Van
Christopher Norris had ik al eens iets overgenomen in het blog van 12-08-2016 getited: “De Spinozareceptie zit vol
interpretatieconflicten – ook op dit webblog.”
Ik
nam daarin grote delen over uit zijn bijdrage waarvan ik wel enigszins onder de
indruk was, “Spinoza and the Conflict of Interpretations,” in het boek van Dimitris
Vardoulakis (Ed.) Spinoza Now [Univ
Of Minnesota Press, 2011].
Christopher
Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern
Critical Theory. Wiley-Blackwell, [series: Bucknell Lectures in Literary
Theory], 1991. - VII, 322 pp – niet meer in te zien bij books.google;
deels nog wel in te zien bij Amazon. De uitgever gaf het bij herdruk een veer saaiere cover mee.
from the Back
Cover: This book offers a detailed
account of Spinoza's influence on various schools of present-day critical
thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics,
deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable writings
of a thinker like Giles Deleuze. The author combines a close exegesis of
Spinoza's texts with a series of chapters that trace the evolution of literary
theory from its period of high scientific rigour in the mid-1960s to its latest
"postmodern", neopragmatist or anti-theoretical phase. He examines
the thought of Althusser, Macherey and Deleuze as well as others (including the
new historicists) who have registered the impact of his pioneering work without
any overt acknowledgement.
On the one hand, theorists like Althusser and Macherey
could celebrate Spinoza as the first philosopher before Marx to understand the
need for a riorous distinction between science (or "theoretical
practice") and ideology (or the realm of lived experience subject to
various forms of imaginary error of misrecognition). On the other, Deleuze
makes Spinoza the hero of his crusade against theories of whatever kind -
Kantian, Marxist, Freudian, post structuralist - which always end up by
imposing some abstract order of concepts and categories on the libidinal flux
of "desiring production", or the "body-without-organs" of
anarchic instinctual drives.
Er
is eerst een Preface van – ik denk – de uitgever, dan een Introduction van
Michael Payne en vervolgens een Author’s Preface. Indertijd was dat in z’n
geheel te lezen bij books.google. En ik vond het een prima stuk dat ik
bewaarde; ooit wilde ik het in een blog opnemen (waar het almaar niet van kwam
daar ik het auteurs copyright niet wilde schenden). Het is alsof ik er een
voorgevoel van had dat books.google weer gesloten zou worden? Het werk is trouwens
al enige tijd in te zien bij scribd.com. Kortom, ik overwin mijn aanvankelijke schroom en
breng hierna die, na ruim 25 jaar, nog altijd interessante tekst die dé
aanbeveling is om het boek aan te schaffen (wat ik tot heden overigens zelf nog niet deed - je kunt niet alles....).
Author's
Preface
The
name of Spinoza has not figured much in recent Anglophone literary-critical
debate. With the exception of one, fairly short-lived episode — the spell of
intensive theorizing that emerged under the sign of Althusserian Marxism — he
has enjoyed nothing like the degree of interest accorded to other leading
philosophers in the European tradition. Most theorists with a decent working
knowledge of post-structuralism or deconstruction could probably give some
account of these movements in relation to such strong precursors as Descartes,
Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and maybe Heidegger. Of course there is
disagreement when it comes to establishing precise lines of descent, or arguing
the case for this or that thinker as a source of continuing insights and ideas.
But Spinoza figures hardly at all in these various elective genealogies. Among
critical theorists — at least in Britain and North America — his writings have
been pretty much ignored, save for the occasional reference to him as an
out-and-out idealist metaphysician whose thought exemplifies the errors and
delusions to which such thinking is chronically prone. Analytical philosophers
have had more time for Spinoza, though usually by way of a 'rational
reconstruction' which concedes a few salient points of interest in Spinoza's
system while consigning what remains - the entire 'metaphysical' doctrine — to
the history of outworn ideas.
In
what follows I shall suggest that critical theorists have a good deal to learn
from Spinoza, not least because they have often been engaged all unwittingly in
a rehearsal of the same arguments. For there is a sense in which every
theoretical activity must presuppose at least some of the basic tenets of
Spinoza's thought. These include the idea that theory is capable of providing a
better, more adequate conceptual grasp of experiences that would otherwise
belong to the [12] realm of pre-reflective 'commonsense' knowledge. To
theorize is to take up a critical distance from the data of first-hand
subjective understanding, or to claim some superior cognitive standpoint from
which to adjudicate in matters of truth and falsehood. For Spinoza, it is the
chief virtue of philosophy that it enables the mind to essay this progress
beyond the partial, perplexed and contradictory evidence of the senses, giving
access to a realm of necessary truths where everything assumes its appointed
place in the eternal scheme of things. If it were humanly possible to achieve
such absolute knowledge - to transcend our creaturely dependence on the inlets
of sensory perception, the fallible workings of memory, imagination, language,
and other such sources of 'inadequate ideas' - then we would comprehend
everything sub specie aeternitatis,
or redeemed from the contingent, error-prone nature of mortal understanding.
But of course this standpoint can only be envisaged as an ultimate ideal, a
regulative notion by which (as he argues) we can and should be guided, but
which cannot be attained under the given conditions of human finitude and
temporal experience. And it is within the limits imposed by those same
conditions that Spinoza carries on his other great project, directed toward a
knowledge of actions and events sub
specie durationis, or as viewed against a background of particular
socio-hiscorical circumstances, most immediately those of the
seventeenth-century Dutch experiment in liberal democracy whose rise and
imminent fall he witnessed at first hand.1 This is the radical
Spinoza more or less unknown to Anglo-American readers, though not — as we shall
see — to French philosophers and left-wing intellectuals, many of whom continue
to acknowledge his formative influence on their own thinking.
So
this book has three main aims. Firstly, it seeks to establish the case that
nearly all the great debates in present-day literary theory have their origin
in one or another aspect of Spinoza's work. Secondly, it points to a number of
specific (mostly French) movements of thought over the past three decades where
Spinoza has figured as a major source of theoretical arguments and ideas. And
thirdly — most important — it argues that a better understanding of Spinoza's
work may help us to perceive some of the fallacies, blindspots, and effects of
foreshortened historical perspective that have characterized the discourse of
literary theory in its latest 'post-modern' phase. This seems to me a matter of
particular urgency since so much current talk has an air of
pseudo-sophisticated 'philo- [13]sophic' import which goes along all too readily with
various irrationalist and anti-Enlightenment doctrines. One thing we can learn
from Spinoza — especially from his writings on scripture, politics, and history
— is the need to distinguish between different orders of truth claim, those
that offer arguments (and invite counter-arguments) by way of establishing
their credentials, and those that trade on some mystified appeal to divine
revelation, scriptural authority, or a truth beyond the powers of rational
understanding. There is a tendency nowadays — most pronounced among critics of
a post-structuralist or postmodernist persuasion — to treat all talk of 'truth'
as a regrettable throwback to bad old Enlightenment habits of thought. In the
same way, adepts of literary deconstruction often refer breezily to
'logocentrism' or the Western 'metaphysics of presence' as if these (along with
'truth') could henceforth be dispensed with to everyone's obvious benefit,
since then we might emerge into a realm of utopian 'freeplay' where the tedious
old constraints of consistency, logic, and right reading would no longer exert
their tyrannical power. What drops out of sight in these massively simplified
accounts is the fact that the critique of scriptural revelation (in Spinoza) or
the deconstruction of 'Western metaphysics' (in Derrida) are projects carried
through by dint of much argument and rigorous thinking, intellectual
achievements of the highest order which still find room for truth, if not for
certain (revealed or transcendental) forms of presumptive truth-claim.
I
shall have a good deal to say in this book about Spinoza's proleptic
contribution to debates in post-structuralism, deconstruction, New Historicism
and other present-day schools. For the moment I wish only to advance the more
general claim: that by reading him afresh - or maybe for the first time - one
achieves a perspective on these recent ideas that makes some of them appear
decidedly wrongheaded or devoid of intellectual consequence, while others take
on an added measure of historical and philosophic interest. Nietzsche came
across Spinoza belatedly - in the summer of 1881 - but his reaction (recorded
in a well-known letter to Overbeck) leaves no doubt of his having discovered a
kindred spirit.
Not only is his overall tendency like mine — making
knowledge the most powerful affect —
but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual
and loneliest thinker is closest to me in precisely these matters: he denies
the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and
evil… 2
[14] Nietzsche's
pleasurable thrill of recognition is one that would leave many commentators
cold, although it does lind an echo — as we shall see — in the reading proposed
by a latter-day Nietzschean like Gilles Deleuze. And Deleuze for his part would
have little sympathy with those thinkers in the Anglo-American tradition for
whom it is axiomatic that philosophical ideas can be be of interest only in so
far as they achieve the requisite standards of logical consistency and truth.
Thus Stuart Hampshire: 'his (Spinoza's) is an interesting, not implausible,
account of freedom of mind, as the detachment from causes in the common order
of nature, a detachment that lasts while self-critical thinking lasts'.3
Where
the commentators divide is in the degree of significance they attach to the
passions (or the pressures of historical circumstance) that went into the
making of a work like the Ethics. For
this is famously a text that offers itself — at least to all appearances — as a
purely rational-deductive chain of arguments, one through which those passions
may have run (so to speak) like wine through ice, leaving no trace behind.
'Emotion recollected in tranquillity' — the Wordsworthian formula best
describes those readings that take the Ethics
more or less as it asks to be taken, discounting any signs of 'mental
struggle on the part of the author', or any indication of its 'origin or course
of development'.4 The words are those of Robert A. Duff in his 1903
book Spinoza's Political and Ethical
Philosophy. But Duff also registers the problems faced by any present-day
exegete who respects Spinoza’s intentions in this matter and seeks to exclude
all reference to 'extraneous' (personal or socio-political) concerns. As he
puts it:
[m]orality treated in geometrical fashion, principles
of conduct proved by an array of definitions, axioms, postulates, propositions,
corollaries, and scholia, do not now exercise the same fascination over the
student, as they did in days when mathematics was the one type of exact or
demonstrated knowledge. On the contrary, it begets in a modern reader the
suspicion of a deductive or a priori
manipulation of experience, and taints the whole atmosphere of the book.5
There
are four main lines of response to this problem, as exemplified by recent
commentators on Spinoza. One — the predominant Anglo-American line — is to dump
a good deal of the seventeenth-century 'metaphysical' baggage, but translate
its terms wherever possible into the idiom of present-day linguistic or
analytical philosophy. [15] Stuart Hampshire offers one good example of this
approach, and Jonathan Bennett the most extensive treatment overtly geared to
the interests of 'rational reconstruction'. The second response is that of
readers like Deleuze, for whom (to cite one fairly typical passage) 'the
Spinozists are Holderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, because they think in terms of
speeds and slownesses, of frozen catatonias and accelerated movements, unformed
elements, nonsubjectifed affects'.6 In short, Deleuze is already on
the path to what he will later call a 'schizo-analytical' reading of Spinoza,
one that not merely rejects the demands of conceptual coherence, clarity and
rigour laid down by commentators like Hampshire and Bennett, but which sees it
as a positive virtue in these texts that they explode such repressive 'Oedipal'
ideas in pursuit of a purely libidinal economy of instinct, affect, and
'desiring-production'.' I shall have more to say about this curious (indeed
thoroughly zany) episode in Spinoza's 'postmodern' reception-history. For the
moment I mention it only by way of signalling the sheer diversity of
present-day responses to his work.
The
third and fourth options are those that will occupy me most in the following
chapters. They both have to do with the relation in Spinoza's work between
philosophical issues of reason, truth and knowledge on the one hand, and
socio-historical or political concerns on the other. This relationship is in
turn capable of two very different (but not, as I shall argue, mutually
exclusive) readings. One is the approach adopted by theorists like Althusser
and Macherey, an approach that starts out from Spinoza's distinction between
'imaginary' (or confused) and 'adequate' (or conceptually valid) ideas, and
which then goes on to elaborate that distinction into a full-scale Marxist
'science' of material, historical and ideological conjunctures.8 The
other approach would eschew such high theoreticist ambitions for the sake of
determining just what it was, in the immediate context of Spinoza's life and times,
that led him not only to think as he did but to cast his thoughts in the form
of a treatise constructed more geometrico,
or after the manner of Euclid's Elements.9
And this takes us back to our earlier question as to whether such a text can
really be read at its own professed level of abstract universality.
What
emerges from recent historical scholarship — books like Simon Schama's superb
study The Embarrassment of Riches —
is the extent to which these same ideals went along with a progressive or liberal-democratic
ideology, one that found its closest philosophical [16]
equivalent in the left-Cartesian' strain of rational-deductive thought. But at
the same time there were forces of social disruption — religious, sectarian,
and resurgent monarchist interests — which threatened to destroy this hard-won
state of enlightened ecumenical and multi-ethnic coexistence. Schama makes the
point with reference to Spinoza's most influential patron, the
statesman-philosopher de Witt:
Such conflicts [i.e. the growing spate of trade-wars,
civil altercations etc.] remained obstinately the contentions of power,
authority, religion, dynastic amour propre and custom — the very issues that
Grotius had deemed inadequate pretexts for the prosecution of a just war . . .
At a later date, the more Johan de Witt relied on Cartesian actuarial
calculations of diplomatic contingency, the more vulnerable he became to acts
of public unreason. [In the end] he was done to death in the aftermath of a
judicial travesty perpetrated on his brother. In striving for the best possible
principles by which to arrange their relations with other states, the Dutch
succeeded only in bringing out the worst in all concerned. The world they were
condemned to live in was the world of their public ethics turned upside down.I0
Hence
— it might be argued — the ambivalence encountered so often in Spinoza's works:
on the one hand his commitment to a method of reasoning more geometrico, his address to an ideal community of
readers, a republic of learning beyond all merely partisan opinions and
interests; on the other, his enforced recognition of the fact that no such
community existed, so that thinking could only serve a practical end in so far
as it adjusted to the given conditions of prejudice, unreason, and sectarian
strife. In his 'political' writings, therefore, Spinoza took full and detailed
account of the various well-documented failures — the upshot (as he saw it) of
confused or `imaginary' ideas, conjoined with the seemingly contingent nature
of historical events as viewed sub specie
durationis - that had characterized all societies to date, from Old
Testament to present-day times. And it is precisely in his treatment of these
manifold errors — these sources of imaginary `misrecognition', as Althusserian
theory would have it — that Spinoza once again anticipates the interests of
modern critical thought.
It
will be clear by now that this book is addressed more to students of recent
intellectual history — in particular, of French post-structuralism and its
various offshoots — than to scholars who have specialized mainly or exclusively
in the study of Spinoza's [17] work. Nevertheless I would hope that its arguments
stand up in light of the best - and not only the most up-to-date -
philosophical commentaries on Spinoza. As usual, I have derived much benefit
and stimulus from discussing these issues with my colleagues and friends in
Cardiff, especially Robin Attfield, Kate and Andrew Belsey, Carol Bretman,
Simon Critchley, Terence Hawkes, Kathy Kerr, Nigel Mapp, Kevin Mills, Peter
Sedgwick, Ian Whitehouse and Zouher Zoughbi. Thanks also to Robert Stradling
and Scott Newton, for directing my attention to some first-rate historical
background material; to Kathy, Nigel and Peter (again) for reading the
typescript with exemplary thoroughness and care; and to Michael Payne of
Bucknell University who invited me to give the Andrew W. Mellon lectures in
Autumn, 1989, and thus got me down to some serious work on what had been, until
then, a rather vaguely formulated project. I am especially grateful to Holly
Henry and Brenda O'Boyle for taking time off from their studies at Bucknell to
compile the Bibliography and Index. Much of the reading and thinking was done
during a semester I spent as Visiting Professor at the Graduate Center, City
University, New York. My thanks to David Greetham, for inviting me in the first
place; to Sam Levin, Angus Fletcher and their colleagues for many hours of
fruitful conversation; and to all my students at CUNY for allowing me to bring
the discussion back to Spinoza whenever I could. Finally -and all too briefly -
let me say how much my work on this book has been helped along by the
friendship and sustaining interest of Andrew Benjamin, John Drakakis, Cheryl
Fish, Paul Hamilton, Geoffrey Harpham, Tina Krontiris, Dan Latimer, Wendy Lewis
and Massimo Verdicchio.
Some
portions of this book have appeared previously in the journal Textual Practice and the volume Encyclopaedia of Literature and Criticism,
eds. Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall and John Peck (1990). I am
grateful to the publishers (Routledge) for permission to reprint material from
both sources.
Cardiff, August 199
De
noten haal ik uit scribd:
Zie
eventueel nog ’t Review van
David
West, Reviews: Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical
Theory (Basil Blackwell, 1991). In: Thesis
Eleven Vol 38, Issue 1, 1994 - May 1, 1994 [Cf.] 
Stan,
BeantwoordenVerwijderenBedankt voor de link naar Scribd.
Tja, die Fransen zijn aandachtige Spinoza lezers.