Warren Montag geïnterviewd over Althusser en Spinoza
Op 1 febr. 2017 had het kwartaalblad Salvage (over revolutionary arts and letters) een uitgebreid
interview dat George Souvlis (a doctoral candidate in history at the European
University Institute in Florence) had met Warren Montag:
Althusser,
Spinoza and Revolution in Philosophy: An Interview with Warren Montag [cf.]
Warren Montag is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is known primarily for his
work on twentieth-century French theory, especially Althusser and his circle,
as well as his studies of the philosopher Spinoza. [cf. ook ‘t blog van 28-09-2013 “Warren Montag over Louis Althusser
(1918 - 1990) en Spinoza”]
Ik haal alleen de laatste van twee passages die in het bijzonder
over Spinoza gaan hier naar binnen (voor de eerste, die een interpretatie van
Hegel’s Spinoza en Macherey’s
Spinoza betreft verwijs ik naar het interview).
GS: In Bodies, Masses and Power: Spinoza
and his Contemporaries you argue for “Spinoza’s paradoxical and unsuspected
contemporaneity”. Where does this contemporaneity lie?
WM: It seems that contemporaneity has
two different meanings here. First, the question of fact: has Spinoza, insofar
as he is revived, resuscitated or rehabilitated, become our contemporary,
figuring not simply as a reference point but as a living body of thought
capable of growth? The answer here is certainly yes. For reasons I explained in
the preface to the New Spinoza, the radicalization that occurred
internationally around 1968 produced as one of its effects a resurgence of
Marxist theory whose weaknesses and gaps became apparent in practice. Neither
philosophies grounded in Hegel or Kant nor, later, those grounded in Analytic
philosophy were capable of identifying let alone addressing these weaknesses.
The former proved incapable of separating themselves from the teleologies that
plagued Marxist thought, while the latter which tended to see teleology
everywhere (especially in structuralism) turned to the methodological
individualism of Hobbes and Adam Smith without any awareness of the
providentialist and thus teleological tendencies to which it is linked.
From these perspectives, Spinoza was
unintelligible. But for Althusser and his colleagues, as well as Negri,
Spinoza’s critique of concepts like order and providence, of emanationist and
expressive causalities, that is, his thorough assimilation (but also
transformation) of Epicurus and Lucretius, as well as Machiavelli (as both
Filippo Del Lucchese and Vittorio Morfino have demonstrated) allowed us to see
these problems as problems for us. Similarly, Spinoza’s problematization of the
idea that the mind through an act of will moves the body and thus that belief
“causes” action poses a profound challenge to political theory past and
present.
But there is another question
concerning Spinoza’s relation to the present: not simply does he belong to it,
but what does he have to offer it? The answer of course is that he has a number
of concepts, including those that exist in the practical state in his work,
that can be put to use. As far as I am concerned, the most important and also
the most difficult is the concept of the immanent cause which is captured
perfectly in Spinoza’s declaration in Ethics I, P33, sch.2 that “God did not
exist prior to his decrees nor can he be without them.” Althusser insisted that
the notion of structural causality, “the presence of the structure in its
effects,” another way of saying the cause is absent outside of its effects,
always already re-presented by delegation through a metonymic structure, marked
a “shattering of the classical theories of causality.” The model of base and
superstructure, the determination of ideologies by the economic base, conceived
along the lines of an emanative or expressive causality, had the paradoxical
effect of tying the realm of ideas to material existence but at the expense of
maintaining the immateriality of ideology which existed in the realm of
consciousness as beliefs and ideas. Althusser’s notion of the ISAs was
predicated on the thesis that “ideology has a material existence,” one effect
of which was to eliminate the possibility of an ontological hierarchy whether
of the primacy of spirit over matter, soul over body or matter over spirit,
body over soul. I emphasize Althusser’s objective here because it is at risk of
being forgotten. I refer to certain tendencies in that very Anglo-American
movement of the new materialism which strike me as profoundly idealist. First,
a declaration of independence from the history of philosophy (mimicking
Analytic philosophy) as if one can free oneself from historical determination
by a decision or act of faith. Second, a turn to objects (and more recently
matter) instead of the subject or subjects through whose mediation alone
objects were available to us, which declares language or discourse mere
“epiphenomena,” a term whose primary function is to dematerialize that to which
it is applied on the (Platonic) grounds that it is too distant from the source
of truth. It is absolutely predictable that in another decade or so we will
witness a return to the subject in a reaction against a crude and reductive
objectivism, if not materialism. We are a long way from the notion that philosophy
must, before anything else, understand the theoretical and political
conjuncture in which it exists in order to act effectively, that is, it must
confront its own material existence.
_______________________
Nog meer over Althusser en Spinoza: het artikel van
Peter Thomas, "Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza," in: Historical Materialism Vol. 10 (2002) (#3): pages 71-113, is te vinden op academia.edu
