montag, imitating the affects of beasts

Volume 20, Numbers 2 and 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-2009-004

© 2009 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

warren montag

Imitating the Affects of Beasts: Interest and Inhumanity in Spinoza

In Naissance de la biopolitique, the text of his course at the Collège de France in the academic year 1978–1979, Michel Foucault argues that two distinct forms of governed subjectivity emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: first, the legal subject (le sujet de droit), the individual conceived as possessor of rights and foundation of legitimate sovereignty; and second, the subject of interest (le sujet d’intérêt), a subject of calculation and choice. In opposition to the legal subject, the subject of interest did not determine the legitimacy of states but rather their practi-cal ability to exist: the state that fails to take into account the basic fact that all individuals pursue their own interests will, irrespective of its legal status, soon cease to govern at all. In fact, according to the mode of governmentality that emerged in the eighteenth century, individuals, Foucault maintains, were said to be governable only to the extent that they were understood as subjects of interest. Interest alone, understood as a calculation of gain and loss, would render their conduct, not only in what we understand today to be economic matters but even in their most intimate and private choices, both intelligible and predictable.

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Foucault has thus drawn a line of demarcation within the cat-egory of the subject insofar as it became the object of critical analysis in post–World War II French philosophy: not only is there no single subject into which the legal subject and the subject of interest might be amalgam-ated, but Foucault cautions us against assuming any sort of homology (whether formal or historical) between them. If legal and moral philoso-phies took the subject of right as their point of departure in their defini-tion of legitimate authority from the beginning of the seventeenth century (Suarez and Grotius to Hobbes and Locke), the subject of interest, at least until the middle of the eighteenth century, remained the province of a shadowy raison d’état, which announced, as much in opposition to early liberal and republican philosophies as to the legacy of medieval Christian political thought, that it would regard human beings not as they ought to be but as they were.

But what were they? A. O. Hirschman has shown that the lust for power and possessions once denounced as sin came to be understood as an unalterable property of human nature and thus part of a design: if individu-als were governed by interest, this interest, which as Bernard Mandeville suggested appeared at a certain level to be a vice (and which might take the forms of selfishness, greed, or lack of charity), regarded at a superior level, that is, from the perspective of its results on the scale of society as a whole, could be understood as the instrument of a general good, or at least prosperity that would itself furnish many of the conditions of such a good. There emerged from this line of investigation a vision, from which we haven’t entirely freed ourselves, of a utopia far more compelling and durable than any dream of communism: that of a society whose perpetual advance in material and cultural terms is guaranteed by autonomous individuals pursuing their interest free of interference (by states or by shadowy combinations of envious and irrational workers or consumers, the former often acting at the behest of the latter) whose actions combine to produce a rationality beyond the comprehension or design of human beings. We were and are assured that such a society cannot fail to offer a stability heretofore unimaginable: irreversible prosperity without crisis or dearth that would in turn provide the base for a politics without need of revolution or repression.

However tempting it may be at this point to link the themes of government by consent and the economics of free choice, Foucault injects a note of caution: while the legal subject and the subject of interest are associated historically, they remain in important ways distinct. In fact,

56 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

citing the example of Hume, he will postulate as a characteristic of political thought from the middle of the eighteenth century on a tendency to grant a permanent excess of interest over right, as if the former animates and gives content to the otherwise empty forms of the latter. While interest can invalidate law and right, law cannot dissipate interest, even if the force of law can hold it in abeyance. The contract (private or public and social) is no longer binding in irresistible fact if it fails to serve the interests of one of the parties. Foucault observes that while much attention in the last decades had been devoted to the genesis of the legal subject, far too little thought has been given to the specificity of the subject of interest and its historical emergence, and it has thus remained the unthought-of political speculation, liberal and Marxist alike.

Foucault’s admittedly schematic treatment of the two forms of subjectivity and their relation to what he calls governmentality raises a number of questions, of which one in particular is important for the discussion that follows. It may well be the case that Foucault too quickly reduces the subject of interest to “the model of homo economicus,” that is, the theory of human conduct that one finds, for example, in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the not very distant predecessor of the utility maximer whose choices furnish grounds for so much contemporary social science. Interest more broadly conceived (beyond not only mere economic interest but even “self-interest”) was the object of a great deal of speculation and debate a good century before the appearance of Smith’s masterpiece. In fact, the deduction of right from interest and the assertion of the perma-nent excess of the latter over the former is arguably to be found in Hobbes’s Leviathan. At the same time, Spinoza’s relation to these discussions and debates has remained in question. He appears in Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests as a partisan of interest against Christian moralizers, only to disappear altogether from Pierre Force’s extremely comprehensive and interesting work, Self-Interest before Adam Smith. The disappearance, or rather invisibility, of Spinoza, who manages to haunt these discussions all the more when he has no apparent place in them, is absolutely typical and indeed necessary: in a certain sense he represents what must be placed out of bounds for the discussion to take place as it has. Enough has been said about Spinoza in the last thirty years, not only by well-known French and Italian scholars but also by historians such as Jonathan Israel, for it to be clear that Spinoza was an opponent of every theology of transcendence, as well as the moralism that is the necessary correlative of such theologies. I want to ask, however, whether it is not possible in addition to understand


his work as a whole in relation to what Foucault called the two forms of modern subjectivity, the subject of law or right and the subject of interest. Some of the most important contributions in recent Spinoza scholarship have demonstrated Spinoza’s critique of the idea of the subject of right, his insistence that right in any meaningful sense is coextensive with power and that a contract is nothing more than an expression of a relation of force (which is quite distinct, needless to say, from deducing right from interest). Accordingly, I want to argue that just as we can read parts of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (ttp) and the entire Tractatus Politicus (tp) as cri-tiques of the legal subject (and of the entire apparatus of right, contract, and consent), it is possible to see the Ethics as containing one of the most rigorous critiques of the concept of the subject of interest ever written.

To approach this critique, however, we must first acknowledge and explain not only the appeal of Spinoza to the partisans of interest (who are themselves, albeit unwittingly, partisans of the concept of the subject of interest), but also his incontestable influence on figures as varied as Mandeville and Ludwig von Mises. Both drew inspiration from Spinoza’s epigrammatic utterance at the conclusion of the preface to Ethica 3: “I will therefore discuss the nature and force of the affects, as well as the power of the mind over them according to the same method I just employed in relation to God and the mind, and I will consider human appetites and actions as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies.” The move from moralistic denunciation of the affects or passions to the project of comprehending them as necessary parts of nature opened the possibil-ity of judging them by their effects rather than according to theological prejudices. This, together with the idea that God is the immanent cause of all things, allowed a kind of sanctification of the effort to preserve one’s own being. That which preserves one’s being is good and that which harms or threatens to harm it is bad; we are thus led by nature and our nature to choose the good over the bad, to choose that which is useful over that which is harmful.

Certain philosophers of the period turned to the stoic tradi-tion to assert that the effort to conserve one’s being was the prompting of Providence within, our desire seeking the end proper to the design of nature as a whole. The Greek term όρμή (“instinct” or “inclination”) cap-tured the sense in which individuals were impelled to serve natural ends, an impulsion that they experienced as desire. Thus the sexual impulse that individuals sought to gratify served the natural end of the propaga-tion of the species. Such notions were easily adapted to society by later


thinkers. The effects of what were once denounced as selfish passions, understood at the level of society, produced a system that would relieve the sufferings of the poor far more effectively than the self-sacrifice and denial involved in acts of charity (which, insofar as they involve renuncia-tion and a kind of diminution of the individual in question, might be seen as a refusal of Providence). In this way, necessity and morality could be happily made to coincide and the subject of interest made to rest on the natural foundation of self-preservation. This became for Hobbes the basis for a society without conflict (if, that is, he could persuade individuals genuinely to fear physical death and surrender their hopes of the world to come) and for later thinkers such as Mandeville and Smith the ground for a theory of social progress and prosperity (themselves the only real guarantee of social order): individuals, understood as subjects of inter-est, will choose life over death and prosperity over poverty. Finally, while Foucault was undoubtedly correct to argue that the subject of interest in the course of the eighteenth century comes to exceed the subject of right, it is nevertheless true that the legal subject provided the form that the subject of interest tended to take in philosophical speculation: the essentially solitary individual who preserves himself without regard or responsibility for others.

What was Spinoza’s relation to these currents of thought? In common with the Stoics, as understood by Cicero, and with Hobbes, he uses the term conatus, derived from the verb conor that, as Pierre Macherey has observed, “has the double meaning of an attempt and an engagement” (80). For Cicero, every animal seeks to be its own preserver and is endowed with self-love in order that it will desire not only its own persistence but that of its kind (De finibus bk. 4, sec. 7–8). The conatus is thus the point at which the individual’s self-love coincides with the ends established by Providence. The conatus becomes the striving toward an end, and the entirety of human culture can be understood as the means peculiar to humanity for the attainment of that natural end. Hobbes translates conatus as “endeavor, the internal beginning of voluntary motion as in walking, speaking, striking and other visible actions.” This endeavor, in turn, is governed by a law of nature, which Hobbes describes in moral and legal terms even though it functions like the laws that determine the motion of bodies: “[A] man is forbidden to do that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved” (189). Indeed, Hobbes’s entire theory of the stable commonwealth is predicated on the idea that individuals will (and not simply should) act to preserve their own lives and may therefore


be counted on to perform their covenants and obey the laws of the com-monwealth as long as there is “a visible power to keep them all in awe”: the Leviathan. The theoreticians of self-preservation as natural principle who followed Hobbes (particularly Mandeville and Smith) tended to fault him for failing to penetrate beyond the appearance of discord to the underlying harmony it concealed; self-seeking individuals not only unwittingly real-ized the goals of nature, they just as unwittingly served to create a social harmony whose design remained invisible to them. While they believed they acted only to secure their own prosperity with indifference, if not active enmity, to others whose pleas for material aid or even mere pity were received with scorn, they in fact contributed to the general welfare to a far greater extent than any voluntary act of assistance. Thus interest was not merely the real motive for human action; it was just as importantly laudable, worthy of the approbation that prejudice denied it.

The term conatus as it functions in the Ethics (esp. pt. 3, prop. 4–8) has as little in common with these ideas as Spinoza’s “God, or Nature” does with the God of Christianity. First, conatus is not peculiar to human or even animate existence; it is neither instinct nor voluntary or animal motion. It is not inscribed in a providential design, nor does it describe the way that every individual in animate nature acts, with the end of its own preservation in view, an end that in turn serves the end of the preservation of the species of which it is a member, which itself preserves the delicate balance of species as a whole in nature. Spinoza’s conatus is disengaged from any teleology; it is simply the tendency for any singular thing (res singularis) at all, animate or inanimate, a stone or a human being, to persist as it is. The conatus of each singular thing “is nothing other than its actual essence” (Ethica 3, prop. 7), a phrase that rules out any final-ism (immanent or transcendent); the thing is not striving to realize its essence or potential. The essence of a thing coincides entirely with its actual existence and has no meaning outside of that existence (“by reality and perfection I mean the same thing”). To complicate matters further, a singular thing, far from exhibiting an irreducible simplicity, is “several individuals [plura individua] concurring [concurrant] in one action, such that they are all simultaneously the cause of the same effect” (Ethica 2, def. 7). This definition is extremely important in a number of respects for any understanding of the conatus. How can a “thing” that is nothing more than a number of other things united long enough to produce an effect be endowed with something like an “instinct” or impulse of self-preservation? Further, if Spinoza’s definition, as rendered in English, would appear to confer upon the thing a kind of precariousness, the Latin verb Spinoza


has chosen here to denote the “unification” of several individuals into one underscores its precariousness even more. Concurro is derived from the verb curro, to run. Concurro is a running together, but in two distinct senses: it can signify both a rapid assembling together and also a running to meet in combat. It is, in other words, the most unpredictable, fragile, and temporary unification that would merit the name. Further, it is worth remarking that although Spinoza’s discussion of singular things at this point and later in Ethica 2 is derived from Lucretius, his account of the tendential unity of the bodies of which any thing is composed is even more cautious than any found in De Rerum Natura. Lucretius employs a verb that Spinoza freely appropriates in the Ethics, convenio, which means both to come together and to agree, capturing the simultaneity of body and mind upon which Spinoza repeatedly insists. The allusion to Lucre-tius is important here: singular things are formed through an encounter between bodies capable of simultaneous agreement and assemblage. Once composed through such an encounter, the thing will persist indefinitely and can be destroyed only by an external cause. The conatus is then noth-ing more than the tendency for such a composite assemblage to persist. Neither the human nor even the animate thus stands apart from or in any way transcends physical nature; we are subject to its determinations as is any other existing thing. These determinations, insofar as they increase or diminish the power of the body to act and the mind to think, Spinoza calls affects. It is in relation to the affects alone that the conatus can be understood. We live our actual essence as appetite, and to the extent that we are conscious of this appetite, we desire.

Here we must confront a possible objection: is it not the case that Spinoza has simply recast the subject of interest, depriving interest of its subjective character, it is true, but nevertheless granting each thing the tendency to persist in its being, a tendency that, in the case of human indi-viduals, will lead them to choose that which aids them in their persistence and to avoid that which threatens it? Has not Spinoza posited an internal finality according to which each thing tends insofar as it is able to seek the end of its own preservation, as both the Stoics and Hobbes held? If such a reading is tenable, then Spinoza has provided a foundation for a theory of human action, understood as a choice among alternatives, perfectly compatible with the theoreticians of interest. Even if the subject of inter-est derivable from Spinoza’s conatus is in no way reducible to the model of homo economicus, the human individual as understood in the Ethics is constantly faced with the ethical alternatives of the utile and the malum.


However, as Macherey has remarked, Spinoza develops the notion of the conatus at the beginning of Ethica 3 in a provisional and artificial state of isolation. The conatus in the Ethics is simultaneously a principle of singularization (or individualization) and a principle of trans-individualization. Constant interactions with bodies and forces external to it are the condition of the very existence of any thing and are as such unavoidable, but such encounters carry risks as well as benefits. All that follows the account of the conatus in propositions 4–8 of the third part of the Ethics serves to demonstrate that the distinction between the conatus as internal cause and as the infinity of external causes cannot hold. In fact, in any important sense, there are no internal causes, only external causes compatible with our being that precede our being the cause of an effect, which will in turn become an effect ad infinitum (and in this way increase an individual’s power and virtue), or, in contrast, external causes incompatible with us, which weaken or decompose the concurrence of the bodies of which we are comprised (diminishing our power). There can be no withdrawal from nature, including that part of nature that is the human world: “[W]e can never bring it about that we do not need what is external for the conservation of our being and live without commerce with the things that are external to us” (Ethica 4, prop. 18, schol.). We should not be misled by Spinoza’s use of the term things (rebus): among the things we need, as he makes clear in the remainder of the sentence, are other human beings.

If, for example, we examine our mind, it is certain that it would be more imperfect if the mind were alone and had nothing other than itself to comprehend. There are thus many things outside of us that are useful to us, and which we therefore desire. And among them we cannot conceive of anything better than those that agree [conveniunt] with our nature. If, for example, two individuals having the same nature are joined together [jun-guntur], they compose an individual twice as powerful as each one taken separately. For man, therefore, there is nothing more useful than man.

But if the human world tendentiously increases the power of each individual, “disposing the body to be able to be affected in a greater number of ways by external bodies” in ways that “render it able to affect other bodies” in its turn, it often, perhaps more often, subjects the indi-vidual to affects that weaken the body and mind. I have noted elsewhere


Spinoza’s fascination with automatons and somnambulists: those entirely subjected to determinations external to them and forced to serve tyran-nies inimical to their own well-being, all the while desiring nothing but what the tyrant commands. To the list of the figures of human servitude, however, we must add an even more disturbing character: he who dreams with his eyes open and, in the grip of conflicting affects, observes himself with horror as he “sees the better and pursues the worse” (Ethica 3, prop. 2, schol.). This phrase, or some version of it, occurs three times in the Ethics:

But to tell the truth, if from experience they did not know that they not infrequently do something that they later regret, and that often, when they are in the grip of opposing affects, they see the better and pursue the worse [meliora videre, et deteriora sequi] nothing would prevent them from believing that they act freely in all things. (pt. 3, prop. 2, schol.)

The powerlessness [impotentiam] of human beings to restrain and limit the affects, I call servitude; in effect a man subject [obnoxius] to the affects is not under his own authority, but that of fortune [sui juris non est, sed fortunae], whose power is such that he is often constrained, although he sees the better, nevertheless to pursue the worse [quanquam meliora sibi videat, deteroria tamen sequi]. (pt. 4, preface)

In this way, I believe that I have shown why men are moved more by opinion than by true reason and why the true knowledge of good and bad excites the soul and gives way to every kind of libidinal desire; from which comes the phrase of the Poet: I see the better, approve it, and pursue the worse [ Video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequo]. (pt. 4, prop. 17, schol.)

There are many observations to be made about these three passages. In the first, the fact that we in certain cases know clearly what the utile is but pursue (as I have translated sequor) what is harmful to us, what will diminish our power, allows us to see what is usually invisible to us: that our will is merely an effect of causes external to it and not the cause of our actions. And this is not only the case in actions that are harmful to us: an individual thinks that he is the cause of the painting that he makes only because he is conscious of the desire to make a painting and unaware of the causes of his desire, the determinations that move both body and mind simultaneously. In the second passage, which follows the first fairly


closely, the phrase takes on a more specific ethical and political function: it reveals that the nature of “servitude” is to act or be acted upon in ways that weaken us, including fighting a war in the interest of the tyrant who oppresses us. But it also suggests that human beings are always affected in contrary ways by antagonistic affects, some impelling us to greater power, others to weakness and even decomposition (and it is in Ethica 4 that Spinoza will consider the forms by which we destroy ourselves slowly and imperceptibly, as well as the case of desiring and bringing about our own death at the behest of causes external to and incompatible with our nature, that of suicide).

In the third passage, Spinoza attributes the phrase he has already used twice without any indication that it was a citation to, simply, the Poet. In fact, it is a verbatim citation of Medea’s words in book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as she struggles to “shake off” (excute) the passion she has inexplicably conceived for the foreigner and enemy, Jason (line 17). The statement differs from the two preceding versions not only by the fact that it is in the first person rather than the third but also because it contains an additional element that sets the mind in partial conflict with the actions of the body. The speaker not only sees the better but “approves” or “judges” (proboque) it to be so. He not only perceives but knows through the mental act of judgment that it indeed is the better, and yet he pursues the worse. It is here that Spinoza tips his hand: to assume that individu-als follow their interest not only as conceived abstractly according to some philosophical system but even as they themselves define it is simply another form of “conceiving men not as they are” but as the philosophers want and need them to be.

The subject of interest, in all its diversity, from Hobbes to Smith, rests on a fantasy of how people should be rather than how they are, even if its norms diverge from those of Christianity. Spinoza, in fact, rules out even the concept of a deceived subject of interest: the problem here is not that people pursue illusory rather than real interests or those of others rather than their own without knowing it. Spinoza’s example leads to a far more disturbing conclusion: while we sleepwalk through the motions of obedience to that which weakens and destroys us, a part of us is awake to see and understand our utter subjection to what we know is the worse. It is not that we are ignorant but that our knowledge, our use of reason, is powerless in the face of the determinations that compel us, against what we know to be the case, to follow the worse. Immediately after the citation from “the Poet,” Spinoza adds another citation as a kind of gloss: “It is this that


Ecclesiastes seems to have had in mind when he said: Whoever increases knowledge, increases pain” (dolorum; in the Hebrew text of Ecclesiastes, :with which Spinoza was familiar (the verb is to feel pain, to suffer ,(קהּלת To see the better, to know it and understand it, and .(ויוסיף דעת יוסיף מבאוכsimultaneously to see oneself follow the worse and, even more pathetically, be forced by our very reason to acknowledge that a part of us desires to fol-low the worse, would be enough to make anyone but Spinoza turn away in despair. But knowing that which determines us and the extent of its power increases our own capacity to modify it: there is no surer road to servitude than the belief that we alone determine our actions by the exercise of the will. In part 4 of the Ethics, “Of Human Servitude,” the notion of the indi-vidual as subject of interest is shown to be a cruel hoax or, better, a kind of denial that masks the ways in which we are “constrained” to choose that which harms us and weakens the powers of body and mind (and it is worth remarking in passing that nothing suggests that the pursuit of the greatest possible wealth would in any way augment the powers of mind and body or that the very model of homo economicus would not constitute for Spinoza a form of seeing the better and doing the worse, that is, of slowly destroying oneself in the service of causes outside of us).

We may now understand that our conatus impels us into inter-actions with a great number of other things in the interest of our very survival, let alone the increase of the power of mind and body, but that such encounters are full of risk as well as opportunity; we may be made more powerful by the joyous affects of mutual love and desire or weakened and destroyed by the sad affects of hatred and self-hatred. Of all the things that affect us, none have greater force than things themselves affected by affects. “When we imagine that something we love is destroyed, we feel sadness; if we imagine it conserved, we feel pleasure” (Ethica 3, prop. 19). But beyond mere destruction or conservation, there exists, in certain things at least, the possibility of joy at that which increases power and thus tends to a thing’s conservation and, in contrast, sadness at that which weakens a thing and renders it liable to destruction. If we imagine a thing itself capable of being affected by affects of joy and sadness that we further judge similar to ourselves, we will be affected by the same affects (Ethica 3, prop. 27). Spinoza will call this propensity “the imitation of the affects” (Ethica 3, prop. 27, schol.).

The concept of affective imitation, although absolutely central to Spinoza’s social and political thought, received very little attention until relatively recently and remains to an important degree unexplored.


It raises a number of questions and problems, all of which are relevant to understanding the resistances to the category of the subject of interest by philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Against the idea of individuals affected by their own passions alone, calculating an interest peculiar to them, Spinoza and a number of his contemporaries developed an entire vocabulary of transindividual affective existence in which affects neither originate nor are contained in discrete individuals but are “communicated,” or “transmitted,” from one to another outside of both knowledge and control. Such communication might be viewed, as it often was, negatively, as a “contagion” by which various harmful follies spread across great numbers of people, but it was also understood as a means of influencing weak minds in the interests of public good. The 1670s wit-nessed, probably in reaction to the translation of Hobbes’s work into vari-ous European languages by the beginning of the decade, the introduction into philosophical and political discourse of a number of such concepts, notably in the work of La Rochefoucauld and Malebranche, in addition to Spinoza himself. The extent of Spinoza’s convergence or divergence from these and other like-minded thinkers remains to be determined.

I want to focus on an aspect of Spinoza’s discussion of the imita-tion of the affects that has so far received little attention. We imitate the affect we imagine affects a thing similar to us (res nobis similis). This might appear to be merely an extravagant way of denoting our fellow human beings that all the other thinkers of transindividual affectivity assume without discussion, without making any concessions to a theoretical humanism that would place the human outside of nature (human beings are finally things among other things, etc.). I propose, then, to examine a passage in which the propensity to “see the better and do the worse” is tied directly to the imitation of the affects: the scholium to Ethica 4, proposi-tion 68, Spinoza’s final word on the parable of the first man. If man were born free—that is, free of the sad affects that diminish his power to act and think and to persist in his being—he would form no ideas of good and evil. But he lives in a world of servitude, subject to the affects of things similar to himself that he imitates without wanting to or knowing that he does.

It is this as well as other things that we have already demon-strated that Moses seems to have meant in his history of the first man. We can conceive in this history no other power of God than that by which he created man, that is, a power by which he sought only the utility of man and it is in this sense that it is


narrated that God forbade free man from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that as soon as he ate from it, he would fear death rather than desire to live. Then, man having found woman, who completely agreed with his nature, he knew that there could be nothing in nature more useful to him than she; but that, believing that the beasts were similar to him [bruta sibi similia esse credidit], he soon began to imitate their affects [see Ethica 3, prop. 27] and allowed his freedom to escape, which was later recovered by the Patriarchs led by the Spirit of Christ, that is, by the idea of God, on which alone depends the fact that man is free and desires for other men the good he desires for himself.

Deleuze has very accurately described Spinoza’s “fascination” with the problem of evil, a fascination that overpowered his caution and led him to express himself quite imprudently to the Calvinist Willem von Blyenburgh. In three letters written between December 1664 and February 1665, Spinoza returned to the parable of the first man, a par-able that he discusses, in addition to his exchange with Blyenburgh, in each of his major works: the Short Treatise, the ttp, the Ethics, and the tp, each time with a slightly different emphasis, as if he sought to use the passage from Genesis for a number of purposes. Of all these discussions, the passage from the Ethics is by far the most wide ranging, as well as the most elliptical, and poses numerous difficulties. Spinoza’s discussion begins by acknowledging the obscurity of the “history of the first man” in its concrete textual existence. He claims to be able to do no more than determine what Moses “appears to have meant” in this history, a claim that assumes Moses’s authorship when it was none other than Spinoza himself who had argued in the already published and far more accessible ttp that “it is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone who lived many generations after Moses” (bk. 8). Rather than examine the scriptural passage to which he refers, however, he invokes in a remarkably condensed way a number of distinct themes already developed in Ethica 3–4. Adam was free in that he not only could but did endeavor to persist in his being and to increase the power of the body to act and the mind to think. As a particular expres-sion of God’s power, he sought only the utile and thought of nothing but life and living: in this sense, Adam is the portrait of the homo liber or free man, the possibility of which occupies the concluding propositions


of Ethica 4. In Spinoza’s earlier texts, the prohibition that God addresses to Adam was neither legal nor moral, but causal: “God revealed to Adam that eating of that tree brought about death in the same way that he also reveals to us through our natural understanding that poison is deadly” (Letter 19, Works 810). In the Ethics, the account of the nature and content of the “prohibition” changes in subtle but not insignificant ways: “[A]t the moment he ate, he would fear death rather than desire life.” While the Hebrew of Genesis is unambiguous—“as soon as you eat it, you shall die Spinoza emphasizes the affective consequences of eating the fruit—”[מת]of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Desire, which Spinoza has defined as consciousness of one’s own conatus, will be replaced by fear, the present by the future, and being by nothingness. The individual who lives according to reason is affected by “joy and desire,” while the one who acts out of fear is governed by external causes more powerful than he, which are antagonistic to his nature. The free man is one who seeks the good, “that is, to act, to live, to conserve his being by seeking that which is properly useful to him: he thinks of nothing less than death, but his wisdom is a meditation on life” (67).

Here Spinoza departs from the theme of the forbidden fruit, as does the narrative of Genesis, whose order he follows quite closely. The following, and concluding, sentence of the scholium strangely complicates the temporality of Spinoza’s account of the first man:

Then, man having found woman, who completely agreed with his nature, he knew that there could be nothing in nature more useful to him than she; but that, believing that the beasts were similar to him [bruta sibi similia esse credidit], he soon began to imitate their affects [see Ethica 3, prop. 27] and allowed his freedom to escape, which was later recovered by the Patriarchs led by the Spirit of Christ, that is, by the idea of God, on which alone depends the fact that man is free and desires for other men the good he desires for himself.

The sentence begins with the word then, as if Spinoza intends to continue the narrative of the eating of the fruit. Instead, however, he inserts a parenthetical clause whose significance would appear to be at odds with the account of the fall into servitude that occupies the remainder of the sentence. It is, in fact, an account of Adam’s conatus, of his endeavoring to persist in his own being and increasing his power to do so through his fortuitous encounter with Eve (we should note that Spinoza says Adam


“found” or even “came upon” Eve—the verb is invenio—thereby suppress-ing the account of God’s creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib). In fact, Spinoza here offers a kind of allegorical reading of this passage from Genesis, according to which the image of Eve’s origin in Adam signifies the fact that his encounter with her was an encounter with another singular thing that “absolutely” (prorsus) agreed with (the verb is conveno) his nature. It appears that the narrative of Adam and his wife (Spinoza does not name her in this account), condensed into a parenthetical phrase, is the paradigm of the proposition cited earlier: “If for example two individuals having the same nature are joined together, they compose an individual twice as powerful” (Ethica 4, prop. 18, schol.). This sentence, in fact, fol-lows the Hebrew of Genesis 2.24 very closely: “A man leaves his father and mother and becomes joined to (דבק—the exact Hebrew equivalent of the Latin, juncto) his wife and they become one body (בשר—often translated as “flesh”). “Nothing could be more useful to him” than the woman he encountered, nothing could increase the power of his mind to think and his body to act to a greater extent than the act of joining with her. At this point in the sentence, however, what may very well be an allegory of the act of increasing one’s virtue and power (that is, to follow Spinoza’s theme, the condition of being a free man) through a composition of bodies and forces—two individuals forming a new individual—is interrupted, cut short by an account not of the eating of the fruit, which is entirely omitted here, but of the causes that determined the first man to see the better and pursue the worse, relinquish his freedom and seek his own destruction.

The sentence resumes, “But because he believed that the beasts were similar to him [bruta sibi similia esse credidit], he soon began to imi-tate their affects and allowed his liberty to escape [amitto, to let go or to send away].” This phrase is extraordinary in a number of respects, above all insofar as it invokes the earlier discussion of the imitation of the affects. In the earlier passage to which Spinoza refers, Ethica 3, proposition 27, we are said to imitate the affects that we imagine affect “a thing similar to us” (res nobis similis). Similitude here appears as an objective fact: the similarity of the thing to us seems to be the condition of our imitating (usually unwittingly and involuntarily) the affects we imagine it to have. Further, we should recall that for Spinoza imagination is not a synonym for illusion: the imagination is nothing more or less than the production of an image in or to the mind of a thing once present but now absent. The imita-tion of the affects is precisely the image of the pleasure, pain, or desire of the other that tends to produce in us the same affect. In the parable of the


first man from part 4, however, the fact of similitude is problematized and, with it, any permanent demarcation between the human and the animal; the border between the similar and the dissimilar is now condemned to constant fluctuation. The phrase “a thing similar to us” ceases necessarily to designate humanity or even humanity together with beasts (and Spinoza does not use the term animalia, but bruta) in a metahuman universalism, but may just as well function to narrow the class of things we “believe” to be similar to us and whose affects we are therefore prone to imitate to a mere portion of what we formerly understood as humanity. In fact, in Ethica 3, proposition 46, Spinoza appears to acknowledge a tendency in affective existence to exclude from the category of those we experience as similar to us those of “a different class, or nation” (classis, sive nationis). In the case of Adam, however, Spinoza seems to imply that the expansion of the limit of the similar to beasts is not only what brought about Adam’s imitation of their affects but more importantly what caused him to abandon his freedom, that is, to cease to endeavor to persist in his own being and to be overpowered by external causes destructive of his very nature. His belief that he is similar to the beasts is thus not so much false in the sense that it does not accurately reflect the true state of affairs as it is destructive of his being, of his power and pleasure.

The specificity of the bestial in this sentence, then, appears to concern the power not so much of the animal as the inhuman, so defined by the effects of decomposition and death that it produces in man. Spinoza’s account of Genesis (from which Eve has all but disappeared) suggests that Adam imitated the desire of the serpent in an act of emulatio (the imitation of another’s desire) that subjected Adam to determinations more powerful than he and inimical to his being. In the scholium of proposi-tion 27 in Ethica 3, Spinoza argues that there can be no doubt that beasts feel and that they have affects. The affects of animals, however, differ as much from those of men as their nature differs from human nature: the libidinal desire of a horse is as different from that of a man as an insect’s is from that of a fish. As might be expected, however, the Ethics subjects every notion of “class” or “species” to a destabilization that is never sim-ply a reduction of a secondary whole to its primary parts in the spirit of a methodological individualism. A species must henceforth be considered a singular thing in exactly the sense we noted earlier: it is nothing more or less than a concurrence of singular things at a given time. As such, it exists in a perpetual recomposition that may render it greater or lesser, more or less powerful. But between it and the “individuals” that compose


it, there exists an infinity of intermediate compositions or singularities, such as the two individuals who unite to form one body and mind twice as powerful as each one taken singly.

Human individuals are singular things like any other—“Peter must, as is necessary conform to the idea of Peter and not to the idea of Man” (Short Treatise, ch. 6, in Complete Works)—and Spinoza is led to a conclusion identical to that of his contemporary, the English poet Roch-ester: “Man differs more from man, than man from beast.” Spinoza notes, at the end of the scholium to proposition 37 in Ethica 3, that in the matter of affects, the happiness of a philosopher does not differ much less from that of a drunkard than does that of an animal from that of a man. But this appears to pose a serious problem: what, then, can the term bruta signify in the parable of the first man as it is recapitulated in Ethica 4, where Adam is said to have lost his freedom by imitating the affects of the beasts to which he believed himself similar, if Spinoza rejects a categorical distinction between the human and the animal? Perhaps it signifies nothing more or less than the eruption of the tendency to self-destruction at the behest of what is more powerful than we are within us, a tendency determined by an imitation of the affects to act in ways that weaken, sadden, and finally bring about our own demise in the service of another thing that does not and cannot agree with our nature—namely, the inhuman.

The freedom that the first man lost, the freedom to persist in his own being by increasing his power, cannot be for Spinoza, as we have established, a freedom that sets one individual against another. The man who is free according to the definition above will, as Spinoza says in the conclusion to the scholium to proposition 67, part 4, “desire the good for all men which he desires for himself.” And the effect of so doing, Spinoza explains in proposition 37, part 4, to which he refers the reader at the conclusion of the scholium to proposition 67 in Ethica 4, is that “a good to which a man aspires for himself and which he loves, he will love with a more constant love if he sees that others love it.”

It is in this context, that of the transindividualization of the conatus, the necessity that impels us to share simultaneously the good and the desire for the good in order to persist and remain constant in our endeavor to increase our power, that Spinoza introduces the concept of the inhuman. The very principle that necessitates our joining with others to compose a new, greater body demands that they share the good that we enjoy. If this is not the case, their deprivation, pain, and sadness can only


weaken us, and we, of necessity, seek to “deliver them from their misfor-tune,” driven not by reason but by the sad and passive affect Spinoza calls pity. Pity, he tells us, often moves an individual to relieve the distress of the other in ways he will later regret (Ethica 4, prop. 50, schol.). But what of those who endeavor neither by reason nor by passion to increase the power and pleasure of others as they do their own? Those who, as it were, heed the voice of the serpent, the most cunning of all animals, to turn away from others, insensible to their affects, sad and joyful, passive as well as active, and, thinking to embrace a good that they alone can enjoy, bring about their own destruction? “He who is moved neither by reason nor pity to help others is rightly called inhuman. For he no longer appears to resemble a man.”

From Spinoza’s point of view, the production of the subject of interest as it occurred in the course of the eighteenth century can be nothing less than the inhumanization of politics. Inhumanization in this sense would not be a deviation from an essential and given humanity, for the boundaries of the human must constantly expand for its power to increase, according to Spinoza. Rather, the inhuman can only ever be defined conjuncturally as that which at a given moment undoes the human composition, subjecting it to an antagonistic external cause whose reverberations are felt within—that is, the eruption of the external inter-nally—disrupting the concurrence of its parts so that it is no longer what it once was. The demand that individuals separate their interests from all others and ignore their affects is already in itself an imitation of death and of that which demands death in the service of something other than life. To take Spinoza seriously is to acknowledge that the separation of inter-ests and desires, of bodies and forces, does not exist merely at the level of philosophical concepts; it must simultaneously operate in the physical, corporeal dimension as well. It is only in the act of resisting this separation in body as well as mind that virtue and perfection as Spinoza understood them exist; it is in such resistance alone that life can, for the moment or for eternity, be preserved against death.

warren montag is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His books include Louis Althusser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (Verso, 1999).


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