Spinoza's Authority Volume II by A. Kiarina Kordela Dimitris Vardoulakis

Author:A. Kiarina Kordela,Dimitris Vardoulakis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

5

Spinoza’s Politics of Error

Siarhei Biareishyk

It is a guilty reading, but not one that absolves its crime on confessing it. On the contrary, it takes the responsibility for its crime as a “justified crime” and defends it by proving its necessity.

Louis Althusser, Reading Capital

when an error makes its appearance a repression lies behind it

Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life

“I know that I am human and may have erred” reads the penultimate sentence of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (TTP 259).1 Georges Canguilhem points to the difficulty of accounting for this uncharacteristic “I” in view of Spinoza’s thought and its political intervention: “this philosophy that refutes and rejects … the cogito, the affirmation of freedom in God and people—this philosophy without subject … gave its author the strength of mind or spirit [ressort] required to rebel against le fait accompli”—all that under the auspices of a possible error?2 If in Spinoza’s ontology, because thought and extension are two attributes of God or nature, all bodies participate in thinking, then what is the function of error? and what or who errs? In the face of the eternal and infinite substance, what is the epistemo-ontological status of error? “[L]ife,” Michel Foucault says, commenting on the thought of Canguilhem, “is what is capable of error.”3 In saying this, Foucault suggests that life generates errors beyond the subject-object relation. Insofar as “error is the root of what produces human thought and its history,” this history is considered in terms of and through its interruptions and discontinuities.4 In a similar vein, the Spinozan theory of error, entailing also the process of error becoming truth, enables one to think the dynamics underlying epistemological ruptures as well as shifts in political regimes—which in Spinozan philosophy prove to be two sides of the same epistemo-ontological process.

In what follows, I unfold three kinds of error in Spinoza that correspond to his three kinds of knowledge, thereby also demonstrating the political modality of error. While every kind of error participates in truth, only the third kind, functioning according to the logic of immanent causality, can constitute a political or epistemological event—the event of error becoming truth. Elucidating Spinoza’s strategy of interpretation in the context of his ontology, I will consider the processes underlying error-becoming-truth in light of the following conditions: first, error is neither a matter of a decision nor subjectivity; second, error manifests itself not as an exception, but as a mode of political or epistemological existence; third, the epistemological value of error as truth or falsity is not determined by representation, but by the production of its own effects—of knowledge, of political regimes. Reading Spinozan theory of error in conjunction with Louis Althusser’s conception of epistemological rupture as symptomatic reading and the Freudian/Lacanian status of the unconscious enables a conceptualization of the process of error becoming truth through a theory of the encounter—between interpretation and the third kind of error. Finally, I propose to approach Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise itself as a production of the theory of the democratic republic through an encounter with a persistent erring inherent in the first commonwealth of the Hebrew state.

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