Willing Slaves of Capital by Frederic Lordon

Author:Frederic Lordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

THERE IS NO INTERIORITY (AND NO INTERIORISATION EITHER)

To make others’ desire like the master-desire is the utterly simple secret of light-hearted, even joyful, obedience. We could speak of ‘interiorisation’ if we so wish; but despite its familiarity, the term creates more problems than it solves. For consent always points back to the authenticity of the subject, the subject’s core, which – the very language suggests it quite explicitly – is to be found ‘inside’. But what distinguishes between consent and coercion is not topology – exterior versus interior – but the nature of the affects, sad or joyful, that are respectively associated with each.

It is the fault of the Cartesian dead ends to have spread such confusion by making interiority one of the defining elements of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Yet it is Descartes who first posits the substantial difference between Extension and Thought. Besides, up to that point Spinoza is in his own way a Cartesian – but only up to that point.41 Extension and Thought are two orders of expression of Being – unlike Descartes, Spinoza will not call them substances but attributes42 – that are absolutely heterogeneous, and as such absolutely separate from each other. But Descartes fails to maintain the substantial difference between them. Turning back to the human person and wanting it to be a subject endowed with free will, Descartes searches for an improbable link between body and mind, which ruins the initial assumption of separation. For the soul to exercise sovereign command over the body, the two must interact somewhere and have a point of homogeneity. The pineal gland thus becomes this inextricable aporia of the corporeal site of the incorporeal soul. Spinoza does not abandon the unity of body and soul. On the contrary, he takes it to the highest level, since body and soul are for him one and the same thing, considered under the different attributes of Extension and Thought. But he abandons without regret (although at the cost of the most severe incomprehension) any causal interaction between them, and therefore also any need for finding a site common to both. Produced by the encounters between bodies, affects inscribe themselves first in bodies, as variations in their power of acting; this corporality, that puts the ‘psychology of emotions’ back in the mortal coil, is not the least characteristic sign of the Spinozist difference. However, while Spinoza certainly understands affects as ‘affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished’,43 he also sees them as ‘at the same time, the ideas of these affections.’44 Thus, in so far as they are ideas of the body’s affections, affects also have a mental part. But because these ideas belong to the attribute Thought, and in so far as this attribute is absolutely distinct from the attribute Extension, they – our feelings or states of mind, as much in the common usage as in the Spinozist sense – are strictly without a site: localisation only applies to things

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