsed between exchange and
production as two different individuations, it is no longer a matter of the
isolated subject of freedom, equality, and Bentham in the sphere of
exchange contrasted with the co-operative power of species-being in the
hidden sphere of production, or of the anarchy of competition against the
discipline of production, but between what could be called a public sphere
without publicness, a politics governed by mechanical and disciplinary
manners of counting votes and amassing responses to surveys, and what
Virno calls ‘publicness without a public sphere’, the economic exploitation
of the general intellect. The former refers to the ossified structures of
representational democracy, which exclude the very public that they claim
to represent. The latter is what happens when publicness, the powers of
knowledge, communication, and relation are developed and made
productive, but are denied any political transformative power, being subject
entirely to the rule of profit. Virno argues that this rule takes the form of
hierarchies and subordinations that are increasingly personal, personal
because they encompass not just labour power, understood as the capacity
to work, but also the capacity to communicate and relate. ‘Nobody is as poor
as those who see their own relation to the presence of others, that is to say,
their own communicative faculty, their own possession of a language,
reduced to wage labour’.453 There is thus a double alienation, a loss of a
world in that this capacity cannot become public, but also a fundamental
alienation from the conditions of one’s own communicative activity, an
alienation from the preindividual relations that are constitutive of
the fetish, offers much for thinking about capitalist sociality, a sociality
defined by the paradoxes of ‘gregarious isolation’. However, it still leaves the
sense that there is a co-operative kernel inside the mystical shell, as if it were
possible to simply dispense with this appearance of capital to arrive at the
co-operative relations within.457
As we saw with Marx’s analysis in Capital, as much as it was possible to
locate a co-operative dimension of species activity in the production
process, this co-operation was still subject to exploitation, the effects of
which lead to a despotism over the productive process. Virno marks a similar
ambivalence over the productive co-operation of the general intellect, but it
is framed in different terms consistent with the fragmentation of the factory
space and factory discipline in the contemporary production process. As
much as the flexibility, communication, and co-operative dimension of post-
Fordist labour constitute the possibility for a realisation of democratic forms
of political action, denied in the formal spheres of representation and
participation, Virno argues that the predominant forms that this co-
operation takes are cynicism and opportunism. The materialist basis for this
cynicism is given in the transformation of the real abstraction, the shift from
the abstractions of the equivalent to the abstractions of the contingent and
incommensurable. The absence of any common reference, any common
rule, between different protocols, paradigms, and forms of knowledge, as
workers go from client to client, and job to job, each with their own rules
and paradigms, constitutes the materialist basis for an indifference to the
very idea of common rules. If cynicism is a subjective response to the
incommensurability of different tasks and different jobs, then opportunism
is the response to their instability.458 Post-Fordism has dispensed with the
long-term labour contract, and with it the ethical values of deferred
gratification, dependability, and commitment. In its place it has created the
values of networking, flexibility, and manoeuvrability. Opportunism is a
response to this transformation, and to the breakdown of any division
between personal relations and economic relations; it is social relations as
universal networking. The exploitation of the general intellect does not
stand above it, as a division between co-operation and command in the
Fordist labour process, but penetrates into its deepest recesses,
transforming its basic components of subjectivity into opportunism and
cynicism. Cynicism is quite simply the tendency to accept the given and
shifting terms of power without worrying about their ground. Whatever rule
is in operation is the rule, and these rules will also change.
At the level of political economy, the opposition between Stiegler and Virno
is ultimately between two different conceptions of capitalism and its
tendencies. Stiegler follows, and extends, the logic of proletarianisation,
extending the loss of knowledge over the productive process into all spheres
of life. This extension effectively reverses Marx’s understanding of the
political potential of proletarianisation, offering an explanation as to why
that history was never realised. In Stiegler’s account, proletarianisation has
not resulted in the masses realising that they have nothing to lose but their
chains; rather, it has resulted in a further disintegration of the very capacity
for transindividual individuation, the formation of a ‘we’ and an ‘I’. In
contrast to this, Virno takes up something of a minor thesis of Marx – namely
the idea of capitalism becoming increasingly dependent upon technology,
science, and industry, to the point where labour becomes a miserable
residue – and inverts it. Labour time is reduced and replaced not necessarily
461 The disquieting and oppressive appearance that Virno alludes to in this passage has been
documented and investigated by Ivor Southwood. Southwood describes the
confluence of professionalisation (as a kind of formless content) and insecurity: ‘The
skills required to present oneself correctly to employers and generate future
opportunities constitute a new untrammelled form of emotional labor, driven by
insecurity, which leaks over into leisure and consumption and colonises the social life
whose energy it has drained, transforming the home into an office and friendship into
a promotional network’ (Southwood 2011,
the hidden abode of individuation 225
just as easily reverse it and argue that what defines the present is the
commodification of the pre-individual and the exploitation of the
transindividual. Such a formulation is not necessarily more accurate with
respect to Simondon, but it has the advantage of underscoring the fact that
what is being commodified is the basis of individuation, the capacity to
create singular memories and interpretations, while what is being exploited,
and put to work, is fundamentally relational and social, though not
necessarily collective in any discernible sense.
From the vantage point of transformation, it appears that Stiegler and
Virno can be differentiated not just in terms of their respective focuses on
consumption or production, disindividuation or the social individual, but on
the larger issue in terms of how they understand the fundamental
transformation of capitalism. As we have already noted, Stiegler
understands the fundamental transformation of capital to be located in its
specific crises, first in a crisis of overproduction, of an excess of productive
capacity, which necessitates the creation of new markets and new circuits of
consumption. These new markets and networks short-circuit the long
networks of individuation that historically defined the transindividuation of
the citizen as transindividuation. Stiegler explicitly argues against any
understanding that situates the transformation of capital against the
backdrop of the struggles and critiques against it. He makes this argument
not in terms of what is often referred to as the ‘autonomist hypothesis’, the
argument developed first by Mario Tronti, and popularised by Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, that working-class resistance precedes and prefigures
the transformations of capital, but in terms of Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. In that book, Boltanski and
Chiappello distinguish between what they refer to as the ‘artistic critique’ of
capital and the ‘social critique’ of capital; the former is aimed primarily at
the massification and standardisation of capital, while the latter is oriented
towards exploitation and poverty. 462 The second half of the twentieth
century saw the rise of the former at the expense of the latter, a theme
which can be seen through the various discourses on authenticity,
alienation, and conformity, from existentialism to the Frankfurt School.463
Boltanski and Chiapello argue that capitalism responded to these critiques,
diversifying and differentiating consumer goods to produce markets in
authenticity and transforming the organisation of labour to stress flexibility,
self-invention, and change over stability and linearity. Stiegler makes the
claim that this argument is fundamentally flawed, idealist even, in making a
Subject and economic system are each oriented towards the short term,
towards the immediate gain.
In contrast to this, Virno argues that the genesis of post-Fordism, of the
productive putting to work of the habits and sensibilities developed during
‘free time’, must be traced to the struggles against the rigidity and discipline
of the Fordist work regime, against a life confined to the factory walls.468 The
regimented and repetitive work of the Fordist factory, and a life limited to
such a factory, was something that people actively struggled against,
demanding freedom from strictures and routine. It is in this sense that the
transformation of capital, the turn towards the productive capacities of
language, affect, and habits, has to be considered a counterrevolution, a
revolution in reverse, ‘an impetuous innovation of modes of production,
forms of life, and social relations that, however, consolidate and again set in
motion capitalist command’.469 Thus, we could argue that Virno also calls
into question the division between ‘artistic critique’ and ‘social critique’, but
rather than subordinate both to the general transformation of
transindividual relations, the aesthetic and social dimensions are constantly
intersecting with each other as new subjectivities, new sensibilities, are
produced by, and made productive of, new regimes of social accumulation.
Social critiques, critiques of exploitation and organisation of labour, carry
with them new understandings, and new sensibilities and aesthetic critiques
carry possibilities for new social relations (this point will be returned to in
the next chapter). This is a version of the ‘autonomist hypothesis’, the idea
that working-class resistance precedes and prefigures capitalist
restructuring, with the added caveat that there is distortion in this figuration.
The tension, even contradiction, between Stiegler’s and Virno’s different
understandings of the current conjuncture, the intersection of capitalism
and individuation, could be referred back to the division between
consumption and production as the specific areas of focus. As such it would
repeat and deepen Marx’s analysis of the sphere of exchange and the hidden
abode of production as two different individuations, two different
467Stiegler2010b, p. 83.
468Virno 1996b, p. 243.
469Virno 1996b, p. 241.
the hidden abode of individuation 229
description of the social imperative to know and cite the culture industry. As
Horkheimer and Adorno write,
Just as the worker in the initial stage of capitalism was stripped of the means
of production, becoming only labour power, a source of value that
necessarily must be exchanged, sold on the labour market, so the worker in
cognitive capital becomes part of the general intellect, producing knowledge
which must circulate in order to have value. Knowledge must exist in
relation, must be exchanged or shared, to have any value at all.471
André Gorz offers another way of making sense of the division between
the knowledge that is destroyed and the knowledge that is rendered
productive for capital. This division is between experiential knowledge, the
knowledge that is produced and circulated in common life, and formalised
knowledge. 472 Formalised knowledge is capable of being exchanged and
circulated, while experiential knowledge is necessarily embodied, coinciding
with the individual who utilises it.473 As Gorz writes, ‘The great majority of
people know more and more things, but have less and less know-how and
understanding’.474 For Gorz, there is a lingering question as to whether this
formalised knowledge, knowledge ripped from its context and conditions,
can ever become something like a culture or common life, a question which
has as its existential correlate the question of the full automisation of
knowledge. As much as Gorz, like Stiegler, stands as something of an
antidote to claims of the radical potential of cognitive capitalism, situating it
within the capitalist tendency to either commodify or possess knowledge
The One of the multitude, then, is not the One of the people. The
multitude does not converge into a volonté générale for one simple
reason because it already has access to a general intellect. The public
intellect, however, which appears in the post-Ford world as a mere
resource of production, can constitute a different ‘constitutional
principle’: it can overshadow a non-state public sphere. The many, in
as much as they are many, use the publicness of the intellect as their
base or pedestal: for better or worse.477
While the term of the general will is drawn from Rousseau, it is not entirely
out of place in Virno’s conflict between Hobbes and Spinoza, albeit
somewhat retroactively. The social contract in its various guises from
Hobbes to Rousseau presupposes the idea that the people cannot (or must
not) communicate, that the only ground for political unity is that which
everyone can will independently of communication or connection. 478
Security is both the minimum condition of unity; it is that which everyone
necessarily wills, and the maximum conditions of sovereignty, its ultimate
conditions are undefined leading to the maximum possibility of
intervention.479 The consensus around security of self and property require
neither deliberation nor discussion; it is an idea common to all without being
communicated. The general will unifies disparate individuals through the
shared will for security and safety, a will that becomes unified, becomes one
in the unity of the sovereign or state. In contrast to this, the general intellect
makes unity a presupposition, not a result.480
The one that is a presupposition of the intellect, the shared linguistic and
communicative capacity, is radically different from the one that is the result
of political representation. In a later text, drawing from the unlikely
bedfellows of Simondon and Duns Scotus, Virno utilises Duns Scotus’s idea
of a common nature to articulate an idea of one that will be common and
not universal. The former not only exists prior to its conceptualisation, prior
to its division into one and many; unlike the universal which is always
represented as shared attribute or belonging, the common exists prior to its
name.156 The common in this case is thus another way of naming a pre-
individual reality that constitutes the basis for both the constitution of
collectivity and individuation. What this diversion into medieval ontology
potentially clarifies is that the ‘one’ we are speaking of with respect to the
general intellect is neither some unified totality, the people that exist
through the sovereign, nor is it some shared attribute that can be
represented as a universal. The one, the ‘less than numerical’ unity that
constitutes the general intellect is potential, or, better yet, a relation that
does not exist outside of its singular instantiations.157 Whereas the idea of
the social contract, of the general will, reflected a consensus that did not
require a relation, everyone in isolation decided that security is better than
insecurity, the general intellect is a relation without consensus. The general
intellect only exists in its singular instantiations, in the articulations that pass
knowledge and habits from individual to individual. Its unity exceeds or falls
short of any universal representation, any constitution of a state or people.
It is more than the minimum condition of security, and thus something other
than sovereignty.
Virno’s understanding of the politics of transindividuation could be
generally understood as prefigurative, in which the organisation of
production under post-Fordist capital prefigures and precedes the
revolutionary multitude. Framed in such a way, Virno’s position would seem
to be a reversal of the autonomist hypothesis as proposed by Mario Tronti.
It is no longer the resistance that prefigures capitalist exploitation, but the
exploitation of the habits, knowledge, and language that prefigures a new
‘non-state public’ sphere. Virno’s reversal is only apparent, however, in that
these transformations are themselves the products of past struggles, as
struggle prefigures transformations and vice versa. It is perhaps because of
480
Virno 2004, p. 43. 156
Virno 2009, p. 62.
157 Virno 2009, p. 65.
the hidden abode of individuation 235
reinvention. Similarly Virno’s politics are oriented towards the future, not
just because they see revolutionary potential in the most recent
manifestations of the transformations of labour, but also because politics
has as its ground not the maintenance of a tradition but the practice of a
radical reinvention of every tradition. What these two conceptions of politics
have in common, however, is a relative separation of the political economy
of transindividuation from politics. In each case it is a matter of the economic
effects of transindividuation, conceived either as the marketing of memory
or as the labour of social relations, on the political sphere. The economy
either destroys politics, or makes possible its undoing, but it does so as a
cause that acts on political transindividuations without being affected by
them. The citizen or the basic principles of political action have been
fundamentally transformed by consumption or post-Fordism, without
remainder. Moving beyond this impasse entails bringing together not only
the different registers of transindividuality we have discussed thus far,
politics and economics, but also the different aspects of transindividuality,
imagination, affects, and knowledge.
excursus three
The work of Maurizio Lazzarato intersects with that of Paolo Virno and
Bernard Stiegler on multiple levels. First, and perhaps most immediately,
there is the understanding of the current conjuncture. Lazzarato is the
author of ‘Immaterial Labour’, an early and often criticised text, which
attempted to thematise the cognitive and intellectual dimension of
contemporary capitalism. In that text, Lazzarato defines immaterial
labour as that which produces the informational or affective dimension of
a commodity.481 Like Virno and Stiegler, his understanding of the current
conjuncture is framed through the intersection of knowledge and
capitalism, through the labour that produces ideas, information, and
knowledge. Lazzarato’s later writings have continued to examine the
contemporary transformation of capital through an investigation of debt,
finance, and marketing. Lazzarato’s strongest point of intersection with
Stiegler and Virno is not his investigation of the novelty of contemporary
capitalism, nor in the problem of transindividual social relations, but the
fact that these two problems are necessarily related. Lazzarato’s primary
point of reference for this new understanding of social relations is not, as
it was for Stiegler and Virno, the work of Gilbert Simondon, but the
nineteenth-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde. 482 Lazzarato can thus be
situated in the broader category of transindividual thinkers, grouped by
the shared problematic rather than the shared point of reference. This
difference of theoretical references would itself perhaps justify the
inclusion of Lazzarato in this project, providing a point of distinction and
clarification of the accounts of transindividuality informed by Simondon
or Spinoza.483 However, my point here in dedicating an excursus to his
thought has less to do with this general point of comparison than with the
two particular points of intersection sketched out above, which provide a
conceptual bridge between the last chapter and the next. First, and in
some sense continuing the argument of the previous chapter, is the
manner in which Lazzarato focuses on the intersection between
contemporary capitalism and transindividuality, arguing that there has
been a radical shift in this relation from Marx’s time. Second, and looking
ahead to the next chapter, Lazzarato offers a way of tying together the
threads of the political articulation of transindividuality and the
economics of transindividuality through what he calls ‘noopolitics’, the
politics that acts on imagination, habits, and ideas.
While a complete study of Tarde’s massive body of work encompassing
sociology, philosophy, criminology, and fiction is beyond the scope of the
current project, it is at least worth noting some of the central tenets that
Lazzarato draws from. Lazzarato’s engagement with Tarde is drawn from
the latter’s critique of political economy as much as from his political
thought. The text that is at the centre of Lazzarato’s revalorisation of
Tarde is his two-volume study La Psychologie Economique. As Lazzarato
argues, Tarde’s double critique, a critique of individualism and holism, can
be understood as first and foremost a critique of two perspectives in
economics, the classical conception that began with Adam Smith and
Marx’s critique of capital and political economy.484Thus the basic critical
orientation follows Lordon more than Balibar, the figures of individualism
are Smith (and, for Lazzarato, neoliberalism) rather than Locke, and the
figure of holism is Marx rather than Hegel. Lazzarato’s tendency to see
Marx, or Marxism and socialism, as a holism, as positing a ‘collective which
takes on an existence that is separate from the singularities which
produce it’, marks something of a departure from the contemporary
philosophers considered above, all of whom considered transindividuality
to be at least a philosophy for Marxism (Stiegler and Lordon) if not already
at work in Marx’s thought (Balibar and Virno). Lazzarato’s work, especially
Les Révolutions du capitalisme, often works with a generic picture of
Marx, dominated by determination, totality, and dialectics, as its point of
theoretical opposition. Despite the fact that Lazzarato does not
significantly draw from Simondon, his critique of Marx and Marxism draws
from some of the same basic points of the former’s criticism of Marx
covered in Chapter 2, most notably the critique of the predominance of
the economic individuation over all others.485 I will turn to the limits of
Lazzarato’s particular understanding of Marx, and political economy, in
the conclusion of this section. More important for us here is the way in
which this opposition is in part predicated on how intelligence, mind, and
the relation between minds are understood in both classical and Marxist
understandings of political economy.
In Lazzarato’s reading of Tarde, the division between neoclassical
conceptions of the economy, focusing on the question of utility, and
Marx’s conception focusing on labour, has to be seen as not just two
different conceptions of social relations, one individual, the other
collective, but in how they posit identity over difference, quantity over
quality. They would have more in common than would first appear. For
Lazzarato, neoclassical economists and Marxism are connected by what
they exclude, which is the realm of pre-individual imitations, adaptations,
and antagonisms that define and determine social existence. Their
opposition belies an identity at the level of how they posit subjectivity.486
This can be seen in their tendency toward uniformity, excluding the
temporal and differential aspect of subjectivity. How this is excluded
differs in each case. Classical economists focus on utility, on a measure of
pleasure and pain, but this conception of utility is solipsistic and uniform,
unable to comprehend the qualitative differences of time or the
constitutive relations between different judgements and values. 487 As
Christian Laval argues, this reduction of qualitative difference to
quantitative difference is necessary for political economy to constitute its
particular object.8 Without the fundamental idea that different pains and
pleasures are identical, both over time and between different individuals,
the idea of any predictability or calculability is impossible. Marx’s critique
of political economy is based less on taste and judgement, the uniform
calculations of pleasures and pain, than on labour, shifting from the
sphere of exchange, where utility and its value are articulated, to the
hidden abode of production, to labour. What Marx and classical
economics have in common, despite their very different focus on utility
and labour, consumption and production, is the transformation of
subjectivity into something calculable, uniform, and predictable. They
imitate, or repeat, any action, idea, or habit. As Lazzarato argues, this can
only be explained by the asymmetry of social space; imitations reflect
hierarchies and inequalities. 492 We imitate, adopting the styles, habits,
and beliefs of others, because we believe these others to possess the
power and influence that others possess.493
Imitation through hierarchy, through asymmetries of power, also
defines our relation to money, which functions as a universal object of
desire because of the belief attached to it. As Lazzarato writes, ‘The
modern economy is for Tarde essentially monetary because it is an
economy of desire and belief, their articulation (invention) and their
diffusion (imitation)’.494 On Lazzarato’s reading, Tarde’s theory of money
anticipates, or duplicates, much of Marx’s ‘The Power of Money in
Bourgeois Society’ (a text which, although it predates Tarde’s, was
published after his death); money is a social power because it is the power
to transform the possible into the actual. It is from this assertion that
Lazzarato’s reading of Tarde offers a response to a question that we have
examined with respect to Marx, Hegel, and Spinoza: why do people
continue to identify with capital, with the economy, seeing in it the
condition of the realisation of their desires, even as it exploits them?
Lazzarato argues that this has to do with a fundamental affective
difference; political authority, right, works on fear while money works on
hope.495 While Lazzarato differs from Lordon with respect to the actual
affective composition of money, money is both an object of hope and fear,
they argue that the economic subjection is fundamentally more aligned,
more colinearised, than political subjectifications. The best that politics,
the state, can offer is protection from fears, while money, the economy,
offers the realisation of desires. Add to this the fetish in which money, and
the economy, appears as a necessary condition of our action, and you
begin to have the genesis of a strong affective identification with money.
Returning to Tarde’s critique of political economy, from this distinction
between invention and imitation it is possible to argue that the distinction
between Tarde and Marx (as well as Tarde and political economy) is less
one of the difference between difference and uniformity, concrete and
abstract, and more one of a method that examines the production of
uniformity versus one that takes this uniformity as more or less assumed.
In each case, classical political economy and Marx, what is taken as given,
while Marx already argued that the collective species activity is in some
sense misrecognised, appearing as the productive power of capital itself,
the spatial and temporal proximity of production on the factory floor at
least made it possible for individuals to recognise their collective
productive power. Debt utterly transforms this, obscuring both the wealth
that debt creates and its status as a collective condition. The hidden abode
of production is even hidden from those who participate in it.520
The individuation of the subject of debt can be grasped as a way of
understanding the articulation of noopolitics and economics, not just in
the sense that it deals with the non-economic conditions of economic
exploitation, the beliefs, ideas, and fears, but because it passes through
the political terrain of the intersection between ethical work and
collective belonging.521 The moral imperative to pay one’s debts passes
through the idea of the nation and political belonging, of being an
upstanding individual and citizen who pays one’s debts. The moralisation
of debt does not just affect the general imperative to pay, but also
includes the various different forms of debt, as the debts of homeowners,
students, and consumers are subject to different degrees of moral blame
and evaluation.46 The politics of debt, the manner in which it individuates
and controls behaviour, functions as a precondition for economic
exploitation. It is a contemporary ideology of productivity, one no longer
indexed to the affective dimension of hope, but of fear. This political (and
ethical) dimension is not directly productive; it is the precondition for a
higher degree of economic exploitation. There is a politics and an
economics of debt: politically it produces subjects capable and willing to
labour even as the incentives of a vibrant consumer culture dissipate,
while economically it makes it possible to extract wealth from every
relation, from the reproduction of existence.
Lazzarato’s emphasis on the political and economic dimensions of the
production of subjectivity, noopolitics and nooeconomics, makes it
possible for him to underscore the political aspect of certain
transformations of the economy beyond the figure of debt.
Financialisation is not just an economic transformation, but is also a
transformation of the production of subjectivity. Lazzarato argues that the
various economic relations, from the wage to stock options, must be
understood in terms of both their economic relation, their relation to both
stocks, the rise and fall of various indicators and national markets, has
become synonymous with the economy in general.
To conclude with a final ambiguity, Lazzarato presents his noopolitics,
and his understanding of Tarde’s economic psychology, as something that
presents a radical alternative to Marx. Contrary to Marx, the source and
site of productive activity is not labour power or the factory, but the
general relations of invention, adoption, and imitation that define social
existence. These relations produce the desires and attitudes that make
consumer goods possible, the belief and confidence that makes
investment possible, and the subjection that make the neoliberal worker
possible. Capitalism has produced its own ‘inverted world’ in which it is
no longer the base that is productive, but what used to be called the
superstructure. However, this inversion, this positing of the exteriority of
the economy to itself, is constantly transformed into interiority, a point
that is made increasingly clear as Lazzarato shifts his analysis from the
general points regarding the role of knowledge, of the social brain in
production, to the specifics of contemporary capitalism, such as debt and
financialisation. With respect to the latter, we see that what Lazzarato
calls noopolitics, the transmission, reproduction, and imitation of habits,
perceptions, and beliefs, is economically productive precisely because it
functions as the precondition of economic production. Noopolitics
produces the subject that is necessary and functional for the
contemporary economy. While debt might function to reduce tax
burdens, shifting the costs of education and health onto individuals, and
to produce financial revenue from these same basic and fundamental
services, one of its primary functions is to produce a subject that is
sufficiently docile and co-operative, a subject that lives under the
constant threat of debt. Debt is a practice on the self; it channels desires,
activities, and habits towards that which would be most productive for
capital, turning every student into a business student and tying every
individual to their job.
In a similar manner, financialisation transforms the subject of labour
power, the working class. Wages remain the ambivalent condition of
recognition and exploitation, counting diverse forms of labour as socially
valid while at the same time extracting more value than can be paid for,
but this representation of economic activity is displaced by individual
retirement funds, stocks, and investment. As Lazzarato writes, ‘The
economic exploitation of workers is as real as their participation in the
financial majority’. 535 These new representations of the economy have
encounters left everyone in their own world of radically unique signs and
images. This is for two reasons. First, the general causal connections that
determine the imagination are something that everyone is subject to,
constituting universal laws of causal relations. It is the same causal order
of nature that determines the farmer and the soldier to make different
connections with respect to hoof prints. As with Spinoza’s logic of the
affects, there is a combination of a common order and an existing
multiplicity: it is because we are all subject to the same order, the same
relation of connections, that we have radically different imaginations. This
causal order is not just a relation between sign and thing, image and
object, in a general logic of association in which contiguity and proximity
can associate anything with anything, but a relation between image, idea,
and the conditions of interpretation. As Vinciguerra argues, Spinoza’s idea
of the imagination is not just one framed between sign and thing, but sign,
thing, and individual conatus, the body and the mind that interprets.544
This general condition, that every interpretation is as much about the
character, the ingenium, of the one that interprets as it is about the nature
of the sign itself, frames the relation between the individual and society.
As we have seen, for Spinoza, the ingenium, character or habit, not only
defines the individual and the nation, it is also the ground of their
transindividual relation. 545 Connections between signs and images, the
imagination, can be collective as much as they can be singular, a point that
Spinoza reinforces in arguing that language is not radically distinct from
any other connection between sign and image. The connection between
the word apple, or pomme, to take Spinoza’s example, and the fruit, a
connection that makes language possible, is based on the same
conjunction that grounds the idiosyncratic imagination that arrives at
different associations from the same hoof print. Common associations are
the basis for a common language.
Spinoza and Stiegler converge on a basic fundamental point that
memory conditions experience, thus determining future memory. What I
perceive, think, and feel (although this last point is stronger for Spinoza
than it is for Stiegler) is structured and determined by what I have
perceived; signs, traces, and images are the preconditions of future
interpretations. They differ on a fundamental point, that of
disindividuation. Spinoza cannot accept the possibility that any set of signs
and images would become so powerful, so determining, as to completely
condition future signs. Any attempt to completely condition future
fetishism, but what is striking in this context is the way in which Jameson’s
reading would seem to demand an affective dimension. What people find
in consumer society, what makes it humanised, is less the fact that it
seems to reflect the interests of consumers, but rather that it reflects their
desires, their joys. Consumer society is recognised, affirmed, because it
addresses the affirmative dimension of existence, the passive joys of love
and hope. As Lazzarato and Lordon argue, our capacity to identify with
capital, commodities, and corporations rather than the institutions of the
state and democracy stems from the ability of the former to address the
passive joys, hopes, and desires rather than fears. Spinoza offers a second,
equally powerful, explanation for the different affective relation to capital
and the state, one that is ultimately aligned with Marx’s theory of
fetishism. As Spinoza argues, our affects are more intense, in terms of
hatred and love, towards that which we imagine to be free than that
which we think to be necessary. Free actions, actions that could be
performed otherwise, will always generate more veneration and hostility
than those that seem to be nothing other than an effect of a
concatenation of causes. The fetishisation of the commodity, and the
general reification of the economy, effectively naturalises the economy,
making it a cause and never an effect of actions.557 The more the economy
is naturalised, the more it is depoliticised, the less it can prompt anger and
indignation. The economy is perceived as a quality of things, a way of the
world, and not the effects of actions. Finally, the putative complexity of
the economy, the intersection of various factors from around the world,
increases one’s apparent freedom. The more complex the
determinations, the easier it is to imagine oneself as autonomous, as not
determined. The affective composition of capitalism is structured by a
series of relations in which money appears as the universal equivalent of
desire, the economy appears as a natural force, and the individual appears
to be free. Passive joyful affects, naturalisation of the economy, and our
apparently autonomous consent are more potent constitutions of our
subjection than any loss of individuation.
It is at this point that Spinoza’s temporal distance actually brings him
paradoxically closer to the present organisation of desire and knowledge.
The reification of the economy as something necessary, coupled with our
inadequate idea of our freedom, leads to a tendency to affirm the very
conditions of our subjection, finding affirmation in their limited conditions
for existence. As Jonathan Crary writes,
as its effects can be entirely shut off by a sign that reads ‘no admittance
except on business’. As Balibar writes:
In the previous section, I argued that the articulation of the politics and
economics of transindividuality was less a matter of the destruction of
politics by economics, as in the case of Stiegler, or the prefiguration of a
politics by economics, as in the case of Virno, than a mutual displacement
and transformation of political and economic individuations, as Balibar
argued. The detour through Spinoza’s account of individuation against
Stiegler reinforces this point, not just because, as I argued in Excursus
One, that Balibar’s idea of ‘the other scene’ of the intersection of a mode
of production and subjection is directly influenced by Spinoza’s rational
and affective foundation of social and political life. This displacement
through the ‘other scene’, or other scenes, is also a necessary
consequence of Spinoza’s assertion of the irreducible striving of the
conatus. It is because we necessarily interpret, make sense of our
condition, assembling together the various affects and encounters that
this interpretation is always caught up in real relations and imaginary
conditions, situated between the present articulations of society and
politics and ideals of bygone social orders. Balibar argues that this
irreducible individuality is not unique to Spinoza, but as a fundamental
aspect of transindividual thought, it can also be found in Marx. As Balibar
writes, ‘The incompressible minimum of individuality and sociality that
Marx describes with regard to capitalist exploitation is a fact of resistance
to domination which, as he wished to show, did not have to be invented
or incited, since it had always already begun’.570 Reading Marx through
Spinoza (or both through Balibar) makes it possible to understand that this
irreducible minimum, this degree zero of individuation, does not have a
necessary telos or direction. How people struggle and what they struggle
for is in part determined by how they imagine or represent the conditions
of both their subjection and liberation. This irreducible minimum of
individuation can manifest itself just as much in the worker who struggles
to develop her human capital as in the worker who organises a strike. The
difference depends as much on the imagination as the material
conditions, and most importantly on the way in which they intersect with
and transform each other.
The irreducible singular condition of every conatus is the basis of a kind
of ‘combined and uneven transindividual individuation’, as images and
symbols from the past combine with current transformations. Of course,
Spinoza is not unique in this perspective; Marx and the Marxist tradition
carries its own theorisation of the combined and uneven development of
transindividuation, from Marx’s claim that ‘the tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’, to
Gramsci’s assertion that the spontaneous philosophy of everyman
contains ‘elements of the cave man, and principles of the most modern
and advanced learning, shabby local prejudices of all past historical phases
and intuitions of a future philosophy’. 571 What is perhaps unique to
Spinoza, or the intersection between Spinoza and transindividuality, is
It is with respect to the first question above, namely that of the striving
and power internal to every institution, that Citton examines the politics
of the imagination, or as he calls it, ‘mythocracy’. Citton’s concept of
mythocracy is not, as in Spinoza’s concept of theocracy, exclusively
concerned with the attempt to construct and maintain authority based on
a stable imagination, nor is it, as in Stiegler’s hypercapitalism, exclusively
concerned with the new technologies that make it possible to disseminate
memories and knowledge, although it overlaps with both concepts. Citton
defines his concept of ‘mythocracy’ with reference to three philosophical
interventions that we have already considered. The first is Lazzarato’s
conception of noopolitics, a politics that acts in and on beliefs, ideas, and
thoughts. To which Citton adds, or combines, Sévérac’s concept of an
‘occupation of spirit’, stressing that control of thoughts and beliefs is first
and foremost a politics of attention. 576 Attention, what interests or
engages individuals, is necessarily understood as an economy, a division
and distribution of time and energy. This division and distribution is
necessarily defined and determined by love, hate, joy and sadness. ‘In
other words, the economy of attention can only exist if it is articulated
with an economy of affects’.577 Transindividuation is defined as much by
what we pay attention to, what compels us, as what we think and feel,
and is so through a combination of pre-individual conditions and collective
relations. 578 Finally, Citton defines mythocracy through Lordon’s
‘energetic structuralism’. Whereas Lordon argued that the conatus was
simultaneously structured by and structuring of the division of labour, the
wage relation, and the desire for money, Citton finds the same
fundamental relation in which the conatus, or striving, is fundamentally
structured and structuring in myth and narrative. Narrative orients our
desire, but does so only if it has initially captured our attention. The stories
and narratives that drive and motivate us are both the cause and effect of
our desires. Thus, it is possible to say that the order and connection of
economic exploitation is the same as the order and connection of mythic
representation, provided that order and connection refer to the same
structuring dynamic, the same structure of the conatus, and not
necessarily the same fundamental points of orientation and investment.
As we saw in Excursus Two, it is precisely because the economic
imagination, the narrative of successful entrepreneurs and lazy failures, is
at a distance from the quotidian experience of subordination that it
to become active, to take hold in the mind, they must demand our
attention and affective involvement. As Spinoza writes, there is a limited
efficacy of the true insofar as it is true (eivp1). Even true causal knowledge
of the world requires the imagination and affects to demand and sustain
our attention. Second, what we can imagine limits and determines our
capacity to act. As Spinoza writes, ‘For whatever man imagines he cannot
do, he necessarily imagines; and he is so disposed by this imagination that
he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do’ (eiii Def. AffsXXVIII).
Imagination, affect, is a necessary condition for becoming active.
Citton ultimately sketches out a three-part system of the politics of
knowledge, which divides into information, invention, and interpretation.
The first, information, is quantifiable, and, as in the case of statistics or
credit scores, is created without the conscious participation of the
subjects involved, while the second, invention, is the idiosyncratic and
unique creation of a gifted individual. The first two types of knowledge,
information and invention, are the forms of knowledge valued in
contemporary capitalism, but their valorisation takes radically different
forms. The first is the work of data entry operators, subject to Fordist rule,
or to the collective work of a consumer society whose actions continually
produce information, while the latter is the work of the valorised
entrepreneur. 584 Given that these first two types of knowledge divide
along the collective and individual, it is perhaps not surprising that Citton’s
interest is in interpretation, which he sees as a necessarily transindividual
relation, passing between the collective production of information and
singular inventions. 585 Interpretation is situated between the collective
and tacit knowledge, which forms the backdrop of everyday activity, and
the singular transformations that work from this backdrop, contesting it
and transforming it. A new interpretation, a new way of making sense of
the world, just like a new narrative, is neither an anonymous and
collective project, nor a singular act of genius, but the indiscernible point
where the two meet. Myth and interpretations are subject to the same
transindividual conditions, framed between the singular and the
common. Where they differ is not so much in the truth of one and the
falsity of the other, but rather in the former’s necessity to work with, and
thus interpret, facts, and the latter’s ability to contest and construct the
given of the world. 586 What Virno called the public intellect is torn
only through the immediate contacts of social existence, but also through
the highly mediated, and mediatised, realm of film and video. Case in
point: the entire gestural economy of smoking a cigarette is disseminated
through various films. Jameson describes this global dissemination of
habits and practices:
61 Citton 2012b, p.
157.
the politics and economics of transindividuality 287
593 As Carlo Vercellone argues, Marx’s stages of capitalism can be understood in terms of
how the intellect of the worker is incorporated into the productive process. In the
first stage, that of formal subsumption, the formal imposition of the wage and
commodity production on a pre-existing technical and social labour process leaves
much of the ‘hegemony of knowledge’ in the hands of the workers (Vercellone 2007,
p. 16). The knowledge of production exists in social relations prior to its capitalist
organisation. The technical and social subsumption of labour is also a subsumption
of the knowledge of workers, as the skill and knowledge of work is either embodied
in machines or dictated through a Taylorist separation of conception and execution.
As Vercellone writes, ‘Mass education and the development of a diffuse
intellectuality make education a central site for the crisis of the Fordist wage
relation. The key role attributed to the theme of a “socialized and free” sector of
education in the conflicts concerning the control of “intellectual powers of
production” is, therefore an essential element of Marx’s elaboration of the notion
of the general intellect. The establishment of a diffuse intellectuality is configured
as the necessary historical condition, even if, in the Grundrisse, this reference is
implicit and, in some cases, concealed by a dialectical approach to the evolution of
the division of labour that privileges the analysis of structural changes instead of the
institutions and the subjects which could
the politics and economics of transindividuality 289
∵
Perhaps every conclusion closes on the question of practice, on the
difference that a particular line of inquiry makes on the world. Or perhaps
every conclusion should. In this case the question of practice can be
differentiated into three distinct but overlapping problems. First, there is
transindividuality as a philosophical practice. This philosophical practice is
defined first and foremost by a refusal of the false binary of the individual
and society, examining the points of intersection of individuation and
collective existence. This practice is resolutely critical in that the task is not
simply to dismiss ‘individualistic’ and ‘collective’ understandings of social
relations, but to show how such perspectives emerge from transindividual
relations and practices. Transindividuality as a philosophical perspective
necessarily includes a theory of how the imaginary apprehension of one’s
condition emerges from the very relations that define one’s condition.
Transindividuality is a critical perspective on our impoverished notions of
both collectivity and individuality, not in the sense that it simply opposes
them in a sterile opposition of true to false, but in the sense that it
comprehends the way in which images and ideas of collectivity and
individuality emerge from transindividual relations. This brings us to the
second dimension of transindividuality as a philosophical practice:
transindividuality as a kind of philosophical practice necessarily exceeds the
boundaries of philosophy proper, turning from the speculative and
ontological matter to one that is infused with politics, economics, and
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Contemporary 8, 10, 123, 148, 168, 193,
Index 194,
202, 216, 219, 222, 227, 234, 236, 244,
Adorno, Theodor 206 246,
Agamben, Giorgio 196n84, 274 250, 259, 272, 287
Affect 27–28, 126–129, 146, 231, Definition of11, 74, 80, 96, 134, 148,
252, 260 imitation of 30, 231, 157, 164, 165, 168, 198, 200, 202, 203,
252 See also Spinoza and Simondon
206
Affective composition 159–165, 195, 232,
Historical transformation of187, 215, 216,
258,
217, 218, 220
260, 278, 281, 285
Formal subsumption 11, 275n62
Althusser, Louis 19, 80n165, 133n91, 284
Real subsumption 215, 230
“aleatory materialism” 7
overdetermination 94, 149n14, Citton, Yves 165, 175n25, 240
265 On Fordism 284
“society effect” 34, 136 “Politics of gestures” 272–276
Spinoza 20 metastability 268, 277–280, 284–285
“Spontaneous philosophy” 21 “mythocracy” 268, 270
“Politics of pressures” 272, 280
Sur la Philosophie 6
Sur la Reproduction 89n20 Combes, Muriel 119, 124, 135, 136
Arendt, Hannah 208–209 Consumer Society 56n107, 165, 181n45,
260 Crary, Jonathan 261
Badiou, Alain 244, 288
“Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Balibar, Etienne 7, 17, 124, 175, 179, 192,
Citizen”
245 Citizen 96
68, 96
Citoyen Sujet et autres essais Deleuze, Gilles26n29, 103, 120–123, 160,
d’anthropologie philosophique 94 205n114, 235, 240
“equaliberty” 95–96 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari
“Intellectual difference” 85, 191 Anti-Oedipus 76n161, 121–123
“other scene”89, 90, 94, 263, 265, 277, A Thousand Plateaus 106, 127, 242,
282, 283 286 Descartes, Rene 4
“Political anthropology”83–84, 86, 91, 97,
98, 118, 192, 223n152 Eisenstein, Sergei 185n56
race 93
Federici, Silvia 243
Reading Capital 87
“short-circuit” 89, 101, 155 Fischbach, Frank 66n134, 71n144, 155
Spinoza and Politics 91–92 Foucault, Michel62n125, 177, 232, 233,
On Sittlichkeit 52 267
Bergson, Henri 204n114
Gehlen, Arnold 195, 202
Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello 162,
Gorz, André 220–221
216–217
Gramsci, Antonio 266
Buck-Morss, Susan 185n56
Capitalism
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri Transindividual dimension of 56, 75,
Commonwealth 52n99, 216 276 and wage form 234,
Hegel, G.W.F. 243, 245
On “Civil Society” 52, 58–64, 259 Laval, Christian 229
On Culture 49–50 Lazzarato, Maurizio
On The Family 53 On “control” 235
On Labour 41–42, 57, 60 The Making of Indebted 238–239,
On political economy 54 Man 241
Phenomenology of Spirit 38–48 On Marx 228, 229, 230, 231
Philosophy of Right 51–65, 130 “noopolitics” 228, 236,
242
On “the rabble” 61
Puissance de l’invention 236
On the State 63–65
Les Revolutions du Capitalisme 228
Heidegger, Martin 172, 207
Signs and Machines 243
Hobbes, Thomas 223
On Tarde 227–229, 233
Horkheimer, Max 182
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre170, 171, 190n71
Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor183,
Lordon, Frédéric 25, 158–160, 165
184, 206, 220
“energetic structuralism” 269
“culture industry”181, 182, 186, 189, 192,
On Fordism 159–161
206, 207
La Société des Affects 163
Husserl, Edmund 172, 205n115
index
Ideology6, 19, 70, 83, 90, 154, 155, 220, 236,
On post-Fordism 162–163
241, 263, 270, 287
Symbolic Violence 165
Imagination and 20, 26, 80n165, 91
Individualism as 2, 4, 80, 71n145
Lordon, Frédéric and André Orlean 26,
Imagination 24–26, 67, 68, 90–91, 94, 97,
151 Lukàcs, Georg 55n105
148,
151, 165, 176, 251 Macpherson, C.B. 54n104
Marx, Karl
Jameson, Fredric71n145, 112, 204n114, 259,
1844 Manuscripts10, 70, 151, 154
273 1857 Introduction 3
Capital, Volume One10–11, 71, 89, 104n6,
Kant, Immanuel 176
231
Kojève, Alexandre 39, 46
Capital, Volume Three 88, 186
Labour 11, 20, 41 Abstract 57, 137, The Communist Manifesto 179, 203, 206
“General Intellect” 195–196
198, 200, 229, 230
The German Ideology 4, 18, 74n151,
Division of57, 58, 61, 74, 78, 93, 101, 107,
77n162
136, 159, 234, 237, 269, 275n62
Grundrisse73, 152, 180, 195–196, 198
Immaterial 227, 231
“On the Jewish Question” 67–69
Living 79n164, 137–138, 149, 197, 200,
211, “primitive accumulation” 158, 165
Matheron, Alexandre 153, 154
230, 232, 263
Recognition and 41, 42, 48
326
Metastable 109, 120, 125, 128, 132, Appendix of Part One of the Ethics
137, 139, 140, 144, 157, 169, 268, 277– 20–23, 26, 147
280, 284–285 “common notions” 32–34, 35
Money 73, 150–152, 158, 162, 199, 214, “conatus”21, 27, 29, 32n45, 79n164, 129,
231, 232, 260, 269 146, 266
Morfino, Vittorio27n130, 66n134, 262 “imagination” 24–26, 263, 271, 272
“ingenium”23n15, 24–25, 34, 37, 92, 157,
Negri, Antonio 158, 179n164, 138, 147, 250, 253
149, 211 Neoliberalism 2, 100, 236, “memory” 173, 250, 252
264, 284, 290 “Superstition” 22–25, 33, 37, 146, 152,
153,
Philosophical Anthropology4, 14, 26, 54, 83,
250, 253
84, 118, 120, 170, 201
Theological Political Treatise 33, 147
Populism 100, 278–279
Stiegler, Bernard On the citizen
Postone, Moishe 137 174, 177 On “control”
Power, Nina 163 253 grammatization
Preindividual6, 115, 120, 136, 166, 201, 211, 176–178 on memory
213, 169, 170, 173, 255
234, 238 For a New Critique of Political Economy
169
Rancière, Jacques 99–100, 178n39 On Hegel 173–174, 179, 188
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 223n152 “hypercapitalism” 186, 249, 258, 268
On Marx 181
Sévérac, Pascal 160, 258 Philosophical anthropology 170, 171
Sharp, Hasana 145 “Proletarianization” 177–181, 187,
Simondon, Gilbert 5 On 275 On Spinoza 256n17
affect 111, 126
On Hegel 130–132 Tarde, Gabriel
L’Individuation à la lumière des notions On affect 231–232
de forme d’information 115 La Psychologie Economique 228–231
L’Individuation psychique et collective Concept of the Public 234–235
103, 121
index 309
L’Individuation et sa genèse Toscano, Alberto 116, 140
physicbiologique 103, 121 Transindividuality
On Marx 132–139 As Critique8, 18–19, 37, 51, 52, 65, 69,
Du mode d’existence des objets 79–81
techniques Definition of 5, 109–113, 135
104–105, 107 And Metastability 109, 120
On Spinoza 125–127 And Technology 103–107, 168
Tronti, Mario 137, 216, 225
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 198, 199
Southwood, Ivor 214, 255n14 Vercellone, Carlo 275n62
Spinoza Virno, Paolo
Affects27–28, 126–129, 146, 231, 260
On “the culture industry” 206–208 On
Fordism 194
on “the general intellect” 197, 199, 200,
209, 212, 223
On Post-Fordism 197, 198, 224
Philosophical Anthropology 168, 202
On “real abstractions”198–200, 204, 212
On the “Social Individual”200, 207, 214,
262