Étienne Balibar en zijn diepgaande #Spinoza-studie [4]

Ik vervolg de kleine reeks blogs over Balibar met het opnemen van een tekst van hem. Ik kies daarvoor een gedeelte uit zijn Preface in Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas. Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. Transl. James Swenson. New York & London: Routledge, 1994; reprint 2013, te weten uit de pagina’s 10 – 13.

In the first part, called "Dilemmas of Classical Politics: Insurrection vs Constitution," I give readings of three major texts, or groups of texts, of the classical tradition: Spinoza's philosophy (in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the Ethics, and the Political Treatise) inasmuch as it represents the most lucid example we have of a combination of politics and ontology; the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen inasmuch as it founds the potential identity of "man" and "citizen" (or the universal right and access to politics) on a revolutionary principle of "equaliberty"; finally, the enigmatic notion of the "internal (or inner, or interior) border" lying at the core of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, which were to become a model for much of the subsequent "nationalist" literature. Thus there is one seventeenth century, one eighteenth century, and one nineteenth century text. But also there is one text in which the "political subject" submitted to discussion is the multitude, one in which it is proclaimed to be the nation made up of free and equal citizens, and one in which it is identified with the people, as a transcendent and incarnate unity.

"Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses" is the earliest of these essays. It was undertaken in an attempt to clarify what I thought were the reasons for the unique theoretical and political importance attributed by Spinoza to the concept of "the masses," but also to clarify the high degree of ambivalence in his attitude toward what he himself considers to be the basic problem of politics—namely, the "popular" or "mass" movements as real phenomena in the field of the imaginary (hence his largely aporetic propositions intended to provide democracy, which he designated himself as the "most natural" and "most absolute" regime, with a juridical foundation, and the possibility of drawing from him both revolutionary and conservative arguments). My conclusion is that the importance of Spinoza's philosophy for democratic thinking (even today) does not arise in spite of, but rather because of these very aporias. It is precisely these aporias that allow him to frame a realistic concept of freedom, which is inseparable from the originary "transindividal" character of human nature, and a concept of community immediately associated with a dialectics of affective "fusion" and rational "communication." This latter concept is, I think, well ahead, not only of his time, but also of many of our contemporary debates on this issue.

Spinoza had a radically democratic view of the complementary functions of individual liberties and collective freedom, and also of the formidable difficulties which arise from this complementarity in practice. But he certainly had a very negative view of "revolutions," which he still considered in the "ancient" way, as mere changes in the form of a regime or in the identity of the rulers, accompanied by mass movements. This may explain his inability (or our inability inasmuch as we follow him) to express and valorize another dialectical aspect of politics, which is precisely the negative import, or negativity, of the principle on which a democratic revolution is founded (and which is best exemplified by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen—namely, the fact that any effective democratic constitution remains dependent on the idea of insurrection, which itself must always take a negative logical form. By means of a deliberate play on words, I call it the "proposition of equaliberty," meaning that equality and liberty are "identical" in practice, because neither can true liberty go without equality nor can true equality go without liberty, and I try to show that it is literally contained in the articles of the Declaration, being a logical prerequisite for its new universalistic (or "infinite") definition of the citizen. But this leads me to emphasize the inner tensions of "equaliberty," which make it anything but a stable or "axiomatic" principle, and account (at least at the conceptual level) for the contradictory forms of its realization. Having been once "declared" in history (and in fact this "declaration" or "utterance" was repeated several times, in basically equivalent forms), the proposition of equaliberty could no longer be ignored, but it could also not be implemented (particularly as a Grundnorm or a principle of the juridical order) without mediations and conflicts.

However, it seems to me that these contradictions (in the broad sense) are of two very different kinds. One group of contradictions emerged when eualiberty was combined with the antagonistic principles of property and community, or better said, with opposite, conflictual forms of these principles (the national community versus the proletarian community, capitalist properly versus property as a result of personal labor). Those are openly displayed in political discourse throughout the modern era, and in particular they provide the discourse of "class struggle" with its essential ideological references. On the contrary, another group of contradictions were mainly repressed in political discourse: which does not mean that they found no expression at all, but rather that they were institutionally marginalized and, with few exceptions, could hardly be recognized as contradictions in their own right. I suggest that this other group is underpinned by two great anthropological divisions or "differences": sexual difference, and intellectual difference, inasmuch as they are also immediately political. Not by chance, they are precisely the contradictions whose importance seems today either to relativize or to "overdetermine" the more classical forms of social conflict. This leads me to suggest that what is sometimes described with more or less clarity as a "postmodern" turn in the history of politics does not, in fact, so much refer to a new stage in a linear periodization as to a superimposition of layers of the "political," which can be hierarchized differently according to the conjunctures. I return later to these questions when confronting the more practical question of a "politics of the rights of man" as it can be defined today (see chapter 9).

Third, I include in this first part of the book my essay on Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (which I also wrote in the mid-eighties, at the time when I was working with Immanuel Wallerstein on our book Race, Nation, Class)⁶, both because it brings in a reference to the currently more and more crucial question of nationalism (to which I return in the third part), and because in my opinion it adds an essential example to the discussion of the notion of community. I was amazed to realize that the real meaning (and therefore the real reasons for the ambivalent effects) of the philosophy displayed in the Addresses remains so completely distorted and misunderstood. The reasons could be that the text is more often symbolically mentioned than actually read. But even authors who go into detail, with a good knowledge of "German Idealism," keep picturing it as an intermediary link between what they present as "Herder's cultural particularism" or "historicism") and nineteenth century racial theories, not to speak of Hitler’s National Socialism. Behind these amazing errors, I think that we can identify on the one hand lasting prejudices (themselves nationalist, especially in France) concerning "German ideology," but also on the other hand a complete misunderstanding of the role of universalism, and especially moral universalism (of which Fichte is a brilliant representative) in politics and history. The fact that some radical expressions of nationalism (and probably every symbolic institutional foundation of a national community, as a crystallization of nationalist ideology) are rooted in universalistic, not particularistic, categories and principles, will remain a mystery for anybody who believes in the absolute character of such alternatives as "individualism versus holism" or "rationalism versus irrationalism." Conversely the categories elaborated by such a consistent idealism as Fichte's philosophy of history (particularly those categories which identify subjectivity with activity) are perhaps more illuminating for our understanding of nationalism and the construction of a national "identity" than any empirical sociological explanation. At least they should be integrated into such an explanation, and this is what I try to demonstrate.

Finally, this first series of critical readings leaves us with some questions. One question has to do with the Janus face of "universalism" in politics and political discourse. It is not certain that Spinoza could be considered an advocate of universalism (he certainly is not anti-universalistic, as some quick comparisons with Nietzsche would suggest), since his analysis of transindividuality as an actually existing network of all individuals in nature refers to a deeper concept of singularity. But on the other side, the undoubtedly universalistic proposition of equaliberty, as an expression of the conquest of personal and civic rights, and the no less universalistic notion of the national community in Fichte, can (and perhaps must) enter into sharp conflict, although they have a clear historical connection. It would be attractive to refer the first to a "formal," "negative" notion of the universal (a "universal of the void," so to speak), and the second to a "substantial" universal (which could also be labeled, in another language, an ideological notion of the universal). However, the way (unexpected, in many respects) in which the question of the universal and universalism presents itself in today's "unified" world suggests to us that we abandon these kinds of traditional symmetries and leave the discussion provisionally open (I return to it in the third part).

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