Rereading Spinoza
Antonio Negri’s studies of Spinoza pursue an aim different from that of a conventional interpretation in the history of philosophy. The fundamental thesis that emerges in The Savage Anomaly and is later developed again in the essays collected in Subversive Spinoza is that Spinoza cannot be fully situated within the conventional trajectory of seventeenth-century European thought. Negri reads Spinoza not as a missing link in modern philosophy extending from Descartes and Hobbes toward Hegel, but as another possibility of thought emerging within modernity itself. At the centre of The Savage Anomaly is the fact that although Spinoza lived within the same historical world in which the modern state and its accompanying bourgeois political economy were being constituted, he conceived social constitution in a non-dialectical direction. Subversive Spinoza reworks this thesis through democracy, community, resistance, and the limits of modernity.
Negri’s use of the concept of “anomaly” therefore does not simply mean that Spinoza was different from or unusual among his contemporaries. The fundamental distinction emerges within the political and metaphysical constitution of modernity. While an important current of modern thought searches for a central principle capable of unifying social multiplicity, in Spinoza the source of order is not displaced outside being and social life. For Negri, two possibilities of modernity confront one another here: a modernity that constructs political unity through sovereignty, representation, and mediation, and a Spinozist line that thinks social power through the immanent production of relations. The “anomaly” lies in the fact that this second possibility cannot be completely absorbed by the dominant form of modernity.
Spinoza Against Hobbes: From Contract to Immanent Constitution
The political specificity of Negri’s reading of Spinoza becomes clearest when compared with Hobbes. In the Hobbesian constitution of politics, the conflicting powers of individuals in the state of nature are organised within a new political unity through the establishment of sovereign power. The contract is the decisive mediation in the transition from dispersed individuals to the political body. Sovereignty therefore becomes not merely an institution that governs existing powers, but the fundamental condition for the constitution of political unity.
Negri does not find the same transition in Spinoza. Particularly in the Political Treatise, Spinoza’s refusal to separate natural right from power prevents the natural powers of individuals from disappearing in a metaphysical sense once political society is established. When human beings move from the state of nature into the political condition, they do not abandon their own structure of being; their desires, fears, hopes, and striving for self-preservation continue. Political order is likewise not a second world externally added on top of these powers. For Negri, the consequence is significant: the constitution of society should be understood less as a transfer of right than as a collective composition of powers.
Sovereign power thereby ceases to be the starting point of society. The actual power of political institutions is limited by the capacity for collective action of the people who constitute them. The state may proclaim itself absolute, but it cannot produce a power independent of human beings and their social relations. This is why Negri places Spinoza against the modern theory of sovereignty: in Spinoza, political constitution can be explained without appealing to a will that is separate from and transcendent to the multitude itself. This is one of the fundamental alternatives to the modern conception of the state that The Savage Anomaly discovers.
An Ontology Outside Dialectics
For Negri, Spinoza’s anomaly is not limited to political theory. Behind it lies an ontology that does not explain the world through the overcoming of oppositions within a higher unity. Spinoza’s understanding of substance, mode, cause, and power does not allow reality to be constituted by a principle outside itself. Being carries its own cause within itself; singular beings are real expressions of this immanent productivity.
The importance Negri gives to the term “non-dialectical” becomes intelligible here. The negative is not made into the constitutive motor of the production of being; multiplicity does not need ultimately to dissolve into a higher identity. The reality of differences is preserved. Singularity is not a temporary or deficient appearance of the whole; it is one of the real forms through which being expresses itself. Social order therefore need not be completed by a superior unity that transcends singularities.
The political consequence of Negri’s separation of Spinoza from later idealist dialectics is direct. Social plurality does not first have to be dissolved into a single “people,” a single will, or a state subject in order to attain its truth. Political unity is not the result that emerges after differences have been abolished, but the relations that different beings establish with one another. The sections of Subversive Spinoza devoted to modernity and anti-modernity locate Spinoza’s contemporary significance precisely within this immanent and plural ontology.
Imagination: From Illusion to Social Production
One of the areas that distinguishes Negri’s interpretation from an ordinary summary of Spinoza is the political importance he attributes to imagination. In Spinoza, imagination can produce limited and fragmentary knowledge when compared with adequate knowledge, yet it is not merely an error that can be removed from human social existence. Human beings experience the world through the encounters of their bodies, create common images, share hopes and fears, and affect one another affectively. Imagination therefore belongs both to false beliefs and to the material reality of common life.
Negri expands this point. If imagination is read solely as a deficiency of knowledge that reason must overcome, the productive dimension of Spinoza’s social thought is lost. The construction of shared images, the formation of expectations concerning the future, and the capacity to imagine a life different from the existing one are all part of collective constitution. Society is not merely the product of laws and institutions; it is also produced through the organisation of desires, fears, expectations, and shared images. The new rationality Negri seeks in Spinoza therefore does not depend upon a simple opposition between reason and the passions. It incorporates the material and affective components of social life into thought. The particular emphasis placed upon the central position of imagination within rationality in presentations of Negri’s early study of Spinoza also marks the distinctive character of this interpretation.
This approach also reveals why political order cannot be explained through law alone. Human beings do not live together merely because they obey rules. Hope, the desire for security, fear, love, anger, and solidarity constitute the actual relations of the political body. Power therefore concerns not merely a mechanism that prohibits or commands, but also the organisation of affects. Democratic constitution, in turn, is not completed simply by finding the correct constitutional form; it includes the question of through which affects and collective representations common life is produced.
Unfinished Democracy
One of Negri’s most characteristic interpretations of Spinoza concerns the importance he gives to the unfinished final section of the Political Treatise. After treating monarchy and aristocracy in detail, Spinoza had only begun his discussion of democracy when the work was left incomplete. We therefore do not possess a completed text containing Spinoza’s mature theory of democracy. Negri does not attempt to fill this absence by inventing a closed doctrine; instead, he investigates the direction in which democracy was developing on the basis of the preceding movement of the work. The essay entitled “Reliqua desiderantur” in Subversive Spinoza is directly constructed around this incompletion.
For Negri, what becomes decisive in the progression from monarchy to aristocracy and then toward democracy is the increasingly extensive presence of common power within the political institution. Democracy is therefore not merely a technical regime in which rulers are selected by a larger number of people. It is the form in which the distance between political constitution and the social power that produces it is reduced to a minimum. For Negri, Spinoza’s inability to complete the section on democracy leaves a theoretically productive opening: democracy can be understood not as a completed model of the state, but as a tendency that continuously limits the separation of political power from the common power that constitutes it.
An important limit must be maintained here. This interpretation of “absolute democracy” is not a ready-made political programme whose details are fully presented in Spinoza’s text; it is a powerful interpretation Negri develops from the general logic of the Political Treatise. Contemporary studies also emphasise that Spinoza’s position toward multitude and democracy is more complex. Rather than completely identifying Negri’s Spinoza with the historical Spinoza, it is therefore necessary to distinguish the democratic possibility that Negri foregrounds within the text.
What Does “Anti-Modern” Spinoza Mean?
When Negri describes Spinoza as “anti-modern” in his later writings, he does not mean that Spinoza stood outside the modern world or belonged to a pre-modern age. On the contrary, Spinoza stands within the very moment in which modernity is being constituted. He thinks in the Netherlands at a time when commerce, new sciences, capitalist relations, and modern forms of the state are developing. His anomaly lies not in failing to recognise these historical transformations, but in refusing to accept that their only possible political and ontological outcome must be the sovereign state and a transcendent order.
Anti-modernity therefore does not mean a return to the past. It names another tendency suppressed within modernity itself: immanence instead of transcendence, multiplicity instead of represented unity, collective constitution instead of juridical transfer, and the openness of democratic process instead of a fixed political form. Sections of Subversive Spinoza such as those concerning “Spinoza’s anti-modernity,” “democracy and eternity,” and “Spinoza and the postmoderns” demonstrate how Negri transforms his earlier thesis of “anomaly” into a broader critique of modernity. Rather than simply repeating the theses of The Savage Anomaly, the work corrects and expands them while connecting them with Negri’s later political thought.
Conclusion
The originality of Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza does not lie in borrowing a few political concepts from him. The Savage Anomaly and Subversive Spinoza constitute an attempt to reconstruct the beginning of modern political thought differently. In the Hobbesian line, political society emerges through a constitutive mediation that organises dispersed individuals beneath a sovereign unity; in Negri’s Spinoza, social relation exists prior to political power. Human powers, passions, imaginations, and forms of living together already produce the material of political reality.
Spinoza is therefore not, for Negri, merely an alternative philosopher belonging to the past. His “anomaly” disrupts the idea that modernity necessarily develops toward sovereignty, representation, and transcendent political unity. Democracy likewise ceases to be a perfect form of state that can be established and completed; it becomes an open problem of constitution that prevents social power from becoming entirely separated from its own political form.
