Part I - Convergences of subjectivity and totality

Chapter 1: Simple and complex totalities of interiority

‘The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts ... is the essence of dialectics’[5]

Simple totalities refer to forms of thought about wholes that allow no room for non-identity within them, and the content of which is neither divided nor opposed to itself. Thus this content forms a sovereign identity based upon a singular level of determination of the whole. Given that such totalities are based on identity and closure they are open to the power of negation. This fiction that is termed simple totality will be adopted and held onto whilst its problematic and function as an ideological signification is developed. Very few elements of social life can be said to exist as simple totalities, but such forms of thought do exist and are operative. They have been and continue to be forms of social consciousness that are produced by the attempt to understand the complexity of human life.

Simple totality is sovereign exteriority, reflection without the reflexive awareness of the cognisant and lacking in any pre-established inner dynamic of demarcation and development. It is exterior because interiority would require a double perspective, and hence a division within the total form. It is thus something of a fiction, but a real operative fiction. This is because simple totalities always break down, whether externally or internally; they are their own passage onto something else. Simple totality is in fact impossible, because it insists on suggesting something else. Here the critique of simple totality is similar to Lyotard’s analysis of de-legitimation in speculative discourses of legitimation. Its breakdown is inherent in the interiority of its self legitimating language game: it is ‘an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge”[6]. For Lyotard this creates a crisis in philosophical knowledge as well as the demarcation of all sciences, but it is one that complex theories of totality have attempted to avoid.

In the ‘war on totality’, the common postmodern anti- totalistic reduction of different totalities to their basis in one and the same set of epistemological limitations shows simple totality to be more than an abstract ideational form, but one of the outcomes of the practices of critique. It also forces us to ask if there is something that all categories of totality involve and are reducible to.  Can they in fact all be reducible to simple totalities – to their caricature in post-modern criticisms? Do they share fundamental affinities? Can difference in itself be thought of in terms of totality? Can it be open or does it require boundaries? Anti-totality in thought that has with the period of post-modernity become generalised in social consciousness has tended to pass over important variations in the different manifestations of the category of totality. 

It shall be argued that although dialectical systems attempt to reject a form of simple totality, such a totality is a necessary moment in their passage to complexity. Similarly many self-styled movements and methods of ‘critique’ in philosophy, sociology and Marxism, all in some way or other attempt a deconstruction of the commonsense of the-way-things-are. Hence whilst many of the theories of totality or that use totality that are investigated here display a deep ontological connection between the notion of totality and being, many of them are also intrinsically linked to fundamental processes of separation. The desire for totality, whether manifest as a sovereign political community or as a coherent philosophy of subjectivity, is necessarily dependant upon the existence of division. It is our somewhat counter-intuitive claim that totalities can only be thought through the division of their content. Our working definition of totality is any attempt to consider a whole in its capacity as a whole. Totality refers to the form, composition and demarcation of an interior. One major claim here is that any attempt at bridging subjectivity with totality, that is all forms of the dialectic, depend upon the positing of a simple form of the object, from which the more complex constituent elements can emerge to form a more complex whole. It is the starting point of the dialectic and how it relates to the totality of its own process that will be examined here.

The desire for totality within thought can be understood as a compulsion towards the necessity of representing all of the determinations of the content as a whole. In the idealist dialectics of Hegel this necessity is manifest in the requirement that substance be understood as subject, that is as a dynamic self-positing force whereby the totality is grounded in its inner process of becoming. The first two paragraphs of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit deal with sense-certainty. Sense certainty is a type of immediate knowledge where the object presents itself to the knower as if it were in apparent entirety; nothing is altered in recognising it. Though it appears as the richest kind of knowledge, this approach lacks concepts and only senses being and is thus for Hegel the most impoverished knowledge lacking any reflexivity in the thought process. We are only certain of something being there, an Is.[7] It could be said that this external relation of the objects of consciousness to the knowing subject is defeated by scale. But its defeat turns it inward and produces consciousness as a form of reflection. The immediate knowledge of the richness of being in this sense also produces the need for concepts because it knows no determinateness within the content. In this experience of sense-certainty, consciousness cannot find its essence in either the ‘object’ or the ‘I’.[8]

Fichte and Subjectivity: totality and its ground

In Fichte’s idealism the totality of the absolute self is generated through the relation of one to itself. This is the beginning and end of idealist philosophy[9] and is given one of the most developed expressions in Fichte’s absolute certainty of the ego. The totality is the opening of division in the one as it relates to its own knowledge of itself. In Fichte’s system it is through this struggle of its relation to itself that the one posits the other, and its unity is the positive outcome of this negative moment of the one distancing itself. Through the simple affirmation of the Identity of the I, a primordial form of self- awareness is presupposed which is the simple basis from which Fichte develops a subjectivist conception of totality as absolute self- consciousness.

In so far as Fichte’s philosophy develops from the certainty of the ‘I’, it is consciousness within identity that creates difference: the sameness of identity is the source of non-identity as I am conscious of something that is mine but not me. The other appears as non-self, but the I must deny this non-self any objectivity outside of the positing self- consciousness.[10] Thus the other is conceived of as a check or limit upon the self. Fichte’s dialectical thought attempts to develop the categories of otherness and negativity directly into the precepts of identity. By making absolute the identity of the self consciousness of the I, Fichte’s philosophy is viewed by Hegel as having completed the Kantian system, and given it a much more thorough exposition in its deduction of the categories. [11]

But what is special about Fichte is not so much his Kantian positing of the absolute ego, but more the conditions that give that the primary place it has in his philosophy. Fichte wants an immanent and speculative development to his philosophy in which all attributes can be deduced from its foundations. He thus asks philosophically, what is it that we can be absolutely certain of?

“Our task is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge. This can be neither proved nor defined, if it is to be an absolutely primary principle.”[12]

He investigates whether a simple identity A=A could be the foundation of the system. It seems to be evidently true, but in fact we cannot be certain of this formulation; it is actually conditioned. This identity (simple totality) cannot serve as the starting point even though it does actually serve as the entry point into the system. Hence the unconditioned must be arrived at through destroying an apparent but fictional fundamental - although it is known that A=A, this must be given up to that which must necessarily precede it. Fichte concludes that the most fundamental thing we can be certain of is the self awareness of the ego presented in the form of I=I, which is essentially the same form of certainty that allowed Descartes to formulate ‘cogito ergo sum’ some years before.[13]

Fichte is at pains to state that this Ego is not the individual, but rather the absolute Ego. This concerns the act that exists as the basis. What is crucial for Fichte is that all else must be deducible from the certainty of this starting point, from the act that is the basis of all consciousness. This act is the awareness of thinking: the I is not a thing but an activity, and awareness of it is consciousness of self. This shows the crucial connection between subjectivity and a speculative science of knowing of the totality where the latter is based within the immanent power of subjectivity itself.[14] Fichte elevates the ego and the pure self of consciousness to the absolute principle of the consciousness of totality. The result of this is that the dualism between self and external world is only overcome by reducing the latter to an Entausserung (alienation) of the I.

For Fichte the essence of his version of critical philosophy and the possibility of a science of knowledge consists in the view “that an absolute self is postulated as wholly unconditioned and incapable of determination by any higher thing.” Hence the infinity of the absolute, what in fact should have been proven, is presupposed, and the finite is seen as issuing forth out of this infinitude, yet anything that does arise out of the ego must be expunged from the development of the science. Here Fichte makes a move against the rationalist philosophy of Spinoza that also anticipates, as will be seen, Hegel’s critique:

“Any philosophy is…dogmatic, when it equates or opposes anything to the self as such; and this it does in appealing to the supposedly higher concept of the thing (ens), which is thus quite arbitrarily set up as the absolutely highest conception. In the critical system a thing is what I posited in the self; in the dogmatic, it is that wherein the self is itself posited: critical philosophy is thus immanent, since it posits everything in the self; dogmatism is transcendent, since it goes on beyond the self. So far as dogmatism can be consistent, Spinozism is its most logical outcome…”[15]

Hegel saw himself as perfecting this speculative method of the critical system. He does so through further deconstruction of the starting point and is at pains to show that the absolute ego is not capable of performing the task of the beginning of a properly idealist system. This is demonstrated by the problem of the Anstoss (stimulus) in Fichte.[16] In Hegel’s view the problem arises when Fichte posits a non-ego outside of the ego. Even though this is an empty noumenon and is only invoked by the activity of the ego, it is still a point of reference that does not emerge dialectically out of the ego’s self development, but rather is awkwardly placed there as something invoked by the ego’s own generated sense of limit. Fichte tries to show that this is not really something outside of the ego, but the whole insistence on self-positing upholds the negativity of the non-ego. Hegel does not accept Fichte’s dialectics here and sees his chosen starting point in the subjective as limiting the exposition to a continuous reciprocal relation between ego and non-ego that does not really develop any further.

All the same, Fichte won praise from Hegel for distinguishing speculative philosophy from practical philosophy although Fichte endeavoured to give popular expression to his ideas,[17] and in his later work, the System of Ethics attempted to ‘present philosophy as a whole’ and unite theoretical and practical philosophy.[18] Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s subjectivism provides evidence for the treatment of Hegel as both an objective and subjective idealist. Fichte is most concerned with developing a system of knowledge from which all possible acts of thought can be derived from the form that thought assumes, i.e. the ego.[19] The subjectivity of thought can be intimately linked with the political community in which men enter into a community of mind. One important aspect of this lies in that although the ego is the fundamental principle of the system, there is a powerful anti-individualism at the basis of Fichte’s conception. The ego has a singular and individual manifestation but it is not individuality and belongs to the absolute and infinite. The political import of this philosophy is that it attempts to provide a scientific rationale for the German state wherein intelligence and will are united.

Of course the simple point of departure in idealism has been criticised at length. But within it can be found an inextricable connection between totality and subjectivity that shapes a whole era of German metaphysical thought and relates fundamentally to the nature of the modern. One of the questions raised by this tradition is whether the dialectic of negativity only work within a initially posited sameness or identity or whether it is capable of generating reflection on complexities shaped by multiple causality.

Hegel and thorough negativity

“We must represent objects as they are – in our belief – without our cooperation; our representation must be determined by their being.”[20]

Although Lukács would later counterpoise Fichte’s idealism to Hegel’s ‘realism’, Hegel consistently makes exactly the demands of the speculative point of departure as Fichte does. For example:

“the principle ought also to be the beginning, and what is the first for thought ought also to be the first in the process of thinking. ... all that is needed to ensure that the beginning remains immanent in its scientific development is to consider, or rather, ridding oneself of all other reflections and opinions whatever, simply to take up, what is there before us.”[21]

This means that for Hegel, the starting point can not be anything concrete but rather ‘unfilled immediacy’ or ‘empty being’, or ‘pure being.’[22]

“This Notion, which is immediately actuality, and this actuality which is immediately its Notion, and that indeed in such a way that there neither is a third thought above this unity, nor is it an immediate unity which does not possess difference, separation within it, is the ego; it is the self-distinction of opposites within itself.”[23]

However whilst Hegel strongly criticises what is a subjective starting point to Fichte’s auto-genetic and speculative thought totality, and its precepts in the Cartesian certainty of the ego, does he not fundamentally share this same insistence on the development of the notion out of itself that is found in Fichte, and is the basis of his criticisms of Spinoza and Kant?[24]

There are however, fundamental differences between these two philosophies of the absolute that cannot be passed over in silence. Fundamentally these lie in two different orders to consciousness advanced by Hegel, which can be divided into subjective and objective dialectic. It is only in the Phenomenology of Spirit that this speculative movement can be seen to advance along the lines of self-consciousness. In contrast, the works on logic have as their basis/ their own ground the realised form of consciousness as absolute knowing in the form of the notion. In the notion knowing itself as notion it takes for granted the passage from self-consciousness to philosophy. This certainty however turns back into itself in the form of the unknown and yet-to-be-determined adequate or appropriate to the indeterminacy of the beginning. Whereas Fichte makes self into the absolute i.e. he sees the spirit just in terms of ego as self positing, it requires an absolute idea of God as all subjectivity being god like (how similar is this to Spinoza’s ‘God or nature.’)[25] Hegel on the other hand demands the incorporation of the outside stimulus (that serves in Fichte in the same way as the noumenon served Kant)[26] into the overall movement in which nothing exists solely in separation.

Hegel and the intimate relation between totality and subjectivity

"The living substance is being which is in truth subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self othering with itself. This substance is, as subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and its antithesis (the immediate simplicity). Only this self- restoring sameness or this reflection in otherness within itself - not an original or immediate unity or such - is the true. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal. Having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end is it actual."[27] 

One cannot overestimate the importance of the category of totality in Hegel’s philosophy, both as a normative orientation and a logical necessity.[28] It is important to his treatment of other philosophers too. This is exhibited well in the elaboration of the difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s philosophy wherein, considered as the nullification of the finite, ‘speculation acknowledges as the reality of cognition only the being of cognition in the totality.’[29] In Fichte, as will been seen in a different way in the work of Bataille, where the totality of being is the object of desire, the I strives to be the whole I in the same way that rational individuals strive towards the community of man. In Hegel the striving is rather the object of necessity of what is a kind of intrinsic longing within thought to thoroughly ground itself in its own process and notion. In historical terms what informs this outlook is the romantic reaction to and experience of the enlightenment as a void and the return to ancient and classical dialectics to recover a philosophical system from which could be derived a philosophy of right. The sense of loss and lack that drove the desire for a unified and self-subsisting philosophical approach led to the negative drive to more determinate synthesis. This can be explicated in a number of ways: as the crisis felt by the separation of thought and being and as the experience of nothingness in the midst of being; as the disharmony of civil society and its separation from the state. However the most potent separation in Hegel’s thought of the totality is the separation in spirit itself, which in its passage to absolute knowing, divides itself from its own object and becomes comprehensive by positing its inner moments of antithetical separation and return. The principle of Aufhebung reflects the principle of the process of the concretion of unity through this process of division. Hegel thus introduces into Spirit a temporal dimension in the passage to absolute knowing in the Phenomenology[30] and a historical process of realisation in the modern German state where the universality of thought allows for a harmonisation with its objective world in the spiritual kingdom of the universal state.[31] Hence Hegel’s formulation of the idealist totality as absolute knowing represents one of the most systematic attempts to subsume rather than consume difference within a synthetic whole.

Hegel’s unitary system of idealist philosophy falls under the category of complex simple totality too, although at first glance it might seem strange to place it here. In Hegel, negativity is constitutive yet this negativity operates continuously within an overall context of synthetic unity. This is not a type of unity that dissolves any distinction between parts for they are retained in their separation as an antagonistic unity.[32]

“The true is the whole. But the whole is only the essence/ entity perfecting itself through its development.”[33]

And yet reading Hegel is a constant reminder of the profound complicity that the totality has with subjectivity known as spirit. Totalisation is far from being a methodological device; it is also the presentation of the object in the manner of the object. For instance the passages from the Phenomenology where spirit is:

‘This absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which in their opposition enjoy perfect freedom and independence: the ‘I that is we and the We that is I.”[34]

Hegel is concerned with the resurrection or reconstitution of totality. In some places this results in the ethical life, in other cases it is the absolute idea. But in every case it is the internal expression of a particular in the spirit of substance that gives it its truth. And in each case whether expressed in logic or in the political state there is a dynamic longing for the reconciliation of separation. In the earliest of the Jena works this is most explicitly treated by using a model of totality as the existence of this necessity that all must be seen in its inter-correlation with the absolute.[35] For Hegel the beginning, process and result of the self-positing idea are all integral moments of the truth of spirit or reason. The clearest and simplest example of the preservation of separated entities in their unity is his relation of civil society and the state in the form of ethical life. The strength of his idea of the state is that he that philosophises along with Hegel by arriving at the state as a result, develops through his speculative journey an immanent and interior justification of the state. That is to say equally that the actual holds its precedent within itself: “the real is rational and the rational is real.”[36] The progressive realisation of the absolute to totality – that is to say to the point where all of its determinations of content and form are represented and indeed presented in their actual movement – is to give a sovereignty to the now which as soon as it has been ­posited must call forth a reflexive determination that destroys the sovereign moment. It is not hard to see how the philosophy of change par excellence counters itself and becomes counterfeit to a largely conservative impulse to resolution. It is the end of history, but as history is negativity, the end of history is the negation of negativity.

In Hegel the state is the reconciliation of the disharmony within civil society. It has its basis in the family and the individual of civil society, but stands outside of particular conflicts and thus embodies the principle of universality; it is the concrete form of the ethical life. Hegel’s conception of the state is its internal justification and this is important to not fully identify the ‘march of God in the world’[37] with the transcendental absolutism of the natural law tradition. This is no theistic God but rather one that exists in and through the universal and particular actions of men. Hegel is making an “ontological defence of the integrity of the state”, a claim that will be rejected by Marx.[38]

Totality as mediation

Both the existentialist interpretation of Hegel from Kojève to Sartre and the Frankfurt school understand the use of totality in Hegel as a mediation of the overall movement. However there are important differences, some of which are well noted. Adorno says Hegel uses totality as mediation; it is almost a get out clause.[39] For Adorno Hegel is principally a thinker of non-identity; he draws a distinction between Hegel and the rationalists’ ‘clarity’ whose clear thinking would curtail and limit objects by pre-determined schemas.[40] Hegel in contrast does not divorce thought from the thing; subjectivity of spirit is re- centred as the thing in itself, as the outward totalising movement that has interiorised the contents of the world. But for Adorno to maintain the primacy of non-identity, substance must be non-identical with itself. Hegel’s dialectic cannot finally resolve itself. Hence in Adorno’s view the presentation must become increasingly unclear as it struggles with its own impossibility. This I contend is its struggle to be identical with itself, a harmony between thought and what is. Adorno not fully right; the motor of the process is negation and non-identity but the real labour goes into the reconciliation – the cementing of a more concrete determination out of the relation of becoming. Adorno seems at times almost wanting to save Hegel from himself by giving him back the negative as the failure of the system to reach its gnoseological summit and avoid obscurantism. The conservative Hegel is born in the young romantic Hegel of the struggle with the other. The goal is identity and a recovery of a lost unity that is a renewed sovereign partnership between part and whole – reconciliation with the now.

It is in this concept of mind as that which is only through its own free causality and through its endless return into itself out of the natural immediacy of its existence, that there lies the possibility of a clash between its potential and its actuality.[41] Herein lies the possibility of the alienation of personality and its substantive being, whether this alienation occurs unconsciously or intentionally. It is this figure of the unhappy consciousness that heavily influenced the French subjectivist, historical and phenomenological reading of Hegel, a matter often attributed to the influence of Kojève.[42]

This incessant play of the not yet and the surpassed, of the inherent movement of things and non-fixity of essence nor boundaries, is the very body of the Hegelian dialectic and as such for all its dynamism it does exhibit a certain consistency of approach. Adorno seeks to push Hegelian thought to the point of the dissolution of the fundamental identity of the dialectic with its own coming to be, to the point where reason undermines reason.[43] The crux of the problem of the Hegelian dialectic is that it requires that the absolute be a result. This result must be a result of its own process and thus it must be somehow present within the beginning. Furthermore because it is a result of itself, it is in a sense reducible to any moment of its becoming. Because nothing can be external to the self- positing idea, all that it can become is that which it gives over to itself in its autopoietic development. In other words, it must become an accomplished representation of that which it is already. The point of departure determines the point of arrival although it advertised itself as a purely indeterminate starting point. The starting point is not identical with the result, but it must come to be through the same formal process of movement through non-identity.

Sartre’s formulation of ‘partial totalities’ seems at first nonsensical but originate out of another pertinent difficulty within Hegel’s thought:

“Within a totality (whether completed or developing), each partial totality, as a determination of the whole, contains the whole as its fundamental meaning and, consequently, also contains the other partial totalities; the secret of each part therefore lies in the others.”[44]

This is supposedly an example of totality with dialectical mediation, with mediation as used by Hegel in the Encyclopaedia Logic.[45] Sartre is talking about dialectical reason in generalities as the type of reason appropriate to understanding totalities. His point is that dialectic is not there to affirm the existence of organic bodies nor organised wholes. Rather the dialectic is appropriate to them only if they exist. The business of the dialectic is in the matter of wholes and their relations to their parts, but it is not something that the dialectic can verify as their being. Despite this however, Sartre’s formulation of a ‘partial totality’ is a necessary result of the view of history as a totalisation. Here the critique of Hegel is that the latter can see himself, as at the end of an effected historical totalisation, whereas in Sartre’s action orientated and practice centred view, there can never be a complete totality.[46] Sartre’s notion of historical totalisation is described as growth of human understanding and action in history or as creation of the other as an objective, inorganic whole.[47] Crucially then, this totalisation goes on without a totaliser and it is a non total totalisation. In opposing the simple unmediated totality, and arguing that concepts ought to be built up out of new experience and continuously reinvented, existing Marxism is condemned for taking the concepts as ready made; universalising a particular and dissolving real man ‘in a bath of sulphuric acid.’

In the analysis presented here, there is no claim of a series of immovable stages in history where at a given point a concrete totality can be delineated (because the movement, the process itself is more than any one of its moments). Although a certain idea of totality can be used to make benchmarks in these progressions, the force of the negative implies that any construed totality is built up in order to be torn down. In this sense Adorno is right to see the totality in Hegel as mediation, rather than an inter-aggregation. But at some points Hegel does exactly that and places several totalities together, as at the end of the objective logic in the Science of Logic[48] where Hegel demonstrates that the Notion is the realised truth of being and essence.[49] This gets closer to what might be called ontological fields[50] although they are still marked by teleological temporality, and by the dissolution in the order of subsumption. Indeed, it is here, in the passage from absolute substance to the Notion, from objective logic to subjective logic, and from the illusions of being into the idea, that Hegel draws upon Spinoza. In this passage, the movement is from ‘necessity to freedom’, where the notion is the very identity of actuality passing over to finding its own substantiality in the independent substantiality of another. This is actually the liberation of the I, which when extended to totality ‘is free Spirit; as feeling, it is love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness’[51] it is free in its dependency, it is cause of itself whilst being its own creation in this other actuality. What was mediation has become an embodiment. By the power of subjectivity, the abstract dimensions of the totality have become concretised.

Hegel’s thought is an objective idealism as much as it is a subjective idealism.[52] Hegel’s method is an immersion into the thing, the inner life of the content. The complexity lies in that this content (truth) must be thought of as self-positing, as substance but equally as subject. Philosophers like Kojève who emphasised the subjectivist side only understood this as a method of the disinterestedness of science[53] in that the thinker should not add anything to the object that it gives expression, but rather act as its midwife. But for Hegel, totality must be a result, or as Althusser describes it: a totalisation at which he places himself at the end. Thus the result cannot be one sided and must become substantial through its active process.

“In general…substance is in itself or implicitly Subject, all content is its own reflection into itself. The subsistence or substance of anything that exists is its self-identity; for a failure of self-identity would be its dissolution. Self identity, however, is pure-abstraction; but this is thinking.”[54]

As will be seen, in Althusser’s early Hegelian years he insisted upon this point that the movement of spirit is equally substance. This insistence was to form the later basis of the critique of Hegel’s form of the dialectic. For all the insistence on Hegel as a thinker of thorough negativity, there is a fundamental and positive identity at the heart of his ontologics of the homeliness of the dialectic. 

“…The task of modern German philosophy is, however summed up in taking as its object the unity of thought and being, which is the fundamental idea of philosophy generally…” [55]

The confrontation with Kantian and Fichtean philosophy is on the basis of its subjective and finite categories, which according to Hegel separate from the infinitude of the absolute. And yet when he turns to Spinoza - who uses the ontological proof of God as that whose nature can not be conceived of without it existing, which Hegel says ‘merely’ results in the knowledge that God ‘is that of which the notion and being are inseparable’[56] – he finds that Spinoza can not give any truth to the finite and that substance is characterless in its differentiations. In the Encyclopaedia Logic this point is made in connection with the ‘one-sidedness’ of Cartesian thought that takes facts of consciousness, such as what thinks exists, as maxims of the intellect. There is no doubt that for Hegel immediate thought, as represented by Descartes’ maxim, has a content that is true and philosophical. He wants to show however that this immediate knowledge is in fact mediated.

“This immediate knowledge, consists in knowing that the Infinite, the Eternal, the God which is in our Idea, really is: or, it asserts that in our consciousness there is immediately and inseparably bound up with this idea the certainty of its actual being.”

In the pages of the Encyclopaedia Logic where Hegel is concerned with the passage from the subjective idea to being, what he attempts to demonstrate is that the simple maxims which declare ‘a primary and self-evident interconnection…between our idea and being’ though correct, do not have an inner reflexive understanding of themselves. The presence of two distinct terms that have their truth in the other is not seen in this immediate unity. For Hegel this proves that even simple intuition (which he identifies with simple thought[57]) involves mediation.[58] A lot hangs on Hegel’s criticisms of intuitive knowledge. Its role in the speculative elaboration is to finally reduce it to a form of finite knowledge.[59] And yet it occupies a necessary position in the double role of Hegel’s philosophy, its representational commentary on its own meaning. The ironic difficulty of this position is that it is a one-sidedness that he himself cannot do without as a springboard to the infinite. So he is forced to posit this immediacy and at the same time render it incomprehensible.[60]

This moment of immediacy and the given-ness of the absolute is one of the essential ingredients in the construal of complex totality (complex by the introduction of the diachronic) out of simple totality where Spinoza’s absolute of infinite attributes is a single and sovereign self-evident and univocal entity. Marx uses this method of the dialectic in critiquing the one- sidedness of other positions amply. It could be called a trick of the light, because as if in a flash the opposing position is integrated and surpassed into a fuller totality that the proficient dialectician can supposedly divine.

It is clear from the Phenomenology, that in the development of self- consciousness from intuition to the absolute, moments of fusion are equally moments of internal change. The movement of the spirit, as the autopoietic generation of internal divisions and conflict that pass through a hierarchy of self-knowing, is formed fundamentally by contradictions in the understanding. The idealism consists in believing, because of the identification of mind with the essence of spirit, that the concretions of the synthetic intellect are one and the same process as the instantiation of ethical life. This progressive totalisation which had its origin in freedom through an absolute process of becoming comes fundamentally into conflict with its own project (its own subjectivity) when the becoming turns into the become and in so doing denies its infinitude, and where freedom becomes the un-freedom of law where finite beings surrender themselves to their particular role in the totality of social and political life. The more embodied the totality becomes, through its own necessary demands on itself, the more it finalises the dynamism of its external historical horizons beckons anti-totality.

Arguably, those dialectical traditions that have drawn heavily on Hegel have not done so because they shared the same desire to present such a result. What they have drawn on is not the veracity of the absolute idea but the process of inner legitimation of the absolute inherent in its approach. As can be seen by the excited reception of subjectivist, humanist and existentialist reading of Hegel in interwar France the powerful themes of the unhappy consciousness, and the overall conception of reality as struggle between opposing forces left its audience intoxicated and blinded them to the necessarily conservative implications of the result willed. It took another generation to see that in fact the result willed, synthetic and uncomplicated identification of the I in the universal and the universal in the I itself informed the process and the essence of the speculative method. This of course had a precedent in Kojève’s existentialist Hegel - in for instance the discourse surrounding his lecture at the College of Sociology in the 30’s, where the eschatological role that Napoleon played for Hegel is substituted by the modern equivalents of Stalin and Hitler - but the identity between totality and totalitarianism was still an avant-garde anticipation that was to become in the 60’s a far more established point of view.[61] At any rate if, for a later generation, the task of renewing an anti-totalitarian philosophical project was still to be carried out by negative dialectics and its anti-totality was to emerge only within the discourse of totality, it would take still one generation further - landing us in the present - for the formulation to emerge that ‘somehow’ both Lukács (with his commitment to truth as totality) and Adorno (with his ‘the whole is the untrue’) were actually both saying the same thing. But to see how this position can emerge, (the argument belongs to Negri) our exposition needs to first take a detour through Spinoza and Althusser.[62] If the dialectic were a man its two feet would be placed one in the past the other in the future; the weight of its body would sit in the present.

Spinoza on totality

In the treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding that anticipates some of the themes of Fichte’s practical philosophy, Spinoza deals with primary truths and asserts that clear and distinct ideas imply the existence of things. If a thing can be rightly conceived it exists as ideas are real. This is part of the method. His rationalist standard of truth requires, ‘a being single and infinite; in other words, it is the sum total of being, beyond which there is no being found.’[63] This is a monist conception of being that believes in the indivisibility of the absolute and the infinity of its attributes.

“The object aimed at is the acquisition of clear and distinct ideas, such as are produced by the pure intellect, and not be chance physical motions [such as memory or the imagination – EE]. In order that all ideas may be reduced to unity, we shall endeavour so to associate and arrange them that our mind may, as far as possible, reflected subjectively the reality of nature, both as a whole and as parts.”[64]

For Spinoza this process involves conceiving of things under their essence and their cause and thus outlines a rationalism of objects that by no means privileges extension, one of the errors that he sees as resulting from the confusion of imagination with understanding.[65] Things that are self-existent must be understood through their essence only, as they are self-caused, whilst things that have their cause (of existence) in another must be understood through this other. In this aetiological orientation, Spinoza wards that ’we shall be extremely careful not to confound that which is only in the understanding with that which is in the thing itself.”[66] This results in an insistence on a kind of differential treatment within thought. Particular things cannot be understood by universal axioms or abstractions, rather the discovery must ‘form thoughts from some given definition’, which has certain conditions. The definition is about the innermost essence of the thing taken singularly, in separation from other things, its nature must be given in and through its own nature so much that its existence cannot be questioned[67] and also, though not strictly necessary, all of its properties can be deduced from it. Hence in Spinoza there is a strong appeal to thought that is adequate to particular things, and singular things, those things that are self- caused. This idea of causa sui is the key to the way of thinking about the absolute without imbuing it with an affectivity sovereign over its parts. 

Here the desire for the totality is opposed to abstractions and generalities in so far as Spinoza believes that one must look into the knowledge of particular things. Therefore the method is opposed to a priori structuring of objects, although there seem to be definite rules of treating particular objects that Spinoza regards as crucial. In the elaboration of the totality, nothing from outside must enter into the view of the object under study. However far from this being a method of scientific detachment, it is rather an immersion into the particular through the sense of infinity of the absolute. This process is the opposite of representation,[68] and is a form of expression in which, to quote Deleuze, “…it is now the object that expresses itself, the thing itself that explicates itself.”[69] Clearly there are parallels here with speculative idealism. The understanding involves certainty: “it knows that a thing exists in reality as it is reflected subjectively,”[70] it perceives things under a certain form of eternity, not number or duration. Ideas like objects must follow from their own nature, so the ideas that we form must arise solely out of the power of thought. As Spinoza goes on to say in the Treatise on the Understanding, this is not a method suited to particular finite things but rather the series of eternal and fixed things. We cannot possibly follow the series of the multitude of mutable things, quantitatively they surpass our capacity to know them, and qualitatively, their existence is not connected with their essence i.e. they are so dependent upon fixed and immutable things that they cannot be conceived of without them. This insistence on viewing things that are the cause of themselves is an attempt to find the grounds in knowledge of an immanent conception of being wherein the particular gives itself expression. Indeed, much of it is written in polemical opposition to false and doubtful ideas and to irrational theological strictures, external and transcendental, on the understanding. In the words of Negri, this specific orientation in the understanding, allows us ‘to approach being from all sides.’[71] This is quite a different consideration of Spinoza from that which would strongly inform the preceding generation. One obvious marker is the treatment of Spinoza by Kojève. Kojève says that to be a Spinozist is to be quite simply mad. The system is absurd, even though the idea of the system, i.e. absolute knowledge is not. Kojève argues that Spinoza’s version of absolute knowledge is a closed circle, that ultimately leads to a silence in what it can say about man. Although Kojève claims that Spinoza and Hegel are in fact philosophically quite similar – they both hold that the concept relates only to itself - he distinguishes the two over the question of the eternal and time. In the context of the 1960’s revival of Hegel within radical thought, it was this expressive notion of being opposed to representation that led many philosophers to begin to draw on this pre-enlightenment thought.

Spinoza viewed by Hegel

 “The great vision of substance in Spinoza is only a potential liberation from finite exclusiveness and egotism: but the notion itself realizes for its own both the power of necessity and actual freedom.”[72]

Being and essence ‘lose themselves in the unity of the notion.’ Spinoza’s philosophy is surpassed when Hegel develops the doctrine of the notion. That is to say in the books of the logic, which are beyond the development of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology and seek to develop the science solely in terms of that concept from the ground where the spirit knows itself as notion,[73] Spinoza must be left behind when Hegel makes the concept itself a self identical totality in the form of the notion where ‘the notion is the principle of freedom, the power of substance realised. It is a systematic whole, in which each of its constituent functions is the very total which the notion is, and is put as indissolubly one with it.[74]

From what has been said so far it is not surprising that Hegel sees Spinozism as ‘defective’ because reflection in it remains a form of external thinking in that it does not take its beginnings from the absolute – it takes determination as given – absolute substance is assumed not derived.[75] For Hegel, it is a necessary development in the becoming of the notion of absolute to find itself in substance, especially ‘one substance, one indivisible totality’, because all determinateness is contained with in it, although as been shown, Spinoza does not develop the notion out of this. Spinoza has no cognition of the self-negating negation.[76] Hegel’s criticism of Spinoza amounts to that he does not treat the absolute speculatively, so thought and extension are only really empirical definitions of attributes of the absolute and he can not show how ‘infinite plurality reduces itself to opposition’. ‘Outside’ of the absolute, and thus in fact imposing upon the absolute a determination, ‘the order of things is the same as that of figurative conceptions or thoughts’ thus there are parallel totalities of things and of conceptions.’[77]  

It is here that the reductive moment in Hegel is exercised directly in the critique of what could be called Spinoza’s horizontal system. Hegel criticises the dissolution of determinateness within this indivisible substance. Although Hegel concedes that in Spinoza this totality of substance is the ‘absolute unity of thought and being or extension’, he believes that the manner in which this comes to light in Spinoza fails to recognise the activity of thought in its necessary historical separation of itself from extension[78] and thus the recurrent and formative power of its notion. Thus where reflection is external and not the organic development of itself, Hegel says this results in substance lacking ‘personality’ which can be taken to mean something like the memory of its own development through the history of philosophy.

That, for Hegel, Spinoza presupposes the absolute, as opposed to his view where the absolute must be demonstrated as its own result is evidenced by the episode in the Encyclopaedia Logic,[79] where Hegel explains why one can not start with the absolute notion, as it would have only a nominal power. By beginning with the absolute, following with the attributes, and then subsequently the two modes of substance; thought and extension, “the Spinozistic exposition of the absolute is complete…but these three are only enumerated one after the other” and Spinoza demonstrates no inner sequence of development.[80] Because the absolute, according to Hegel, must be a conceptual accomplishment rather than an assumption, he compares Spinoza’s thought to the oriental philosophy of emanation with the theme of the ‘distancing and vanishing of the absolute’ that ends in negativity and night. By beginning with the absolute what follows implies a decline in depth, a watering down to imperfection, and a lack of purpose. Seeking perfection, Hegel argues that Leibniz makes good this problem over Spinoza by preserving the varied multiplicity of the content in its negativity and not collapsing into the indeterminacy of content. The monad is a non- passive manifestation of total substance in an integrated, non external thought which has ‘internal completeness’, although Leibniz’s ‘ratiocinative’ and ‘dogmatic’ reflection still lack the kind of inner coherence Hegel seeks. This is Hegel’s trademark criticism of philosophy prior to him, including that of Fichte who in fact inaugurated this insistence on the speculative unity of the categories. Hegel ceaselessly presses this line of criticism that he applies equally to Kant. Hegel claims that in these philosophies there is no inner coherence between the categories, they are definitions, posited without relation to one another even if some of the postulates are correct and insightful. Hence the dialectic is systematically introduced first because of the problem in the presentation of other systems and their failure in the construal of philosophical conceptions to authentically emerge out of the inward movement of substance. In Hegel the scientific quality of science is to correctly present the material in its own inner order of opposition. In contrast to the Spinozian notion of adequate ideas, Hegel demands of thought that it must demonstrate the inner movement of appearance, movement, contradiction and dissolution. Only as such can a sovereign and authentic, inwardly coherent totality be conceived.

Hegel’s critique of Spinoza further states that the latter denies any truth to the finite, substance is characterless in its differentiations and that by assuming the absolute infinity of God, Spinoza does not look for the origin of thought itself. Indeed Spinoza presents his definitions without proper justification, without arriving at them. Furthermore, Spinoza does not demonstrate how extension and thought ‘are evolved from the same substance, nor does he prove why there can only be two modes of substance; a difficulty which incidentally Hegel also links to Schelling.[81]

Responses to Hegel on Spinoza

Substance must be infinite because God is the only substance that can be conceived as existing.[82] It is that our idea of this totality can be clear, defined and inherent, that it may include everything and all must obey the same type of determinacy and force. Hence finite things must be understood under the infinite duration given by their determinacy in the sequence of substantial cause. For this reason, Spinoza made causa sui the principle of his system which was to place the self-positing desire not in the overall movement of the absolute, but within its manifold manifestations and differentiations seen as aspect of the same totality. If something is not the cause of itself, then it is not its own property and in fact belongs to a different or stronger entity as its effect. The same force of combination operates at the level of thought and being. As Deleuze explains:

“The object that agrees with my nature determines me to form a superior totality that includes us, the object and myself. The object that does not agree with me jeopardizes my cohesion, and tends to divide me into subsets, which, in the extreme case, enter into relations that are incompatible with my constitutive relation (death).[83]

Consciousness is the awareness of this becoming lesser or greater, where the affections in relation to other things become relations of convergence and combination or entropy with other bodies. Hence the fundamental hypothesis of Spinoza’s system in the inseparability of notion and being allows for the divergence of forms of being and forms of thought but holds them together in a parallelism wherein the ‘order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.’[84]

The denial of causality between mind and body and the denial of the primacy of one over the other will become important to Althusser’s designation of the distinction between real and thought concretes that he claims to find in Marx. In Deleuze however, what is brought out of this question of parallelism is that the unknown aspects of the body reveal the unknown of thought, that is to say that the unpredictability and infinity of possibilities of action for the body, are paralleled by the infinite thoughts that go on beyond and beneath ‘consciousness’.[85] In the same way that the body surpasses our knowledge of it, thought surpasses our consciousness of it. This radical alterity and invisibility is equally the conditions of possibility for combination and knowledge.

Spinoza's method is synthetic as opposed to analytic. The latter starts from individual case and derives a notion thereof. The former develops universals or definitions out of these analytics and proceeds from there to deduce the truth. Thus for Hegel it appears it is Spinoza's method that is faulty although he discovers a great many speculative truths. This move on behalf of Hegel disguises a disagreement that is not a methodological but ontological. Spinoza never makes the reduction of thought to being and in fact attempts to preserve their distinction whereby ideas are adequate but not morphologically identical to their objects. It is precisely because Spinoza sees the limitations of the intellect in giving an account of all of the manifestations of this absolute totality, that he refrains from turning the dialectical movement of thought itself into the highest expression of being. This is also the reason why, when philosophers in the 1960’s sought to renew materialist philosophy in the critique of Hegelian Marxism, they sought out in Spinoza the ‘primacy’ of the body and the secondary nature of thought. However Deleuze appeared to oppose this move and focus on how the body elucidated rather than determined the function of thought.

Clearly to argue that the Hegelian system was a set of increasingly complex formation that were totalities as part of the circle in the sense of a historically actualised development which has temporal unities, is to lend the system a favourable flavour for Marxian discourse. However here, the usual confrontation with Marx will be temporarily sidestepped. Spinoza cannot reply to Hegel but modern Spinozists can be turned to in order to work out something of a reply.

The Revival of Spinoza and the critique of Hegel

Not only for Hegel, but also for Moses Hess who was an early collaborator of Marx, Spinozian philosophy, through its attempt at a unity of spirit and nature (or in our chosen idiom; subjectivity and totality), represented the inauguration of the modern age. Today, one could say that, in so far as it can be defined by the ‘war on totality’, one of the inaugurating moments of the postmodern was the rehabilitation of Spinoza in the critique of the Hegelian Marx. The theoretical stakes that underpinned this debate had of course a much longer history, but in the fervent political environment of the 1960’s these different currents came into direct confrontation. One characteristic modern reading of Spinoza is that he provides an early modern account of the subject and object identity that was to characterise Lukács’ political epistemological interventions in the early 1920’s.[86] However more recent work on Spinoza and Spinozism questions whether it is reducible to that kind of identity.

There is a mocking tone to the manner in which Perry Anderson, in his Considerations on Western Marxism, portrays the Althusserian turn to the reading of Spinoza in order to shed philosophical light on Marx. Anderson is right in many respects in so far as he describes the tendency in western Marxism to orientate itself to drawing out of Marx the basis for an embracing method of social inquiry.[87] However in the attempt to trash this connection he highlights several correspondences between the analysis in Reading Capital and Spinoza’s Ethics, most notably the all too important distinction between the idea and the ideatum. Anderson is too readily dismissive of those attempts to take full heed of their significance[88] in the subsequent proliferation of positive attempts to draw on Spinoza in order to develop a materialism of knowledge and the body.

Whether it is discovering an, ‘ontology of pure affirmation’ (Negri) or system of irreducible difference (Deleuze), what typifies the post-war French intellectual engagement with Spinoza is an involved system of ‘reading’. This is an affective reading,[89] or a symptomatic reading, including Macherey’s to ‘think in’ or ‘to think with’ or as Deleuze says, to be ’in the middle’ of Spinoza’s thought.[90] This should be contrasted with the more analytic reconstructive approach typified by Bennet’s A study in Spinoza’s Ethics.[91] The revival of Spinoza in the France of the 1960’s was for one of its instigators the particular ‘actuality’ of his thought.[92] Moreover for Negri, Spinoza’s philosophy is an ‘absent centre’ of the canonical western philosophical tradition, representing a powerful but repressed critique of modernity. There are clear differences between the reading of Spinoza in Germany which, as Kolakowski has noted, drew on Spinoza for ‘the motif of the whole and the part, [and] hope for ultimate reconciliation with the absolute through the mystical renunciation of individual affirmation” and the French reception. This latter is said to fortify ‘the threads of republican free thought, generalizes the slogans of liberty, [and] repeats with satisfaction the sallies against the clergy and the church.”[93] Although it is right to demonstrate that the French treatment of Spinoza was more political, this was not at the expense of a philosophical conception, but rather became something of a rejuvenation of the materialist totality in theorists who explicitly attempted to divorce Hegel from Marx.

Althusser’s early critique of Hegel did not explicitly draw on Spinoza, in fact in the immediate post-war period Althusser was for all intents and purposes a Hegelian, although he was strongly critical of the one-sided French subjectivist treatment of Hegel. This French communist intellectual’s critique of Hegel is best known from the essays collected in For Marx. Within the space of a few years, and on the basis of his earlier analysis of Hegel as both a subjective and objective idealist, Althusser developed a powerful criticism of Hegel that would by the time of the ‘Return to Hegel’ essay, and following Della Volpe and Colletti, state the ‘irreconcilable theoretical distinction between Hegel and Marx.’[94]

Althusser’s criticism of the simple totality takes the form of an attack on the idealist dialectic and its confusion with the method of Marx. The meaning of the dialectical inversion, the change in substance that becomes the content of totalising forces, is so different in its nature that dialectic itself cannot be revised without substantive modifications in its total form. Althusser argues that because the essence of the movement in the Hegelian dialectic is that of the Idea, a simple inversion of the dialectic, in terms of the common understanding where the dialectic in Marx’s hands is simply placed right side up, could not be achieved without revising its entire content and structure. In fact this notion that the form of the dialectic is correct and only its content in Hegel is corrupted belongs to the Feuerbachian period of Marx’s thought where man’s historical essence still has the structure of a religious metaphysics. It conformed to a simple identity at the level of being, and in fact modelled man on the basis of man’s own ideal projections of himself. Rather than falling for the historically embodied Lukácsian variant of the unity of thought and being, Althusser attempts to show that this reduction at every point in the Hegelian dialectic renders the formal and dynamic element of his philosophy that generates complexity to a simple inner principle that can not be sustained within a Marxian conception of history.

“The simplicity of the Hegelian contradiction is made possible only by the simplicity of the internal principle that constitutes the essence of any historical period.”[95]

Real problems start when trying to maintain this union of subjectivity, historicity and objectivism at the level of ideas. Indeed it would be a mistake to see these elements as unproblematic in the form Hegel gave to them, let alone as forms that are the shape of the activity of real individuals. In Hegel’s case for instance, to think historically became a closure on history. Because of his need to demonstrate actuality as a speculative unity (as reconciliation of something with itself) the sequence of historical development, known a posteriori cancels out the possibility of its own overcoming of its age, because actuality needs to be exhibited as a result, and thus ends up in a closed totality. In the attempt at a creation of an orthodox humanist canon Marx’s role in the narrative of western Marxism is seen in terms of being the next stage, the next level of development or even the sublated result of Hegel’s achievements. Structuralism carries an implicit challenge to the attempt to chart history through the lens of great thinkers, despite the continuance of this practice in contemporary academic institutions. The analysis of materialist dialectics renders impossible any uncomplicated substitution of materialist history with its idealist representation. As such totality must have a different ontological ground in its materialist conception the very nature of which makes simple substitutions and inversions theoretically untenable. Ultimately it is on the nature of subjectivity that the question of totality rests. For this reason, Martin Jay is right to draw out the similarities between elements of the Frankfurt School, notably Horkheimer and Adorno who questioned the universalism of the subject and Bourgeois conceptions of man in contrast to the more humanist Marxism of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, with the various positions discussed here that offer a critique of identity through a critique of totality.[96]

As will be elaborated in more depth later, because of the reasons that Althusser outlines, the thought totality that expresses the inner dynamics of capital (in so far as its method resembles that of the Hegelian dialectic) cannot be a historical one too. This is because the beginning of the Hegelian dialectic is simultaneously the ‘real’ beginning of historical development, or of the subject’s journey through self- consciousness. In Hegel the form and content move to a fundamental synthesis, which is simultaneously their real development.

“There is no assignable Origin in Hegel, but that is because the whole process which is fulfilled in the final totality, is indefinitely, in all the moments which anticipate its end, its own Origin. There is no subject in Hegel, but that is because the becoming-Subject of substance, as an accomplished process of the negation of the negation, is the Subject of the process itself.”[97]

In materialism such a formulation is impossible and in introducing Das Kapital, Marx makes this very point, and in fact exaggerates it – the order of the categories is opposite to the order of their historical development. For Althusser this means that in Marx’s study of capital the concretely complex object is always, ontologically presupposed in its totality. Again Spinoza comes directly into service here where in Althusser’s reading social complexity represents a whole wherein effects are not outside of the structure but the elementary basis of its interiority. Althusser’s problem however is again his attempt at fidelity to Marx that leads him to a radical anti-historicism, whereas in fact Marx’s own approach to the possibility of presenting capital vacillated from historical to logical methods and their combination and was never fully resolved. In fact Althusser’s attempt at fidelity to Marx ultimately results in misrepresenting him, and denying him his chosen frame of reference, and despite this, it generates a highly important break with Marx, a break that Althusser was himself unable to make.[98]

It is only at the level of consciousness, or more accurately the idealist attempt at reconciliation of consciousness with being that man’s history could be viewed in a circular way as both a historical and logical development. Far from showing their unity, the work of Marx shows the irreconcilable division between the real concrete life of men and the thought conceptions that are constructed in practical theoretical activity to account for them. In fact Hegel’s importance in Marx is reduced to:

“The feeling for and practice in abstraction that is indispensable to the constitution of any scientific theory, the feeling for and practice in theoretical synthesis and the logic of a process for which the Hegelian dialectic gave him a ‘pure’ abstract model.”[99]

Martin Jay argues that within three years of the publication of For Marx, Althusser had already changed his position. According to Jay, in ‘Marx’s relation to Hegel’, published in Essays in Self-criticism, Althusser began to believe that Hegel had surpassed Spinoza in his appreciation of the complexity of contradiction. However Althusser makes the revision that the totality that belongs properly to Hegel’s thought and the ‘whole’ should be given over to Marx. Jay goes on to say that because Althusser privileged class struggle, this was in itself a return to an expressive totality.[100] In fact however, it seems that Althusser became increasingly interested in Spinoza in the last decade of his life.[101] Yet it is less a matter of the content of the whole that Althusser’s work informs, and rather the process of the reading of Spinoza’s affects in the immediate responses of his critics. On the other hand, this latter has tended, in the writings of the New Spinozists of Macherey, Montag and Norris, to be treated in terms of the deconstruction of the body of the text rather than in the politics of refusal and ‘constituent power’ which is Negri’s real muscle when it comes to these new modes of theorisation.

An example of the new theorisation of power in the Spinoza is found in rejuvenation of his notion of conatus where beings preserve themselves in their being and seek to maximise their power. This is a feature of all nature and of all beings, that stems from the notion of God as the cause of all things, rather than being just another theory of possessive individualism.[102] Rather than a notion of divided and antagonistic individuals this is a theory of the uniqueness of singularities. It is not a new stand off between the ego and civilisation but rather points to a different type of subjectivity that creates itself in combination with and resistance to other powers. Materialist totalities where the ‘whole and parts [have] love for one another’, can be read as more than an expressive totality, one that inches away from a philosophy of origins and opens onto an aleatory, de-centred totality. In Spinoza’s conception of God as the cause of all things there is an assumption of absolute substance and material totality and as has been shown the presence of ‘irreducible singularities’ as the premise of the whole system. In this conception of the immanent cause there is understood to be nothing that lies outside of the totality. In sharp contrast to Kojève, who regarded Spinoza’s ontology as a closed totality, the proximate generation would begin to see within it an affirmation of the immanent demands of desire and freedom within popular democratic power; opposed to fixed limits and hierarchies.

If Spinoza’s response to Hegel is voiced through the political Spinozism of Negri and Hardt, it demands the totality as the field of possibility and the open radical and disobedient construction of the ‘democratic absolute’:

“The names of things that it indicates are common, ontologically grounded and moved by passions. It is rigorously anti-transcendental and anti-teleological: the totality it constructs is open, as open as the world of possibility, the world of potential. Critique, thus, functions within it as an arm of the practical deconstruction of the enemy totality and the articulation of a project in the desire of liberation.”[103]

This answers somewhat how Deleuze, who is often treated as one of the paradigmatic thinkers of anti-totality, can find so much of power in Spinoza. For Deleuze, there are two readings of Spinoza, the scholarly systematic totality and the affective, “without an idea of the whole’ which the layman or philosopher alike can perceive in a flash, ‘a kinetic determination, and impulse’ and fundamental insights that assume the form of a passion. As Kolakowski, explains the French reading of Spinoza was inherently more political. In the work of Deleuze and Negri there is a return to the interconnection of politics and ontology that attempts to sidestep the whole idealist framework that has formed such a strong element in the western humanist philosophical canon.

Although they share important differences, the popular revival of Spinoza and explosive reception of Deleuze seem at first to represent a return to the analytic, mechanical atomism that characterises non- totalistic empiricist philosophy. And yet crucially it does not collapse into the ideological individualism so intrinsic to liberal thought. The opposition to totality in Deleuze is for an empiricism that for him is identical with pluralism, which is thinking about ‘multiplicity’. This is suggestive that the totality has become a constraint on the complex and the different. This repeats in affect Brunschvicg’s criticism of Hegel that he seeks an irrational unity. The real opposition is to a priori standards of the ordering of information. That is to say, here totality is political, because the totality is the management of the multiplicity, whereas in Deleuze the multiple, the rhizomes, the subterranean growth are all ontologically primary.[104] What for Sartre was the degenerate scholastic totality that defiled the original revolutionary import of the concept, has with the Deleuzian generation become automatically associated with a kind of imposition, the fixity of the transcendental and arboreal structures of order that traverse mind and body alike.

This does not signal a simple return to the Cartesian type of totality, where atomistic disassociated elements are only brought together by an act of the imagination.[105] Here the whole is a micro-foundationalist assemblage of individual parts. And yet it denies the affectivity of the whole over the parts, or the reducibility of the parts to the whole, as Deleuze promotes a philosophy of constant change and absolute becoming. The difference between Deleuze and say Thomas Hobbes, a thinker whose ontology of human life is directly linked to the alienation of political right to a sovereign power, and where the state of nature represents an atomistic idea of human life, and the political contract is at once the abstract, ideal, and imaginary basis of social solidarity is that the latter sought a practical political resolution in the unitary and totalitarian power of the one. Opposed to this Deleuze argues for a view of life that sees recognises the expansion of being in innumerable spaces of becoming particular. By simply not believing in the necessity of a sovereign resolution, Deleuze displaces the problematic from one of totality towards the particular.

Organization, subject, plan, form and development are the consequences of the transcendent when counterposed to the immanent; the immanent is the plan of composition referring to speed, of infinite particles, an anonymous force, dynamism, motion and rest.[106] Now although it is not expressed in these terms, this is the result of a manner of totalistic thinking about the nature of things. For it is not actually from single bodies that Deleuze derives the nature of the body; it is from the whole gamut of being and affect. The implicit presence of the whole of being that informs the idea of the power of single beings. Of course the totality never expresses itself as the completed system, it has no independence from its parts, it does not coexist with them nor exist about them, in short the totality has no positive affectivity of its own – it is just the mental operation of the totality that sutures a sovereign element to the overall combination. Yet it remains a holism as it is concerned with composition, with the manner in which things interconnect, and the extent of their power to enhance or destroy one another. A truly atomistic philosophy could not privilege these interconnections in the manner that Deleuze does. Thinking holistically about substance is a fundamental characteristic of Spinoza’s thought, and Deleuze’s positive commentary upon it picks up the deeper resonance of this attitude. So the hostility of Deleuze to total schemas of demarcation needs to be understood not as reaction to totality itself, but as a reaction to reductions of totality, particularly reductions to subject or development.

Spinoza’s ontology is an incredibly positive one, in Negri’s words ‘pure affirmation’. His thinking is materialist because it looks at the body and affect. It sees combination and assemblage simultaneously philosophically and politically. It unites idea and power and makes them coextensive.[107]

The determinations and affectations that arise out of conatus, this striving to self- preservation, are movements of combination and dismemberment that tend to either greater or lesser perfection. Life is understood then as the movement of the potency of the totality – in the ‘purely transitive’ consciousness of this, there is no implicit totalisation as each is equally thought of as producing a de-totalisation or differentiation.[108] Deleuze quotes a Spinozistic Nietzsche for whom consciousness is the inferior moment of the subordination of a whole into a ‘superior whole’, a reality external to the ego: “consciousness is born in relation to a being of which we could be a function: it is the means by which we incorporate into that being.’[109] So here it is consciousness as the realm of semblance, identity and incorporation, again the plan of development characteristic of transcendent reason, that is under attack. Deleuze privileges those aspects of the mind not known to it where consciousness insistently appears as a form of subsumption of one whole to a greater one, a sacrifice to a greater cause. The Deleuzian reading of Spinoza is strongly orientated against the Hegelian dialectics of identity and non-identity. When Deleuze provokes the question ‘is repetition possible’ in one of his most rigorous academic productions, he is not simply repeating the anguish of Constantin Constantius, but seeking to ground explanation and expression outside of totality in so far as totality is only the division within a simple unity, i.e. constrained to have dynamics only out of contradiction between identity and non-identity. Counterpoised to negative identity are the categories of difference and repetition. In the book of the same name, repetition is outlined as the force of recreating a previous form, appropriating  - or itself appropriated - the novel constitutive force of difference that gave such expression a transitive force in the first place. Repetition is an un-representable form of non-conceptual conduct: one that disturbs the order of the same, and is more fundamental than the restrictive and finite dimensions of identity that uncover objects by placing them, despite their distinction, into categories of identity. As Colebrook describes it, the only thing that can be repeated is difference itself.[110] Deleuze’s influences here, in respect to the explicit challenge to Hegel that this thought invokes are a Spinozistic Nietzsche and a Kierkegaard, both of whom though different, oppose difference and repetition to the conceptual development of Hegel. Here Deleuze’s criticism of Hegel goes beyond Adorno’s positive appropriation of Hegel as a thinker of non-identity i.e. that the negation is the constitutive moment and is thus a stronger principle of the system than they points of dialectical synthesis. What Deleuze appears to object to is Hegel’s project itself, rather than any one moment of its progress.[111]

If a repetition is possible it would have to be an identical reoccurrence or reproduction, but if it is the same thing - completely identical - in what sense could it be a repetition, as where we had one we now have two. The talk of repetition and difference is an attempt to get away from this structuring of difference into oppositions that the dialectics of the same and other reproduce, hence the insistence on irreducible difference. Whilst difference rather than sameness is the key to Hegelian philosophy, it cannot be advanced in these terms without recourse to identity that has been analysed as the necessary formal coherence of the dialectic. Recovering the alternative in repetition has a deep mythological aesthetic resonance. In fact in an number of places in Difference and Repetition where Deleuze talks of Aristotle and Hegel, as philosophers of difference (similar to Adorno's insistence on non-identity) that only entertain conceptual difference but have no concept of difference, difference becomes ensconced in this conceptual blockage of identity and this 'false movement of the abstract' which obscures repetition from view. Deleuze wants to find a concept of difference that has its own singularity at the level of ideas. That he finds this in repetition marvellously re-invokes the negative – the repetition of negativity – because although it aspires to talk of reality without reduction to similitude, and however much it aspires to be autonomous from that discourse, it involves a deconstructive and critical effect. It is generated in counter-position, inevitably sutured to the world it aims to displace. In order to escape some of these aporia Deleuze argues that what is repeated is difference. In repetition we produce something different, a singularity - this reproduction of difference is what is repeated, it is just that we can't know it: repetition repeats itself by disguising itself. This must be brought to bear on the question of the un-nameable and the desire for totality evident in Lukács, later in Debord, and holistic humanist Marxism in general. Through Spinoza, Deleuze offers ways to subvert the nostalgic longing for original unity and critique of separation from the perspective of a utopian future unity. The dialectic of negative decomposition and fragmentation is challenged by a system of the positive emanation of difference conceived outside of a framework forming a tyranny of the ‘same’. In short has simple contradiction been banished from totality or does complex being render totality impossible?

Whilst Martin Jay jibes that Spinoza’s statements may not be the basis of a science of materialism, it is perhaps more astonishing that many Marxists have believed the latter to be found in idealism. What Althusser reads into Spinoza at the level of the ordering of knowledge is otherwise read more by others in political terms of the power of the body; his theorisation of power, the untapped possibilities of the body, of appetites and passions that all have cause, self cause of conatus. What Althusser does with Spinoza at the level of the order of knowledge is try and attribute the same force and affectivity at the level of the concept that is later more readily attributed to the body. However the return to Spinoza’s materialist and substantialist theorisation is powerfully suggestive of a way to see forms of inter-subjective combination and association in the time of complete subsumption of capital. This cannot be quite understood without developing how post-modern political theories have drawn on Spinoza, this will be postponed, until it has been shown how the formal substantialist treatment of totality in the work of Althusser exhausts the scientific value of the idea of totality.

Any one of a number of approaches could exhibit the importance of the use of the category of totality in Marx’s work, but also the varied meanings with which it is employed in his work. Mostly the totality refers to the synthetic function of thought that draws together disparate or separated elements of social life, and insists on viewing them first in isolation and then in combination. Hence for Marx totality as a scientific process first involves a ‘violence’ of abstraction. However as the following exhibits, for Marx social relations under capitalism exist not simply as an aggregate of what is in terms of identity, but as an overall process wherein conflict is increasingly interior to the total social form.

"The relations of production in their totality constitute what is called the social relations, society.... Capital is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois relation of production, a relation of production of bourgeois society."[112]

In one of Engels’s later works written three years after Marx’s death he returns to reconsider the German metaphysical tradition. In this text he introduces one of the fundamental ambiguities that was to confound Marxian political epistemology for a century to come. Here historical development, seen as a Hegelian process of continuous becoming, is seen as development from the simple to the complex, from lower to higher stages of development. He sutures this process to one of the knowledge of social formations; there is no question that historical materialism is seen as a critical embellishment of Hegelian doctrines of historical progression, and ultimately the identity of thinking with being.[113] The more ‘ruthlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds’ the more it ‘finds itself in harmony with the interests and aspirations of the workers.’[114] He returns in effect to the ‘profane history’ of man as the history of the productive forces and economic forms, the Marx of 1846.[115]

As will be demonstrated in Chapter Two, this connection seriously confounds the understanding of the notion of the totality in Das Kapital. Although the impact of Althusser’s point has suffered from trying to locate an exact break in Marx’s thought, he is correct to draw a distinction between the humanism of Marx’s early works and his later systematic and more structuralist work on the critique of political economy. Elements of humanism are evident throughout Marx’s writings, something that Althusser’s critique ultimately recognises and there is a consistency to his political goals of human emancipation. However in Marx’s scientific work, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this political orientation is pushed to the background, did not have an explanatory power and would conflict in intellectual terms with the adoption of what Marx calls the ‘social point of view.’ Althusser, who returns to the text and to the politics of reading Marx, develops the somewhat counter-intuitive posture that Marx’s later work represents a ‘theoretical anti-humanism’. In the early works and the works of the so-called epistemological break, Marx is a humanist because his materialism remains negatively configured against idealism. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx’s humanism shows all the trappings of the Hegelian utopian longing for the unity of thought and being in calling for ‘complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being — a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development’. However, in the German Ideology he makes the claim that the premise of materialism is ‘real individuals’, and something of a separation is drawn between the previously conceived identity between the social and the human.[116] The problem is that real individuals cannot be abstracted in the imagination; this abstraction would have to take the form of society, or social form.[117] The materialist method cannot start from man, but from a given social epoch.  Thus whilst idealism is the principle combatant, in Marx at least, materialism takes this humanist form.[118] However when he begins to develop an interior critique of the scientific consciousness that prevailed in contemporary society a new continent of meaning begins to be configured. Althusser’s symptomatic reading of Marx that first gave these claims some coherence and explanation has perhaps inevitably been received badly by modern proponents of a humanist Marxism.

With a few exceptions the work of Althusser has been largely misunderstood or misappropriated in England. Characteristic of the humanist reaction to Althusser, the bilious historian E.P. Thompson finds in Althusser an ‘inexorable structuralism.’[119] In English usage ‘structure’ refers to something like the ‘girders of a building’ whereas in French structuralism it does not refer to a visible and present form of ordering of things. In fact structuralism is based on the idea that words and concepts do not represent or reflect reality in a non- mediated way, but rather refer to a given body of meaning in a ‘community of speakers’. In Sausserian linguistics for instance, it refers to the absent totality, to all of the over-determined elements of speech, grammar syntax, and all the rules, from which a particular sentence can be interpreted and given meaning.[120] Whereas structuralism is often charged with formalism it rather sees itself as an attempt to take all factors into account, and not just those elements visible to ordinary perception. It transpires out of the desire of totality to name or capture the non-represented. Of course Althusser did not describe himself as a structuralist, even though he appears to use the term structure in the sense given above.

“Effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark; on the contrary, the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists in its effects, in short that the structure which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside of its effects.”[121]

This presents a different perception of structuralism from the one we have come to expect, even in some supposedly Althusserian accounts. It was this invocation of Spinoza into the equation that invokes a very new form of theorising the totality that attempts to evade the aporia of negative reasoning. Althusser uses Spinoza to support a materialist metaphysics that is based on a theoretically anti-humanist and non-positivist conception of science. This does not just involve the notion of the distinction between thought concrete and real concrete, but also that the normal categories of reflection, ‘time bound or localised perception of cause and effect’ are different from the order of a priori truth, and belong to knowledge of the imagination, i.e. ideology.[122] This suggests a critique of history as a kind of resemblance within this realm, but also a positive rationalist conception of knowledge that believes that the truth, the eternal order of logical relations, can be captured by the knowing mind.[123] So there is a deep connection between the structuralist critique of the ordinary perception of things and Althusser’s notion of ideology; with Spinoza’s critique of ‘knowledge of the imagination’, and the way things are presented to the senses in non- scientific observation/ appearances.[124] Althusser argues that we cannot be outside ideology, but science is the outside of ideology within ideology. But in neither Spinoza nor Althusser, is ideology reduced to false consciousness.[125] In Spinoza it has sub specie durationis – a temporally valid truth, but partial and lacking in adequate ideas. For our purposes anti-simple totality is not about denying its reality but identifying its prima facie semblance of things. So the concrete totality involves or rather presupposes a deconstruction of simple unities.

In Hegel ou Spinoza, Pierre Macherey argues that Hegelian idealism rests on a providential logic where the result is already known. Materialist dialectic does not foreclose the future and sees it open- ended, although how this works with the Spinozian critique of free will is not clear. For Macherey, Spinoza sees the limits of a both types of dialectics. It is suggests that the ‘godliness’ of Spinoza can be translated into a form of ideology critique.  Despite Spinoza’s apparent religiosity he does much to attack the transcendental idea of God. Whenever Spinoza speaks of ‘God’ he also mentions ‘nature’, in so far as they refer to all of being, they are more or less the same thing. Indeed even in his examination of the contradictions in scripture and the politics of its interpretation in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza insists on internal critique.[126] Scripture must be understood by scripture alone, through its own history, not through a cause behind or above it. Hence the attempt at the reading and rendering intelligible of the written word, separates out – as science does when it studies nature – the common and universal elements to form a foundation from which to advance to the more particular, incidental and localised. By bringing a ‘natural reason’ to bear on Scripture, Spinoza upset all religious authority that professed a ‘supernatural’ faculty was necessary to divine the truth of Scripture.

Although there are parallels between Spinoza’s critique of organised religion and Marx’s atheism, rather it is this notion of reading that takes us, albeit somewhat awkwardly, to the way in which the Althusserian circle began to approach Marx.

Here Althusser claims, once more counter- intuitively that the concept of history without a subject is ‘the basis of all the analyses in Capital.’[127] Crucially however, this is a conception of interiority that is sutured to the immanent force of critique as opposed to the immanent positing of the self in consciousness that was seen in Fichte and Hegel. Spinoza was crucial to this enterprise, and Althusser claimed that in this theorisation his group took a detour through Spinoza in the same way that Marx took a detour through Hegel. This produced the somewhat ridiculous (because it is so opposed to fact) but equally instructive position that Marx’s only direct philosophical ancestor was Spinoza himself.[128] This view was not without some precedent in Marx’s own early comments on Hegel.

“In Hegel there are three elements, Spinoza’s substance, Fichte’s self consciousness and Hegel’s necessary antagonistic unity of the two, the Absolute spirit. The first element is metaphysically disguised nature separated from man, the second is metaphysically disguised spirit separated from nature; the third is the metaphysically disguised unity of both, real man and the real human species.”[129]