It now seems to be a given that the history of modern philosophy recognises a line of thought that links Machiavelli to Spinoza and Spinoza to Marx. Even though this line does not represent itself as anti-modern, it does seem to prefigure and to empower the tensions, dynamics, and mechanisms of ‘alter-modernity’. That is to say, this line expresses the development of a humanistic ontology and a radical immanence at the same time as it stands in conflict with the genesis of the capitalist organisation of society. In its twisting path, this line opposes the values affirmed by the victorious modernity with ethical alternatives and a different conception of the human – that is, of the constitutive relation between the singular and the common.
The Machiavelli-Spinoza relationship has been widely explored within this framework. The great interpretations of both these authors that followed one after the other across the second half of the twentieth century emphasised the continuity of this line of thought. But moreover, within this continuity, they identified an irreducible alternative to the lines which configured the hegemonic ideology of capitalist modernity and sovereignty from Descartes to Hegel. Even today, when frequent objections are levelled against this continuity, with the indecent digging up of idealistic or naturalistic positions, the centrality of Spinoza’s materialism (in its relation to Machiavellian thought) is still considered essential. The theories prevalent today that rely on a negative interpretation of ontology, do not succeed in breaking up this awareness. And if, as is well-known, Heidegger never considered Spinoza a philosopher who could be considered a part of modern metaphysics, this sectarian underestimation not only deserves no response, but serves as a condemnation of its author.
The Spinoza-Marx line has been instead very little studied in the history of contemporary philosophy. When this has been done, it has been done starting out from the supposed continuity of an objectivist and progressive ‘revolutionary materialism’ – a continuity which presumed specific political options, in this particular case meaning diamat. The Spinoza-Marx relationship was not set on a line of altermodernity but on the line of progress. Despite and against all this, today the Spinoza-Marx theme assumes renewed present relevance [attualità], which is to say, it again becomes fully theoretical. Pascucci centres on this crux of present-day thought. The subtitle of the book is ‘Marx reads Spinoza’. The proposed themes are the virtuality of potentia in Spinoza; the potentia of poverty in Marx; the definition of the ‘common notion’ in Spinoza; and the definition of the ‘law of value’ in Marx. The thesis is that the potentia of poverty sets value free.
The volume articulates three moves. In the first, the Spinoza-Marx relation is established starting from the juxtaposition, in the development of the immanentist mechanism, of the definition of common notion in Spinoza and of value in Marx. The second highlights the faithfulness and fruitfulness of Marx’s reading of Spinoza in the 1841 Cahier. The third develops the theme of the virtuality of labour-power, that is of the potentia of poverty, through an attentive comparison of Spinoza’s and Marx’s writings, as well as of their most recent interpretations.
The questions that Pascucci poses, starting from the ‘poor’ virtuality of labour-power, are precise ones: can production be imagined, on such a basis, as a liberation of value from the abstraction which it is forced into? Can the potentia, recaptured from within the time of capital, be liberated and constructed as the time of our lives? Can Marx’s transformative praxis materially organise the potentia of Spinoza’s imagination? Steering clear of any economistic conception of Marxism, Pascucci believes that it is possible to oppose the ‘surplus-value of capital’ with ‘a surplus-concept of life: an excess of being, a dismeasure1 which annuls capital within its own production mechanism and overturns it into non-sense, which lets it vanish in the void that it is’. This thus again proposes the value of the world as a production of the poor.
I will leave it up to readers to evaluate Pascucci’s refined research, through which, throughout her entire book, she outlines the abstraction of value, the disproportion of labour, and the potentia of transformative praxis. I would like to insist on the characteristics of the potentia of poverty and on the way in which poverty can be read as potentia. We can thus say that the production of the subjectivity which emerges within capitalist development reaches its own truth only when it stands on the basis of the liberation of labour-power. That is to say, when it rests on the freedom and the infinite potentiality that labour-power has inasmuch as it originally consists of poverty. The production of commodities and the construction of life enter into contradiction and open up into a process of metamorphosis, or rather of practical transformation, when the potentia (of poverty) succeeds in expressing itself. Poverty cannot be defined in the restrictive terms of misery to which capital would like to reduce it: rather, it constantly rises up against this, continuously revealing common potentia and capacity to give rise to joy. If virtuality opens up to time and coordinates the tendency of the real, poverty is the site of both the knowledge of the capitalist violation of the common and of the revolutionary praxis that is thus necessary. Poverty is never lack, it is not a state of need; rather it is a potentia which expresses itself incessantly in the time of life. It is impossible for capital to handle it. It is constitutive of new life.
How paradoxical it seems, to identify the origin of wealth and joy in poverty! Yet, it is this relation which realises Spinozist virtuality in praxis. The movement of this poor virtuality and its metamorphosis mark, illustrate and enhance the theoretical path which defines poverty as potentia.
In the present renewal of communist thought (which runs against the further abstraction of capitalist power), more and more voices are powerfully rising up to refer to poverty as a productive force. Indeed, we have learned to read poverty as the virtuality of a common potentia. On these foundations it will probably be possible to renovate the communist experience. But how can we do this, if not by plunging our thought and our lived existence into the experience of poverty (and of its creative potential), of exclusion (and of the resistances that it produces), of the refusal of command (and of the imagination that it liberates)?
Margherita Pascucci’s book is easy to read when we follow the Ariadne’s thread which leads our intelligence and our potentia into conflict with the capitalist Minotaur. In this panorama of legends, we find other, similar ones which do not however likewise stimulate our imagination. Neither does Icarus do so, with his utopian will to fly away from the misery that capital imposes, and nor does Hercules, who as a good reformist thinks he is always stronger than the adversary, right to the point when the illusion turns into defeat. No, here our ethical and revolutionary responsibility pivots knowledge toward poverty – neither to utopia nor to the arrogance of realism – but indeed to the experience of poverty. The poor is the powerful, Pascucci tells us. She interprets Marx as a reader of Spinoza; however, maybe there is something more here than there is in Spinoza and Marx themselves. A further passage is necessary to grasp this ‘more’: namely, to tie the experience of poverty to an ontology of ‘cupiditas’ [desire], that is, of ‘amor’ [love].
Antonio Negri
The Italian is dismisura.