Review of the critical, interdisciplinary anthology Spinoza Now edited by Dimitris Vardoulakis with contributions by Alain Badiou, Christopher Norris, Simon Duffy, Justin Clemens, Mieke Bal, Antonio Negri and more.

These volumes in Bloomsbury's series of studies in continental philosophy arise from the editors' and authors' conviction that a study of Spinoza's views about authority can be productive politically. The volumes include works of scholarship, then, but scholarship with a purpose beyond that of understanding Spinoza. The editors and authors take Spinoza to have enduring relevance for the criticism of and resistance to harmful power structures in society today. The essays ought to be read as works themselves on political philosophy (...) and critical theory as well as works on Spinoza. (shrink)

Vardoulakis explores what Balibar means by designating transindividuality as ‘quasi-transcendental.’ He does so by turning to Balibar’s readings of Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics, the Part that is central to Balibar’s understanding of the transindividual in Spinoza. Vardoulakis shows that the quasi-transcendental in Spinoza can only be a form of agonistic relations if his political theory in the Theological Political Treatise is to account for political change.

I argue that a distinction between three autoimmunities is implied in Derrida’s _Rogues_. These are the autoimmunities of democracy as a regime of power, of democracy to come and of sovereignty. I extrapolate the relations between three different autoimmunities using the figure of the internal enemy in order to argue for an agonistic conception of democracy.

The Doppelgänger or Double presents literature as the “double” of philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelgänger is literature’s response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism’s assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as decentred. From this perspective, the Doppelgänger has a “family resemblance” to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It (...) becomes the emblematic subject of modernity. This is the first significant study on the Doppelgänger’s influence on philosophical thought. The Doppelgänger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy’s relation to literature. Vardoulakis demonstrates this by employing the Doppelgänger to read literature philosophically and to read philosophy as literature. The Doppelgänger then appears instrumental in the self-conception of both literature and philosophy. (shrink)

The paper examines the importance of monism in Heidegger’s thought. Monism is understood here as the supposition of one kind of existence, or a single mode of being. Monism matters for a better understanding of Heidegger’s approach to practical philosophy. The paper explains that monism always faced the question of how to account for action. If there is a single, unified being, then aren’t all actions merely modifications of that being? The paper traces Heidegger’s answer to this question to argue (...) that it faces two problems: Heidegger’s solution is similar to the solution in onto-theo-logy; and, it appears to make action trivial or self-contradictory. Despite that, the paper highlights the importance of Heidegger’s answer for continental philosophy. (shrink)

Sophocles seems to have already reached in Antigone the same insight about the body politic which will again be expressed in the seventeenth century by Spinoza: namely, the political has as its condition of possibility the potential for being challenged from within. Sophocles’ play starts immediately after Thebes has successfully stoved off a challenge from an external enemy – from Argos, another city state. However, during the battle, Eteocles, the king, and his own brother, Polynices, who in fact was heading (...) the Argeans, both died. Thus afterwards Creon is elected ruler of Thebes. Creon’s first act of government is to decree that Polynices’ body is to remain unburied. If the new king thought that the worse was past him after the end of the battle, he was sorely mistaken. A challenge to his degree from one of the citizens and his own niece, Antigone, will not only lead to the decimation of his own family, but also to the new king being stranded alone at the end of the play, in charge of a self-incurred desert. Antigone, a stubborn teenage girl, is the cause of challenging the sovereign of Thebes and hence the city’s body politic. (shrink)

The Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger’s entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinking—in short, the ineffectual—are critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work. -/- By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger’s response to an old problem, (...) namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality. -/- Heidegger’s conception of an action without ends or effect forgets the role of instrumentality in the tradition that posits a single, unified being. And yet, the ineffectual has had a profound influence in how continental philosophy determines the ethical and the political since World War II. The critique of the ineffectual in Heidegger is thus effectively a critique of the conception of praxis in continental philosophy. Vardoulakis proposes that it is urgent to undo the forgetting of instrumentality if we are to conceive of a democratic politics and an ethics fit to respond to the challenges of high capitalism. (shrink)

This collection, the first broadly interdisciplinary volume dealing with Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates.

The paper demonstrates how Heidegger constructed his notion of an action without ends, or the ineffectual, through his early readings of Aristotle. Heidegger initially aligns the ineffectual with the notion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, and later develops it further in Division 2 of Being and Time. The paper examines some of the implications of the conception of an action without ends. It shows that in fact the notion is absent from Aristotle and it is inconsistent. Finally, the paper briefly (...) explores the profound influence that the ineffectual has had on what came to be called in the United States ‘continental philosophy’. (shrink)

This article will investigate the paradoxical relation between iconic logos, such as the Nike logo, and architectural icons, such as the Sydney Opera House. Both logos and icons are immediately recognizable worldwide. Yet they function in seemingly radically different ways logos as signifiers of a single company: icons as signifiers that always represent something different from exactly what they are. How can these two different ways of signification produce the same result of instant recognition?

This paper explores the way that Elizabeth Presa's artworks respond to Jacques Derrida's thought. By examining how the particularity (the beside) and its supplements (the besides) operate in Presa's works, it is shown how this movement between beside and besides is also central to Derrida's thought.

In The Principles of Art, R. G. Collingwood pursues, on the one hand, a ‘definition’ of art, and, on the other, a ‘metaphysics’. The Principles is divided into three Books. Book I is devoted mostly to craft, while Book II pertains largely to metaphysics. The fact that Book II is twice the size of Book III, where the discussion of ‘art proper’ takes place, is proof enough that the metaphysical part of the Principles is not a mere excursus. Collingwood’s ontology (...) is indispensable for understanding his aesthetics, and vice versa. The crucial link is the imagination. What Collingwood calls ‘total imaginative experience’ is described in the Principles as the sine qua non of both thought and sensibility. The aim of this article is to examine the ontological import of Collingwood’s conception of the total imagination. (shrink)

How is political change possible when even the most radical revolutions only reproduce sovereign power? Via the analysis of the contradictory meanings of stasis, Vardoulakis argues that the opportunity for political change is located in the agonistic relation between sovereignty and democracy and thus demands a radical rethinking.

J’ai découvert l’oeuvre de Jacques Derrida quand j’étais étudiant dans un département de philosophie analytique. L’un de mes professeurs – un spécialiste du positivisme – parlait d’un philosophe français comme du « plus grand logicien du vingtième siècle ». Ce philosophe français, c’était Derrida. -/- J’aimerais prendre au sérieux cette assertion, en la mettant à l’épreuve d’une rencontre entre la conception philosophique occidentale de la liberté et la logique derridienne. Rencontre que je propose de mettre en scène sous la forme (...) de deux instantanés. (shrink)

Through a radical new reading of the Theological Political Treatise, Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that the major source of Spinoza’s materialism is the Epicurean tradition that re-emerges in modernity when manuscripts by Epicurus and Lucretius are rediscovered. This reconsideration of Spinoza’s political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism. Central to this new reading of Spinoza are the theory of practical judgment (understood as the calculation of utility) and its implications for a (...) theory of democracy that is resolutely positioned against authority. (shrink)

By looking at its history, this article emphasizes the importance of practical judgment for materialism. This sense of practical judgment is traced back to the function of phronesis in one of the ancient schools of materialism, namely, the Epicureans.

Vardoulakis traces the function of violence in Balibar’s theory of the subject/citizen. Doing so, Vardoulakis brings together areas of Balibar’s philosophy that are usually discussed separately, such as his work on Spinoza, his anthropology and his lectures on violence. Finally, Vardoulakis uses the presentation of the way violence figures in all these fields to offer a critique of Balibar’s conceptions of democracy and power.

1. The opening sentences of Being and Time (§1) indicate that, according to Heidegger, Plato and Aristotle raised the question of being. A page later, Heidegger asserts that Aristotle discovered th...

Spinoza and Rembrandt were contemporaries and in fact they were neighbours in Amsterdam. Even though there is no record that they ever met, it is hard to imagine that they never crossed paths. This article seeks to explore common ideas that we can find in the philosopher and the painter. This contributes both to a philosophical examination of Rembrandt and examines the possibility of an aesthetics in Spinoza.

Those of Collingwood's interpreters who insist that the science of being was abandoned in the later writings, tend to display also a marked dissatisfaction with the logic of question and answer, at least as it is presented in the Essay on Metaphysics. The most influential statement of this interpretation is undoubtedly Rex Martin's. It was initially published as an article in 1989 and was later institutionalized through its incorporation in his 'Editor's Introduction' to the Oxford University Press revised edition of (...) the Essay. I start from the assumption that Collingwood should be read as a hermeneutic philosopher. Having shown elsewhere what this means for Collingwood's conception of being and ontology, I will concentrate here to show that Collingwood's hermeneutics cannot be reconciled with an interpretation that finds no place for question and answer in his philosophy. The logic of question and answer is indispensable to the hermeneutics of Collingwood. I will argue that Martin's expunction of question and answer from Collingwood's philosophy rests on an a sense of meaning that is foreign both to hermeneutics and to Collingwood. (shrink)

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11, agonistic democracy promised to navigate away from both liberalism and dialectical materialism. How can we renew that discourse to highlight its significance in the times of COVID-19? I answer this question by looking at three articulations of the apple metaphor.

Vardoulakis examines the concept of political theology in terms of the ancient greek term "stasis." The term "stasis" means both mobility and immobility. Vardoulakis explores these seemingly contradictory meanings generate a notion of agonistic politics that challenges perceived ideas about political theology.

This article examines the connection between lying and the concept of freedom, especially in the wake of the social contract tradition. I show that the liar poses a particular threat to the social contract. As a result, lying has been portrayed as a pernicious threat to the political. This culminates in Kant’s outright rejection of lying under any circumstance. From the Kantian perspective, one can be free only if one does not lie. Conversely, Spinoza’s co-implication of virtue and power entails (...) that lying is acceptable under certain circumstances, which enhance one’s freedom. The contrast between Kant’s and Spinoza’s response to lying reveals two fundamentally different ways of conceiving freedom. (shrink)

Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty (...) and Its Other puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

Has there ever been a better time to be a Spinoza scholar? As an undergraduate studying in a large philosophy department in the 1990s, I encountered Spinoza only in a general introductory course wh...

The purpose of this article is to examine Gadamer's criticism of Collingwood's re-enactment. A parallel concern is the evaluation of Collingwood's hermeneutics of history. Given that Collingwood can be read as a hermeneutic thinker, what is the impact of Gadamer's critique of re-enactment? My response to this question focuses on the dual significance of completeness for hermeneutics. The fore-conception of completeness, on the one hand, presupposes meaningfulness. The incompleteness of meaning, on the other hand, shows that the finite human can (...) never arrive at a perfect explanation. The fusion of horizons is created by the tension that exists between completeness and incompleteness. According to Gadamer, the lack of a clear distinction between the two notions of completeness leads Collingwood to a historicist position exemplified by re-enactment. I review Collingwood's books to demonstrate that, pace Gadamer, both notions of completeness are central to Collingwood's philosophy, guaranteeing the hermeneutical stance of his thought. However, what substantiates Gadamer's dissatisfaction with re-enactment is Collingwood's insufficient grasp of the difference between human historicity and the practice of professional history. I argue that while Collingwood is correct to indicate the inferential procedure of the writing of a political history, he nevertheless forgets that the historian is still a finite human being conditioned by historical situatedness. (shrink)

This article examines the analysis of action in Division 1 of Being and Time to suggest that Heidegger makes a distinction between different kinds of action depending on their ends. But the ends of action are determined exclusively as the final ends of causality, never as instrumental ends. The article examines the effects of this move. It demonstrates that the concealment of the instrumental ends deprives Heidegger's conception of action of any sociopolitical import, undercuts the distinction between inauthenticity and authenticity, (...) and undermines the determination of theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

In this ambitious, erudite and at the same time impassioned book on conceptualisations of war since the seventeenth century, Nick Mansfield starts from the premise that war can only be thought in relation to its other. This other can assume different guises, such as peace, the social, sovereignty and so on. Mansfield persuasively argues that only a ‘humanist sentimentality’ would see war’s other as unquestionably good. Such naivete forgets that wars have always been fought and crimes have always been perpetrated (...) in the name of a purported defence of humanity, even of life itself. ‘Peace might be the most aggressive thing of all.’. (shrink)

It explains the importance of the concept of freedom in Kafka's work.

Ancient monism matters today because it reveals an alternative answer to a problem faced by ontology “after the death of god,” namely, how to distinguish between good and bad actions after the disappearance of transcendence. The modern answer in Continental philosophy was systematized by Heidegger and consists in positing that the everyday is permeated by instrumentality whereas there is a different kind of action that is noninstrumental, such as art or the thinking of being. By contrast, ancient monism holds that (...) all actions are instrumental and employs on a typology of action that relies on the distinction between techne and phronesis. Recognizing a different answer from the dominant Heideggerian one has the potential to renew the conception of the ethical and the political in Continental philosophy. (shrink)

The difficulty with democracy is always how to define the demos—the people. Can we think of democracy in a different way? My starting point is to ask what it would mean to take kratos (power) rather than demos as the starting point of the thinking of democracy. I will argue that this is consistent with Solon’s first democratic constitution and that it leads to a thinking of democracy in terms of agonism. Maybe such a conception of agonistic democracy will allow (...) us to conceptualize as well as actualize a political space not predetermined by the “fickle multitude” that can be manipulated and is pray to the forces of populism. (shrink)

Mystery is not merely a theological or literary category for G. K. Chesterton. It is also instrumental in understanding his conception of the political. The essay demonstrates the political significance of mystery through a close reading of Chesterton's short story ‘The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd’. A comparison with Heidegger's construal of the political will highlight Chesterton's originality.

The article explores the distinction between authority and authoritarianism from the perspective of the concept of sovereignty.

Vardoulakis argues that the notion of law as developed in chapter 4 of Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise does not rely on a notion of legitimacy but rather on how authority justifies itself. To demonstrate this point, Vardoulakis analyzes closely the example of Adam and the Fall used by Spinoza in that chapter of the Treatise.

Vardoulakis explores the connection between sovereignty and stasis in the work of Agamben. It considers some of Agamben's most famous formulations of sovereignty, such in Homo Sacer. But the focus is on some seemingly obscure references to Spinoza in Agamben's works. Vardoulakis argues that these references reveal the logic of Agamben's political philosophy -- including a politics of reading that influences his account of the philosophical tradition.

Vardoulakis argues that the concept of equality is determined by the distinction between three different types of equality in Aristotle. He then shows how Spinoza overcomes the Aristotelian conception by determining equality through a notion of differential power.