Martin Saar over de politieke verbeelding bij #Spinoza

Graag wijs ik op het in het Engels vertaalde artikel van

• Martin Saar, “Spinoza and the Political Imaginary.” Translated by William Callison and Anne Gräfe. In: Qui Parle, Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 23, no. 2, Spring/Summer 2015, pp. 115-133 [cf. Jstor en PDF]

De eerste alinea’s luiden:

For those interested in pursuing the historical and philosophical origins of the idea of the political imaginary— a key concept in contemporary social and cultural theory— Spinoza represents a wellspring. Even if many seventeenth- century authors refl ected on the imaginary and image- mediated nature of political relationships, particularly in the connection between politics and religion, few did so as thoroughly and systematically as Spinoza. Indeed, evenmore than for Hobbes, for Spinoza the ability of the human mind to create images is an anthropological given and an irreducible dimension of all human actions and interactions.

But even for those more interested in pursuing theoretical and methodological resources for a contemporary theory of political imaginaries, something can be found here. Despite the generality of Spinoza’s epistemological conception of the imaginatio, it receives a remarkable sharpness and concreteness in his political writings. Equipped with a fine sense of the imaginative power of the mind, Spinoza systematically describes political processes and institutions as imaginative and imaginary phenomena. From this perspective, politics as a whole can be read as an area of human life in which images, projections, misjudgments, and often-involuntary associations between ideas become effective. This effectivity is expressed not only in the fact that these imaginative processes directly affect the ability of human subjects to act, namely, by strengthening or weakening their ability to guide their own actions toward certain goals. But even more generally for Spinoza, politics is a field of the immanent movement and confrontation of imaginative forces and imaginary linkages, many of which are not consciously available to the political actors.

• Response by Zeynep Gambetti. Critical Theory Summer School: ÒRe-Thinking IdeologyÓ Humboldt University, Berlin July 16-20, 2018 – academia.edu

Foto Martin Saar van hier