Spinoza for Our Time by Antonio Negri

Author:Antonio Negri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction, POL010000, Political Science/History and Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Presence then means not simply the fact of being present in truth, the unconcealed character of being, but the projection of the present, of authenticity, of the new rootedness of being. Time aspires to potency, it alludes to its productivity, it brushes against its energy. And when it does fold back upon nothingness, it nevertheless does not forget potency.

With this we may return to Spinoza and essay the counterintuitive task of linking the philosopher of Amsterdam to Heidegger. Tempus potentiae. The Spinozan emphasis on presence fulfills what Heidegger bequeaths us as a mere possibility. The hegemony of the singular presence in the face of becoming, which characterizes the metaphysics of Spinoza vis-à-vis that of Hegel, is reaffirmed as a hegemony of the ontological plenitude of the present as against the empty presence of Heidegger. Without ever having set foot in modernity, Spinoza here exits it at a single bound, in reversing the concentration of time—which Hegel and Heidegger wished to see as concluded, whether in becoming or in nothingness—into a time positively open and constituent. In the ontological condition of this absolute immanentism, love takes the place of “care.” Spinoza systematically reverses Heidegger: to Angst he opposes Amor; to Umsicht, Mens; to Entschlossenheit, Cupiditas; to Anwesenheit, Conatus; to Besorgen, Appetitus; to Möglichkeit, Potentia. In this opposition, presence, antifinalism, and possibility unite that which the different meanings of ontology divide. And at the same time, the meanings of being undergo a dichotomy—toward nothingness for Heidegger, toward fullness for Spinoza. The Heideggerian ambiguity that vacillates toward the void is resolved in the Spinozan tension that conceives the present as plenitude. If, for Spinoza as for Heidegger, modal presence, meaning the phenomenological being [l’étant phénoménologique], is delivered into liberty, Spinoza, unlike Heidegger, perceives a productive force in this being. Hence the reduction of time to presence is carried out in opposite ways: constitution of a presence that goes toward nothingness for Heidegger, creative insistence on presence for Spinoza. Through this reduction to presence, then, two different constitutive directions occupy the horizon: Heidegger may have accounts to settle with modernity, but Spinoza—who lived in modernity but never entered modern philosophy—shows us the indomitable strength of an antimodernity completely projected toward the future. In Spinoza, love expresses the time of potency, a time that is presence as action constitutive of eternity. Even in the very difficult and very problematic genesis of part V of the Ethics, one can see this conceptual process unfolding. First, the formal condition of identity of presence and eternity is given: “Whatever the mind understands under the form of eternity, it does not understand by virtue of conceiving the present actual existence of the body, but by virtue of conceiving the essence of the body under the form of eternity.”6 This is repeated by proposition XXX: “Our mind, in so far as it knows itself and the body under the form of eternity, has to that extent necessarily a knowledge of God, and knows that it is in God, and is conceived through God.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.