Reflecting on "What is Wrong with us?"

 More in the context of "What is wrong with us"?

....as an introduction to his thoughts I like his essay on
The Dissolution of Society within the `Social'(1)....Very reasonable and all-round .
It is unfortunate that there is no english translation of his main work,

Dialectique et Société.

See some extracts below.

 >From the book review: A Phenomenology of Spirit for our Times
Frédéric Vandenberghe

....Michel Freitag, the spiritus rector of the ‘École de
Montréal’, has been working in relative isolation on a massive dialectical critical
total social theory that is so general, complex and systematic that it can easily
match – and perhaps even encompass! – those of Hannah Arendt, Jürgen
Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Niklas Luhmann, or Alain Touraine for that
matter, who supervised his dissertation on the theories of development in the
1960s................

*
The basic idea of the general theory of symbolic practice, understood by Piaget and Arendt as a
developmental relation of objectivation, is that every practice is always already and
inevitably caught in a web of representations (of the world, society, the other and
the self ) and (cognitive, normative and aesthetic) significations that functions as
an a priori and transcendental order of determination that regulates and unifies
the practices, which reproduce society in turn. By introducing culture as a transcendental
virtual totality that a priori forms, informs and regulates the symbolic
practices that produce and reproduce society while drawing on the symbolic order
and actualizing some of its representations and meanings, Freitag has successfully
forged a dialectical connection between the regulation of practices and the reproduction
of society that simultaneously establishes an internal connection between
agency and structure, the latter being ‘not only the medium, but also the result’
of the signifying practices.
The ‘double dialectic’ between agency and structure, which has just been
presented in an ontological and synchronic perspective, forms the basis and the
starting-point of a developmental theory of the modes of regulation of practices
and the reproduction of society. Re-analyzed in a historical and diachronic
perspective, the ideal-typical description of a society that is conceived as a
community of language that functions ‘like a language’ reappears now, formally,
as the first mode of reproduction of society, the ‘cultural-symbolic’ one, which,
‘sublated’, will be succeeded in modernity by the ‘political-institutional’ one and,
subverted and tendentially abolished, in postmodernity by the ‘decisional-operational’
one.

***

'The Dissolution of Society within the `Social'
Michel Freitag

Abstract
This article provides a general, theoretical reflection on the decline of
the normative dimension in postmodern societies. Modern societies were the
first to recognize themselves as societies, that is, to reflect explicitly on
the normative basis of their constitution. With the decline of modernity,
societal integration, which was based in part on the collective solidarity
borne of an idea of Justice, has dissolved into merely ‘social’ forms of integration,
legitimized in terms of a claim to operational perfection. At a purely
epistemological level, this results in a profound misunderstanding of the
subjective and unitary character of society and social action. The article ends
in a plea for the recovery of a reflection on values, understood not just as a
change in values, but as a change in the relation to values, necessary to
confront the irreducible plurality of the world.

And his philosophical resume'.....(my italics and bold)

One has spoken of the disenchantment of the world, of a loss of meaning, of
a life become absurd. The death of God was proclaimed, and barely fifty years
later that of the subject. Are we truly dead as subjects, or only weakened,
‘cretinized’? What then was this now defunct God? We are told that we have lost
our illusions, but what were these illusions? Were they really illusory? If there is
no ‘foundation’ (always a spatial and ultimately realist, substantialist and positive
metaphor) where previous societies believed, whether in the gods, the fleeting
intimacy of individual consciousness, or the Reason at the center of that
consciousness, does this really mean that we are without foundations, that we are
falling in Abgrund, into the abyss?
The problem we are now confronting is not ‘complicated’: every adolescent
has to resolve it to become an adult. In conceptual terms, it comes down to the
question of the reality of ‘transcendence’, which entails that of the validity of
norms. For the justification of norms is rooted in a transcendental dimension of
existence, even as this ontological dimension grounds their claim to an a priori
validity relative to the formal autonomy of particular social practices. The question,
then, concerns the foundation or mode of constitution of this societal a
priori; it is the question of society itself, understood as having an identity and
normative dimension, and as a real totality that is simultaneously objective and
subjective. Unlike the prophet, it is not up to the sociologist or philosopher to
determine which values should exist. S/he can, however, demonstrate the value
of values and the importance of ends, because this is precisely what s/he does
when she fixes her reflexive gaze on human, social and historical action, and
considers a person’s or society’s mode of existence.

What is involved is a question of ontology bearing on the irreducibly normative
‘mode of being’ of human (read: contingent) reality, and the fragility inherent
in the ‘mode of being’ of value. Note that it is not the mode of being (our
mode of being as social beings) that has changed, but only our manner of representing
it. Until now all societies have given themselves, through the ‘debt of
meaning’, an indirect view of their transcendental constitution and, in consequence,
their ontological actuality. By projecting outwards their inner consciousness
of themselves (at first in a concrete, and then an abstract manner), they were
not – whatever might have been said – deluding themselves as regards their
nature. On the contrary they were duly recognizing, in an entirely realist manner,
the ontologically transcendental character of their existence. In a sense, they were
only looking at themselves in a mirror. True, the mirrors were broken; but being
just mirrors, what they reflected did not, thereby, fall to pieces. And what were
these mirrors? At bottom no more than the reflection’s ‘reification’. And the
reflection is still with us: it is immanent to our capacity to see and think,

and isfundamental to our liberty.

 It is neither a matter of reviving ‘old’ values, nor ‘producing’ new ones, but of
establishing a new relation to values that will no longer be mediated by reflection’s
reification. What is involved is the attainment of a new, direct consciousness
of our reflexivity, one that needs no longer be guaranteed by its alienation,
that is to say, by the alienation of ourselves as reflexive beings. Instead ofsuccumbing to ‘nihilism’ – which is nothing more than ‘illusion’s illusion’ (that
is, the illusion that it is just an illusion and an arbitrary one at that) – we can
establish a new relation to values. This relation will no longer be prophetic or
dogmatic, but reflexive and pedagogical; in it the ‘value of value’ will be immediately understood, since it will be recognized ontologically and experienced existentially.
But this implies, relative to both modernity and tradition, a sort of
ideological revolution, if by the latter one refers not to how being is,

but to how it is conceived (and one could add, to approach Hegel a little,

how it arrives at its self-understanding).

......

.....The most immediately pressing object of our consciousness, the
objective stratum of human-social-historical reality (one might remember here
the Socratic dictum ‘know thyself ’) is normative through and through, since it
can only exist as an objective reality in its self-affirmation.

....
.....I am claiming here the spirit of a pre-modern common sense 

where the ‘true world’ appears as the ‘world’s wealth’, the world of a contingent multiplicity, an inexhaustible diversity of particular beings 

and forms and their enchanting harmony, a world that possesses 

ontological beauty and offers us an epistemological welcome.

....
................Thus the adventitious existence of each living species, 

each language and culture, each person in her or his liberty in 

society, and of the ‘world’ understood as an ontological space 

for the diversity of existents, their cohabitation, relations
and ‘harmony’.
....

..........What is involved is, for the first time, assuming responsibility 

for our ‘authority’, in the entirely new situation resulting from the increased importance of technique, 

whether turned towards the transformation of the ‘external’ world, or the ‘self-production’ of society,

that is, everything considered, of ourselves. Because, as we now realize, we are the ones responsible

in the last  instance, we cannot assume such responsibility without a new 

consciousness of the ontological value of existence in both its subjective 

and objective dimensions. What is required, then, is a new consciousness 

of the hierarchy immanent to being, where the affirmation of identity is 

valid only in its respect for difference, a respect rooted in the recognition 

of a common belonging that already encompasses even......

............... By ‘inscribing’ wealth, multiplicity, harmony and beauty 

 in the ontological field of ‘being’ and ‘truth’, I am simply repeating, 

if in a pompous, laboured manner, what has always spontaneously

been recognized by common sense. But the latter has been downgraded 

by science, and by technique’s claims to ‘creativity’. Here perhaps is the nub of the problem: 

how could the knowledge, intuition and certitude of common sense allow itself to be 

completely marginalized ontologically (that is to say, cognitively, aesthetically and 

normatively)by a knowledge and certitude that can only connect with 

the ‘true world’s reality’, while still relying on common sense, as it remains an abstraction 

from the latter?
Common sense, which immediately affirms not just the cognitive but the normative
and aesthetic value of its judgements, has become restricted to the ontologically
inessential realm of ‘private life’, even if, within that realm, it is exalted
by contemporary psychology and personalist ideology. And even if this ideology
lays claim for both itself and its object to the singular nature of personal subjectivity,
identified with being’s ultimate ontological truth.

..............

.....We must instead become conscious of the ontological
reality ‘unveiled’ by their critique of ideological reification. Here too,
behind the purely critical form of its implementation (and by way of it), an
‘unveiling of being’ can acquire meaning and value, should we prove 

capable of effecting its ontological recovery, as an ‘enhancement of being’ within an immemorial, indefinite process of transmission.
*

*

More  on Postmodernism ...Habermass.......etc. ......and.....Michel Freitag

1 http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/10/2/261

1 http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/5/2/175

Reflection for "What is wrong with us"?

 "What is wrong with us"?
 
- Interesting readings and references...in this context:

Politics and Sovereign Power

Considerations on Foucault; 

http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/9/4/443

 Reflections and essays around "the political philosophy of Claude Lefort" are worth noting for  contemplation on the problems of "the Ethiopian Political Order"; ie. sovereignity, governance, cultural development and rights etc.

Above all "the Reason of the State" and its historical development. Yes, "State", which I would still define , to make it simple and intelligible or demysitify it from its complexity and non-transparence for the "common man"; as : an "embodiment of a collective Intelligence" to interpret the following statement (out of the Atachment), which has a lot to say and on which we could reflect much to see through the problem of politics (and the lack of peace) in our region: Ethiopia; i.e. The Ethiopian State.

The State, "An embodiment of Collective Intelligence", which claims the right of ontological development; and if hampered in this process by human agents as well as by exterior forces, elements which are not organically linked in the process, would be a cause of a lot of pain in its constitution, resulting in wars and social conflicts, difficult to be dealt with, since "mini" intelligences and the collective intelligence are involved in the tension. The collective, with its highly consumed evoluion and revolution and the mini-s claiming for a new existence, whereas a political imperative could have resolved the tension through "Aufhebung"/ sublationto a higher complexity/ of their higher mutual existence to the benefit of all.

I = h * q * q

I  (Intelligence, the Axis for the human hemisphere, manifested and embodied in the "State" / as the tritpartite of (human) power, law and knowledge) = h (humanity, the Axis of the social plane) and (q as an axis of the cultural plane, qualified as quality of music) q*q  (h alluding to zoe and q to bios; or human power to Intelligence, law to humanity (laws and rights) and knowledge to quality of music, the limit of culture)

***

Interesting thoughts from and on Claude Lefort.....

For instance for the role of religion in modern politics implicit or explicit..visible or invisible.............

CAN THE PROBLEM OF THE

THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL BE

RESOLVED? LEO STRAUSS

AND CLAUDE LEFORT

Gilles Labelle

*

For more on "CONFIGURATIONS OF POWER, LAW and Knowledge"

THINKING THE ‘SOCIAL’

WITH CLAUDE LEFORT

Brian C. J. Singer

*

Politics and Sovereign Power

Considerations on Foucault

Brian C.J. Singer and Lorna Weir

"Abstract

Foucault’s critique of early modern political theory aimed at displacing

sovereignty as the principle of intelligibility of power. In the genealogical

literature since Foucault, sovereignty has become a residual category lacking

analytic specificity, largely displaced by governance, in turn equated with

politics. We argue that Foucault and the Foucauldians have not understood

that the flourishing of governance has presupposed a symbolic regime with

a division of knowledge–power–law characteristic of the democratic

sovereign. The conflation of governance with politics, together with the

sliding of sovereignty under governance, has left Foucauldians unable to

diagnose the dangers present in varying possible sovereignty–governance

configurations."

**********Extracts....http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/9/4/443t*********

"Dillon’s (1995, 2004) formulation of biopolitics owes much to Agamben, reading the inclusive
exclusion of zoe¯ (the type of life human and animals both share) as defining
the space of politics in the ancient polis, while in the modern period sovereignty
proliferates bare life by the fusing of zoe¯ with bios (cultural forms of
life) when securing health became one of sovereignty’s main functions.

For Dillon (2004: 84), ‘[t]o analyze a regime of security is . . . to analyse a regime
of politics in which governance and sovereignty intersect".

"To speak of power is to
speak of its place in the construction of the order, coherence and intelligibility
of a larger world. And how one understands that world depends, in good
part, on how one presents power as a meaningful construct. This is why we
speak of ontologies of power: the latter are integral to the establishment of
a meaningful world in its generality, even as the introduction of the term
‘sovereignty’, and the shift from a monarchic to a democratic sovereign,
implies a change of cosmology or, to use Lefort’s expression, of ‘symbolic
regime’. With this latter shift, and the separation of knowledge and law from
power that it entails, the meaning of the binaries that structure one’s basic
sense of the world – true or false, real or unreal, possible or impossible, just
or unjust, etc. – is altered. Needless to say, the character of the symbolic
regime underpins the terms and forms of governance."

"Our remarks herein can be situated as a contribution to recent theorizing
about the state of exception (or at least one particularly extreme type
of this state), which we have conceptualized as the collapse of the tripartite
symbolic regime of modernity – law, power, knowledge – when the antecedent
reference is to a democratic sovereign. In this state of exception the
governmental notion of population fuses with the conception of the sovereign
people, producing in effect the oxymoron of a sovereign population
that can no longer appoint or summon its representatives but can only be
represented, ostensibly for its own protection. Following Schmitt, we understand
the state of exception to be characterized by the suspension of law,
declared to no longer apply under conditions interpreted as emergency –
even as the play of division characteristic of the democratic sovereign is
suspended by the designation of an (internal) enemy. In the black hole of
the alternative modernity that ensues from the fusion of government and
sovereignty, the limits of juridical law are annulled, with power operating
by decree, in secret, sundered from the democratic sovereign."

"We are arguing that the democratic sovereign is the condition of possibility
for the formation of national population as a governmental concept;
the ‘people’ makes possible national ‘population’. In his commentaries on
Foucault’s conceptualization of the Holocaust in Society Must Be Defended,
Agamben (2002: 84) argues for the non-equivalence of ‘people’ and ‘population’,
with ‘people’ being constituted as ‘an essentially political body’, and
‘population’ as ‘an essentially biological body’ to be regulated and optimized.13
A people is not a population, but during the early to mid-20th century,
people and population became the shadow of each other: ‘With the emergence
of biopower, every people is doubled by a population; every democratic
people is, at the same time, a demographic people’ (Agamben, 2002:
84, emphasis in original). The doubling of people and population is exemplified,
Agamben argues, by the 1935 Nuremberg decrees that racialized
citizenship, categorizing Jews as residents of Germany rather than citizens,
prohibiting marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and mandating compulsory
medical examinations for couples prior to marriage with the intent of
protecting the German Volk against damage to its hereditary health (Erbgesundheit).
Between political categorization by people and nation and demographic/
biological categorization by population lies what Agamben (2002: 84)
calls a ‘caesura’."
"The caesura to which Agamben refers pauses between and conjoins two
radically heterogeneous discourses: a veridical governmental knowledge of
population and the political representation of the people as sovereign. With
respect to Agamben’s discussion of the Shoah, what he calls the ‘biological’
population was also racialized, and one must ask the historical question of
how the sovereign people came to be equated with a racialized population.
An additional and properly theoretical question must also be raised: what is
the error in equating a people with a population?
Agamben repeatedly emphasizes the closeness of people and population,
whereas we would maintain their distance. In Homo Sacer (1998: 176–80)
Agamben argues that the people as ‘titular’ democratic sovereign has its
double in the people as impoverished, leading to demands on the democratic
sovereign to abolish/reduce poverty, demands that result in the proliferation
of bare life. In this reading democracy becomes a machine for the production
of bare life. Our understanding of the relation between sovereign people
and governed population is in some senses a Foucauldian response to
Agamben, though based on a much more robust concept of (democratic)
sovereignty than Foucault’s, with sovereignty and governance having incommensurable
epistemological differences – what we call the symbolic and the
veridical (Weir, forthcoming 2008). Attention must be called to the dangers
that result from the collapse of the knowledge-power distinction in the modern
symbolic regime, which results in the impossible fusion of the symbolic and
the veridical, as well as the reconstruction of both the symbolic register of the
political and the veridical register of expertise normed by the distinction of
truth and error."

"Unlike Agamben, our primary emphasis is focused
not on Foucault’s weak theorization of the relation between sovereignty and
law, but on the governance-sovereignty relation. Where Agamben theorizes
sovereignty as ‘the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing
homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice – that is, life that may be
killed but not sacrificed’ (Agamben, 1998: 83), a sphere originating in ancient
Rome in the practice of creating homines sacri, we have followed the
interpretation of most intellectual historians in dating the use of the term
sovereignty to the growth of territorial powers independent of the Papacy
beginning in the 14th century and the subsequent extension of public law
during the late Renaissance. In Agamben’s (1998: 28) conceptualization,
sovereignty ‘is not exclusively a political concept’ but also an ontological
one (p. 44). The result is to treat bare life/homo sacer as part of the inevitable
tragedy of Western political thought from its inception, rendering the
state of exception almost inevitable. In Agamben’s thought, all modern sovereigns
appear as totalitarian, with the democratic, monarchical, fascist and
communist sovereigns made equivalent: a counsel of despair. In his conception
of sovereignty the differing articulations of law, power and knowledge
are not examined, an elision that results in the inevitable fusion of governance
and sovereignty. The state of exception and bare life spread without
check as sovereignty is conceived to have no specificity other than the
power of the ban, a single, dark point whose remit expands without limit
in modernity as its limits are never theorized."

"The fusion of government with sovereignty coupled with the elision of
law in the state of exception forms a limit articulation of law–power–knowledge
in the symbolic regime of modernity. Generally, the articulation of
the three terms demands their separation/difference, as underscored by the
separation/articulation of governance and democratic sovereignty. The different
forms that such articulations may take produce a substantive area of
inquiry that needs further theoretical and empirical research. The articulation
(and, thereby, the establishment of the frontiers) between juridical and
governmental forms of knowledge and their respective forms of power will
prove particularly sensitive because, typically, constituted out of contestation.
In effect, individuals, institutions, social or political movements, or the
government itself seek to modify the law–governance articulation, which
thus becomes symptomatic of the play of division in democracy. When acts
of government are explicitly tied to law, they often find themselves before
the glare of the public sphere, where they must justify themselves under
examination."


*
"In this article we have argued against the tendency to equate power
with government, and government with the political. The problem with
governance is, on the contrary, that it seeks to avoid the space of the political,
even as it refuses to allow power to speak in its own name. It prefers
to examine powers that are audible at best only indirectly, which prefer to
hide in the language of non-political savoirs. Governance prefers its politics
outside of the space of the political properly speaking, where power is forced
to reveal itself in the spaces that it has claimed to vacate. Now, we would
be the last to deny that such an exercise is not without its uses, but it seems
to have come at the expense of examining what is happening where power
appears most vocal, i.e. in the place of sovereignty. Thus the tendency to
ignore the implications of what, traditionally, was termed regime change,
and notably the more unpleasant versions. Sometimes it seems as if the state
of exception was not to be considered exceptional, as if it reflected some
sort of logical end-point in governance’s ineluctable, if unconscious, imperial
ambitions. In our view, behind such tendencies lies another, theoretical
failure: a failure to understand that power, even after the ancien regime, is
still tied to the symbolic and constituted within a larger symbolic order."

*
"Democracy supposes, whether implicitly or explicitly, the reference to a
sovereign,17 even as the position of that sovereign has shifted since the
decline of absolutism. And this shift, we have argued, entails a set of larger
changes in – and changes in the relations between – power, law and knowledge,
with enormous implications not just for the expressions of the political
but for the character of governance itself. This is what is missed when
governance appears without an outside."
****************************End Extracts.****************

A symbolic Order,  which is dis-covered in due course of the human development, not only to a limited section of an enlightened stratum of a community.  May be  "Dasein and Authenticity"
calling for a democratic model in modernity counter to an order , which calls for a divine legitimacy, due to the development of the community in its "collective intelligence", i.e. The modern State.

What is this symbolic Order? Or How would it be conceptualized? Under different conditions?
Given the human agency is compatible to whot it articulates and propagates?


*
"changes in the relations between – power, law and knowledge"

The Problem is:
These relations have hardly changed in the case of Ethiopia....from the radical christian orthodox ideological
backdrop to that of the radical left, which just gives a lip service to the democratic state model, since it has failed in the correct apreciation of its "Dasein". It has fallen dramatically and is afraid of its resolution to be "There"; i.e. to be Free.

****************

Reflection - "What is Wrong with us?"

Worth reading.....

It is a short trip into the annals of modern Philosophy...with the necessary concrete touch highly worthy of a reflection...
*
Thoughts out of the "left spectrum", which I think are worthy of a reflection; and I am ready to embrace with one arm, without departing from my teleological "determinants"/ as applied in "The Harmony Model"/ I  promote ...

The "Harmony Model" as it goes like :-
*
May Science make it to Perfection
With Time and Space,
New Dimension.
May Culture be pure and Human
Would History cease to be?
For new Culture, Peace and free,
Life is Faith and Faith in Life
For Infinity — Eternity,
Through Harmony
To the Point, the Destiny.
JOY! is the final Act!
*
Through high Hope -Deliverance,
It is real; for the Human to feel the Source.
*
Be it Nature or Universe
With Mankind full of Wisdom
Where the State is History
And the Laws are Freedom.
Where faith and religion
Inspire pure Knowledge
Life for Heavon;
Is a challenge.
For perfection peace and culture.
JOY! is the final Act!
*
Through Harmony the glory purpose
The godly Human would touch the Source.
*
...A Model with more affinity to "Hegel's Absolute Substance" and a touch of some sort of "faith", which is not opposed to Spinozist's "Love" at all.

*
Leaving the substance of the "pre-ontological substance of Being" to be determined by the Beings, who may be dimensioned out of the "substance or non-substance of the pre-ontological Being", whatever that could be,... to get its own resolution through generations of the future, who are in a position to live phenomenologically as well as really and concrete; we should be able to re-dis-cover the "WE" beyond Modernity,  i.e..  after the initial dis-covery of  the dichotomy of the "I" and "They", which may end up (via the "I" -->> "HE/SHE"  vector) in the "WE" of Post-modernity ( if one has successfully overcome nihilism during the process) . I.e. not necessarily in a sense of anti-modernity, but in my opinion, in a Post-Modernism rich with optimism and a principle of Hope.

Nonetheless I like the way Antonio Negri reflects...here:


**************



Interesting..........Extracts....Spinoza's Anti-Modernity.....Antonio Negri

 http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm



"Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory."

*
Consequently,
intellectual Love is what sheds light on the paradox of the
multitude and its becoming-community, since intellectual Love
alone describes the real mechanism which leads potentia from
the multitude to determining itself as the unity of an absolute
political order: the potestas democratic

*

These processes, on the
contrary, are always complete and always open, and the space
which gives itself between completion and opening is that of
absolute power, total freedom, the path of liberation.
***

>>>>>>>Here more quotations out of the link>>>>>>>>>>

 Spinoza's Anti-Modernity http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm

Without Spinoza it is impossible to philosophize,
but outside of dialectics it is impossible to be modern.
Modernity is the peace of the real, it is the fulfillment of history.
*
Here too, dialectics would be in a position to
restitute the being of reality and would contribute, through this
concretization of time, to elaborating the definition of modernity.
*
sub specie aeternitatis
What remains is the second Spinozian definition of time, as
presence and opening-up of power, sub specie aeternitatis. Now,
how might one be opposed to that Spinozian definition of Dasein,
or rather of the determinate being of the mode, which in its
singularity is irreducible to Gewordensein, and which radically
opposes determinate being to any dialectical synthesis? Hegel is
especially conscious of this objection when he claims that the
dialectical concept of temporality does not nullify concrete
determination—in other words, that the event, the determination
(as act, Bestimmung, as well as as result, Bestimmtheit) remains
in its concreteness.
*
Hegel is
especially conscious of this objection when he claims that the
dialectical concept of temporality does not nullify concrete
determination—in other words, that the event, the determination
(as act, Bestimmung, as well as as result, Bestimmtheit) remains
in its concreteness. If the time of modernity is that of fulfillment,
this fulfillment of the real could not mystify or conceal the
splendor of the event.
*
Hegel can well attempt the inversion of power, but this process
takes on the appearance of a sophism, since the goal pursued is
to reassert the same power. Hegel may indeed denounce in
Spinozian being the violence of an irreducible presence and push
it towards indifference and nothingness. But each time that this
singular presence reappears, the reality that Hegel claims to be
void, reveals itself on the contrary to be charged with all
positivities, openings, and singular potentialities. Hegel may
indeed consider the perspective of a time conceived as indefinite
duration to be unsatisfactory, but he can only oppose a repetitive
and sterile transcendental movement to a theoretical practice of
time where the latter appears charged with present
determinations. It is here that the Hegelian system is
endangered, here, when the time of modernity as fulfillment of
the historical development opposes itself to the emergence of
singularity, of the positive time of Dasein, of Spinozian presence.
*
The fate of modernity
The real, that is, modernity, is "the immediate unity of essence
and existence, in other words, of the inner and the outer, in the
shape of dialectic."
substance and power, Wirklichkeit and
Dasein became increasingly separated.
*
The preeminence
of relations of production over productive forces detaches itself
from the Hegelian utopia of the absolute and takes on the garb of
reformist teleology. The schemes of indefinite duration, running
counter to those of the dialectical infinite, are renewed as
projects of the progressive rationality of domination. Modernity
changes sheets without changing beds
*
Heidegger represents the extreme limit of this process, a
process which is perfectly integrated, if it is true that one of the
goals of Sein und Zeit is to rethink the transcendental
schematism,17 but a process which, at the very moment when it
is starting off again on the usual tracks, is completely thrown off.
*
If to interpret the meaning of Being becomes our
task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be
interrogated; it is also that entity which already
comports itself, in its Being, towards what we
are asking about when we ask this question. But
in that case the question of Being is nothing
other than the radicalization of an essential
tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein
itself—the pre-ontological understanding of
Being
*
Effectivity is no longer Hegelian
Wirklichkeit but a crude Faktizität. Modernity is fate. In the last
pages of Sein und Zeit, against Hegel’s mediation and Absolute
Spirit, Heidegger asserts that
Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the
contrary, starts with the 'concretion' of factically
thrown existence itself in order to unveil
temporality as that which primordially makes
such existence possible. 'Spirit' does not first fall
into time, but it exists as the primordial
temporalizing of temporality . . . 'Spirit' does not
fall into time; but factical existence 'falls' as
falling from primordial, authentic temporality.
*
The nostalgic
Hegelian demand of Bestimmung becomes a desperate
Entschlossenheit in Heidegger—a deliberation and a resolution of
the opening of Dasein to its own truth, which is nothingness. The
music which provided the rhythm of the dance of determination
and of the transcendental has come to an end.
*
 
Heidegger is not only the prophet of the fate of modernity. At the
same time as he divides, he is also a hinge-point opening onto
anti-modernity, that is, opening onto a conception of time as an
ontologi-cally constitutive relation which breaks the hegemony of
substance or the transcendental, and therefore opens onto
power
" 'We'
presuppose truth because 'we', being in the kind of Being which
Dasein possesses, are 'in the truth'."21 But Dasein—and this is
implied in the constitution of being as care—is ahead of itself
each time.
*
Openness and discovery belong in an
essential manner to being and the power-to-be of Dasein as
being-in-the-world. For Dasein, the issue is its power-to-bein-
the-world, and conjointly, the discovering circumspect
preoccupation with inner-worldly being. In the constitution of the
being of Dasein as care, in being-ahead-of-itself, the most
originary "presupposing" is included
*
Under
the same ontological conditions, love takes the place of "care."
Spinoza systematically inverts Heidegger: to Angst (anxiety) he
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6 von 13 02.02.2009 11:40
opposes Amor, to Umsicht (circumspection) he opposes Mens, to
Entschlossenheit (resolution) he opposes Cupiditas, to
Anwesenheit (being-present) he opposes the Conatus, to
Besorgen (concern) he opposes Appetitus, to Möglichkeit
(possibility) he opposes Potentia. In this opposition, an
anti-purposive presence and possibility unite that which different
orientations of ontology divide.
*
From the same horizon, two constitutive
directions open up: if Heidegger settles his accounts with
modernity, Spinoza (who never entered into modernity) shows
the untamable force of an anti-modernity which is completely
projected into the future.
*
Love in Spinoza expresses the time of
power, a time which is presence, insofar as it is action which is
constitutive of eternity.
The formal condition of
the identity of presence and eternity is given before all.
"Whatever the Mind understands sub specie aeternitatis, it
understands not from the fact that it conceives the Body's
present actual existence, but from the fact that it conceives the
Body's essence sub specie aeternitatis."
*
"Insofar as our Mind knows itself and the Body
under a species of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God,
and knows that it is in God and is conceived through God."
*
The
ultimate explanation is to be found in Proposition 32:
Out of the third kind of knowledge, there
necessarily arises an intellectual Love of God.
For out of this kind of knowledge there arises
(by P32) Joy, accompanied by the idea of God
as its cause, i.e. (by Def. Aff. VI), Love of God,
not insofar as we imagine him as • present (by
P29), but insofar as we understand God to be
eternal. And this is what I call intellectual love of
God
*
Eternity is therefore a formal dimension of presence. But now
here is the reversal and the explanation: "Although this Love
toward God has had no beginning (by P33), it still has all the
perfections of Love, just as if it had come to be."26 Beware,
then, of falling into the trap of duration: "If we attend to the
common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed
conscious of the eternity of their Mind, but that they confuse it
with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory,
which they believe remains after death."27 Parallel to this:
This Love the Mind has must be related to its
actions (by P32C and IIIP3); it is, then, an action
by which the Mind contemplates itself, with the
accompanying idea of God as its cause (by P32
and P32C) . ... so (by P35), this Love of the
Mind has is part of the infinite love by which God
loves himself
*
This Love the Mind has must be related to its
actions (by P32C and IIIP3); it is, then, an action
by which the Mind contemplates itself, with the
accompanying idea of God as its cause (by P32
and P32C) . ... so (by P35), this Love of the
Mind has is part of the infinite love by which God
loves himself.28
 
*
 
Spinoza's Anti-Modernity http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri10.htm

 
*
 
Out of this we clearly understand wherein
consists our salvation, or blessedness, or
Freedom, viz. in a constant and eternal Love of
God, or in God's Love for men . . . For insofar
as it [this Love] is related to God (by P35), it is
Joy
What I wish to say is that intellectual Love is the formal
condition of socialization, and that the communitarian process is
the ontological condition of intellectual Love.
*
Consequently,
intellectual Love is what sheds light on the paradox of the
multitude and its becoming-community, since intellectual Love
alone describes the real mechanism which leads potentia from
the multitude to determining itself as the unity of an absolute
political order: the potestas democratic
*
These processes, on the
contrary, are always complete and always open, and the space
which gives itself between completion and opening is that of
absolute power, total freedom, the path of liberation.
*
The
negation of Utopia in Spinoza takes place thanks to the total
cooptation of the power of liberation onto a horizon of presence:
presence imposes realism as against utopia, and utopia opens
presence onto constitutive projection.
*
Contrary to what Hegel
wished for, measurelessness and presence cohabit on a terrain
of absolute determination and absolute freedom. There is no
ideal, nothing transcendental, no incomplete project which could
fill the opening, satisfy or fill a gap in freedom. Openness,
disproportion, and the Absolute are completed and closed in a
presence beyond which only a new presence can be given. Love
ren ders presence eternal, the collectivity renders singularity
absolute.
*
When Heidegger develops his social phenomenology of
singularity, between the inauthenticity of inter-worldliness and the
authenticity of being-in-the-world, he develops a polemic against
the transcendental which is analogous to that waged by Spinoza,
but once again the circle of the crisis of modernity closes on him
and productive power convulses itself in nothingness. On the
contrary, in determination, in joy, Spinozist love exalts that which
it finds in the horizon of temporality and constitutes it as
collectivity. Spinoza's anti-modernity explodes here in an
irresistible manner, as analysis and exposition of productive force
constituted ontologically as collectivity.
*
The cycle of definition of modernity inaugurated by Hegel—in
other words, the cycle in which the reduction of power to the
absolute transcendental form reaches its apex, and
consequently, in which the crisis of relation is dominated by the
exorcism of power and its reduction to irrationality and
nothingness—thus reaches completion. And it is here that
Spinozism conquers a place in contemporary philosophy, no
longer merely as an historica1 indicator but as an active
paradigm.
*
It is on this basis that Spinozism acts as the catalyst of an
alternative in the definition of modernity.
*
On the terrain of the alternative, we find compromise positions
well-versed in the art of mediation—such as those of Habermas,
who over the course of the long development of his theory of
modernity 35 has never successfully overcome the feeble and
bland repetitiveness of the pages where Hegel constructs
modernity phenomenologically as absoluteness forming itself in
interaction and incompletion.
Certain contemporary authors have happily
announced our definition of Spinoza's anti-modernity. Thus
Altbusser:
Spinoza's philosophy introduced an
unprecedented theoretical revolution into the
history of philosophy, probably the greatest
philosophical revolution of all time, to the point
that we can regard Spinoza as Marx's only direct
ancestor, from the philosophical standpoint.
*
Why? Because Spinoza is the founder of an absolutely original
conception of praxis without teleology, because he thought the
presence of the cause in its effects and the very existence of
structure in its effects and in presence. "The whole existence of
the structure consists of its effects . . . the structure, which is
merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing
outside its effects."37 For Foucault, Spinoza transforms this
foundationless structural originality into a mechanism of the
production of norms, which base themselves on a collective
present:
And thereby one sees that, for the philosopher,
to posit the question of belonging to this present
will no longer be the question of belonging to a
doctrine or a tradition, it will no longer be the
simple question of belonging to the human
community in general, but that of belonging to a
certain "We", to a We which relates to a cultural
whole which is characteristic of its own actuality.
It is that We which becomes the object of his
own reflection for the philosopher, and thereby
the impossibility of ignoring the philosopher’s
questioning of his singular belonging to that We
is asserted. All of this, philosophy as
problematization of an actuality and questioning
by the philosopher of that actuality of which he is
a part, and in relation to which he has to situate
himself, might well characterize philosophy as
the discourse of modernity and on modernity.
*
It is from this position that Foucault can propose a "political
history of truth" or a "political economy of the will to
know"39—from a position which reverses the concept of
modernity as fate to show it as presence and belonging. For
Deleuze, lastly, Spinoza pushes the immanence of praxis in the
present to the limit of the triumph of the untimely over
effectivity—and the subject, here, finds itself as collective
subject, presented in Spinozist fashion as the result of a
reciprocal movement of the inner and the outer, on the flattened
presence of a world which is always reopened to absolute
possibility.40 Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory.
*
Anti-modernity is therefore the concept of present
history, recast as the concept of a collective liberation. As limit
and overcoming of the limit. As its body and eternity and
presence. As the infinite reopening of possibility. Res gestae,
historical practice of theory.