vrijdag 8 december 2017

Lees Christopher Norris over Spinoza

Van Christopher Norris had ik al eens iets overgenomen in het blog van 12-08-2016 getited: “De Spinozareceptie zit vol interpretatieconflicten – ook op dit webblog.”
Ik nam daarin grote delen over uit zijn bijdrage waarvan ik wel enigszins onder de indruk was, “Spinoza and the Conflict of Interpretations,” in het boek van Dimitris Vardoulakis (Ed.) Spinoza Now [Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2011].
Daarna las ik zijn heldere inleiding, waarin hij een degelijk beeld gaf van wat hij ging brengen in zijn boek – en weer was ik onder de indruk van zijn Voorwoord op: 

Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory. Wiley-Blackwell, [series: Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory], 1991. - VII, 322 pp – niet meer in te zien bij books.google; deels nog wel in te zien bij Amazon. De uitgever gaf het bij herdruk een veer saaiere cover mee.

from the Back Cover: This book offers a detailed account of Spinoza's influence on various schools of present-day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable writings of a thinker like Giles Deleuze. The author combines a close exegesis of Spinoza's texts with a series of chapters that trace the evolution of literary theory from its period of high scientific rigour in the mid-1960s to its latest "postmodern", neopragmatist or anti-theoretical phase. He examines the thought of Althusser, Macherey and Deleuze as well as others (including the new historicists) who have registered the impact of his pioneering work without any overt acknowledgement.
On the one hand, theorists like Althusser and Macherey could celebrate Spinoza as the first philosopher before Marx to understand the need for a riorous distinction between science (or "theoretical practice") and ideology (or the realm of lived experience subject to various forms of imaginary error of misrecognition). On the other, Deleuze makes Spinoza the hero of his crusade against theories of whatever kind - Kantian, Marxist, Freudian, post structuralist - which always end up by imposing some abstract order of concepts and categories on the libidinal flux of "desiring production", or the "body-without-organs" of anarchic instinctual drives.

Er is eerst een Preface van – ik denk – de uitgever, dan een Introduction van Michael Payne en vervolgens een Author’s Preface. Indertijd was dat in z’n geheel te lezen bij books.google. En ik vond het een prima stuk dat ik bewaarde; ooit wilde ik het in een blog opnemen (waar het almaar niet van kwam daar ik het auteurs copyright niet wilde schenden). Het is alsof ik er een voorgevoel van had dat books.google weer gesloten zou worden? Het werk is trouwens al enige tijd in te zien bij scribd.com. Kortom, ik overwin mijn aanvankelijke schroom en breng hierna die, na ruim 25 jaar, nog altijd interessante tekst die dé aanbeveling is om het boek aan te schaffen (wat ik tot heden overigens zelf nog niet deed - je kunt niet alles....).

Author's Preface

The name of Spinoza has not figured much in recent Anglophone literary-critical debate. With the exception of one, fairly short-lived episode — the spell of intensive theorizing that emerged under the sign of Althusserian Marxism — he has enjoyed nothing like the degree of interest accorded to other leading philosophers in the European tradition. Most theorists with a decent working knowledge of post-structuralism or deconstruction could probably give some account of these movements in relation to such strong precursors as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and maybe Heidegger. Of course there is disagreement when it comes to establishing precise lines of descent, or arguing the case for this or that thinker as a source of continuing insights and ideas. But Spinoza figures hardly at all in these various elective genealogies. Among critical theorists — at least in Britain and North America — his writings have been pretty much ignored, save for the occasional reference to him as an out-and-out idealist metaphysician whose thought exemplifies the errors and delusions to which such thinking is chronically prone. Analytical philosophers have had more time for Spinoza, though usually by way of a 'rational reconstruction' which concedes a few salient points of interest in Spinoza's system while consigning what remains - the entire 'metaphysical' doctrine — to the history of outworn ideas.
In what follows I shall suggest that critical theorists have a good deal to learn from Spinoza, not least because they have often been engaged all unwittingly in a rehearsal of the same arguments. For there is a sense in which every theoretical activity must presuppose at least some of the basic tenets of Spinoza's thought. These include the idea that theory is capable of providing a better, more adequate conceptual grasp of experiences that would otherwise belong to the [12] realm of pre-reflective 'commonsense' knowledge. To theorize is to take up a critical distance from the data of first-hand subjective understanding, or to claim some superior cognitive standpoint from which to adjudicate in matters of truth and falsehood. For Spinoza, it is the chief virtue of philosophy that it enables the mind to essay this progress beyond the partial, perplexed and contradictory evidence of the senses, giving access to a realm of necessary truths where everything assumes its appointed place in the eternal scheme of things. If it were humanly possible to achieve such absolute knowledge - to transcend our creaturely dependence on the inlets of sensory perception, the fallible workings of memory, imagination, language, and other such sources of 'inadequate ideas' - then we would comprehend everything sub specie aeternitatis, or redeemed from the contingent, error-prone nature of mortal understanding. But of course this standpoint can only be envisaged as an ultimate ideal, a regulative notion by which (as he argues) we can and should be guided, but which cannot be attained under the given conditions of human finitude and temporal experience. And it is within the limits imposed by those same conditions that Spinoza carries on his other great project, directed toward a knowledge of actions and events sub specie durationis, or as viewed against a background of particular socio-hiscorical circumstances, most immediately those of the seventeenth-century Dutch experiment in liberal democracy whose rise and imminent fall he witnessed at first hand.1 This is the radical Spinoza more or less unknown to Anglo-American readers, though not — as we shall see — to French philosophers and left-wing intellectuals, many of whom continue to acknowledge his formative influence on their own thinking.
So this book has three main aims. Firstly, it seeks to establish the case that nearly all the great debates in present-day literary theory have their origin in one or another aspect of Spinoza's work. Secondly, it points to a number of specific (mostly French) movements of thought over the past three decades where Spinoza has figured as a major source of theoretical arguments and ideas. And thirdly — most important — it argues that a better understanding of Spinoza's work may help us to perceive some of the fallacies, blindspots, and effects of foreshortened historical perspective that have characterized the discourse of literary theory in its latest 'post-modern' phase. This seems to me a matter of particular urgency since so much current talk has an air of pseudo-sophisticated 'philo- [13]sophic' import which goes along all too readily with various irrationalist and anti-Enlightenment doctrines. One thing we can learn from Spinoza — especially from his writings on scripture, politics, and history — is the need to distinguish between different orders of truth claim, those that offer arguments (and invite counter-arguments) by way of establishing their credentials, and those that trade on some mystified appeal to divine revelation, scriptural authority, or a truth beyond the powers of rational understanding. There is a tendency nowadays — most pronounced among critics of a post-structuralist or postmodernist persuasion — to treat all talk of 'truth' as a regrettable throwback to bad old Enlightenment habits of thought. In the same way, adepts of literary deconstruction often refer breezily to 'logocentrism' or the Western 'metaphysics of presence' as if these (along with 'truth') could henceforth be dispensed with to everyone's obvious benefit, since then we might emerge into a realm of utopian 'freeplay' where the tedious old constraints of consistency, logic, and right reading would no longer exert their tyrannical power. What drops out of sight in these massively simplified accounts is the fact that the critique of scriptural revelation (in Spinoza) or the deconstruction of 'Western metaphysics' (in Derrida) are projects carried through by dint of much argument and rigorous thinking, intellectual achievements of the highest order which still find room for truth, if not for certain (revealed or transcendental) forms of presumptive truth-claim.
I shall have a good deal to say in this book about Spinoza's proleptic contribution to debates in post-structuralism, deconstruction, New Historicism and other present-day schools. For the moment I wish only to advance the more general claim: that by reading him afresh - or maybe for the first time - one achieves a perspective on these recent ideas that makes some of them appear decidedly wrongheaded or devoid of intellectual consequence, while others take on an added measure of historical and philosophic interest. Nietzsche came across Spinoza belatedly - in the summer of 1881 - but his reaction (recorded in a well-known letter to Overbeck) leaves no doubt of his having discovered a kindred spirit.
Not only is his overall tendency like mine — making knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me in precisely these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil… 2
[14] Nietzsche's pleasurable thrill of recognition is one that would leave many commentators cold, although it does lind an echo — as we shall see — in the reading proposed by a latter-day Nietzschean like Gilles Deleuze. And Deleuze for his part would have little sympathy with those thinkers in the Anglo-American tradition for whom it is axiomatic that philosophical ideas can be be of interest only in so far as they achieve the requisite standards of logical consistency and truth. Thus Stuart Hampshire: 'his (Spinoza's) is an interesting, not implausible, account of freedom of mind, as the detachment from causes in the common order of nature, a detachment that lasts while self-critical thinking lasts'.3
Where the commentators divide is in the degree of significance they attach to the passions (or the pressures of historical circumstance) that went into the making of a work like the Ethics. For this is famously a text that offers itself — at least to all appearances — as a purely rational-deductive chain of arguments, one through which those passions may have run (so to speak) like wine through ice, leaving no trace behind. 'Emotion recollected in tranquillity' — the Wordsworthian formula best describes those readings that take the Ethics more or less as it asks to be taken, discounting any signs of 'mental struggle on the part of the author', or any indication of its 'origin or course of development'.4 The words are those of Robert A. Duff in his 1903 book Spinoza's Political and Ethical Philosophy. But Duff also registers the problems faced by any present-day exegete who respects Spinoza’s intentions in this matter and seeks to exclude all reference to 'extraneous' (personal or socio-political) concerns. As he puts it:
[m]orality treated in geometrical fashion, principles of conduct proved by an array of definitions, axioms, postulates, propositions, corollaries, and scholia, do not now exercise the same fascination over the student, as they did in days when mathematics was the one type of exact or demonstrated knowledge. On the contrary, it begets in a modern reader the suspicion of a deductive or a priori manipulation of experience, and taints the whole atmosphere of the book.5
There are four main lines of response to this problem, as exemplified by recent commentators on Spinoza. One — the predominant Anglo-American line — is to dump a good deal of the seventeenth-century 'metaphysical' baggage, but translate its terms wherever possible into the idiom of present-day linguistic or analytical philosophy. [15] Stuart Hampshire offers one good example of this approach, and Jonathan Bennett the most extensive treatment overtly geared to the interests of 'rational reconstruction'. The second response is that of readers like Deleuze, for whom (to cite one fairly typical passage) 'the Spinozists are Holderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, because they think in terms of speeds and slownesses, of frozen catatonias and accelerated movements, unformed elements, nonsubjectifed affects'.6 In short, Deleuze is already on the path to what he will later call a 'schizo-analytical' reading of Spinoza, one that not merely rejects the demands of conceptual coherence, clarity and rigour laid down by commentators like Hampshire and Bennett, but which sees it as a positive virtue in these texts that they explode such repressive 'Oedipal' ideas in pursuit of a purely libidinal economy of instinct, affect, and 'desiring-production'.' I shall have more to say about this curious (indeed thoroughly zany) episode in Spinoza's 'postmodern' reception-history. For the moment I mention it only by way of signalling the sheer diversity of present-day responses to his work.
The third and fourth options are those that will occupy me most in the following chapters. They both have to do with the relation in Spinoza's work between philosophical issues of reason, truth and knowledge on the one hand, and socio-historical or political concerns on the other. This relationship is in turn capable of two very different (but not, as I shall argue, mutually exclusive) readings. One is the approach adopted by theorists like Althusser and Macherey, an approach that starts out from Spinoza's distinction between 'imaginary' (or confused) and 'adequate' (or conceptually valid) ideas, and which then goes on to elaborate that distinction into a full-scale Marxist 'science' of material, historical and ideological conjunctures.8 The other approach would eschew such high theoreticist ambitions for the sake of determining just what it was, in the immediate context of Spinoza's life and times, that led him not only to think as he did but to cast his thoughts in the form of a treatise constructed more geometrico, or after the manner of Euclid's Elements.9 And this takes us back to our earlier question as to whether such a text can really be read at its own professed level of abstract universality.
What emerges from recent historical scholarship — books like Simon Schama's superb study The Embarrassment of Riches — is the extent to which these same ideals went along with a progressive or liberal-democratic ideology, one that found its closest philosophical [16] equivalent in the left-Cartesian' strain of rational-deductive thought. But at the same time there were forces of social disruption — religious, sectarian, and resurgent monarchist interests — which threatened to destroy this hard-won state of enlightened ecumenical and multi-ethnic coexistence. Schama makes the point with reference to Spinoza's most influential patron, the statesman-philosopher de Witt:
Such conflicts [i.e. the growing spate of trade-wars, civil altercations etc.] remained obstinately the contentions of power, authority, religion, dynastic amour propre and custom — the very issues that Grotius had deemed inadequate pretexts for the prosecution of a just war . . . At a later date, the more Johan de Witt relied on Cartesian actuarial calculations of diplomatic contingency, the more vulnerable he became to acts of public unreason. [In the end] he was done to death in the aftermath of a judicial travesty perpetrated on his brother. In striving for the best possible principles by which to arrange their relations with other states, the Dutch succeeded only in bringing out the worst in all concerned. The world they were condemned to live in was the world of their public ethics turned upside down.I0
Hence — it might be argued — the ambivalence encountered so often in Spinoza's works: on the one hand his commitment to a method of reasoning more geometrico, his address to an ideal community of readers, a republic of learning beyond all merely partisan opinions and interests; on the other, his enforced recognition of the fact that no such community existed, so that thinking could only serve a practical end in so far as it adjusted to the given conditions of prejudice, unreason, and sectarian strife. In his 'political' writings, therefore, Spinoza took full and detailed account of the various well-documented failures — the upshot (as he saw it) of confused or `imaginary' ideas, conjoined with the seemingly contingent nature of historical events as viewed sub specie durationis - that had characterized all societies to date, from Old Testament to present-day times. And it is precisely in his treatment of these manifold errors — these sources of imaginary `misrecognition', as Althusserian theory would have it — that Spinoza once again anticipates the interests of modern critical thought.
It will be clear by now that this book is addressed more to students of recent intellectual history — in particular, of French post-structuralism and its various offshoots — than to scholars who have specialized mainly or exclusively in the study of Spinoza's [17] work. Nevertheless I would hope that its arguments stand up in light of the best - and not only the most up-to-date - philosophical commentaries on Spinoza. As usual, I have derived much benefit and stimulus from discussing these issues with my colleagues and friends in Cardiff, especially Robin Attfield, Kate and Andrew Belsey, Carol Bretman, Simon Critchley, Terence Hawkes, Kathy Kerr, Nigel Mapp, Kevin Mills, Peter Sedgwick, Ian Whitehouse and Zouher Zoughbi. Thanks also to Robert Stradling and Scott Newton, for directing my attention to some first-rate historical background material; to Kathy, Nigel and Peter (again) for reading the typescript with exemplary thoroughness and care; and to Michael Payne of Bucknell University who invited me to give the Andrew W. Mellon lectures in Autumn, 1989, and thus got me down to some serious work on what had been, until then, a rather vaguely formulated project. I am especially grateful to Holly Henry and Brenda O'Boyle for taking time off from their studies at Bucknell to compile the Bibliography and Index. Much of the reading and thinking was done during a semester I spent as Visiting Professor at the Graduate Center, City University, New York. My thanks to David Greetham, for inviting me in the first place; to Sam Levin, Angus Fletcher and their colleagues for many hours of fruitful conversation; and to all my students at CUNY for allowing me to bring the discussion back to Spinoza whenever I could. Finally -and all too briefly - let me say how much my work on this book has been helped along by the friendship and sustaining interest of Andrew Benjamin, John Drakakis, Cheryl Fish, Paul Hamilton, Geoffrey Harpham, Tina Krontiris, Dan Latimer, Wendy Lewis and Massimo Verdicchio.
Some portions of this book have appeared previously in the journal Textual Practice and the volume Encyclopaedia of Literature and Criticism, eds. Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall and John Peck (1990). I am grateful to the publishers (Routledge) for permission to reprint material from both sources.

Cardiff, August 199
De noten haal ik uit scribd:
Zie eventueel nog ’t Review van  
David West, Reviews: Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Basil Blackwell, 1991). In: Thesis Eleven Vol 38, Issue 1, 1994 - May 1, 1994 [Cf.]

1 opmerking:

  1. Stan,
    Bedankt voor de link naar Scribd.
    Tja, die Fransen zijn aandachtige Spinoza lezers.

    BeantwoordenVerwijderen