Tolerance and affect
- Chapter 3 -
“Pleasure is a kind of pain.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
3.0 Spinoza’s affectivity
One of the most interesting points of convergence in contemporary science concerns the
role of affect in the regulation bodily dispositions.1 Affects, a number of scholars in both
the humanities and the natural sciences suggest, reside in the simplest bodies—those that
elude perception. Their work begins when these simple bodies are influenced by stimuli
from either inside or outside sources, and their role is to transform these stimuli into
physical reactions that move the same bodies in appropriate, if not satisfactory ways. This
1
Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher
Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and Brain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); William E.
Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002);
Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003);
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]); Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy
for New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004); Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (New
York: Simon & Shuster, 1996); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the
Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1998); Paul Redding, The Logic
of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor
Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 1993).
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happens by either embracing the stimuli (as in joy) or by rejecting it (as in sadness).
However, since the reaction itself is one of reflex—that is, it happens automatically,
without prior “decision”—the bodies in which affects reside are not the ones that control
them. In fact, new research indicates, bodies do not have affects, if by the verb “to have”
we mean the possession of entities available for exchange or trade. Rather, it is more
accurate to call affects brute intensities that, at the brink of perception, suspend the
expression of bodily dispositions, both individual and collectives ones, only to make
them reappear in new forms and shapes. Affects are in that sense autonomous sources of
creativity—what Antonio Damasio sees as “relays” and “reverberations” in the detection
of signals related to the brain’s sensory processing systems2; and what Brian Massumi
terms the “virtual” that “escapes confinement in [a] particular body.”3 Both comments
suggest that to study affect is to study the deep circumstances from which the body’s
dispositions emerge.
The objective of this chapter is to connect this suggestion, and the research that
follows in its vein, with the need for an investigation of tolerance proper, an investigation
that, in turn, enables us to approach tolerance and toleration as two equally important
issues. There are the several reasons for focusing on affect in this connection, the most
obvious being that tolerance, as we saw in chapter one, refers to the endurance of pain
and suffering—both of which are dispositions of the body that entail an affective
dimension. By situating tolerance at the level of affect we thus find ourselves in a better
position to address some of the questions that were left unanswered by the literature on
reasonable toleration: What kind of pain and suffering do embodied identities within the
2
3
Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 58.
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 35.
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multitude tolerate? What makes it possible to endure pain and suffering? What kind of
engagement does this endurance entail? Furthermore, if it is the case that to study affect
is to study the deep circumstances from which bodily dispositions emerge, then it may
also be the case that to explore linkages between affect and tolerance is to situate our
analysis at the point where tolerance first comes into being. One advantage of this
viewpoint is that it turns our analysis of the deep circumstances of tolerance from a
presumption of stability to a presumption of volatility—that is, to a presumption of the
body’s constitutive role in judgment and reason. Another advantage is that it elucidates
the way in which bodies, by virtue of being affective entities, participate in the genesis of
pain and suffering that they themselves endure. We might even say that it shows how
bodies operate on both sides of tolerance, that is, that they are both what tolerates and
what is being tolerated.
My inspiration in pursuing these suggestions is, as already indicated, the work of
Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677). That Spinoza’s work entails an alternative approach to
the issues of tolerance and toleration—one that defies conventional paradigms of
democratic pluralism—has been the focus of several studies over the past ten years. The
historian Jonathan Israel goes as far as to suggest that Spinoza inaugurates a “radical
Enlightenment,” which not only precedes but also surpasses most other approaches to the
intersection of the two (including the approaches we discussed chapter two).4 But there
4
Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. at pp. 265–270. See also John Christian Laursen, “Spinoza on
Toleration: Arming the State and Reining in the Magistrate,” in Cary J. Nederman and John Christian
Laursen (eds.), Difference and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Michael A. Rosenthal, “Spinoza’s Republican Argument for
Toleration,” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 11, no. 3 (2003), pp. 320–337; Steven B. Smith, Spinoza,
Liberalism, and the Question of the Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 119–
144; and Theo Verbeek, Spinoza’s Theological-political Treatise: Exploring “the Will of God”
(Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 181–183.
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has been little attempt to interpret Spinoza’s analysis of tolerance proper in light of his
insights into the role of affect in the regulation of bodily dispositions. What follows seeks
to change this with the suggestion that Spinoza opens a window to what I call the
“affectivity of tolerance.” Affects, Spinoza suggests in line with contemporary research,
are sources of creativity that help bodies react to physical stimuli in appropriate ways.
They do so by circumscribing our perceptions with a sense of depth and color and,
furthermore, by infusing bodies with ethical and political aspirations of the highest
nature. But, Spinoza continues, adding insight to the discussion of affective being, affects
can also subvert these aspirations. Their power entails a sense of passivity—that is, they
occur or, perhaps even better, take place in bodies without these bodies being the full
cause of them—and, thus, their upshot is a tension between the empowerment of ethical
and political aspirations and the subversion of these aspirations, creating a perpetual
circuit of pain and suffering. It is the endurance of this circuit that I call the affectivity of
tolerance.
The most important insight that this reading of Spinoza brings to the questions set
forth at the outset of this study—in brief, what are the deep circumstances of tolerance?
and what sensibility nurtures these circumstances most effectively?—is that we should
think of tolerance as being conceived reflexively. That is, the deep circumstances of
tolerance arise from within the structure of affective being, and they fold into this
structure the pain and suffering that makes tolerance necessary. Indeed, it is because of
this reflexivity that tolerance concerns the endurance of pain and suffering, and not, for
example, the erasure or displacement of these affective states. Affects, we might add, are
both the proximate cause and the effect of tolerance. Throughout the chapter I develop
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this idea with a view to the sensibility that Spinoza envisions as the most productive one
in the pursuit of democratic pluralism. My approach to this sensibility is a double-edged
one. On the one hand, I affirm Spinoza’s idea of a sensibility of hilaritas that, while
acknowledging the persistence of pain and suffering, turns these affective states into an
energizing mood that nurtures the deep circumstances of tolerance based on values such
as respect, equality, and generosity. On the other hand, however, I also argue that
Spinoza ties this sensibility of hilaritas to a doctrine of immanence that, because it is
presented as being beyond contestation, obstructs the pursuit of that very same nurturing.
“I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy,” Spinoza wrote in a letter to
Alfred Burgh (1650–1708), “but I know that what I understand is the true one.”5 This
confidence in the doctrine of immanence is surprising, first, because it assumes a mode of
thinking that is nonaffective (something Spinoza denies throughout his work) and,
second, because it overlooks the subversive aspects of affective being—aspects
correlated to the way in which affects escape confinement to a particular body. Because
of this, I seek to disclose the contestability of Spinoza’s doctrine of immanence, a
disclosure that opens up nuances in the experience of what it means both to be a tolerant
subject and to be a subject of tolerance.
These remarks set the stage for this chapter’s contribution to a project that seeks
to rethink the intersection of tolerance and toleration. In brief, the idea is to specify a
particular circuit of pain and suffering, one that defines the beginning of tolerance, and,
furthermore, to show how the affirmation of this circuit might enhance the way we think
of this issue in relation to the one of toleration. Thus, the main focus is an exploration of
5
Baruch de Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, in Spinoza: Collected Works (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 2002 [1675]), Letter 76. References to the Letters will hereafter take the
form of Ep10 to indicate Letter 10.
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affect in Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence. This exploration both discloses the
ubiquity of affect and develops the tension between the empowerment of affect and the
affective subversion of this empowerment, a tension that opens a window to what I call
the affectivity of tolerance. Moreover, it opens a window to the sensibility of hilaritas
that, in turn, sheds new light on how we might nurture the deep circumstances of
tolerance. But first I discuss how and why Spinoza has become one of the most debated
thinkers in contemporary political theory—a thinker whom Deleuze and Guattari recently
named “the prince of philosophers.”6
3.1 Tolerance with affect
Spinoza’s road to recognition has been long. It began in difficult circumstances when he
was excommunicated from the congregation of Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam,
Holland—mainly because his investigations into the nature of affective being made him
question the immortality of the soul7—and it took a turn for the worse when philosophers
in Europe began defining the terms of his legacy. For example, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
ridiculed Spinoza’s view that all things are but modifications of God, commenting that
“in Spinoza’s system all those who say, ‘The Germans killed ten thousand Turks’, speak
incorrectly and falsely unless they mean, ‘God modified into Germans has killed God
6
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burshell
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1991]), p. 48.
7
Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp.
182–184. See also Asa Kasher and Shlomo Biderman, “Why Was Spinoza Excommunicated?” in David S.
Katz and Jonathan I. Israel (eds.), Sceptics, Millenarians, and Jews (Leiden: Brill, 1990); W. N. A Klever,
“Spinoza’s life and works,” in Don Garrett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996); Richard H. Popkin, “Spinoza’s Excommunication,” in Heidi Ravven
and Lenn E. Goodman (eds.), Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy (New York: State University of New
York Press, 2002); and Odette Vlessing, “The Excommunication of Baruch Spinoza: A conflict between
Jewish and Dutch law,” Studia Spinozana, vol. 13 (1997), pp. 15–47.
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modified into ten thousand Turks.’”8 Similarly, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was
convinced that although Spinoza sought to live a virtuous life, his doctrine of immanence
implied that he could not succeed. Indeed, making use of the image of reason that we
discussed in the previous chapter, Kant points out that to equate God with nature is to do
violence to the very idea of virtue. Thus, he argues, “[deceit], violence, and envy will
always be rife around [Spinoza], even though he himself is honest, peaceable, and
benevolent.”9 It is only in recent years that these opinions about Spinoza have begun to
change.
Part of the reason is because of the way Spinoza both anticipates and substantiates
some of the research that contemporary scholars pursue at the intersection of
neuroscience and cultural theory. Take the example of the pain that amputees feel in their
phantom limbs—an example whose insights into pain itself are pertinent to the study of
tolerance proper. The pain that amputees feel in their phantom limb is notoriously
difficult to explain because the nonexistent limb makes it hard to identify a clear
correlation between body tissue damage and the activation of nociceptors that stimulate
activity in the lower regions of the brain. How can we feel pain in parts of the body that
are no longer there? A possible explanation follows from experiments done by V. S.
Ramachandran. Ramachandran argues that what causes pain in nonexistent limbs is not
the damage done to the body tissue but two embodied processes that follow in the wake
of this damage. The first is the memory of the pain that amputees used to feel in their
now amputated limp. Such memory persists, Ramachandran points out, even after surgery
8
Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1991 [1697]), p. 312.
9
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1987 [1793]), §87, p. 342 (452).
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has removed the initial cause of the pain. The second is more complicated, but relates to
the maps bodies draw of themselves, which outline the connections between physical
stimuli, brain activity, and neurological pathways. After amputation, these maps are
redrawn and, Ramachandran argues, it is probable that the new map “confuses” some of
these pathways so that certain physical stimuli get hooked up accidentally to other pain
centers in the brain. Ramachandran writes: “When we experience pain, special pathways
are activated simultaneously both to carry the sensation and to amplify it or dampen it
down as needed. Such ‘volume control’…is what allows us to modulate our responses to
pain effectively in response to changing demands…Among amputees, it’s entirely
possible that these volume control mechanisms have gone awry as a result of
remapping—resulting in echolike ‘wha wha’ reverberation and amplification of pain.”10
Both of these processes—that is, the process of memory and the process of
remapping—suggest that pain and, by extension, suffering is neither purely mechanical
nor exclusively intellectual. It is instead a multilayered phenomenon that combines both
in ways that are not readily available to perception. However, if that is the case, then we
might ask whether it is possible to say anything general about pain and suffering. What is
it that drives the “volume control” that makes bodies feel pain and suffering in this or that
way? Spinoza’s work on the structure of affective being is relevant here. It shows that
affects function as volume controls in culturally inflected settings and politically created
situations. Furthermore, it shows how affects are both what empower ethical and political
aspirations and what subvert these aspirations. As we shall see, it is because of this
10
Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, p. 51. Ramachandran substantiates his explanation in two ways.
First, he points to the fact that some patients report pain in their phantom limb when they or someone else
brush other parts of their body. Second, he shows how it is possible to alter the feeling of phantom pain
through visual manipulation (in particular, the usage of a mirror-box).
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subversion, a subversion that creates a circuit of pain and suffering subsisting in the very
structure of affective being, that we can speak of what I call the affectivity of tolerance.
3.1.1 The ubiquity of affect
Affects play a ubiquitous role in the regulation of bodily dispositions. Spinoza pursues
this thesis within a framework that defines his doctrine of immanence. A review of two
main principles of this framework—what I name “interconnected abundance” and
“expressive differentiation”—shows why philosophers such as Bayle and Kant were
mistaken in their assessment of Spinoza. It also sets the stage for an appreciation of the
way in which affects engender the deep circumstances from which the issue of tolerance
arises.
The first principle that defines the doctrine of immanence is the principle of
interconnected abundance. This principle is part of an attempt to establish the basic field
of existence, and it entails a challenge to the traditional dualisms of Western philosophy,
epitomized in the image of a God who, transcendent to an ever-changeable world, creates
all there is. Spinoza disputes this image, first, because it undermines the omnipresent
power of God, leaving critical aspects of existence (those that are contingent) outside his
or her purview, and, second, because it presupposes the creation of “something” out of
“nothing”—a contradiction in terms.11 Moreover, if there is no radical break between the
creator and the created, then there is no way we can say that existence itself is one of lack
or deficiency. On a Spinozist view there is nothing fundamentally missing in existence,
11
See Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of his Reasoning, vol.
1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 79, for a review of Spinoza’s
engagement with the medieval image of God.
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even when this or that domain seems out of tune with itself. Rather, the closer we look,
the more evident it becomes that the fulcrum of existence is a creative engine—what
Spinoza refers to as Natura Naturans12— that keeps propelling the new or the unexpected
into being. Indeed, from a Spinozist point of view it seems that the new or the unexpected
emerge out of connections that are already in place within existence. It is this notion of
interconnected abundance that leads Spinoza to his controversial definition of God, one
that places the divine at the level of substance. As Spinoza states at the outset of the
Ethics, defying the theologians of his time, “[by] God I mean an absolutely infinite being,
that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and
infinite essence” (E1def6).
This image of God points to the second principle: expressive differentiation. The
task of this principle is to determine the way in which substance becomes attributes—in
Spinoza’s universe we know that there are at least two attributes: thought and
extension—and, furthermore, to explain how these two attributes become concrete modes
of either ideas or bodies. The task is, in other words, to make sure that the immanence of
God is more than the repetition of the same. Spinoza ensures this through a principle of
expression according to which the explication of one aspect of substance happens
because of its involvement with another aspect of substance.13 For example, Spinoza
suggests that although the attributes of thought and extension are explications of infinite
12
Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics, in Spinoza: Collected Works, Part 1, proposition 29, scholium. References to
the Ethics will hereafter take the form of EIIIp9s to indicate the scholium to proposition nine of part three
of the Ethics. Other abbreviations include the following: d for demonstration; c for corollary; def for
definition; s for scholium; ap for appendix; ax for axiom; pref for preface; lem for lemma; def.aff for
definition of affects; and ex for explication.
13
See Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone
Books, 1992 [1968]), pp. 15–17. Pierre Macherey, “The Encounter with Spinoza,” in Paul Patton (ed.),
Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 148–150, discusses the creative distortions that
arise from an expressionist reading of Spinoza.
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essence, they also involve substance, modifying God as they explicate his or her nature
(E1p19d). Likewise, Spinoza argues that although ideas and bodies explicate God in a
definite and determinate way, they do so by involving God in their own existence
(E2p25c; E2p45d). Both of these examples indicate that the concreteness of existence is
never the same, but always in the process of becoming otherwise. We differentiate
ourselves by modifying existing aspects of substance. It is because of this that we are able
to characterize the doctrine of immanence as the perpetual encroachment or folding of
substance, attributes, and modes. An amateur’s drawing of this characterization looks like
this:
God: substance
Attributes
Modes
Existence
Together the two principles of immanence—interconnected abundance and expressive
differentiation—set the stage for the ubiquity of affect in the regulation of the body’s
dispositions. At first it may seem as if affects belong only to modal existence. “By
mode,” Spinoza writes, “I mean the affections of substance, that is, that which is in
something else and is conceived through something else” (E1def5). But since modes are
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affections of substance, affects themselves are not exhausted by that existence. Instead,
on a Spinozist view it is more correct to see affects as creative powers—what we earlier
called “volume controls”—that either increase or decrease the ability of modes to act
upon their surroundings (see E3def3). An excellent example of this enfoldment of modes,
attributes, and substance into one finite entity is the body itself.
The body, Spinoza argues, making no categorical distinction between individual
and collective bodies, is a complex entity whose uniqueness stems from differences “in
respect of motion-and-rest, quickness and slowness” (E2p3lem1). Moreover, what
determine these differences are the affects that each body brings to its encounter with
another body. For instance, if a body in which affects of pain prevail encounters another
body in which affects of pain also prevail, both bodies will see their power to move be
diminished. Likewise, if a body in which affects of pleasure prevail encounters another
body in which affects of pain prevail, the result will be an increase of power in the latter
and a decrease of power in the former. Spinoza makes this logic of empowerment and
disempowerment clear in the following axiom on the nature of bodily existence: “All the
ways in which a body is affected by another body follow from the nature of the affected
body together with the nature of the body affecting it, so that one and the same body may
move in various ways in accordance with the various nature of the bodies causing its
motion” (E2p13lem3ax1).
Let us note that the upshot of this axiom is, first, that it shows how affects play a
ubiquitous role in the instigation and regulation of bodily dispositions—without affects
bodies would be unable to either move or rest—and, second, that it shows how affects
empower ethical and political aspirations such as happiness, democracy, freedom, or
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truth. Spinoza augments the second point by turning the issue of affective being into a
matter of self-preservation. The stronger a body’s affective being is, Spinoza argues, the
more likely it will persist, increasing its ability to put any aspiration it might have into
effect—an ability that Spinoza characterizes as the body’s conatus (E3p7; E3p11; and
E3p28).14 Without forcing the issue too much we may say that this correlation of
affective being with self-preservation discloses three ways in which affects empower
ethical and political aspirations. First, affects are pre-individual powers that differentiate
the field of existence (substance)—that is, they turn attributes of thought and extension
into finite modes of existence. Second, affects are neither form nor content but
embodiments of intensity, each of which has its own register of either increasing or
decreasing power. Third, affects are creative, which also means that they defy
confinement, producing new constellations of existence through the modification of
existing ones.
But before we accept these propositions wholeheartedly—in sum, that affects are
critical to the empowerment of ethical and political aspirations—we need to ask what
kind of empowerment affects entail. Do affects always entail active empowerment? The
usual connotations suggest that the action of empowering is indeed always an active one.
But in a scholium that accompanies the discussion of self-preservation, Spinoza refines
this view, suggesting that affects are passive powers. Here’s how Spinoza formulates his
surprising yet insightful suggestion:
14
See Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), pp. 106–108. Hampshire suggests a
parallel between Freud’s conception of libido and Spinoza’s conatus, arguing that “both philosophers
conceive emotional life as based on a universal drive or tendency to self-preservation; both maintain that
any frustration of this drive must manifest itself in our conscious life as some painful disturbance.”
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We see then that the mind can undergo considerable change, and can pass now to
a state of greater perception, now to one of less perfection, and it is these passive
transitions [paffiones] that explicate for us the emotions [affectûs] of Pleasure and
Pain. So in what follows I shall understand by pleasure “the passive transition of
the mind to a state of greater perfection,” and by pain “the passive transition of
the mind to a state of less perfection” (E3p11s; my emphases).15
My point is that this emphasis on the passivity of affects adds insight to recent research
into the role that affects play in the regulation of bodily dispositions. Most importantly, it
suggests that although affects are creative powers, they do not encompass unfettered
potentiality or exercise unlimited vitality. Instead, within a Spinozist framework, the
passivity of affects circulate in bodies as well as in between bodies—both individual and
collective ones—and they suggest that this circulation is such that there is not a single
body that is the full cause of its effects. There is in that sense a remainder that, intrinsic to
the structure of affect, eludes strict control. This is the remainder that provokes pain and
suffering.
Moreover, since bodies are not the full cause of their own effects, we might say
that they endure affects, that is, they situate the passive within the active so that agency
itself becomes something that happens “in passing” reflecting that which has not yet been
completed. Two consequences follow from this mode of reflexive agency. First, affects
Samuel Shirley, “Translator’s Preface,” in Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the
Intellects, and Selected Letters (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), pp. 23–24, discusses the
difficulties of translating “affect” with “emotion.” The best way to distinguish the two is to think of affect
as an intensity that has not yet been qualified whereas emotion is qualified intensity—that is, intensity that
has been made intelligible in a conceptual manner. Recent explorations of emotions as qualified intensity
include Susan Mendus, Feminism and Emotion: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy (Houndsmills,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); and Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of
Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
15
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are just as much the empowerment of ethical and political aspirations as they are the
subversion of these aspirations, diverting the hope that bodies have for self-preservation.
Second, affects signal the prevalence, if not persistence, of pain and suffering—the pain
and suffering that arise from not being one’s own cause, from being subject to fateful
externalities and accidental happenings. Spinoza brings this aspect of affective being to
our attention in numerous ways, all of which indicate the element of transitive passivity
in bodily dispositions. For example, Spinoza emphasizes what he calls the “vacillation of
mind” (E3p17s); he recognizes the way most bodies “rejoice at the weakness of their
fellows” (E3p55s); he locates the pervasiveness of conflict and strive in the “reality [of]
ambition” (E3p31s); and, finally, he outlines a whole register of painful affects, which
includes aversion, fear, despair, pity, envy, shame, disappointment, humiliation, and
repentance (E3def.aff., passim).
All this suggest that to speak of the ubiquity of affect is to speak of a perpetual
circuit of pain and suffering residing in bodies below the threshold of perception. Across
these bodies this circuit puts into gear a self-enforcing process by which the structure of
affective being is both the cause and the effect of pain and suffering. It is cause because it
subverts the aspirations that it empowers; it is effect because the subversion is disclosed
through various modes of pain and suffering. Moreover, since bodies owe their existence
to affective being—after all, the ubiquity of affects is what enables bodies to either move
or rest—we are at a point where affective being appears to be what generates the
possibility of tolerance, setting the stage for the intersection of this issue with the one of
toleration. Indeed, it appears that tolerance begins whenever affects make a particular
body move or rest, and, furthermore, that it persists as this body endures various modes
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of pain and suffering. These two insights disclose what I call the affectivity of tolerance.
An engagement with a possible objection to the proposition—that affects are both the
cause and the effect of pain and suffering—will help us to decide whether it is possible to
elevate this disclosure to a general insight about the deep circumstances from which
tolerance emerges. Do affects signal the very genesis of tolerance?
3.1.2 Multitudo—the politics of pain and suffering
A possible objection to the proposition just announced is that it does not grasp the full
potential of affective being. Affective being, several readers of Spinoza note, may include
a circuit of pain and suffering, but these affects are merely part of a larger circuit in
which affects of joy and happiness prevail.16 If we do not interpret the affects of pain and
suffering in light of this larger circuit, these readers continue, we risk misrepresenting the
very structure of affective being. In fact, we may contribute, not so much to the politics
of tolerance and toleration—and, as such, to the pursuit of democratic pluralism—as to
the very anger and resentment that Spinoza sought to fight in his critique of religion. If
this were the case we would have disregarded what another reader calls “the full
registering of affect and its affirmation.”17
I discuss the connection between affect and affirmation in the second half of the
chapter, but for now I would like to concentrate on how the transient nature of the
multitude—a term Spinoza puts at the center of his later works—returns the objection
16
See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Light
Books, 1988 [1970]), p. 101; Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past
and Present (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 105; and Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and
Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 108.
17
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 28.
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back to the initial circuit of pain and suffering.18 Using the doctrine of immanence as a
point of reference, Spinoza sees the multitude as a body of many parts whose collective
identity eludes clearly established limits.19 However, Spinoza then goes on to suggest that
what brings this kind of body together in this or that situation is related to the work done
by the imagination.20 The multitude, he argues, is an imaginative force—real but not
actually present—because of the way in which the imagination forges connections across
bodies. It does so, first, through the appeal to particular affects and, second, through acts
of association, ushering new ideas or concepts into being.21 Moreover, since the
imagination brings the multitude together, it also shapes the efficacy of the multitude.
Spinoza computes this correlation with reference to three dimensions. The first
dimension—that of commonality—suggests that a multitude is efficacious only to the
extent that it invokes images that resonate with its own embodied situation (E3p27). The
second dimension—that of temporality—suggests that a multitude is efficacious only to
18
The final definition of the multitude (in Latin: multitudo) does not appear until the unfinished Political
Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, in Spinoza: Collected Works, chapter 2, section 17, where Spinoza argues
that sovereignty is “defined by the power of the people [potentia multitudinis].” On a general level, it is
possible to find traces of the multitude in some of Spinoza’s earlier works. For example, Spinoza
introduces the multitude as a principle of physics in which the multitude itself stands for the “number of
causes [multitudine caufarum]” (E5p20s; also E2p13l7s) that turn our world into an abundance of infinite
combinations. Similarly, he discusses the multitude as the principle of embodiment that describes the
complex composition of the “many parts of the various kinds [plurimis diverfæ]” (E4p45s) of the human
body.
19
Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London: Verso, 1998 [1985]), pp. 69–71;
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The
Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 190–200; Antonio Negri, Subversive Spinoza: (Un)contemporary variations
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 41–45; Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude:
For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea
Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), pp. 21–23; and Yirmiyaha Yovel, “Spinoza: The psychology of
the multitude and the uses of language,” Studia Spinozana, Vol. 1 (1985), pp. 305–333.
20
Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The power of Spinoza’s metaphysics and politics, trans. Michael
Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 [1981]), pp. 187–189, establishes the connection
between the multitude and the imagination.
21
Spinoza outlines these aspects of the imagination in chapter two of Theological-Political Treatise, trans.
Samuel Shirley, in Spinoza: Collected Works. In this chapter, Spinoza shows how Biblical prophesies are
reflections of the prophets’ imagination. References to the Theological-Political Treatise will hereafter take
the form of TPT15/521 to indicate chapter 15 of the Treatise, p. 521.
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the extent that it invokes images that appear to be imminent in time (E3p18s1). The third
dimension—that of intensity—suggests that a multitude is efficacious only to the extent
that it invokes images that affect us in a particularly concentrated way (E3p22d).
It should be clear from the above that what binds these three dimensions together
is their transitive or passing nature. None of the three dimensions stays the same for an
extended period of time, contributing instead to the composition of the multitude through
contingent connections and brief encounters. The multitude is constantly in flux, subject
to new interventions at the level of the imagination, many of which disrupt existing
connections within the multitude. It is in that sense what Paolo Virno calls “a plurality
which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of
communal affairs, without converging into a One.”22 However, even if the multitude
persists as an empowering plurality, it is important not to lose sight of the passivity that
lies at the heart of the multitude.23 The multitude may be profoundly subversive, but the
subversion comes about because the multitude is not its own cause. It situates the passive
within the active, the painful within the pleasurable. Spinoza exemplifies this aspect of
the multitude in terms of the oscillation between two images that he finds particularly
important to mass politics and collective action: hope and fear. At first, these two images
may seem diametrically opposed because the former involves an affect of pleasure and
the latter involves an affect of pain (see E3p18s2). However, in accordance with his
general analysis of affective being, Spinoza maintains that they are closely related to each
22
Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 21 (emphasis in original).
Arguments pointing in this direction can be found in Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics,’”
trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, reprinted in Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (eds.), The New
Spinoza (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and, to a lesser extent, in Leo Strauss, “How
to Study Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise,” reprinted in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of
Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1997 [1948]).
23
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other. The reason for this is that both hope and fear evolve around a certain
inconstancy—a profound uncertainty about the course of events (past and future). This
leaves the multitude’s transition from one state to another in severe doubt, and it creates
an oscillation between the active (and, hence, the pleasurable) and the passive (and,
hence, the painful). The multitude hopes that x happens but fears y; the multitude fears
that z happens but hopes q. It is because of this oscillation between imaginative affects
that the multitude never remains the same. Spinoza writes about the pain of being
hopeful: “For he who is in hopeful suspense and has doubts as to the outcome of a thing
is assumed to be imagining something that excludes the existence of the hoped-for thing,
and so to that extent he feels pain” (E3def.aff.13ex).
Recent events such as the war in ex-Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda—not
to mention the American-led depiction of Muslims in the “war on terror”—bear witness
to the contentious circumstances in which images of hope and fear are created. They
show how often the multitude joins the pleasurable rays of hope to a fear for what is
either different or indeterminate. Furthermore, they show how this fear can be engineered
more or less actively by culturally inspired images and politically created opportunities.
Spinoza experienced this first hand when, on August 20, 1672, a mob attacked and
brutally murdered Johan and Cornelis de Witt in The Hague, Holland.24 The de Witt
brothers defined themselves as republicans, and they were both devoted to the
Netherlands as a constitutional state without any quasi-monarchical offices. One of them,
Johan de Witt (1625–1672), was a particularly skilful politician who made his way to the
24
Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 254–259, 304–307.
See also Lewis Samuel Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 76–80;
and Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p. 776–806.
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position of Grand Pensionary at the age of twenty-eight. Holding this position, he
defended the provincial states against their Orangist opponents—opponents who sought
to transform the Netherlands into a monarchy, with William III (1650–1702) as its
sovereign. But when the army of Louis XIV (1638–1715) invaded Dutch territory in the
spring of 1672, public support for the Grand Pensionary started to crumble. Johan de Witt
came under political fire, and he saw no other option but to resign, leaving it to his
Orangist opponents to fight the French. One might think that this capitulation would have
satisfied the demand for strong leadership, yet it fueled a vicious vendetta against the de
Witt brothers. The vendetta culminated when the police arrested Johan’s brother,
Cornelis de Witt (1623–1672), on charges of plotting against the Stadtholder’s life.
Although the charges were unsubstantiated, and the government acquitted Cornelis on
August 20, a hostile mob mobilized outside the city prison in The Hague. The mob,
which was subject to the political ingenuity of the Orangists, protested the verdict and,
when Johan came to escort Cornelis to a relative’s house, it stormed the prison gates,
demanding their lives for “traitorous” acts. Pushed into the streets of The Hague, the
brothers were dead before they reached the scaffold. “Their bodies,” one historian
reports, “were then hung up by the feet, stripped bare, and literally torn to pieces.”25
I retell this part of Dutch history for two reasons. One reason is that it illustrates
the transient nature of the multitude. The multitude is a potent force, to be sure. But it
gains its power from the imagination. This means, first, that its way of forging
connections across bodies is brief and, second, that it is not the cause of its own effects.
Indeed, the de Witt incident bears witness to how a particular constellation of the
multitude arises, not so much by looking into itself—by establishing what Spinoza would
25
Nadler, Spinoza, p. 306.
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have called “intuitive” or “adequate” knowledge (E2p40s2)—but by reacting to those
externalities that disrupt existing connections within the multitude. It is because of these
externalities that anyone who participates in the multitude finds himself or herself subject
to the passivity that lies at the heart of affective being. Also, it is because of these
externalities that the initial circuit of pain and suffering persists. We may even say that if
there is a circuit of joy and happiness, it is one that is co-original with the one of pain and
suffering.
The second reason why I retell the de Witt incident is that it demonstrates the
indispensability of the multitude at the level of politics. Spinoza, who was so infuriated
by the incident that he wanted to post a placard near the site of the massacre reading,
“You are the greatest of barbarians,”26 knew this better than anyone else. Indeed, it is not
too much to say that the lesson he learned from the de Witt incident was that it is neither
feasible nor desirable to eliminate the multitude. The multitude may be transient—and, as
such, shortsighted and irrational—but these qualities neither warrant nor make possible
its elimination. In fact, Spinoza argues in his unfinished work, the Political Treatise, to
do so would be to overlook the way in which the multitude represents the main body
around which political action evolves.27 The challenge is therefore not to eliminate the
multitude, but to translate it into the sine qua non of political relations that appreciate the
virtue of being tolerant. That is, the challenge facing the pursuit of democratic pluralism
is to acknowledge the circuit of pain and suffering, and, with this acknowledgment, to
formulate a politics of pain and suffering that affirms the finitude, fragility, vulnerability
26
The source of the quotation is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) who spoke with Spinoza about the
deaths of the de Witt brothers when he was passing through The Hague in 1676. Leibniz’ remarks are
quoted in Nadler, Spinoza, p. 306.
27
Spinoza, Political Treatise, chapter 2, section 17; and chapter 3, sections 5, 7, and 9. References to the
Political Treatise will hereafter take the form of PTII/3 to indicate chapter 2, section 3 of the Treatise.
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that lie within these phenomena. Spinoza clarifies the challenge in a manner that puts
these ideas at the center of political discourse:
So if human nature were so constituted that men lived only as reason prescribes
and attempted nothing other than that, then the right of Nature, insofar as that is
considered as specific to man, would be determined by the power of nature. But
men are led by blind desire more than by reason, and therefore their natural power
or right must be defined not by reason but by any appetite by which they may be
determined to act and by which they try to preserve themselves. I do admit that in
the case of those desires that do not arise from reason, men are not so much active
as passive (PTII/5; my emphasis).
This observation of Spinoza’s is interesting, not only because it shows awareness of the
transient nature of bodily dispositions—what he refers to as “blind desire”—but because
it points to the passivity that defines the baseline of these dispositions. This may sound
surprising to those readers who think that Spinoza’s ethic is one of joy and happiness. It
is, I admit, but we cannot overlook how Spinoza realizes over the course of his work that
the success of this ethic is dependent on how bodies fold into it a co-original circuit of
pain and suffering. The circuit of pain and suffering is co-original with the one of joy and
happiness, first, because it sets the parameters for the way bodies seek to preserve
themselves (what Spinoza refers to in the quotation as “appetite” and “desire”) and
second, because it persists no matter how reasonable these bodies behave (what Spinoza
refers to in the quotation as “natural power” and “the right of Nature”). Indeed, it is
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because of the latter that bodies are “not so much active as passive.” They do not control
their own circumstances any more than a single individual controls the multitude over an
extended period of time. It is because of this creative disturbance—one in which the
active and the passive operate in a disjunctive conjunction—that we can speak of what I
call the affectivity of tolerance. The following seeks to define this term of art in more
detail.
3.1.3 The affectivity of tolerance
Based on what we have seen, we might define the affectivity of tolerance as a term of art
that locates the deep circumstances of tolerance in the structure of affective being. It
suggests that this structure is one of pain and suffering, one that follows from not being
one’s own cause, and it substantiates this suggestion by showing how affective being
both empowers and subverts ethical and political aspirations of the highest nature. The
upshot is a circuit of pain and suffering that prevails below the threshold of perception.
Let me explicate a number of reasons why attention to this circuit—and, with it, the
affectivity of tolerance—enables us to appreciate the unique nature of tolerance itself.
The first reason is that it shows us how the deep circumstances under which the
issue of tolerance arises are self-created, yet not in such a way that a body has the means
to remove them if it decided to do so. To the contrary, we now know that bodies—both
individual and collective ones—are participants in an endless process by which affective
being defines their dispositions. Affects structure a body as it tries to change them;
affects humiliate a body as it tries to control them; affects haunt a body as it tries to forget
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them. All this means that there is no decision to be tolerant at the level of affect—that is,
there is nothing a body could do to succeed in its endeavors to eliminate the pain and
suffering that circumscribe affective being. It is because of this that tolerance concerns
the endurance of pain and suffering, and not, for example the erasure or removal of these
affective states. A body is stuck, but to be stuck is not to be deadlocked because the
endurance of pain and suffering is also what puts bodily dispositions into motion. This is
the first reason why the term—the affectivity of tolerance—enables us to appreciate the
unique nature of tolerance.
The second reason is related to the insights that the affectivity of tolerance brings
to the debate about the intersection of tolerance and toleration. Most importantly, it
overcomes the pitfall of reducing the former to latter by showing how both come into
being before they establish themselves according to the stable conditions of plurality,
objection, and authority. It elucidates this aspect of our discussion by substituting the
presumption of volatility for the one of stability and, furthermore, by appreciating the
way in which bodies, whether conceived individually or collectively, are both tolerant
subjects and subjects of tolerance. The result is a number of shifts in how we interpret
key terms in the existing literature on tolerance and toleration. Ultimately, these shifts are
the ones that enable us to approach the intersection of tolerance and toleration in a way
that appreciates the unique nature of the former. Let me explain.
(1) From disembodied reason to embodied reason: The first shift that follows from
our explorations of affective being is related to what counts as reason. The
conventional account—the one that most contemporary theorists are committed
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to—depicts reason as a faculty of disembodied cognition. This depiction implies a
tendency to overlook the ubiquitous character of pain and suffering, and it tends
to prevent those theorists who hold this view of reason from dealing with
fundamental aspects of the circumstances from which the issue of tolerance arises
(those aspects related to the experience of pain and suffering). The approach that
follows from the affectivity of tolerance seeks to change this. It does so, not so
much by talking about the irrelevance of reason—about how reason has no role in
democratic politics—but with a different image of reason that depicts it as an
embodied faculty whose very processes depend on what takes place below the
threshold of perception. Reason is now part of bodily dispositions, and, as such, it
may be subject to accidental happenings and other externalities. As we have seen,
the result is a much greater appreciation of pain and suffering. It directs our
attention to the kind of tolerance that resides in the simplest bodies—those that
make perception, and, subsequently, reason, possible.
(2) From discourse and procedure to technique and sensibility: The second shift is
related to where we should locate the politics of tolerance and toleration. The
conventional location—which, again, is the location that most contemporary
theorists have chosen to prioritize—is at the level of discourse and procedure,
both of which are epitomized in the judiciary disputes over where to draw the line
between church and state. The approach that follows from the affectivity of
tolerance does not dispute the importance of this. But it suggests that to locate the
politics of tolerance and toleration in discourse and procedure is to restrict this
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kind of politics to a much narrower band of life than needed. For example, with
the transient nature of the multitude in mind, it points out the importance of the
imagination. Similarly, it points to affects as those volume controls that regulate
our bodies. Finally, it points out the underlying processes that shape our attitude
to pain and suffering. None of these phenomena can be reached by restricting the
politics of tolerance and toleration to judiciary disputes over where to draw the
line between church and state. Instead, it requires additional resources, some of
which the approach that follows from the affectivity of tolerance seeks to provide
by shifting our focus to that of technique and sensibility.
These shifts are important if we wish to approach the intersection of tolerance and
toleration in a manner that appreciates the deep circumstances of the former. Moreover,
they address a key question left unanswered by the model of reasonable toleration—
namely, what constitutes the pain and suffering that bodies within the multitude tolerate?
The answer is the structure of affective being, a structure, we might add, that explains
why tolerance proper entails a reflexive notion of agency. But does this say anything
about the sensibility that makes it possible to endure pain and suffering? What kinds of
techniques are involved? These are the questions to which we now turn.
3.2 A sensibility of hilaritas
Initially, the idea that there is an affirmative sensibility appropriate to the affectivity of
tolerance may sound odd. Most of us find pain and suffering repulsive, we spend a good
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deal of time trying to avoid it, we criticize those who wallow in it, and we believe that
those who devote their lives to the prevention of pain and suffering are fighting a noble
cause. Indeed, we saw earlier how a number of theorists inspired by Spinoza himself
think that the objective of politics is one of joy and happiness—not pain and suffering.
Even so, if pain and suffering subsist in affect, and if this subsistence is ineliminable,
then it may be that the wrong kind of fight against pain and suffering contributes to what
it tries to eliminate. Let me suggest two ways in which this could be the case. First,
because the fight projects a promise—the promise of joy and happiness—that, due to its
unreachable nature, aggravates the pain and suffering that come from not fulfilling one’s
aspirations, from not being one’s own cause. Second, because the fight misrecognizes
significant aspects of existence—in particular, aspects that are related to the structure of
affective being—and because this misrecognition is so much out of tune with the
structure itself that it adds to the existing circuit of pain and suffering. Neither seems an
unlikely possibility. What is more, they both suggest that the central question in
democratic politics is not simply one of how to eliminate pain and suffering. Rather, the
question is how to rewire the circuit from which these dispositions of the body emerge.
How is it possible to rewire the circuit of pain and suffering so that it does not generate
inequality, resentment, and violence? How is it possible to rewire the circuit so that the
multitude doesn’t take joy in somebody else’s pain?
From recent work at the intersection of neuroscience and cultural theory, we get a
number of clues that help us to answer this question. For example, some researchers seek
to trace the neural pathways that make up the circuit of pain and suffering, locating with
more exactitude than before the recurring reverberations back and forth between the brain
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stem, the cerebellum, the gut, and the cingulate cortices.28 Also, some researchers seek to
develop techniques that isolate particular parts of the newly mapped neural pathways—
visual manipulation and hypnosis are prominent examples—and to use these techniques
as means that modify patients’ experiences of pain and suffering. Finally, some
researchers seek to take advantage of the fact that in both laughter and crying, the main
execution sites are in the brain stem nuclei, using this as a clue as to how to rewire
attitudes to pain and suffering. All of these activities appear to enhance awareness of how
the circuit of pain and suffering works, even though the latter operates below the
threshold of perception. Also, they appear to indicate that a sensibility appropriate to the
deep circumstances of tolerance is a sensibility that draws on an array of unconventional
techniques in order to make the endurance of pain and suffering look less improbable.
The latter—that is, the combination of sensibility and technique—may in fact be what
decides the way in which it is possible to rewire the circuit of pain and suffering. Do
bodies rewire the circuit in light of resentment or generosity? Do bodies negate or do they
affirm the nature of affective being?
Given our previous discussion, it should not surprise us that Spinoza’s work
makes yet another contribution to this line of questioning. In an attempt to explicate how
it is possible to nurture the deep circumstances of tolerance, the objective of this part of
the chapter is thus to show how Spinoza proposes a sensibility of hilaritas that, in line
with the clues just mentioned, seeks to fold positive affects into the circuit of pain and
suffering. This folding—what we may think of as a tactical rewiring that bodies pursue in
28
For this and the ensuing twp examples, see Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, pp. 74–79; Damasio, The
Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999),
p. 75; Itzhak Fried et. al., “Electric current stimulates laughter,” in Nature, vol. 391, no. 6668 (1998), p.
650; and Josef Parvizi et. al., “Pathological laughter and crying: a link to the cerebellum,” in Brain: a
journal of neurology, vol. 124, no. 9 (2001), pp. 1708–1719.
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their relationship to themselves and others—makes it possible to nurture the deep
circumstances of tolerance. Spinoza’s discussion of the parallel relationship between
mind and body is an important prelude to this possibility. It draws our attention to
possibility of rewiring the circuit of pain and suffering.
3.2.1 Parallelism: doctrine and/or technique
Spinoza’s investigation of affective being entails not only a better sense of pain and
suffering but also a new awareness of how we might respond to the prevalence of these
dispositions. This awareness focuses on the idea that although mind and body are
nonidentical, it would be a mistake to take their difference to be one of absolute
separation. Instead, Spinoza suggests, mind and body work in parallel ways, allowing any
kind of body situated within the multitude to examine, and act on, the same mode of
existence from two different perspectives. To uncover the reasons for this parallelism is
to uncover a technique that shows how it is possible to rewire the circuit of pain and
suffering.29
At first, admits Spinoza, it may seem as if mind and body are radically different.
Each seems to operate according to its own principle—the mind according to the forces
of ideas, the body according to the forces of physics—and each seems to be unaffected by
29
Ancient philosophers were the first to explore the role of techniques in ethical and political life, but it
soon became a major theme in Christian discourse, with St. Augustine (354–430) as the lead advocate.
Besides Spinoza, it is perhaps Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844–1900) who has explored the issue the most in
modern philosophy. Contemporary works on the role of technique include Talal Asad, Genealogies of
Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993), pp. 135–139; William E. Connolly, Why I am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 143–153; and Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” reprinted in Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley
and others (New York: The New Press, 1997).
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the actions taken by the other. This difference in what constitutes their defining principle
may help to explain why so many philosophers both before and after Spinoza have
affirmed a dualistic account of the relationship between mind and body. However,
Spinoza maintains, the closer we look, the more evident it is that mind and body are
intrinsically connected. Spinoza establishes this connection by suggesting that insofar as
the mind is constituted by what is primary in thinking—in his framework ideas are
primary in thinking (EIIp11d)—the mind itself is an idea of “something.” This
“something,” Spinoza claims, is the body (EIIp13d). It is the body, first, because the body
is what expresses the modality of extension and, second, because the body is what
confirms the existence of what the mind is thinking. Indeed, the body is what gives the
mind something to think about—what gives the mind “food for thought.” This exchange
between mind and body means that it would be wrong to determine a particular
expression of substance as either an idea or a thing, since such a determination would be
tantamount to reinforcing an otherwise invalid mind-body dualism. Instead, we should
see mind and body as parallel, appreciating what is often referred to as the doctrine of
parallelism. Spinoza formulates the doctrine thus: “The order and connection of ideas is
the same as the order and connection of things” (EIIp7).30
It should be clear from what we saw earlier in the chapter that this formulation of
parallelism is one that relies on the doctrine of immanence. Without the latter’s insistence
on the oneness of substance we would not be able to state with confidence that the order
of ideas is the same as the order of things, no matter what the forms and shapes of these
ideas and things are. This is a difficult assumption. However, even if the doctrine of
30
See also Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, pp. 86–91; and Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza,
vol. 2, pp. 22–33. Leibniz coined the term “parallelism”; he used it to designate a correspondence between
autonomous or independent series.
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immanence is contestable—that is, even if we cannot prove the oneness of substance
beyond reasonable doubt (a point I’ll return to later in the chapter)—we do not have to
reject parallelism altogether. To the contrary, if we bracket the larger claims to truth that
the doctrine of parallelism makes, claims about the immanence of Being, and if we focus
more directly on the effects it has on how the body relates to the world, then we may
think of parallelism as a technique according to which one acts as if there are two
perspectives, each of which sheds a different light on the production of this or that
disposition.31 One of these would be the perspective of the “participant” who is directly
implicated in his or her own dispositions; another would be the perspective of the
“observer” who is standing apart from the bodily dispositions that he or she observes.
What is more, since both perspectives add insights to the overall schema of existence, we
do not need to prioritize one over the other. Instead, we might see parallelism as a kind of
explorative perspectivism that not only takes the embodiment of our dispositions
seriously “all the way down,” but encourages us to translate participatory experiences
into more abstract accounts, recognizing the partial and biased nature of such accounts.
Parallelism thus understood opens the door to a technique of the self that shifts back and
forth between the participant and the observer. Stuart Hampshire, who is the main
instigator of this interpretation (and modest revision) of Spinoza, formulates it in the
following way:
31
The distinction between the doctrine of parallelism and the technique of parallelism is one that, first,
scales down the importance of Truth (understood in terms of what we can know) and, second, expands the
importance of ethics (understood in terms of how we should relate to each other, taking into consideration
the embodied circumstances in which we live). I return to this distinction between doctrine and technique in
my discussion of the contestability of immanence (section 3.2.3).
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As a person, as an embodied thinker, I have to think of my actions and
movements as arising from my desires and perceptions; but I also have to think of
my bodily actions and bodily movements as effects of changes in my brain and
sense organs which in turn are themselves the effects of external causes. So
throughout nature, considering individual objects, I may alternate between
considering them as comparatively active agents, partly self-determined by their
desires and perceptions, and considering their behavior as entirely the effects of
external bodily causes.32
Let us first note in the most general way how this interpretation of parallelism points to a
possible rewiring of the circuit of pain and suffering. We have already seen how the
circuit appears to be a lived phenomenon from which bodies are unable to escape.
However, with the above interpretation in mind, it is now possible to interpret the circuit
as part of a larger, impersonal system of bodily dispositions that operates independently
of the individuated bodies carrying it. These two accounts of pain and suffering do not
exclude each other. To the contrary, together they create an examination in which the
circuit of pain and suffering is no longer “my” circuit—where “mine” refers to a firstperson body—but, instead, is a circuit that “I” can see “myself” participate in. That is, the
one who examines the circuit of pain and suffering is able to posit it as part of a larger
complex, and to use this positioning as a way of addressing the general structure of
affective being. This is what helps parallelism to rewire the circuit of pain and suffering.
Stuart Hampshire, “Introduction,” in Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. x–xi.
Hampshire admits that his interpretation is “speculative,” but substantiates it in another article entitled “A
Kind of Materialism,” reprinted in Freedom of the Mind, and other essays by Stuart Hampshire (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 212–213.
32
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The more concrete enactment of this becomes clearer if we take seriously what
Spinoza says about the importance of the imagination in the wiring, and rewiring, of
bodily dispositions. The imagination, we should recall, is particularly efficacious when it
invokes images that affect us in a concentrated way. Thus, invoking the circuit of pain
and suffering in imaginatio, we may turn to the video installation—The Quintet of the
Astonished (2000)—by the artist Bill Viola.33 This installation, whose motif echoes the
executioners in Bosch’s classical painting, Christ Mocked (circa 1490–1500), shows a
group of five individuals (four men and one woman) who undergo a wave of intense pain
and suffering. No one in the group moves from his or her position, and no one shows any
acknowledgment or direct interaction with his or her companions. Nonetheless, because it
projects at normal speed what was shot on high-speed film (about sixteen times faster
than normal speed), the installation itself becomes an explorative arc along which the
group displays the rise and fall of pain and suffering in extreme yet seamless slow
motion. The result is staggering: the video makes visible the smallest details in affective
being and it discloses a virtual community whose pain and suffering is different yet
common to everyone within the multitude.
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, pp. 260–267. See also Cynthia Freeland, “Piecing to Our
Inaccessible, Inmost Parts: The Sublime in the Work of Bill Viola,” in Chris Townsend (ed.), The Art of
Bill Viola (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004); and Peter Sellars, “Bodies of Light,” p. 171, and John
Walsh, “Emotions in Extreme Time: Bill Viola’s Passions Project,” pp. 33–37, both in John Walsh (ed.),
Bill Viola The Passions (Los Angels: Getty Publications, 2003). The installation under discussion is part of
The Passions-project, a series of video works Bill Viola began in 2000. The series spring from Viola’s
interest in older art, especially the devotional painting of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Like the
paintings that inspired them, they are vivid, lifelike, and silent. Unlike the paintings, they are never still, but
always changing, part of an ongoing experimentation with techniques made available by new media.
33
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[Insert image about here]
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In what way does this image (and the video of which it is part) rewire the circuit
of pain and suffering? The most immediate answer is that it makes the circuit available
for perception. The technique Viola deploys—that is, extreme slow motion created by
converting high speed film to normal video—reduces the speed with which affect travels
and, in a truer-than-life kind of way, displays the structure of affective being in a time
that is real yet nonactual. The implications are twofold. First, it means that that we are no
longer confined by a sharp distinction between the domain of affect and the domain of
perception, but can form a bridge across their defining thresholds. Second, it means that
we get a view of the world that normally is imperceptible, allowing us to access what
Viola calls “images of invisible things.”34
Moreover, once we have established this bridge, Viola’s experimentation with
new media opens up an autoscopic examination of the circuit of pain and suffering.35 To
begin with, the onlooker may feel a connection with one of the persons in the video who
makes him or her recall a particularly painful situation in his or her own life. This makes
the viewer a participant in the video, allowing the video to become what it is—a display
of the pain and suffering that defines affective being. However, the video’s medium—the
projection of images on a wall (however banal that may sound)—also creates a distance
between the video and the onlooker, enabling the onlooker to observe pain and suffering
as externally caused phenomenon. The onlooker may even take it upon himself or herself
to use the distance as a way of questioning the circuit of pain and suffering from inside
Bill Viola, “A Conversation: Hans Belting and Bill Viola,” in John Walsh (ed.), Bill Viola The Passions,
p. 191. Viola emphasizes in the same interview that his project seeks to strengthen the “empathetic
connection we have to other human beings,” and, furthermore, that the way to this connection goes through
the “visceral presence of the images.”
35
This insight is inspired by Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.
Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1981/2002]), p. 43. An autoscopy refers to an
instrument for self-examination of the eye.
34
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the circuit itself. What is the genesis of the circuit? Are there different kinds of pain and
suffering? What do they communicate? Could it be otherwise? These are the kind of
questions that, as they go back and forth between the participant and the observer, may
foster a modest rewiring of the circuit of pain and suffering.
It is important to note that this enactment of the technique of parallelism does not
itself guarantee the nurturing of tolerance. There is certainly a limit to what a body is able
to rewire—the definitive limit being the impossibility of eliminating the circuit of pain
and suffering altogether. But within this limit there are multiple ways of modulating the
circuit’s intensities, thereby regulating its rhythms and pulses. Some of these may carry it
into the domain of inequality, violence, and resentment; some of them may carry it into
the domain of equality, generosity, and tolerance. The indeterminacy of these two
directions means that we now must move our discussion from one of technique to one of
sensibility, for it is the shape and content of the latter that both nourishes and sustains a
particular kind of rewiring. It too works at the level of affect, and it too makes bodies
within the multitude more aware of their relationship to others and themselves. My claim
is that Spinoza construes a sensibility of hilaritas that address the indeterminacy of
affective being in such a way that it predisposes the multitude to see tolerance as part of a
democratic politics in which values of equality, respect, and generosity prevail.
3.2.2 The image of hilaritas
Spinoza wrote very little about hilaritas. But based on what he did write, we may say that
hilaritas, like most other sensibilities we know of, strives to become a culturally encoded
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and temperamentally delimited formation—a disposition of the body, if you like—that
orientates our relation to the world in this or that direction.36 Hilaritas contributes to this
orientation by infusing the multitude with an energizing mood that, as it acknowledges
the persistence of pain and suffering, turns the circuit of which these affective states are
part into a care for the deep circumstances of tolerance. A number of remarks about
hilaritas help us to see how this might be the case.
Hilaritas is, Spinoza says in one of his few discussions of it, a species of pleasure
(EIIIp11s). It “uplifts” bodies and, like the sugar that goes into the blood, it “energizes”
them. It is in that sense a mode of empowerment that increases the capacity to act—what
Spinoza also characterizes as the move from a state of less perfection to one of greater
perfection (ibid.). However, even though hilaritas empowers, it is important that we do
not confuse it with the kind of intellectual joy or pure intuition that accompanies true
knowledge of how the world is organized.37 Quite the contrary. Spinoza stresses that
hilaritas is part of affective being and, as such, we would have to say that it retrains a
touch of passivity, which returns it back to the circuit of pain and suffering that have been
our focus throughout this chapter. There are two ways in which this delicate tension
between pleasure and pain surfaces with regard to hilaritas. Both of them put Spinoza
into contact with kindred discourses on humor and laughter, discourses from which the
specificity of hilaritas emerges.
36
This notion of sensibility draws on Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments,
Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 131–158; Jane Bennett and
Michael J. Shapiro, “Introduction,” in idem (eds.), The Politics of Moralizing (London: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 6–7; Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997), pp. 134–137; and Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of
Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 115.
37
Commentators often miss this distinction between joy and hilaritas. Both joy and hilaritas are
pleasurable, but the former is of a much higher nature, one that elevates us to the level of what Spinoza
calls “intuitive knowledge” (EIIp40s2). From the perspective of our previous discussion, this elevation is
nothing but an unreachable aspiration.
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The tension between pleasure and pain surfaces first because hilaritas entails an
incongruity by which it never is what it appears to be.38 An excellent example of this
aspect of hilaritas is the fable about the emperor who was so obsessed with pomp and
circumstance that he spent most of his money on clothes.39 In fact, according to a widely
held hearsay, it was not in the royal council that one should look for the emperor but in
the dressing room. The emperor seemed not too concerned about this rumor; he relied for
the most part on the advice he got from his council members. However, one day the
emperor made a decision to buy new clothes from two strangers who claimed that they
were able to weave the most beautiful dress—a dress that would become invisible if it
was worn by people who were incompetent in their offices. The emperor was more than
eager to see the result of his order. But when the strangers-turned-tailors asked him to
come to their quarters, it became clear that the dress was imaginary. The only one who
could not realize this was the emperor himself. Indeed, he decided to proceed with the
planned procession, in which his new dress was to be showcased in front of the
multitude. Here’s how the story ends in the words of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–
1875): “‘But he is not wearing anything’, shouted the multitude at last. It curled up inside
the emperor, for he realized that they were right. Even so, he thought to himself: ‘now I
must sit it out for the rest of the procession.’”40
It might be tempting to read the last line as the affirmation of a politics that,
although it acknowledges the circuit of pain and suffering—whether it subsists in the
38
Simon Critchley gives a phenomenological description of the incongruity of hilaritas in On Humour
(London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 3–6.
39
The following is based on Hans Christian Andersen, “Keiserns nye klæder,” reprinted in H. C. Andersens
Samlede Værker, Eventyr og Historier I, 1830–1850 (København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab
& Gyldendal, 2003 [1837]).
40
Ibid., p. 181 (my translation).
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multitude’s mediocrity or in the emperor’s ignorance—makes not attempt to change the
way in which we relate to these dispositions of the body. But such a reading would
overlook the tension between pleasure and pain that Andersen invokes below the surface
of his fable. In fact, the closer we look, the more evident it becomes that Andersen’s
fable—and, thus, the incongruity of hilaritas—seeks to subvert the existing state of
affairs. The first evidence of this lies in the empowerment of the multitude that follows
from the fable. Thus, in a moment of truth, Andersen appears to be depicting the
multitude as a dissident that becomes what it is capable of becoming—an empowering
body that laughs at those who think they are in power. Spinoza could not have been
happier with this: it shows how and why the multitude is the sine qua non of politics.
What is more, beneath the circuits of pain and suffering invoked by mediocrity or
ignorance, the fable reveals another, more fundamental circuit. This is one in which pain
and suffering is about realizing that one is not one’s own cause, that one is vulnerable to
external influences and accidental happenings. Both the multitude and the emperor are
confronted with this circuit in the fable—the emperor insofar as he is dependent on the
recognition of his subjects, the multitude insofar as it is subject to sudden impulses and
unpredictable actions. Indeed, it is this circuit that Andersen’s fable seeks to rewire with
humor. It does so, first, by admitting that no one knows what hilaritas “is” before it is too
late and, second, by displaying the absurdities that occur if we do not approach this
untimeliness in a spirit of equality, respect, and generosity.
Moreover, the fact that hilaritas never “is” what it appears to be takes us to
another way in which the tension between pleasure and pain surfaces within the
sensibility that accompanies it. If a body does not know what hilaritas is, it is because it
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has less to do with what reason commands and more to do with what the imagination
creates. The imagination creates hilaritas by juxtaposing two images—one that is actual
(the emperor in his dressing room), and another one that is nonactual (the emperor’s new
clothes)—and it uses this juxtaposition to unleash a number of affective effects, ranging
from mirth and laughter to gaiety and cheerfulness. These affects may seem worthless if
one is interested in the formation of what is true and what is false. But from the
perspective of the imagination they are what make hilaritas “attractive.” Hilaritas attracts
bodies, and it draws them in this or that direction, creating a rallying point around which
they are able to forge new connections.
All this goes into the way in which hilaritas, and the sensibility of which it is part,
seeks to nurture the deep circumstances of tolerance. But before I say more about this
nurturing—in particular, why the nurturing is one based on values of equality, respect,
and generosity—I would like to develop the “attractive” quality of hilaritas by comparing
it to a related discourse, one that Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen calls “the laughter of Being.”
Inspired by the French philosopher-writer Georges Bataille (1897–1962), the objective of
this discourse appears to be the same as Spinoza’s, namely, to realize that since “we
cannot escape pain and anguish, let’s at least relativize them, by observing ourselves
from without, or, more properly, from above.”41 The objective is, in other words, similar
to the rewiring of pain and suffering that I seek to show is at the core of hilaritas. But the
lesson that Borch-Jacobsen extracts from this rewiring is radically different from
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “The Laughter of Being,” trans. Terry Thomas, reprinted in Fred Botting and
Scott Wilson (eds.), Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 147. See also Jacques
Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” reprinted in Writing and
Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978 [1967]), p. 256; and Michel Foucault, The Order of
Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, trans. unknown (London: Routledge, 1970 [1966]), pp.
342–343.
41
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Spinoza’s. To begin with, Borch-Jacobsen argues that laughter is a form of excess that
affirms nothing. The reason for this is that to laugh is to circumvent what we laugh at,
and, as soon as we succeed in this circumvention, to make laughter a step into that which
“is not.” Laughter is, was, and continues to be, nothing. Furthermore, argues BorchJacobsen, this nothingness has a structure that is analogous to that of unconditional
sovereignty. The analogy surfaces because the sovereign is only sovereign as long as
there is nothing that bounds him or her. Moreover, since the sovereign is unbound, he or
she is also free to laugh at that which is, emptying it for any content. This sovereign right
to circumvention makes laughter signal a sense of emptiness that may be intoxicating but
has no respect for that which intoxicates it. As Borch-Jacobsen argues, “being is
sovereign, but sovereignty is laughter, which makes a mockery of everything.”42
My sense is that Spinoza would take issue with the unconditionality of the
mocking mood that follows in the vein of this discourse. Let me explain. If hilaritas
begins with an actually existing image, and if this image is a precondition for the new
image that hilaritas seeks to bring about, then we cannot say that it is boundless—nor can
we say that it is completely sovereign. To the contrary, we would have to say that it is
conditioned by the circumstances in which it exists, a conditioning that, in turn, creates a
tension between a respect for the circumstances that make hilaritas possible and an
attempt to subvert these circumstances. For example, there would be no hilaritas if it
were indifferent vis-à-vis the image it seeks to subvert because such indifference would
make it difficult for the new image to resonate with the existing image. Likewise, there
would be no hilaritas if it did not valorize the contribution that a new image would bring
to the existing mix of images because the contribution itself is what drives hilaritas—
42
Borch-Jacobsen, “The Laughter of Being,” p. 155.
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what makes hilaritas “attractive.” Both of these examples suggest that hilaritas is not
only different from mockery, but also more than mockery. Hilaritas is efficacious
because it cares for what it seeks to subvert and not because it tries to scorn it or takes joy
in ridiculing already existing modes of being. Indeed, with reference to the fable about
the emperor’s new clothes, we might say that the purpose of this fable is not to simply to
ridicule the emperor, but to make everybody—emperor and multitude—realize the
virtues of being modest and respectful. It does so by showing how everyone is subject to
externalities and, furthermore, by illustrating the negative consequences of not being
aware of this in our own mode of being.43
With these comments in place, we are now in a position to make a more general
statement about the relationship between the sensibility of hilaritas and way in which it
nurtures the deep circumstances of tolerance. The most important thing we should notice
is that hilaritas does not seek to eradicate pain and suffering in any definitive way.
Rather, because it itself is an expression of affective being, it seeks to fold positive
affects into the circuit of pain and suffering that subsists in the very expression of affect.
This enables it to nurture the deep circumstances of tolerance so that the latter places a
premium on the values of equality, respect, and generosity in its attempt to rewire this
circuit. For example, hilaritas uses the incongruity of humor to show that pain and
suffering reveal a condition of finitude, which may make us more aware of other ways of
living. Also, it uses the ambiguity of laughter to show that pain and suffering have
multiple meanings, which may make us more alert to the contingency of what we are
feeling here and now. Finally, it uses the gaiety of mirth to show that pain and suffering
43
Of course, this is not to say that mockery is never funny or entertaining. It only says that if mockery has
these qualities, it is because it belongs to the genres of sarcasm, cynicism, or scorn—and not because it
belongs to the genre of hilaritas.
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are part of everybody’s lives, which may make us more attentive to the subtle
connections that we share with people we would think are strangers. All of this, I submit,
is what goes into a political sensibility that seeks to nurture the deep circumstances of
tolerance.
But, a skeptical reader might want to ask, why would this relationship between
hilaritas and tolerance be of interest to larger, more complex bodies such as the
multitude? Isn’t this type of bodies more prone to feeling resentful than to feeling
hilaritas? The current configuration of the political landscape seems to confirm this line
of questioning. Conservatives, evangelicals, pundits, talking heads, news media
conglomerates, and capitalists—influential currents within these constituencies are
pursuing a politics of revenge painted in dichotomous terms. Even so, I believe that it
would be a mistake to accept without reservation the conclusions that our skeptical reader
appears to be implying. The multitude is, as we saw earlier in the chapter, a body whose
transient nature means that it is a plurality that persists as such in the public scene.
Conversely, this means that there is nothing intrinsic to the multitude that makes it more
prone to resentment than to hilaritas. Instead, it is a matter of how we imagine the
multitude—a matter of how we cultivate an awareness of the pain and suffering around
which this body of many parts revolves. Hilaritas may in this regard be a far more
effective strategy than many of the other strategies that currently are available on the
Left.44
44
See, for example, Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (eds.), Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002); Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000); J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen
Resnick, and Richard Wolff (eds.), Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Class (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001); and Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean (eds.), Empire’s New Clothes: Reading
Hardt and Negri (New York: Routledge, 2004).
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The primary reason is that hilaritas communicates through the usage of images,
which means that it has the power to affect the multitude at the very level from which it
emerges—the imagination. We might even say that hilaritas is able to “speak the
language” of the multitude. It does so through a variety of media—literature, storytelling,
cartoons, newspapers, painting, graffiti, movies, TV, and documentaries (just to mention
a few)—and it does so through an attempt to make these media speak to the resurgent
aspects of the multitude. Hilaritas encourages the multitude to resist resentment; it
inspires the multitude to explore new connections; and it provokes the multitude to see
itself in a different light. It does all of this through the resonance created by the
juxtaposition of actual and nonactual images. What is more, since hilaritas itself is an
affective state of being, it too is able to frame the mood—and more generally, the bodily
dispositions—through which the multitude approaches the issues of tolerance and
toleration. Hilaritas “predisposes” the multitude to approach these issues, not so much by
talking about how they may increase the pressure of pain and suffering—about the way in
which they risk becoming intolerable—but with an interest in the way in which the issues
may enrich the current configuration of the multitude itself. Do the issues add to existing
life-styles? Do they entail new strategies of thinking? Do they generate greater awareness
of pain and suffering? These are the questions—questions with answers that are not
determined in advance—that define the sensibility of hilaritas.
We shall later in this study return to the way in which this definition of hilaritas
might find its way into public discourse (especially in connection with chapter five’s
discussion of the separation of church and state). But for now important to note that the
emphasis on values of respect, equality, and generosity puts great pressure on the way in
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which carriers of hilaritas relate to the presuppositions that make hilaritas possible in the
first place—Spinoza’s doctrine of immanence. One might suspect that carries of hilaritas
would claim that this doctrine is so essential to hilaritas that the latter could not exist
without the former. However, if this was the case, then it would be difficult to make
hilaritas speak to those quarters of the multitude that disagree with the principles that
define the doctrine of immanence. The fact that the multitude persists as a plurality in the
public scene only underscores this problem, and it emphasizes the need for us to consider
whether or not the doctrine of immanence enables the sensibility of hilaritas to engage
those constituencies that do not share its view of the world. My entrance to this question
is the issue of contestability—an issue that helps us deepen the way in which hilaritas
nurtures the deep circumstances of tolerance.
3.2.3 Contestation, immanence, hilaritas
A good way to approach the issue of contestability is to distinguish between two modes
of contestation: a mode of contestation within a given framework that does not question
the standards or criteria that define that framework (what we may call “first-order”
contestation), and another in which contestation occurs between two or more
frameworks, each of which has its standards or criteria put into question (what we may
call “second-order” contestation).45 The distinction helps us to see that while Spinoza is
The distinction between first-order and second-order contestation is indebted to William E. Connolly’s
work on essentially contestable concepts in The Terms of Political Discourse, third edition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993 [1974]), pp. 225–231. Connolly argues that to say “that a particular
framework of concepts is contestable is to say that standards and criteria of judgment it expresses are open
to contestation.” Furthermore, he argues that to say that “a network is essentially contestable is to contend
that the universal criteria of reason, as we can now understand them, do not suffice to settle these contests
definitively” (emphases in original).
45
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willing to acknowledge the first mode of contestation, he is unwilling to do the same for
the second one. My claim is that this unwillingness is paradoxical, perhaps even
untenable, given Spinoza’s analysis of affective being. Moreover, I suggest that it risks
impairing the affirmative connection between hilaritas and tolerance; it prevents carriers
of this connection from engaging those who do not share the presuppositions that define
the doctrine of immanence.
The kind of contestation that Spinoza acknowledges is a corollary of the doctrine
of immanence. As we have seen, this doctrine uses the principles of interconnected
abundance and expressive differentiation to present the world as a creative engine that
keeps propelling the new into being. We have also seen how it does so, first, by folding
the existing modes of existence into that which has not yet been explored and, second, by
multiplying their participation in the attributes of thought and extension. The result is a
contestable constellation of connections that keeps expressing novel aspects of God’s
immanence. Indeed, the world envisioned by the doctrine of immanence is never what it
pretends to be. What is more, the doctrine itself entails a radical argument in favor of the
freedom to philosophize—what Spinoza calls libertas philosophandi.46 Spinoza
establishes this freedom as a natural right that all bodies within the multitude have
through two arguments. First, he argues that because affective being exceeds confinement
to a particular body, it is hard to direct or control what bodies think or do. Second, he
argues that because affective being prevents bodies from mastering what they think or do,
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, p. 265; and Laursen, “Spinoza on Toleration: Arming the State and
Reining in the Magistrate,” p. 185. I do not disagree with the claim that these commentators make, namely,
that the force of Spinoza’s argument lies in the fact that every person has a right to philosophize as he or
she pleases. However, insofar as this right is insufficient to the politics of tolerance and toleration—a point
Spinoza helped us to uncover in section 3.1.3 of this chapter—I seek to supplement the argument with
comments about second-order contestation.
46
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it could lead to more disorder and unhappiness if a sovereign tried to reinforce a
particular doctrine (whether this doctrine has a philosophical or a religious grounding).
Both of these arguments lead Spinoza to the claim that “a government that attempts to
control men’s minds is regarded as tyrannical, and a sovereign is thought to wrong his
subjects and infringe their right when he seeks to prescribe for every man what he should
accept as true and reject as false, and what are the beliefs that will inspire him with
devotion to God” (TPT20/566). It seems that contestation is an integral part of the
philosophy that Spinoza advocates.
That this applies only to what I am calling first-order contestation is evident from
Spinoza’s confidence that his doctrine of immanence is superior to those of other
philosophers. “I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy,” Spinoza wrote in
the letter that I quoted earlier in this chapter, “but I know that what I understand is the
true one” (Ep76).47 What would it take to confirm this confidence? That is, what would it
take for Spinoza to convince those quarters of the multitude who do not share his view
that the doctrine of immanence is both true in its claims about the structure of the world
and that it is beyond contestation? Among several things, the most important one is that
Spinoza would be able to convince these quarters that what he calls “intuitive
knowledge” (see EIIp40s2) is a reachable state of mind.48 Spinoza thinks that this is the
47
Gilles Deleuze, arguably the most outspoken advocate of immanence in contemporary philosophy,
expresses the same kind of confidence in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New
York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 27. Deleuze admits that no account could ever demonstrate the
incontestability of immanence, but cautions nonetheless against more than a critical engagement with other
doctrines. This is especially the case with regard to doctrines of transcendence, many of which Deleuze
labels as “hallucinatory reactions” to the “limitlessness of immanence.” The argument that I pursue is an
attempt to show how and why this kind of labeling is not only paradoxical but also contrary to the kind of
sensibility that a doctrine of immanence might entail.
48
See also Aaron V. Garrett, Meaning in Spinoza’s Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), pp. 187–207; and Margaret D. Wilson, “Spinoza’s theory of knowledge,” in Garrett (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, pp. 116–119.
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highest kind of knowledge because it provides us with more than simple reasons or
explanations for why this or that aspect of substance is the way it is. Instead, it proceeds
from “an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes” to “an adequate
knowledge of the essence of things” (ibid.), and, with this movement in place, it turns the
universe of causes and effects “inside-out.” The one who has intuitive knowledge is the
one who knows what it means to be part of substance, even though he or she may not
know all of substance. Also, it is the one who knows how to surmount the lures of
transcendence, aligning himself or herself with the immanent power of God’s eternal
presence. The latter turns that which is passive (affective being) into something active.
Says Spinoza, “The third kind of knowledge [another term for intuitive knowledge]
depends on the mind as its formal cause in so far as the mind is eternal” (EVp31; my
emphasis).
It is true that this kind of knowledge is conducive to hilaritas. It helps bodies to
relax the pressure that stems from the circuit of pain and suffering, and it encourages us
to rewire this circuit so that the virtues of modesty and respectfulness can become the
order of the day. Even so, we must also say that the insights that this chapter has
uncovered seem to present a challenge to the very notion of intuitive knowledge. Indeed,
they suggest that claims to this kind of knowledge are subject to a much deeper
contestation than the doctrine of immanence anticipates (at least in the Spinozist version
of the doctrine). The contestation occurs along three dimensions. First, it occurs along the
imagination that empowers thinking, but does so by folding into it elements that are
either transient or passive. Second, it occurs along the circuit of pain and suffering, which
engages modes of substance in activities and projects that are contrary to the interests and
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well being of these modalities. Third, it occurs along the structure of affective being,
which subverts the aspirations that the very same structure seeks to empower.
Together these three dimensions suggest that the doctrine of immanence is subject
to what I am calling second-order contestation. If the doctrine of immanence cannot show
that intuitive knowledge is a reachable state of mind, and if this means that the doctrine is
torn between what it aspires to and what it can demonstrate, then it is no longer clear why
a body within the multitude should not question the claims upon which the doctrine of
immanence relies. In fact, that a body does not know all of substance—a point that
intuitive knowledge concedes—may encourage it to question immanence itself. For
example, a body may question the claim that immanence has no outside because this
claim is one that presupposes a comprehensive understanding of the internal relationship
between cause and effect (an understanding that in turn presupposes the possibility of
intuitive knowledge). Similarly, it may question the claim that immanence has absolute
power because this claim is one that presupposes the absence of anything beyond or
below immanence (something that only intuitive knowledge could confirm). The answers
to these questions are not pregiven, but to engage them is to engage immanence in a
much deeper mode of contestation than Spinoza anticipates.
I should emphasize that second-order contestation does not preempt hilaritas, just
as it does not undermine the way in which hilaritas seeks to nurture the deep
circumstances of tolerance. To the contrary, once we open the doctrine of immanence to
second-order contestation, we can no longer assume that is sufficient to its own claims.
Rather, we will have to approach it as a faith that moves bodies situated within the
multitude whenever fundamental questions are at stake. A body may indeed have faith in
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immanence, that is, in the way the doctrine makes it perceive the world in this or that
way, yet the same body may not have to justify this faith in some definitive or ultimate
manner.49 That this approach to contestation is conducive to hilaritas—and to the way in
which it affirms and nurtures tolerance—is clear from this point: it keeps hilaritas
flexible in its attempts to interact with those quarters of the multitude that do not share its
faith in the doctrine of immanence. It does so, first, by putting the contestability of its
own claims on display and, second, by making contestation part of the dialogue that
arises between doctrinal faiths. Both are critical if those who carry hilaritas want to
engage constituencies that do not its view of the world—an engagement essential to what
it means to be a tolerant subject.
Among the constituencies that the sensibility of hilaritas might engage, the most
obvious are those committed to a doctrine of transcendence. These constituencies are
particularly important because, although they occupy the same terrain as those who are
committed to a doctrine of immanence, the implications of their claims are radically
different. That is, when the doctrine of immanence sees connections, the doctrine of
transcendence sees separations; when the doctrine of immanence sees abundance, the
doctrine of transcendence sees lack; and when the doctrine of immanence sees infinity,
the doctrine of transcendence sees finitude. This mirroring suggests that the doctrines of
immanence and transcendence are two poles of a continuum with ends that are so
opposed to each other that they might be on the verge of coming full circle, turning their
Spinoza opens himself to this conclusion in chapter 14 and 15 of TPT in which he outlines seven “tenets
of faith”—among which the first four follow from the doctrine of immanence: God is the exemplar of true
life; God is one alone; God is omnipresent; and God has supreme right and dominion over all things. But
Spinoza also tries to modify the status of these tenets by distinguishing between the “moral certainty” of
faith and the “mathematical certainty” of philosophy (see TPT14/517 and TPT15/525). My claim is that the
latter distinction is untenable given his discussion of the structure of affective being.
49
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differences into mutual presuppositions. This in itself is reason enough to continue
developing the sensibility of hilaritas through an engagement not only with the doctrine
of immanence but also with the doctrine of transcendence. What is more, because most of
the issues that the intersection of tolerance and toleration is dealing with relate to the
questions of religious pluralism—and, thus, to the nature of the transcendent—it is only
natural that we try to engage those constituencies that are committed to a doctrine of this
kind. Indeed, without such an engagement we would not be able to anticipate—let alone
comprehend—what the intersection of tolerance and toleration looks like from the
perspective of those to whom it applies.
3.3 From affect to percept
These comments conclude this chapter. With recent studies of affect as my point of entry,
the objective has been to use the work of Spinoza as a means that enables us to shed new
light on tolerance proper, compensating for the lopsidedness that we found in the model
of reasonable toleration. Thus, we have seen how Spinoza’s discussion of affective being
offers an account of the genesis of the deep circumstances from which tolerance arises—
what I have referred to as the affectivity of tolerance. Also, we have seen how we might
nurture these circumstances via a sensibility of hilaritas. The following description seeks
to summarize the main insights of both of these ideas, bringing the two into closer contact
with each other.
To begin with, we should note how Spinoza’s work helps us to identify a structure
of affective being that resides in the simplest bodies—those that are not yet available for
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perception. Moreover, since this structure tends to subvert the highest aspirations that a
body might have—whether these aspirations are ethical or political in nature—we might
say that affective being as such involves an ineliminable circuit of pain and suffering. It is
because of this circuit that we can speak of the affectivity of tolerance, that is, of the way
in which affects make bodies carries of tolerance, of a predisposition to tolerate the pain
and suffering that arises from affect’s subversiveness. This predisposition, we now know,
is one that reveals itself in the reflexive agency of endurance in which the active and the
passive coalesce. Even so, although bodies are imbued with this kind of agency, it does
not follow automatically that they are tolerant of each other. In fact, there is good reason
to believe that a body like the multitude is just as prone to repress the disposition to
tolerance as it is to cultivate the deep circumstances from which the disposition arises. A
Spinozist approach to the intersection of tolerance and toleration acknowledges this, yet it
does not retreat to indifference or cynicism. Instead, it seeks to inspire the multitude by
way of a sensibility of hilaritas. The inspiration expresses itself in two ways. On the one
hand, it invokes positive affects such as laughter and gaiety, condensing these into a
broader attitude that seeks to rewire the initial circuit of pain and suffering in such a way
that it becomes a cause for equality, respect, and generosity. On the other hand, it also
reveals the contestability of hilaritas’ own presupposition—the doctrine of immanence—
turning this contestability into an invitation to interact with constituencies that express
their faith through other doctrines. Both modes of inspiration make a potent contribution
to a political sensibility that seeks to nurture the deep circumstance of tolerance.
The question that now confronts us is whether these insights extend to other parts
of the body’s dispositions. That is, does the circuit of pain and suffering emerging from
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the structure of affective being transpose itself into other types of bodily dispositions, or
do these dispositions transcend the difficulties of affective being? How do answers to this
question relate to the way in which we nurture the deep circumstances of tolerance? Do
more sophisticated dispositions coil back on the tolerance that defines affective being? If
so, should we revise our approach to the intersection of tolerance and toleration? It is in
light of these questions that the study of perception is relevant. The first reason is that
perception itself is a disposition of the body that transposes affects from brute intensities
into more defined images of self, other, and world. The latter are the ones that, in turn,
empower a more cognizant approach to pain and suffering, one that allows us to pursue
the kind of tactical rewiring we encountered in our discussion of Bill Viola’s video
installation. Moreover, perception itself appears to entail a fundamental difference
between the perceiver and the perceived, a difference that lends urgency to the issues of
tolerance and toleration. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the study of perception puts
pressure on how we define the relationship between immanence and transcendence. This
is so, first, because perception invokes the transcendence of that which lies outside
perception itself and, second, because perception seeks to overcome that transcendence
by making it part of its own modus operandi.
All this makes it important to include a study of perception in the attempt to
rethink the intersection of tolerance and toleration. The following discussion of the socalled “politics of difference” shows why the work of Merleau-Ponty is an excellent
addition in this regard—why it harbors insights that we might uses as a springboard in
our attempt to overcome the limitations set by the existing literature on reasonable
toleration.
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