The Anarchic Principle of Imagination. Speculative Materialism and Politics in Spinoza

Starting from the antinomies in Marx's notion of the proletariat, the article follows Balibar in working through unsolvable problems in Spinoza in order to tackle unsolvable problems in Marx. Of particular importance is the way in which Spinoza short-circuited the physical idea of the self-formation of matter with the metaphysical idea of the causal self-generation of Being. Both perspectives excluded transcendence, wonder, the counsels of God or any other form of meta-ontological or anti-scientific causality breaks. Although Spinoza is not capable of consistently integrating physics and metaphysics in an univocal order of reasons, in attempting to do so, he designed a series of exceptional limit-concepts that stretch from the theory of the simplest bodies to that of the transindividuation of affect and thought. Thereby, Spinoza presented a radical alternative to the Cartesian break between a mechanised nature in which there is nothing to wonder about and a metaphysical production of truth related to the transcendence of an incomprehensible God. Passing from metaphysics to politics, the article closes by showing the new political question posed by Spinoza: How to conceptualise the critical points where processes of liberation turn into oppression? Correspondingly, this demands the abandonment of the idea of politics being a radical act of liberation and replacing it through the idea that politics is a transindividual experiment in interrupting, in the process of liberation, the re-emergence of destructive and reactionary forces.