zondag 25 maart 2018

Vittorio Morfino (1966-), Italiaan, “publiceert o.a. over spinozisme”

[aldus de DBNG enigszins eufemistisch].
Al enige dagen houdt Vittorio Morfino mij flink bezig. Het begon met het boek dat als hardback in februari 2017 verscheen en dat komende zomer als paperback zal verschijnen:
Warren Montag and Hanan Elsayed (Eds.), Balibar and the Citizen Subject. Edinburgh University Press, febr. 2017 hardback,  1 aug. 2018 paperback.
Daarin een hoofdstuk van
• Vittorio Morfino, Intersubjectivity or Transindividuality: The Leibniz-Spinoza Alternative
Among the most curious and insistent features in the history of misunderstandings of Leibniz’s philosophy is the attempt to see within it a form of Spinozism. This is a misunderstanding in a double sense, because in order to affirm it, the complexity of Spinoza must be reduced to the same extent as the complexity of Leibniz. Already in the final years of his life, Leibniz had unequivocally expressed the problem with such a reduction in response to a letter from Louis Bourguet: I do not see how you can deduce any Spinozism from this; to do so is to jump...[cf. jstor]
Die titel - vooral 'transindividualiteit' intrigeert me - deed me verder zoeken naar hem, waarbij ik stuitte op zijn artikel
• Vittorio Morfino, “The fracture of a kantian antinomy: Machiavelli and Spinoza,” [translated by Dave Mesing; in Parrhesia Vol 23, 2015 pp.· 43-62, cf. PDF] dat ik zeer interessant vond en dat mij op verdere zoektocht stuurde. De Duitse Spinozabibliografie laat zeer veel van hem zien. Ik vermeld hierna alleen de in het Engels vertaalde boeken en de artikelen die op internet geplaatst zijn.
Het hiervoor genoemde artikel ging over Machiavelli en Spinoza; blijkbaar gaat hij daar dieper op in. Sterker, zijn dissertatie ging erover: "Sa thèse, soutenue en 1998 sous la direction de Jean-Marie Vincent, portait sur la rencontre Spinoza-Machiavel."[Cf. vandaar zijn foto links]  
Zijn vertaler naar het Engels, Dave Mesing, meldt in zijn op zijn academia.edu geplaatste CV dat volgend jaar zal verschijnen:

• Vittorio Morfino, The Machiavelli-Spinoza Encounter: Time and Occasion. [Under contract with Edinburgh University Press. Forthcoming 2019].
Dat betreft de vertaling van Il tempo e l’occasione. L’incontro Spinoza Machiavelli, [Collana della Facoltà di lettere e filosofia dell’Università di Milano “Il Filarete”, LED, Milano 2002]. Het boek verscheen in 2012 in het Frans: Le Temps Et L'occasion: La Rencontre Spinoza-Machiavel bij Classiques Garnier Multimedia (26 Mar. 2012)

Onlangs had ik een blog over Owen Hulatt wiens artikel “Structural Causality in Spinozas Ethics” zal verschijnen dat volges hem bedoeld is als alternatief voor het begrijpen van de relatie natura naturans – natura naturata. Wenu over begrippen als ‘Structural Causality’, ‘aleatory necessity’ en dergelijke kan men veel tegenkmen bij Morfino, zo zal blijken.  

• Vittorio Morfino, “The Concept of Structural Causality in Althusser.” [translated by Dave Mesing; in: Crisis and Critique Vol 2 #2 (2015), pp. 86-107, cf. PDF]
Althusser claims that ‘the immense theoretical revolution of Marx’ is the concept of structural causality. Although only drafted through a series of terms such as Verbindung, Gliederung, or Darstellung, for Althusser this concept lies at the core of Reading Capital. The aim of this paper is to show that Althusser’s interpretation of Marx is grounded on a conception of causality whose philosophical structure depends on three different thesis: the constitutiveness of relations, the contingency of relations, and the plural temporality.
Vittorio Morfino *)
Over Vittorio Mofino
Tussendoor even zijn kort cv uit Between Hegel and Spinoza, waaraan hij bijdroeg (zie onder):


 Zie de pagina van zijn universiteit en aldaar de Engelstalige PDF, waaruit zijn indrukwekkende productie blijkt. Meer over hem is te vinden in
• Giuseppe Tassone and Peter Thomas, “Editorial Introduction to Vittorio Morfino.” In: Historical Materialism, Volume 16, Issue 1, [Brill] 2008, pp. 3–8   [geheel te lezen in deze PDF]
Citaat: Morfino belongs to an emerging younger generation of Italian scholars who have taken up both Althusser’s provocation and Negri’s challenge in a critical spirit. Currently Ricercatore in the History of Philosophy at the University of Milano-Bicocca, he is the author of numerous studies on the history of Spinozism, including most recently Il tempo della moltitudine. Materialismo e politica prima e dopo Spinoza (2005). An editor of Quaderni materialisti (an innovative and influential theoretical journal in contemporary Italy), he is also a well-known commentator, translator and editor of Althusser’s ‘late writings’ and active in the Associazione Louis Althusser, which sponsored a major international conference in Venice in 2006 dedicated to the legacy of Althusser’s thought. [zie verder aldaar] *)
*) Hoe Morino tot een jongere generatie behoort is  duidelijk af te lezen aan het feit dat hij in het boek van Sonja Lavaert, Het perspectief van de multitude – Agamden, Machiavelli, Negri, Spinoza, Virno ( 2011), niet voorkomt.
• Morfino, Vittorio, “Causa sui or Wechselwirkung: Engels between Spinoza and Hegel.” In: Historical Materialism, Volume 16, Issue 1, [Brill] 2008, pp. 9–35   [geheel te lezen in deze PDF]
Vittorio Morfino, “Spinoza dans l'histoire de l'être: le principe de raison chez Spinoza et Leibniz. In: Studia Spinozana, vol. 15 (1999 [versch. 2006]), Special onder red. van Wiep van Bunge: Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism, pag. 191-204
• Vittorio Morfino, “The Misunderstanding of the Mode: Spinoza in Hegel's 'Science of Logic' (1812-16).” In: Hasana Sharp and Jason E. Smith (Eds.), Between Hegel and Spinoza: A Volume of Critical Essays.  London [e.a.]: Bloomsbury, 2012, pp 23-41.
Deels te lezen bij books.google

 Vittorio Morfino, Plural Temporality. Transindividuality and the Aleatory Between Spinoza and Althusser. Leiden: Brill [Historical Materialism Book Series #69], 2014 - paperback 2016. - 187 pages – cf. books.google dat ‘t voorwoord van Jason E. Smith en de helft van de inleiding van Morfino laat lezen.  Het lijkt mij een belangrijk boek, daarom neem ik de samenvattingen van de hoofdstukken van de uitgever over.
Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and Althusser. It attempts to understand Spinoza's thought through Althusser's insights, and in the process to better interrogate Althusser's own philosophy. From the fragmentary intuitions Althusser produced about Spinoza throughout his life, Morfino builds a new and comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy. In the later sections of the book, this interpretation is put to work to help to clarify some of the more problematic aspects of the late Althusser's philosophy, thereby offering new concepts for a materialist position in philosophy and the development of Marxist theory.
Introduction pp.: 1–17 (17)
which reconstructs briefly the meaning of Althusser's own invocation of Spinoza, in order to locate it precisely both with respect to the history of Marxism and to the use made of Spinoza in the Marxism of the present. This work of the construction of an ontology of relation is the clarification of the concept of the transindividual, a term that Balibar took from Simondon with the aim of inducing a sort of chemical reaction in Spinoza's as well as in Marx's work. Althusser's reference to Spinoza with regard to the critique of the theory of knowledge, the theory of structural causality and the theory of ideology constitute the implicit premise of the book.
1 Causa Sui or Wechselwirkung: Engels between Hegel and Spinoza, pp.: 18–45
Jacques Monod dedicates the second chapter of Chance and Necessity to the analysis of vitalist and animist theories, among which he also discusses the dialectical materialism of Engels. Engels shows how the developments of scientific knowledge render the formulation of new philosophical categories necessary: this new order of philosophical discourse appears to be commanded by the category of Wechselwirkung, thought not as the reciprocal action of two substances but as the efficacy of the totality on its elements in as much as it is the interrelation between the action of these elements. Finally, the concept of causa sui led Spinoza to rethink the classical antithesis between the necessary and the contingent. For Engels, thought is the highest attribute of matter, the most complex form of movement, which the eternal cycle [Kreislauf] of matter must return to create.
2 Spinoza: An Ontology of Relation? - pp.: 46–71
From Bayle's early Dictionary article to Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the core of Spinoza's philosophy was said to be its unheard-of gesture of making God the sole res that could be thought through the concept of substance. In line with a whole series of interpretative developments in France over the last thirty years, this chapter disperses this identification by employing a paradoxical formulation. By emphasising his negation of the substantiality of what he calls res singulares, we can locate Spinoza's originality less in having posited the existence of a single substance than his laying out the foundation for this ontology of relation. The undisputed primacy of substance over all other characteristics of being is constitutive of the Western tradition. Within this tradition, the hierarchy between substance and these other traits is structured and governed by the rule of inherence.
[Vittorio Morfino, “Spinoza: An Ontology of Relation?,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27:1 (2006), pp. 103–27]
3 ‘The World by Chance’: On Lucretius and Spinoza - pp.: 72–88
When Althusser presents the subterranean current of the materialism of the encounter, he does so, in this text as in other analogous texts ('The Only Materialist Tradition'), in an autobiographical context. Naturally when the relationship of Spinoza with Atomism is evoked, the famous correspondence with Hugo Boxel cannot be avoided, in which Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius are cited as positive philosophical auctoritates, the only case in all of Spinoza's work, if the two long passages of the Political Treatise on Machiavelli are excluded. Without wanting to overestimate the analogy, there is the same connection between the ignorance of the nature of things, finalism as an anthropo-theo-centric prejudice, and inversion in the finalist explanation of causes and effects. The summons to Atomism, then, seems to be in Spinoza an appeal to the scientific study of the laws of nature against every form of religious superstition.
4 The Primacy of the Encounter over Form - pp.: 89–112
The primacy of relations over elements characterises the works of the first Althusser. In this sense, Althusser's position as it is articulated in his 'Response to John Lewis' is well known. Leibniz holds that relations constitute reality insofar as they order the spatio-temporal structure of phenomena. Althusser sketches the features of a tradition that seems to have crossed the centuries while remaining invisible on the surface. This tradition he calls the materialism of rain, of the deviation, of the encounter, and of taking hold. This chapter maintains that the emphasis on the concepts of 'nothing', the 'null' and the 'void' has a purely rhetorical function; that contingency and the aleatory are the effect of an encounter and not of the nothing or the void. If this function is transformed into a theoretical proposition, it risks transforming the theory of the encounter into a theory of the event or of freedom.
5 The Syntax of Violence between Hegel and Marx - pp.: 113–131
With the aim of better understanding the theoretical stakes at play, this chapter demonstrates that the conception of violence found in Marx's famous sentence is commanded by a Hegelian conceptual syntax whose logical structure can be detailed in two fundamental chapters of Hegel's Science of Logic as well as in the historical dialectic found in some decisive passages from Hegel's philosophy of right and his philosophy of history. The first of the two theoretical sites where Hegel deals with the question of violence, of Gewalt, is in the third section of the Doctrine of Essence, concerned with Wirklichkeit or 'Actuality'. The other theoretical site, Teleology, emerges in Hegel from the well-known dialectic between mechanism and finalism. In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, violence occupies the theoretical space of a threshold, the border between the state and the history of the world.
6 The Many Times of the Multitude - pp.: 132–173
This chapter considers the concept of the multitude through Husserl's concept of intersubjectivity, which he presents in his Cartesian Meditations. The constitution of transcendental intersubjectivity requires the concept of the monad as a unifying mirror of a world-environment and the concept of a monadic community as a reciprocity of their mirrorings, a synchrony of the worlds. The chapter conceives the temporality of the multitude, through the attempt to read a sort of Spinoza/Leibniz alternative in the history of thought, exemplified by the two theoretical models of intersubjectivity and transindividuality. To appreciate the Spinozist concept of multitude in all its radicality, what is required is a concept of temporality that is completely different from temporal co-existence. The chapter discovers that the essential terms of Spinozist ontology, substance and modes, can be expressed entirely in temporal terms: the temporality of the substance is eternity, while the temporality of the mode is duration.
Bibliography - pp.: 174–178
donderdag 12 oktober 2017 had ik een blog "Even een Hegeltje" n.a.v. motto dat Morinno aan zijn boek meegaf.
 
Bij het verschijnen van dit boek schreef Jason Read, Associate Professor of Philosophy Portland, ME, Verenigde Staten. op zijn blog Unemployed Negativity: “Taking Form: Morfino and Zourbachvili Encounter Spinoza” – aan te raden.

Ik vermeld hier meteen dat diezelfde Jason Read in de Los Angeles Review of Books van 9 december 2014 een zeer informatief review had over de vertaling van Frédéric Lordon’s Willing Slaves of Capital: Marx and Spinoza, waarin hij goed inzich gaf over de invloed van de kring rond Athusser.
Zojuist gezien dat bookdepository de paperback aanbiedt voor €21,19 en besloten – als het eerste hoofdstuk dat ook als PDF te vinden is me bevalt - het aan te schaffen. Een boek van Brill voor die prijs! Je weet niet wat je overkomt… [De hardback doet bij bookdepository €103,01 – een cent meer dan bij Brill…]

Aanvulling 4-8-2018. In december 2018 zal van hem verschijnen:
Vittorio Morfino, The Spinoza-Machiavelli Encounter. Time and Occasion. Preface by Etienne Balibar. Translated by Dave Mesing. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
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*) videostill Vittorio Morfino, recorded at the international conference on 'The Power of the Monstrous’ at Brunel University, London, 26th-27th June, 2014 [Youtube]

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