Leibniz & Ideology (3): Bibliography
I'm not sure what the criteria for inclusion is here, but if you are
interested in modern philosophers who work with Leibniz's and
Spinoza's philosophy, Deleuze and Negri make much of Spinoza and
Leibniz. Deleuze's work had quite an impact on Negri apparently
(notable because Negri is usually dismissive of most 'post-mo' stuff).
A few years back I was delving into Machiavelli and Hobbes as a 'side
project' and that led to taking another look at Leibniz and Spinoza,
among others. I doubt if most Americans are used to thinking of
Deleuze as an academic philosopher--nor Negri for that matter.
Leibniz & Ideology (3): Bibliography
Deleuze
(1968) Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (Paris: Minuit); tr. as
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, by Martin Joughin (New York:
Zone Books, 1990).
(1981 [1970]) Spinoza: Philosophie pratique; (Paris: PUF); tr. as
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, by Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1988).
(1988) Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit); tr. as The Fold:
Leibniz and the Baroque, by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993)
Negri
Antonio Negri, Subversive Spinoza: (Un)Contemporary Variations, edited
by Timothy S. Murphy, translated by Timothy S. Murphy, Michael Hardt,
Ted Stolze, and Charles T. Wolfe, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2004.
Online stuff of Deleuze
http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/liste_texte.php?groupe=Leibniz
http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/liste_texte.php?groupe=Spinoza
A wiki piece about that one term that often comes up in modern/post-mo
discourse about discourse--'multitude'. The wiki piece doesn't seem
too well written, but....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitude
Multitude is a political term first used by Machiavelli and reiterated
by Spinoza. Recently the term has returned to prominence because of
its conceptualization as a new model for organization of resistance
against the global capitalist system as described by political
theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their international
best-seller Empire (2000) and expanded upon in their recent Multitude:
War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004). Other theorists which
have recently used the term include political thinkers associated with
Autonomist Marxism and its sequelae, including Sylvère Lotringer,
Paolo Virno, and thinkers connected with the eponymous review
Multitudes.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 History
* 2 Reiteration by Negri and Hardt
* 3 See also
* 4 External links
[edit] History
The concept originates in Machiavelli’s Discorsi. It is, however, with
Hobbes's recasting of the concept as the war-disposed, disolute pole
of the opposition between a Multitude and a People in De Cive, that
Spinoza’s conceptualization seems, according to Negri, contrasted
(See: The Savage Anomaly pp. 109, 140).
The multitude is used as a term and implied as a concept throughout
Spinoza's work. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, for instance,
he acknowledges that the (fear of the) power (potentia) of the
multitude is the limit of sovereign power (potestas): ‘Every ruler has
more to fear from his own citizens […] than from any foreign enemy,
and it is this “fear of the masses” […that is] the principal brake on
the power of the sovereign or state.’ The explication of this tacit
concept, however, only comes in Spinoza's last and unfinished work
known as the Political Treatise:
It must next be observed, that in laying foundations it is very
necessary to study the human passions: and it is not enough to have
shown, what ought to be done, but it ought, above all, to be shown how
it can be effected, that men, whether led by passion or reason, should
yet keep the laws firm and unbroken. For if the constitution of the
dominion, or the public liberty depends only on the weak assistance of
the laws, not only will the citizens have no security for its
maintenance […], but it will even turn to their ruin. […] And,
therefore, it would be far better for the subjects to transfer their
rights absolutely to one man, than to bargain for unascertained and
empty, that is unmeaning, terms of liberty, and so prepare for their
posterity a way to the most cruel servitude. But if I succeed in
showing that the foundation of monarchical dominion […], are firm and
cannot be plucked up, without the indignation of the larger part of an
armed multitude, and that from them follow peace and security for king
and multitude, and if I deduce this from general human nature, no one
will be able to doubt, that these foundations are the best and the
true ones.
The concept of the multitude resolves the tension that scholars have
observed in Spinoza’s political project between the insistence on the
benign function of sovereignty (as witnessed in the quotation above)
and the insistence on individual freedom. It is, we see here, a truly
revolutionary concept, and it is not difficult to see why Spinoza’s
contemporaries (and, as for instance Étienne Balibar has implied, even
Spinoza himself) saw it as a dangerous political idea. .....
[edit] Reiteration by Negri and Hardt
Negri describes the multitude in his The Savage Anomaly as an
unmediated, revolutionary, immanent, and positive collective social
subject which can found a ‘nonmystified’ form of democracy ( p. 194).
In his more recent writings with Michael Hardt, however, he does not
so much offer a direct definition, but presents the concept through a
series of mediations. In Empire it is mediated by the concept of
Empire (the new global constitution that Negri and Hardt describe as a
copy of Polybius's description of Roman government):
New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the
conjecture of events, in the universal nomadism […] They are not posed
merely against the imperial system—they are not simply negative
forces. They also express, nourish, and develop positively their own
constituent projects. […] This constituent aspect of the movement of
the multitude, in its myriad faces, is really the positive terrain of
the historical construction of Empire, […] an antagonistic and
creative positivity. The deterritorializing power of the multitude is
the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the
force that calls for and makes necessary its destruction. (Empire, p.
61)
They remain however vague as to this 'positive' or 'constituent'
aspect of the Multitude:
Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation [of wealth
from capital] and selforganization [of the multitude] reach a
threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is
really affirmed—when the genesis is complete and self-valorization,
the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian
management of production become a constituent power. […] We do not
have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through
its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when
and how the possible becomes real. (Empire, p. 411)
In their sequel Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire they
still refrain from a clear definition of the concept but approach the
concept through mediation of a host of ‘contemporary’ phenomena, most
importantly the new type of postmodern war they postulate and the
history of post-WWII resistance movements. It remains a rather vague
concept which is assigned a revolutionary potential without much
theoretical substantiation.
Sylvère Lotringer has criticized Negri and Hardt's use of the concept
for its ostensible return to the dialectical dualism in the
introduction to Paulo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude (see external
links).
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