When this book was published in Italy, almost twenty years ago, my assessment of Marxâs reading of Spinoza produced a short circuit between potentia and the virtual, of which I gave an account in the monograph which followed: Causa sui.2 Here I have added a Chapter 4, which bridges the content of both texts and continues my reflection, expanding it to include immaterial labour and the construction of the âplusâ of being.
This short circuit contained a theoretical product, already implicit in this earlier text, which emerged more powerfully and was explored further in Causa sui. This was the planning of potentia â how potentia is production, a prospective virtue, a creative texture and free force of our self-causation.
In these twenty years, many works have been written on poverty, conceived from a philosophical point of view. Universities around the world have organised seminars, conferences, and classes; academics have united against the increasing misery which we witness on a world scale.3
Yet that political ethics of which the potentia of poverty is the expression has still to be materially constructed.
I would like, in this preface to the English edition, to resume the discourse by starting out from the last sentence of Negriâs preface to the Italian text: that is, the need for a further passage âto tie the experience of poverty to an ontology of âcupiditasâ [desire], that is, of âamorâ [love]â.4
In the trajectory that these last twenty years wrote on our common body, world society, two experiences of mine embodied the tying of the experience of poverty to love, to the political concept of love. The first was the experience of extreme misery in Bangladesh in 2006, the second the experience of the oppressed people of Palestine in 2013. These two experiences profoundly challenged, and thus reinforced, the need for the construction of that political ethics, or economic ethics, which is the object of this book. These two experiences reaffirmed how far we are from an adequate knowledge of our common world. And they were, indeed, the experience of the potentia of poverty and the experience of the political concept of love: both forces striving against all undue appropriation of life, be it the misery of Dhaka, the direct product of the mechanism of Capital, or the still ongoing occupation of Palestine, the clear effect of a similar mechanism.5
While Dhaka cried out with the crude, impotent, inhuman experience of misery, there seemed to be neither space nor opportunity for a potentia of poverty. Yet living there, sharing knowledge with university students, crossing through the slums every day, every day a new line of actualisation, a new instance, a new voice surfaced, challenging misery and its causes. This voice seemed to say that there is a nature of the material which can be met only if it is common. And there is a common which is only material, it is desire. The common is desire. Poverty is the common which becomes desire, it is desire of the common. We are its potentia. In its sometimes violent internal clash with Dhakaâs slums, its children, its workers engaged in both material and immaterial labour, its strikes, its humanity reduced to nothing, in the overwhelming misery that crushes bodies and minds, the force of the struggle for life pierced through this very misery. In the intensity of material labour, this struggle against misery presented itself as a potentia of poverty, a rhizomatic virtuality seeking the lines of the actualisation of an adequate production, a just life.
Nazrul Islam, A Mountain Song, Panari GanWe are wild as the stormWe are restless as the spring (â¦)We are free as the sky(â¦) We know no kingnor any kingâs lawsWe submit to no rule or regulation,We are born free with the mindopen as the blossoming lotus.We are the murmuring flood tide of the sea and the warbling waters of the mountain spring(â¦) We are flying birds with outstretched wingsWe are bubbling laughter and gay songs.(â¦) We are the gushing river of lifeWe are the flowing waters of mountain brookswarbling singing roaringalways restless and ever on the move.kol kol kol, chol chol chol chol chol chol
âIntensity affirms even the lowest, it makes the lowest an object of affirmation. The power of a waterfall or a very deep descent is required to go that far and make an affirmation even of descent. Everything is like the flight of an eagle, overflight, suspension and descent. Everything goes from high to low, and by that movement affirms the lowestâ (Deleuze, Difference and repetition).
In Bethlehem I experienced for the first time the violence of the state and the nonviolence of a people. The violence of an occupier state and the nonviolence of an occupied people. The power of the lowest, those on the ground, to think differently, to conceive the other and herself in the difference, to empower this thought and praxis of difference, this affirmation of life against death as the inner power to be free, where depth and intensity produce individuation and love, free singularities and political love. âA free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of deathâ (Spinoza, Ethics, IV, LXVII). The Palestinian and Israeli men and women who make the choice of nonviolence in todayâs occupied Palestine, every day risking their lives, are the free men and women of Spinozaâs Ethics. They think of nothing but death: every morning when they wake up, on Fridays before they go to peacefully demonstrate, every night when they go to sleep, they know that it â the occupation, death â can suddenly disrupt their intimate life. It is like this for them just as it was for their fathers and mothers, and still is for their children. Yet they know, because they are free, that their greatest wisdom, the greatest act that they are doing, day after day, night after night, is that which meditates not on that death which comes from the outside, but radically, affirmatively, on the life that comes from within.
âRevolution never proceeds by way of the negativeâ. âRevolution is the social power of the differenceâ. âDepth is like the famous geological line from NE to SW, the line which comes diagonally from the heart of things and distributes volcanoes: it unites a bubbling sensibility and a thought which ârumbles in its craterâ. Depth and intensity are the same at the level of being, or vice versa. The vectors or vectorial magnitudes which occur throughout extensity, but also the scalar magnitudes or particular cases of vector-potentials, are the eternal witness to the intensive origin: for example, altitudesâ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition).
Nonviolence runs like a volcano underneath the violence of the State. Its act of political love is depth and intensity, the vector-potential and vector-magnitude of that altitude of being which is steadfast affirmation against any negative, against all erasure of individuation.
These two experiences deeply marked, and radically changed, my way of thinking and doing philosophy.
In the first experience, commodities needed to become a common notion and the people needed to know their potentia. But the decisive thing in the second experience was the concept of political love that nonviolent activists were striving to realise through their causa sui, their common power to produce themselves as free singularities and affirm life through difference.
Love is the power to conceive the other and to be conceived through the other. For it is the immanent construction of a surplus of being, whose freedom, whose adequate plane, cannot but be a common one. This is also the essence of adequate labour (commodity as common notion)Â â the adequate production which is the production of true wealth. This, too, cannot but be common.
As with the potentia of poverty, the path runs from commodity-imagination to common notion-adequate relation of production to the adequate knowledge and cause of production, which is the production of true wealth. With the labour of love we increase our capacity of acting and our capacity of knowing, we increase the potentia of the mind and the potentia of the body, through the very foundation and movement of the potentia of poverty. Being conceived through the other, the power to conceive through the other, their coming together: this is the construction of the common, when the free expression of individuation produces a common texture.
Love is something concrete, difficult, it is a labour. That is, a labour to construct all the places and times where virtue and potentia are the same thing.
That the workerâs labour could become love is extremely difficult too, but when it does occur, we are truly happy beings.
âAll things excellent are as difficult as they are rareâ ends the Ethics. I thus dedicate this book to the adequate love, and the adequate praxis of love; to the adequate knowledge of love, and the adequate cause of ourselves which will allow us to be happy through labour and the construction of the common being which is love; to all those who make of poverty, potentia â all excellent things, which as difficult as they are rare, however continuously, steadfastly, joyfully constitute our life.
Causa sui. Saggio sul capitale e il virtuale, ombre corte, 2009.
See footnote 11 to chapter 4.
Negri 2012 summarises this constitutive process of potentia in the articulation from conatus to cupiditas up to expressing amor, love. See Negri 2012, pp. 14â15, 30â1, and 42â5. On a new form of the political see p. 15, for the production of subjectivity, the âpowerful virtualityâ of the productive forces, see pp. 30â1, 43â5. Among Negriâs works, we should bear in mind the milestone Negri 1991 and Negri 1992, together with Negri 2013a; 2013b. Meanwhile there has appeared Negri 2017, where in II. 6, the conceptualisation has affinities with the conceptualisation that you find in La Potenza della povertà . On the concept of political love, see Michael Hardtâs work, including his online courses at European Graduate School, About love, 2007, (
See Deleuze 1984 (English translation in Deleuze 1998), and Deleuze 2006.