Impossible potential
A very interesting article from the Contretemps issue on Agamben traces Negri’s opposition to Agamben from a Spinozist point of view:
> For Negri, the concept of bare life denies the potentiality of being. Like Hobbesʼs Leviathan,
> which promotes a vision of life as subjugated and unable to resist, the
theory of
> bare life represents a kind of foundation myth for the capitalist state. It is a cry of weakness
> that constructs the body as a negative limit and licenses a nihilistic view of history. More
> pointedly, “bare life is the opposite of Spinozan potential and corporeal joy.� With this
> statement, Negri reaches the nub of his disagreement with Agamben. As an alternative
> to the Aristotelian notion of potentiality (as intrinsically and paradoxically connected to
> the act), he poses the Spinozan vision of potentiality (potenza) as the unstoppable and
> progressive expansion of desire (cupiditas).
I’ve recently been pondering something similar from the opposite direction, wondering about potential Agambenian criticisms of Spinoza, or at least the Spinoza that Damasio keeps talking about, the biologist interested in the _regulation of life_. But I don’t think it can be as simple as a confrontation of Agamben _against_ Spinoza. Agamben explicitly mentions Spinoza as taking steps (although, he says, incomplete ones) to move away from the Aristotelian account of potentiality which founds sovereignty.
k-punk suggests that Damasio, as a biologist, “concentrates on the organic, perhaps fatally equating Spinoza’s ‘body’ with the organism.” And certainly Agamben, with his painstaking disection of the very concept of the organic (which, I take it, is _the_ point of Homo sacer) would have no time for such a vitalist Spinoza. The question is (and I don’t know enough about Spinoza to even, really, attempt an answer to it), can this vitalist interpretation be avoided given Spinoza’s concentration on a particular sort of immanence? What is life if not simply the will to go on living, the organism/mechanism’s ability to preserve itself in its existence.
Can Spinoza’s ontology encompass the kind of radical break that would provide an alternative to this zombie vitalism (and vitalism is always zombie vitalism; that’s the point of zombie stories)? I may be wrong, but I think that Badiou, at least, suggests that the answer is ‘no’ in his essay, ‘Spinoza’s closed ontology’ (in Theoretical writings). The suggestion in the Contretemps paper seems to be that Virno, arguing against Aristotle’s theory of potentiality, likewise calls for an ontology that can support radical rupture, arguing for a potentiality that is not located in time and is fundamentally irreducible to the time-bound being of the act (”Far from being simply inactual, potentiality is inactualizable”).
I think, and I’m currently arguing in a paper I’m writing, that Badiou’s _event_, like this reading of Virno, can provide the new ontology of potentiality that Agamben is looking for.
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how does this vitalism fit with that of bergson/deleuze? does negri accept a version of it?
Comment by geo @ 3/30/2005 5:24 pm
I’m really not sure - I’ve only recently begun thinking about what ‘life’ might mean as a concept, and I don’t really know anything about Bergson or much about that part of Deleuze. I think maybe their idea of vitality is more to do with creativity, which isn’t exactly the same as what I was talking about (although presumably they don’t _just_ mean ‘creativity’, or they’d say ‘creativity’ and not ‘life’). Negri may well be a follower of Deleuze on this one.
Comment by Tim @ 3/31/2005 11:47 am