Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination: Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce 9781501320057, 9781501320088, 9781501320071

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Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce Patrick McGee

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Patrick McGee, 2016 Cover design: Nick Evans All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McGee, Patrick, 1949- author. Title: Political monsters and democratic imagination : Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce / Patrick McGee. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015050480 (print) | LCCN 2016012211 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501320057 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501320064 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501320071 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Literature–Philosophy. | Blake, William, 1757-1827–Philosophy. | Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885–Philosophy. | Joyce, James, 1882-1941–Philosophy. | Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677–Philosophy. | Ontology in literature. | Imagination in literature. Classification: LCC PN45 .M3975 2016 (print) | LCC PN45 (ebook) | DDC 809–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050480 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2005-7 PB: 978-1-5013-4123-6 ePub: 978-1-5013-2006-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2007-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Preface Note on References 1 2 3 4

The Power of Thought, or Spinoza after Negri and Badiou Imagination as Thought in Blake’s Milton The Savage God of Hugo’s Les Misérables The Amorous Production of Being in Joyce’s Ulysses

vi x 1 45 107 163

Conclusion

225

Notes Index

239 263

Preface Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Baruch Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: (1) a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; (2) a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; (3) an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and (4) a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular historical and cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo’s novel, Jean Valjean confronts his own monstrosity and transforms himself through the realization that the greatest truth about humanity lies not in the church or the state but in the sewer and among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth remain incommensurable with respect to categories and social hierarchies. Spinoza postulated democracy as the ontological ground of every form of political and social power, even the power of monarchy and the aristocratic or plutocratic state. Furthermore, he theorized the force of imagination as a condition of thought and any form of creative action, including the political. For Spinoza, quite simply, if you cannot imagine something as possible, you cannot achieve it. Even free will is a necessary fiction that conditions the power of individuals to pursue specific social and intellectual goals. What Jacques Derrida referred to as the “Spinozist idea,” which means that thought and material being are two expressions of the same thing, forces the realization that mind is not a place or a transcendent spiritual realm but merely concrete thought itself. Such thought is necessarily democratic because any understanding of truth requires the interaction of different minds and bodies in the form of what Spinoza called the multitude. The method of this study cannot be neatly situated in a program or a school of critical practice. Many of the methods that present themselves as new today—

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surface reading, distant reading, affect theory, genetic criticism, and even some of the less imaginative forms of “new” historicism—are merely old methods repackaged. (Spinoza, by the way, is the original theorist of the affects.) Many of these so-called innovations fail to account for the philosophical presuppositions on which they uncritically rely. This book at least makes the effort to account for the logic of its worldly content and the historical situation from which it derives. Every theory of desire, power, and democracy derives from premises, conscious or not, about the nature of being. There is a reason why Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, named his primary work on ontology Ethics. There is a reason why two of the most influential contemporary political philosophers in this post-Derridean era, namely Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri, must be considered ontologists. The foundation of this study is the first chapter on Spinoza, which explicates the seventeenth-century philosopher through comparative readings that align him with Negri and Badiou. Though only Negri has written substantially on Spinoza from a scholarly and historical perspective, both he and Badiou are significant philosophers in their own right, and their different versions of the ontology of immanence and its consequences for the understanding of democracy elucidate and expand aspects of Spinoza’s thinking. For example, Negri may go beyond what Spinoza writes in his emphasis on the imagination and the priority of a mode of being over its primary substance (natura naturata over natura naturans) when being is understood as a productive force. However, his formulation clarifies or explains Spinoza’s particular use of the Latin verb imaginari, “to imagine,” which sometimes has negative and sometimes positive connotations. Similarly, Badiou’s subtractive ontology— the idea that one arrives at an ontological truth not by constructing categories but by subtracting categories that shape and limit understanding—can be used to clarify the difference between common notions and essence, or between categorical and intuitive understanding in Spinoza’s philosophy. The chapters that follow the first explore three significant literary works at critical historical junctures that resurrect and further elaborate Spinoza’s democratic ontology and its political consequences. The works are Blake’s Milton (with significant reference to his Jerusalem), Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Joyce’s Ulysses. The issue is not whether these authors read Spinoza’s text, which may have directly influenced their thinking and writing. Though Spinoza directly influenced many literary figures from the eighteenth century to the present, the three literary figures analyzed in this study represent something more than his influence. They are transfer points in the passage and development of a

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thought. Blake may not have been familiar with Spinoza’s works, though one of his interlocutors during his life considered him a Spinozist. Nonetheless, his major illuminated poems, Milton and Jerusalem, expand and elaborate the Spinozian idea and the democratic theory of imagination. Hugo wrote Les Misérables and the never-translated philosophical preface to the novel as a way of working through his own conflicted understanding of Spinoza and the nature of democracy, a movement he once betrayed during the 1848 revolution. Joyce’s Ulysses represents the mature realization of the Spinozian idea and a radical concept of social equality that finds expression in the deconstruction of literary styles and of unified characters. As I argue in the conclusion to this work, democratic ontology is one of the keys to understanding the historical significance of modernism and everything that comes after it. Obviously, my method is interdisciplinary and presents an alternative to influence studies and the history of ideas. A term that might serve as a description of the method is “interexplicative,” but if I had to give this method a formal name according to the outcome it intends to produce, it would be critical ontology. The readings of the different works explain and illuminate each other as I excavate the passage of an ontological thought through different textual bodies and historical periods. Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination is the first in an informal trilogy of works that will constitute an archaeology of the democratic imagination in literary, popular, and mass culture. The premise of the project is that critical imagination has produced political monsters (a term I take from Negri and explain in Chapter 2) who challenge dominant social hierarchies and the forms of common sense through which they legitimate themselves. Part of this common sense derives from ontological presuppositions that continue to hold sway over modern political discourses—presuppositions largely derived from ontologies of transcendence. In the conclusion, I offer a brief sketch of the next stages of this project, which will focus more on the transition from the verbal to the visual in expressions of ontology. Visual ontology, as I name it, implicitly challenges the historical privilege of transcendence over immanence in the ontological legitimation of social orders and intellectual values. This ontological unconscious finds expression in mass culture and in those literary works that enter into dialogue with mass culture. While writing this book, I enjoyed the friendship and intellectual support of Bill Boelhower, one of the premier scholars at Louisiana State University and formerly at the University of Venice, Italy. He has now retired from teaching but not from producing the influential scholarship that has made him a modern

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intellectual explorer of Atlantic culture and a true Gramscian. I wish him well in Venice! Thanks go to Jerome McGann who read a portion of this work. Special thanks go to my Joycean compañeros Paul Kelly, Ellen Carol Jones, Murray Beja, and Colleen Lamos—especially Paul who read it all. A number of my graduate and undergraduate students have listened to me patiently for years as I turned every course I teach into a footnote to Spinoza. I thank them all but especially Ben Bergholtz, David Hill, Guillermo Severiche, Amanda Swenson, Logan Wiedenfeld, and Katherine Stephens. Once again, my greatest debt is to my wife Joan, who puts up with my resistance to making myself clear until I can adjust my eyes to the critical light she shines on my work.

Note on References Baruch Spinoza For this study, I found both major translations of Spinoza’s work to be useful. The primary and more detailed references are to Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2002), because this edition contains all of Spinoza’s work in one volume. Equally important is The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, ed. and trans. by Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), referred to by page numbers only and henceforth abbreviated as C; and Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), referred to by page numbers only and henceforth abbreviated as TPT2. I have checked all translations against the original Latin in Benedictus de Spinoza, Opera, im auftrag der Heidelberger akademie der wissenschaften herausgegeben, 4 vols., ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1925), corrected ed., Past Masters, Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corporation, 2003, Web, 2011–2015, henceforth abbreviated as O, with volume and page numbers. References to Shirley use the following abbreviations for frequently cited works: E TPT PT

Ethics Theological-Political Treatise Political Treatise

In addition to book and proposition numbers, separated by a period, and page numbers at the end, parenthetical references to E use these abbreviations: D A Pr P S

Definition Axiom Preface Proof Scholium

Note on References

Cor L DA Ex

xi

Corollary Lemma Definition of Affects or Emotions Explication

References to TPT are by chapter and page numbers and to PT by chapter, paragraph, and page numbers. References to Spinoza’s other works in the notes are to Shirley unless otherwise indicated. Here and elsewhere, I separate page numbers from other numbered categories by a colon. When I use the translation in C in preference to Shirley’s, the reference to C will precede the reference to Shirley. In such instances, I may modify incidentals in C, particularly capitalizations. When I have silently altered Shirley’s translation according to C or base a reading on both translations, the reference to C will follow the reference to Shirley. With respect to subsection names, Curley uses “Demonstration” instead of “Proof.” He consistently translates the Latin affectus as “affect” rather than Shirley’s “emotion,” and I usually follow Curley in this practice. I follow the same procedure with TPT2 as with C. I make references to O only when Latin words are cited or inserted parenthetically into the quoted text, or when I have silently altered the translations based on the Latin text. In quotations from E, I have removed Spinoza’s cross-references.

William Blake References to Blake’s texts are to The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, newly revised (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982). The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited works, with, as appropriate, Blake’s plate or page and line numbers, as well as Erdman’s pages numbers: MHH FZ M J

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell The Four Zoas Milton Jerusalem

References to Blake’s other works, as well as to Erdman’s “Textual Notes” and Harold Bloom’s “Commentary,” are given in the notes with page numbers only.

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Reference to specific illuminated plates are to the works on The William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, November 1996, Web, 2011–2015.

Victor Hugo ME MF

PP

OC

Les Misérables, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Modern Library, 2009). Les Misérables, Oeuvres Complètes: Roman, vol. 2, ed. Jacques Seebacher and Guy Rosa (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985). I have checked every passage quoted from the Rose translation against this French edition. When I have altered Rose’s translation or inserted words from the French, the reference to the French text will follow the reference to Rose. When I have produced my own translation, I refer to the French text only. “Préface philosophique,” Oeuvres Complètes de Victor Hugo: Romans, vol. 3, Les Misérables: Fantine (Paris: Librarie Paul Ollendorf, 1908), 317–400. Oeuvres Complèts, ed. J. Massin, 18 vols. (Paris: Club français du livre, 1970), with volume and page numbers.

James Joyce U

Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). By convention, references to this edition are by episode and line numbers.

All unattributed translations are my own. In quotations, bracketed words are my insertions, while words in parentheses or braces are from the cited texts, which have been altered accordingly for consistency.

1

The Power of Thought, or Spinoza after Negri and Badiou

The force of truth There’s no such thing as conservative thought. By that statement, I don’t mean that individuals who call themselves conservatives cannot think. On the contrary, all human individuals with the physical capacity can think and express their thought, and there may be other beings capable of thought, though we are not able to perceive that process in them. In any case, political persuasions in themselves have nothing to do with that power, though they may not be the expressions of a thought. On the other hand, a distinction can be made between thought and opinions or common sense. Opinions, according to Alain Badiou, are “representations without truth,” or, more precisely, they are “beneath the true and the false.”1 Clearly, he does not use these terms in the way we use them in everyday language. There are many propositions that are either true or not true in the sense that we can verify whether or not they correspond to the facts of a situation, to what Badiou sometimes calls the encyclopedia of knowledge. If I say to you that it is raining outside, and then you look out the window at a sunny day, you can strictly say that I am wrong, that my statement is erroneous or false. At a slightly more complex level, if I say that the economic proposals of the President of the United States will not produce the results he claims for them, I may find it more difficult to produce the evidence that will verify whether the predictions in the proposals are true or false, and there may be disagreements on such an issue, even if the evidence seems obviously weighted in one direction. At an even higher level, if the preponderance of scientific evidence appears to support the theory of global warming, one can postulate the validity of that theory and more or less determine the probability of its truth, or whether it can be verified. Still, there will be those who will not accept the theory, either by proposing valid

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objections to this or that principle underlying the interpretation of the evidence or by questioning the accuracy of the evidence itself. All of these statements would correspond to what Badiou has termed the veridical, or the truthful;2 that is to say, they are either correct or not correct, true or false, with respect to what has become a stable body of knowledge. They are verifiable in principle, even if it is possible to distort such statements in a way to make the truthful appear to be false or incorrect. Yet such statements of opinion, even when those opinions are founded on verifiable knowledge, fall beneath the true and the false in another sense. For Badiou, truth is distinguished from the truthful precisely because a truth does not conform to the current state of knowledge but rather disrupts that state or falls outside its norms of verification. Such a truth is infinite in the sense that it always remains incomplete in a particular historical situation or context, though it can generate propositions that alter the state of knowledge in such a context. In other words, the force of infinite truth always exceeds the force of truthful propositions. When Badiou says that opinions fall beneath the true and the false, he presumably means by the false what he describes as the subversion of an infinite truth process through the generation of evil. Since the term “evil” has religious connotations that seem to be inappropriate to what Badiou actually means in this context, I will discard that term and substitute for it the word “falsification,” though that term should be understood as a process that is not logically antithetical to truth, its simple negation, but rather derives from a truth process through practices that subvert the production of its infinity. As Badiou stressed in a lecture, “Evil [or falsification, as I would put it] is something immanent to truth, and not something exterior to it.”3 The infinity of a truth process or procedure means that a truth appears to a subject (it actually constitutes the subject) as something absolute but untotalizable. The truth process is generic, which means that it cannot be contained by a category or predication that would situate it in the order of knowledge in the manner of a truthful or verifiable proposition. The falsification of such a truth process derives from “what proves to be an obstacle to the pursuit of the generic procedure.”4 The force of the truth lies in the absolute conviction of the subject it generates, but that conviction can undermine the truth process in three ways. First, it can lead to betrayal because the untotalizable force of a truth can exhaust the subject who lives in a contradictory relation to the concrete world. The subject may feel compelled to deny the force of truth as the condition of returning to the normal state of knowledge. Second, truth can be falsified through the construction of

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3

a simulacrum, which Badiou associates with the Nazi political sequence and its anti-Semitism. The simulacrum reduces the untotalizable truth to a false totality, like national identity, and projects the void that every truth opens in a situation, the condition of its universality, onto a singular identity that must be excluded or eliminated, such as that of the Jew. However, the most critical category of falsification that seems to sum up the other two is the act of naming the unnamable.5 In his lecture on the truth process, Badiou recognizes that, though a truth has no category or predicate, it can produce a kind of knowledge as the effect of a fiction: “The subject can make the hypothesis of the situation where the truth of which the subject is a local point will have completed its generic totalization … A completed truth is a hypothesis, it’s a fiction, but a strong fiction.” As already noted, such an imaginative projection produces transformative knowledge— that is, it can bring about changes in a real social situation. These “bits of knowledge”—for they are never identical with the infinite truth—are effective because they have the possibility of being verified in a context that cannot be conceived without the imaginative act that forces the hypothesis of a completed truth and alters some elements of a current situation that deems such a truth indiscernible or unverifiable.6 In this act lies the power of thought. In order to illustrate this process, Badiou uses the example of love: Someone in love can say, and generally they do say, “I will always love you,” which is the anticipating hypothesis of the truth of infinite love. From this hypothesis, he or she forces the other to come to know him or her and to treat him or her differently—a new situation of the becoming of love itself is created.7

Such an act is imaginative because it forces one to anticipate the completion of a process that, practically speaking, can never be completed because an amorous encounter breaks with everyday temporal processes. This example and formula may seem overly simplistic, but we need to keep in mind that for Badiou the condition of any truth process is an event that disrupts the conventional order of time. Love as an event disrupts the inertia of a person’s everyday identity and virtually creates a new form of being, what Badiou calls the subject, that cannot be separated from the thought or image of the other. The One, or the illusion of self-unity, becomes the Two in a particular sense. In an amorous encounter, something is created whose existence is affirmed, though neither of the two individuals knows what it is. It has no category or predicate, and in that sense remains unnamable and incommensurable. Nonetheless, the force of

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the declaration, “I will always love you,” lies in the imagination of a truth that will stand even at the end of time, though the hypothetical nature of that end creates the possibility of its own subversion. For example, and this is typical, the declaration could be reduced to “abstract legalization,” a “reduction to routine” and “submission to guarantees and contracts.” Badiou terms this conjugality. Or this legal relation could be further instrumentalized by a betrayal in which the subject seeks to eliminate the Two by producing “a deadly possessive reciprocity” that reconstitutes the self as one being. This fusion destroys the amorous encounter that is ironically conditioned by the disjunction constituting the Two.8 David Cronenberg’s 1980s masterful remake of The Fly beautifully illustrates the latter category. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), presumably a brilliant scientist, meets Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a science journalist, at a convention, and they go back to his place because she is intrigued by the possibility of getting a story. Rather than have her reveal to the world his discovery of the mechanics of teleportation before he is ready, he convinces her to take on a book project and record the daily procedures of his experiments and overall progress. The scientific premises of this story are surely absurd, but The Fly is really a love story more than science fiction or horror. Seth and Veronica have an amorous encounter, and there is a brief interlude in which time becomes irrelevant to their physical passion. But then Veronica realizes that she has to deal with her jealous former boyfriend, Stathis Borans (John Getz), who is also her editor, and leaves Seth at a critical moment. Seth gets drunk and falls into a jealous fit that quickly turns into a self-destructive act when he ignores the risks and goes through the teleportation process without adequately testing his experimental subject, a baboon. Unfortunately, a fly enters the teleportation machine with him, and they are genetically fused into one being. Both Seth and Stathis are guilty of the demand for “deadly possessive reciprocity,” but as Seth gradually transforms into the monstrous Brundlefly, he sees Veronica and the baby she now carries as extensions of his threatened humanity. In a final desperate act, he kidnaps her and tries to force her to undergo genetic fusion with himself. At that point, Stathis saves her by sacrificing parts of himself when he is attacked by Brundlefly, and the film ends tragically as Seth is accidentally fused with his own machine and Veronica has to kill him in order to put him out of his misery. In effect, the film’s literal genetic “fusion” symbolizes the desire for amorous fusion, which amounts to naming the unnamable thing that has conditioned the production of the Two in an amorous relation. As Seth says to Veronica while

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he forces her to undergo the fusion, “We’ll be the ultimate family. A family of three joined together in one body. More human than I am alone.” The words “family” and “human” are not incidental choices. The first names the institution of conjugality, while the second names the unnamable thing created by the disjunctive relation of the Two and becomes the rationalization for Brundlefly’s destructive violation of the other. Seth’s scientific blunder is a metaphor for the destructive force of possessive jealousy that turns the amorous subject into a sort of monster, the antithesis of a lover. In a political sequence, a similar logic can unfold itself. By constructing the simulacrum of a truth as a totalized and complete national identity, the Nazis forced the appearance of the void that could not be incorporated into that totality, the sign of the incomplete truth process from which this brutal political sequence derived. To the unnamable thing that would not conform to their totalitarian logic, they gave the name Jew and then attempted to exclude it from their world through extermination. What is the name of the truth process from which even Nazism could be said to derive? Badiou refers to the radicalization of the French Revolution in 1792 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and points to the Nazi appropriation of the names “revolution” and “socialism” as signs of the historical truth procedure that National Socialism subverted.9 After all, there were other names for the void the Nazis wanted to eliminate: communists, homosexuals, gypsies, the disabled, and any other social group that did not conform to the simulated social paradigm known as the Aryan identity. Still, one could argue that the radicalization of the French and Russian revolutions were themselves local points in an infinite truth process, points that eventually concluded with betrayals or subversions of that process. For example, Stalinism would correspond to Badiou’s strict notion of naming the unnamable in the sense that the Soviet regime thought that the theory on which it claimed to be founded had unlimited power to name every element of a situation, which of course led to the disaster of labor camps, show trials, and mass murder. In anticipation of my discussion of Spinoza, I would argue that the name “democracy” articulates the ontological truth process from which these historical political sequences derive, though with the proviso that this term does not apply univocally to any actually existing state in the contemporary world, including the United States and the states of the European Union. Finally, even without constructing a simulacrum or abusing the force of a truth, the simple betrayal of a truth process through the act of giving up can involve naming the unnamable if only in the sense that the truth itself is declared

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definitively not to exist. Not naming the unnamable simply means recognizing the limit of a truth’s force—or of the subject’s power to project its future—in any particular context. As Badiou sums up, “the point of the unnamable is the point which if forced to be named destroys the complete field [of truth] and so destroys the possibility of infinity.”10 Since the force of a truth depends on the subject’s imaginative power of projection, its ability to produce a strong fiction of a completed truth, then the ethics of truth requires some recognition of the limit of imagination, the fact that our vision of the future cannot be coextensive with the truth itself. Badiou’s language on this point, which comes from a verbal exchange after his lecture on the truth process, is paradoxical. If imagination is applied without caution, if thought imagines that it has possession of a truth that can name every element of a situation, it creates “the possibility of the impossibility of the infinite.” Using caution in the exercise of imagination with respect to a truth process preserves “the possibility of infinite creation.”11

Mind is not a place Though I begin this book with the consideration of a contemporary philosopher— whose work I have already described elsewhere as an event,12 at least for the subject whose composition is conditioned by that work—I nonetheless aim to produce a historical construction of the thought of thought that crosses periods and disciplines and yet participates in an infinite process in the sense that it is immeasurable and irreducible to a finite temporal framework, even though it finds expression only in such frameworks. As William Blake phrased it, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time” (MHH 7.10: 36). Every word of that line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell explodes with significations that I will elaborate in the next chapter. But for now I want to tell a story in order to suggest some of the issues this book means to raise. A few years ago, I had an article rejected by the electronic journal Postmodern Culture, even though the reviewer thought it to be an “accomplished work that will have no trouble getting published.” The reason for the rejection had nothing to do with the relevance of my analysis to the exploration of postmodern culture (to the extent that such a period designator means anything), but rather with the theoretical stance of the article, and in particular with the use of the phrase “eternal truth.” Frankly, I was rather amused by this response, considering that the phrase was in reference to Badiou who is a publicly declared atheist and who gives the name materialist

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dialectic to the thought in his most recent major work, Logics of Worlds. Now for Badiou, as far as I can tell, the word “eternal” is indistinguishable from the word “infinite,” which, despite the different contexts in which he may use it, always derives from its use in mathematics. It is not a reference to metaphysical transcendence or “temporal transcendence,” as Antonio Negri would name the endless time of conventional, theological understanding.13 Though this incident may seem to be utterly minor or without significance, it could be interpreted as a symptom of our ontological situation. Since the seventeenth century, and the critical name here would be Descartes, the Western world has been governed by the hegemonic norm of metaphysical dualism, which insists on an absolute division between the substance or nature of thought and the substance or nature of physical being. Science governs the actuality of material being, and though thought must enter the process of scientific understanding, it is limited by material reality or the laws of nature that are revealed through empirical data. In itself, however, thought or mind postulates the eternal as the existence of a transcendent God who operates outside or beyond the laws of nature. Hence the notion of the eternal is associated with transcendence, and the ontological order is compartmentalized so that a human individual can operate as a materialist in the realm of knowledge while at the same time worshiping a transcendent God and believing in the transcendent truth of certain values that require no evidence except God or some kind of transcendent authority. Today virtually all of our politicians and public policy makers operate on these assumptions, while those who occupy the more skeptical end of the spectrum, usually in the realm of academia, frequently operate as if certain ideas belong exclusively to the transcendent realm of being while others belong exclusively to material being under the rule of science or some form of critical thinking. When it comes to values and truths outside of empirical science, these are the prerogatives of individual judgments in a relativistic world. Obviously, I have simplified the rather complex history of the metaphysical assumptions about the nature of thought. While it is not my intention to write an academic history of philosophy or of any particular current of philosophy (a task for which I am ill-prepared by both training and inclination), I do intend to trace an ontological thought and try to elaborate its social and political implications across several centuries through the critical reading of some symptomatic philosophical, literary, and visual texts (the latter in work beyond this book). What is at stake here, and this is my working assumption, is the concept of “savage” ontology, that is to say, an ontology that excludes the realm of transcendence by

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substituting for transcendent being the principle of immanent causality. I use the word “savage” as an allusion to Negri’s masterful, though incredibly difficult, work on Spinoza, The Savage Anomaly. From that work, and from Jonathan Israel’s detailed history of the “Radical Enlightenment,” one understands that from the 1660s, when Spinoza began working on his Ethics, until at least the middle of the eighteenth century, the name Spinoza came to signify the most extreme and savage challenge to the hegemonic norms of the dominant civilization of the West.14 Spinoza was the Marx of that period, and until the present day he has remained an anomaly within the history of Western philosophy, which is a symptom of the fact that Western culture remains firmly in the grip of ontological dualism. Of course, one symptom of that dualism is the insistence of religious thinking in the political order of everyday life. Yet, ironically, the other pole of that dualism is a kind of blind empiricism that produces contrary effects: first, popular or public discourse presumes that whatever appears to be is all that can be, and, second, the same discourse challenges the validity of scientific knowledge because the truths of science are necessarily incomplete, or as physicist Lisa Randall recently phrased it, “any statement about truth is in some sense provisional. It covers the regions that you’ve studied, but that is why there’s always room for new ideas and new theories.”15 For example, the resistance of what passes for conservative thought to the theory of global warming is blind not because that theory cannot be questioned, expanded, or recontextualized on the basis of new knowledge, including new empirical data. It’s blind because it conflates verifiable knowledge with a truth process that always remains, in some sense, incomplete. Or restated in Badiouian terms, it conflates knowledge and truth and confuses incompleteness with the false or meaningless. The history of modern science teaches us that empirical data cannot be trusted without the intervention of rational thought, even though in the end rational thought must turn to empirical data in order to produce some verifiable knowledge that supports the always-incomplete process of thought. Spinoza constitutes a critical break or divide at the origin of modern scientific thinking, what Negri has called “an alternative system of thought.”16 The thought of thought itself achieves its most radical formulation through Spinoza’s implicit understanding that thought as an activity is indistinguishable from mind—in other words, mind is not a place separate from thought, its spiritual container, so to speak, but simply another word for the thought process. The being of mind is thought. Thought in and of itself is infinite to the extent that it expresses truths that cannot be measured by time, such as mathematical truths or, in a different

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way, aesthetic truths. Still, though thought in itself is infinite, the human mind as a finite mode of being is constituted by the idea of the individual body, which is finite (E2.11–13: 250–51). The power of the mind is nothing more than the power of thought, and hence it makes no sense to measure mind as a power separate from thought. No particular mind can be inferior or superior to another particular mind on the basis of some lack in the mind, because the particular mind of the human being is nothing but the “idea or knowledge of the human body” (E2.19P: 258). However, one thought can be superior to another thought, and since the human body is more complex than the bodies of many other existing things—which means that it can simultaneously act or be acted on in more ways—the mind constituted by the idea or thought of that body has correspondingly greater intellectual force. From these premises Spinoza comes to a surprising conclusion: in proportion as the actions of one body depend on itself alone and the less that other bodies concur with it in its actions, the more capable is its mind to understand distinctly. From this we can realize the superiority of one mind over others, and we can furthermore see why we have only a completely confused knowledge of our body … (E2.13S: 252; C 458)

This passage makes sense only in light of Spinoza’s different understanding of the unity of a particular body with the mind or thought that corresponds to that body. As Negri stresses, a singular thing for Spinoza “exists collectively, in the concurrent unity of associate actions toward an end.”17 A singularity (Spinoza uses the phrase res singulares, singular things, in the Latin text) is constituted by an effect, not by the number or nature of the components that come together in the production of that effect (E2Def 7: 244; O2: 85). For purposes of this discussion, I will distinguish between such a singularity of effect and the particular thing, which is simply that which appears to be an individual thing to the everyday perception. When Spinoza argues for the unity of the mind and the body, he means the unity of the idea of the body, or a thought, and the body itself, or an extended thing. The idea of a thing and its physical being are “one and the same thing, expressed in two ways” (E 2.7S: 247). However, if the idea of the body constitutes the human mind, then one can deduce from Spinoza’s argument that every individual thing has a mind to the extent that there is an idea or thought, a form of understanding, that corresponds to each thing, what Spinoza would call the idea in the mind of God, its immanent cause

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(E 2.13S: 251). In the same passage, Spinoza implies that all individual things are animate even though not every individual thing is alive in the organic sense. Things are animate as parts of the animate totality, the infinite being of nature or God. Hence the superiority of mind directly corresponds to the superiority of the idea or thought that constitutes the mind. If the human mind is superior to the mind or thought of some other natural thing, it has to do with the complexity of the object of that thought, the human body, which consists of many parts— what Spinoza calls “the simplest bodies,” which are not atomic units but are distinguished from one another by differential relations of motion and rest, that is, matters of perception (E2.13L3A2: 253). The human brain is a simple body, though it can be considered the critical instrument of verbal expression allowing for the physical expression of a thought. Any particular mind, or the idea of a particular body, necessarily has a confused knowledge of that body because such a mind depends on the passive perception of other bodies and therefore expresses an inadequate understanding of the object of those thoughts. Only when such a mind actively enters into the singularity of a larger and more complex thought that correlates with a more complex body, which is the effect of a socially collective process, does it participate in the constitution of a mind that can depend on itself alone to a greater degree. Such, for example, would be the thought underlying a scientific discipline like physics. When this process of collective action reaches its ultimate form, it becomes “the whole of Nature as one individual whose parts—that is, all the constituent bodies—vary in infinite ways without any change in the individual as a whole” (E2.13L7S: 254–55). Such a body constitutes the adequate thought of nature, both of which, thought and nature as one being, Spinoza refers to as God. (Later, however, I will need to show how he complicates this unity.) Only this singularity can be said to depend on itself alone and to require no other bodies to concur with its actions. Therefore, only God, as Spinoza understands that name, has a completely distinct or adequate knowledge of itself and of the human body. But God is not a subject or a person in the conventional sense but the immanent cause of all things (E1.18: 229). As Pierre Macherey comments, “the Spinozist substance is not a subject,” by which he means that “the cause of an idea resides in the power (puissance) of the intellect, grasped not as the singular power of an individual subject but as the eternal property of the mode of thought.”18 In other words, God is the principle of immanent causality both as it applies to physical being and to thought. Although Spinoza uses words like “soul” and “mind,” not to mention the name “God,” he clearly implies that thought is autonomous—or

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what he identifies in an early work as a “spiritual automaton”—despite the fact that it has a corresponding body or physical being.19 But this latter relation is not a form of dependence because thought and extension, or physical being, are merely attributes of one substance, expressions of the same being. The power of thought is not transcendent but immanent to itself and its physical being. Furthermore, for Spinoza, God doesn’t strictly have free will because will as a conscious decision requires a cause outside of itself (E1.32Cor1: 235). Rather, the infinite thought that Spinoza associates with the mind of God is knowledge of the immanent cause of everything that is. Freedom can be measured only by the knowledge or understanding of the immanent causes that lie within every aspect of existence. The ordinary human subject, what we usually refer to as a person or individual human being, is not antithetical to adequate thought or ideas—hence is not antithetical to God in the Spinozian sense of that word—but in order to arrive at such adequate knowledge, even of its own body, it must annihilate the self, to use the Blakean term—that is to say, it must break through the limitations and inertia of its everyday modes of perception. It must arrive at a level of knowledge and understanding, through collective action and thought, that exceeds what any particular individual can achieve in isolation from others (E4.18S: 331). Self-annihilation, in this sense, is not actually an act of destruction but of liberation because the individual arrives at the understanding that its true existence resides in the power of thought to transcend itself without ever ceasing to be immanent to itself. For Spinoza, the particular mind—or the ordinary and inadequate conception of the individual human body—knows itself and the objects in the external world through images, or imagination. In and of itself, such imagination is not a weakness of mind that is antithetical to the power of thought as long as thought can distinguish between images of things that exist and those that do not exist, which means that the faculty of imagining is free (E2.17S: 257). In other words, perception cannot be trusted without the intervention of rationality to determine the existence or nonexistence of the thing perceived. Even knowledge of the human body derives from images, or ideas of the affections, but these images do not constitute direct knowledge of the body (E2.19P: 258). This perspective anticipates both Freud and Lacan. The particular human mind does not directly perceive its body any more than it directly perceives the existence of other bodies. It imagines those bodies and to that extent has only inadequate knowledge of them (E2.26Cor/P: 261). In fact, the basis of inductive reasoning would be precisely this kind of knowledge, and if you add to it the knowledge

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that is derived from symbols—that is, from words that we have heard or read— taken together these constitute what Spinoza calls “‘knowledge of the first kind,’ ‘opinion,’ or ‘imagination’” (E2.40S2: 267). To put these thoughts into the context of everyday life, when an individual operates on the assumption that what they see or how the world appears to them is the obvious truth, they have mistaken knowledge of the first kind, which may be truthful, for the truth itself. It may be truthful in the sense that it may be verifiable within a particular context or situation, but even this verifiability must be subject to further critique through rational intervention. A criminal court may convict someone of a capital crime on the basis of solid evidence, but the productions of thought, which eventually lead to something like DNA testing, can expose the perception of that evidence as faulty or inadequate. Furthermore, most human beings largely base their opinions about the world on what they have heard, seen, or read, and this information often seems to be verified by experience. The earth may appear to be flat or even the center of the universe, but eventually thought produces an alternative theory that can explain the empirical evidence for the earlier theory as well as other data that could not be explained coherently by the earlier theory. But without the intervention of thought, no individual would raise these questions in the first place. In effect, Spinoza’s knowledge of the first kind corresponds to what Badiou calls opinions, or the state of the situation, which produces the encyclopedia of knowledge. He defines the latter as “the general system of predicative knowledge internal to a situation: i.e. what everyone knows about politics, sexual difference, culture, art, technology, etc.”20 Thought exceeds this encyclopedia by subtracting these categories or predicates in order to generate new categories or postulate something beyond the encyclopedia altogether. Though one can accept Macherey’s view that substance or the principle of immanent causality is not a subject in the ordinary sense of that term, that does not necessarily exclude another concept of the subject, which Macherey would call “process-subject,” a term that he derives from Louis Althusser’s formula for history as “a process without a subject,” and that Badiou would call the subject of a truth process, which is a subject that cannot be reduced to a particular individual. As Macherey explains, “Neither absolute object nor absolute subject, the Spinozist substance invalidates precisely these categories of representation.”21 My point would be that, in the context of Spinoza’s thought, our concept of the subject and the conditions of what we like to call true individuality necessarily undergo a change. Let’s stop using the word “God” or “substance” for now and hold exclusively to the phrase “principle of immanent causality.” Thought is

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autonomous and the mind can be said to expand with the complexity of the thought that constitutes it. The particular mind that we associate with a single human body is constituted by the thought of that body. That mind must certainly be superior to the mind constituted by the thought of a rock. Of course, the thought of a rock does not exist in the form of a subject but as the expression of the immanent cause of the rock’s being. In and of itself, the particular human mind is constrained by the limitations of the individual human body, though such a mind can be described as a subject or a person because it is in the nature of the human body to perceive or imagine its own physical existence and the existence of other bodies. The thought of the human body expresses the principle of that body’s own self-consciousness, or subjectivity. However, it is also in the nature of the particular human mind to recognize the limitations of its own perception, which means the mind can have knowledge that some of the things which it perceives do not actually exist, or at least do not exist in the form in which they are imagined. In order to arrive at a true knowledge of its own existence and of the existence of those things on which it depends, the human mind must transcend itself by uniting with other minds to produce a more adequate knowledge of itself and the world. However, such an intellectual act is not distinct from the physical association of different bodies that come together to form what we could call the body politic.

The subject of democracy In Part IV of Ethics, Spinoza equates every individual’s right with its virtue or power [potentiâ] (E4.37S1: 340; O2: 237). In the Theological-Political Treatise, written before the final version of Ethics,22 he identifies the power of nature in its totality with “the power of all individual things taken together,” each of which has “the sovereign right to do all that it can do” according to its “determinate power [determinata potentia]” (TPT16: 527; O3: 189). Negri makes a distinction in Spinoza’s thought between potestas, which would be centralized, hierarchical power as the form of command, and potentia, which is the constituent power coextensive with every individual’s right to do all that it can do.23 Though politically speaking Spinoza was a pragmatist who accepted the existence of three political expressions of sovereignty—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—he nonetheless also understood that democracy referred to more than a form of government but to the ontological foundation of every

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government, to the potentia of the multitude. In the Theological-Political Treatise, he stressed that democracy “seemed the most natural form of state,” because it corresponded more directly to the real conditions of power (TPT16: 531). This distinguishes Spinoza’s concept of the state from that of Thomas Hobbes, for whom the state transcends and negates, rather than expresses, nature, which for Hobbes is chaos.24 As Negri explains Spinoza, “the passage from individuality to community does not come about either through a transfer of power or through a cession of rights; rather, it comes about within a constitutive process of the imagination that knows no logical interruption.”25 As I will argue later, the key term for Negri is imagination. In the Political Treatise, which was written after the Ethics, Spinoza eliminates the concept of the social contract that still informed his earlier thought. He describes the “collective constitution” of sovereignty and right.26 Any state or sovereign that can sustain its power and authority to rule expresses a natural right, which “is determined by the power not of each individual but of a people” (my italics, PT3.2: 690). The Latin word translated by the phrase “of a people” is multitudinis, the term Spinoza uses consistently throughout the Political Treatise in distinction from vulgus, or a disorganized mob (O3: 284).27 The multitude embodies power through collaboration as opposed to the diffused power of particular individuals. This passage may sound as if Spinoza’s position is virtually indistinguishable from that of Hobbes, but the nuances here are critical. For Hobbes, nature in and of itself is incapable of producing civil society, for the condition of his concept of civil society is the individual’s total alienation of his or her natural powers or rights to the Leviathan of the state and its embodiment in one person.28 For Spinoza, the individual person has less right as a particular being in a commonwealth, but the consequence of that apparent loss of power is actually the enhancement of human power and autonomy. For Hobbes, the state is a fiction because it goes against the truth of nature, which the idea of the multitude expresses, and substitutes for the “Unity of the Represented” “the Unity of the Representer … that maketh the Person One.”29 Furthermore, as Warren Montag observes, Hobbes posits a mind separate from the body, “an internal world of perfect freedom from an external world of obedience and determination.” The individual’s free thought, as an internal process without political consequences, can coexist with the complete transfer of his or her rights and powers to the authority of the state.30 For Spinoza, by contrast, the state is, in Negri’s words, “a natural determination, a second nature.”31 In such a state, “no one is able to transfer to another his natural right or faculty to reason

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freely and to form his own judgment on any matters whatsoever, nor can he be compelled to do so” (TPT20: 566). While in the Theological-Political Treatise democracy is the most natural form of government in a restricted pragmatic sense, Spinoza alters his view somewhat in the Political Treatise after the Dutch crisis of 1672 had incited the brutal murder of the De Witt brothers by a mob and reinstalled the Orangist party, which represented a movement toward monarchy. Though Spinoza was outraged by the murder, one needs to keep in mind that the government of the United Provinces of the Netherlands under Johan De Witt was not a democracy but an oligarchy, which corresponds to Spinoza’s notion of an aristocracy.32 In the Political Treatise, Spinoza suggests that the most stable form of government may be achieved if “all power [potestas] is conferred on one man,” but he immediately qualifies this view by insisting that “the power [potentia] of one man is far from being capable of sustaining so heavy a load” (PT6.4–5: 701; O3: 298). As he further argues, monarchy can never be stable for the king or the multitude if the welfare of the latter is not taken into account, because otherwise there will be conspiracies against the former, which, in response to common fears or injuries, is a natural expression of “the common power of the people [communi multidinis potentiâ]” (PT3.9: 693; O3: 288). Instituted power or potestas, for Spinoza, is never autonomous, never anything more than an instrumentalization of potentia, and as such it is always and necessarily subject to revision. In other words, permanent revolution is the ontological condition of the state. This understanding of potentia as an open-ended process—which one could associate with the force of a truth process in Badiou’s sense—brings us back to the question of the subject. Even Negri recognizes the difficulty of referring to the multitude—which concretely or experientially appears to be “a jumble, a continuous and contradictory intermingling of passions and situations”—as a political subject. He concludes that this subjectivity can only be understood as “a tendency in an indefinite interweaving of subjective intersections.”33 For Badiou, the subject is a finite point in an infinite truth process, but he also notes that the subject produces or appears in the world as a body, though this body does not necessarily have any organic status.34 In other words, such a body can be a collection of texts or works of art, a social institution, a political organization, a revolutionary army, a scientific practice, and so forth. In Spinozian terms, the subject of a thought that moves in the direction of adequate knowledge or truth emerges from a process of social collaboration. For example, any individual has only a limited

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understanding of the world in which it lives, though it can enhance that understanding through collaboration with other minds or individuals—with their thought—so that they form “one mind and one body” (E4.19S: 331). Though politically this means that individuals come together to form a social organization through their common power of action, intellectually it means that the mind constituted by the thought of a particular body transcends that thought through the elaboration of a more complex thought that cannot be reduced to the limited experience of the particular body. Knowledge of the second kind for Spinoza is knowledge of what he calls the common notions, which are ideas that represent something that two or more bodies have in common (E2.37–39: 265–66).35 Just as the particular mind is constituted by the thought of the particular body, the common notion is a thought expressing the agreement of elements between two or more bodies. The common notion is necessarily adequate because it expresses not the totality of the union of two bodies, or the essences of either or both bodies, but the thing they have in common. Common notions are veridical, in Badiou’s sense. For example, at a very general level, the notion that all human beings can think is a common notion that borders on being a tautology, since we define human beings as creatures who can think. Nonetheless, we arrive at this knowledge through images that we derive from other bodies. So, as Gilles Deleuze would insist, the foundation of knowledge of the second kind is knowledge of the first kind, which also corresponds to how we understand scientific thinking.36 Since Deleuze defines reason for Spinoza as “the perception and comprehension of the common notions,” perhaps we can infer that reason is the faculty by which we can distinguish between what is real and what is not real in the imagination or perception of things.37 The common notion is an expansion of thought and therefore of mind. It cannot be attributed to a particular individual, though it produces a new singularity and enhances the freedom of the individual precisely by expanding its understanding of the limits of its own physical and intellectual being. However, the particular individual is not in itself an atomic or irreducible unit but rather a composite of physical parts to which ideas or thoughts correspond. For Spinoza’s ontology, if substance in itself remains indivisible, there can be no atomic parts, because an atomic part would have to be indivisible through its own modal nature (E1.13: 224). In his early work on Descartes, Spinoza argued that material extension is necessarily divisible, but to whatever degree matter is divided, it remains substance, or expresses the same principle of immanent causality. If a particular form of matter were itself

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indivisible, it would constitute a form of substance somehow distinct from substance, that is, a division within indivisible substance.38 Similarly, one cannot attribute to the individual a unitary subjective essence or selfhood that remains unchanged or self-identical as the individual rises to a greater degree of freedom through the expansion of the power of its mind and body. Rather than a unitary essence, the subject is a dynamic process that, insofar as it participates in the articulation of a truth, transcends itself by rupturing the appearance of its own unity.39 As I will argue later, Spinozian essence is generic in Badiou’s sense of that term. The subject is always finite, as Badiou recognizes, because it is never coextensive with the truth process that it nonetheless expresses and attempts to sustain through intellectual and social practice. For Spinoza, as for Badiou, the subject does not constitute a truth but is constituted by a truth: “He who has a true idea knows at the same time that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt its truth” (E2.43: 268). The truth is its own standard: “just as light makes manifest both itself and darkness, so truth is the standard both of itself and falsity” (E2.43S: 269). The thought of a truth produces what Badiou would call a subjective formalism that cannot be identical with what constituted the subjectivity or personhood that preceded such a thought. Étienne Balibar has argued for an understanding of the Spinozian subject as a transindividual process, which is not inconsistent with the views of Badiou and Negri.40 Perhaps most critical to our understanding of this process is his claim that imagination itself, at the foundation of something that could be called a subject, is a “relational or transindividual” structure. As I noted earlier, we know the external world through the ideas of the affections of the body, or images, which are the basis of what we call imagination. These ideas involve the nature of a particular body and those bodies that are external to it. According to Spinoza, “If therefore the nature of the external body is similar to the nature of our own body, then the idea of the external body we imagine [quod imaginamur] will involve an affection of our own body similar to the affection of the external body” (E3.27P: 292; C 508; O2: 160). In other words, the self-image of a particular individual is formed through interaction with others, and this involves the process of “affectuum imitatio,” or “imitation of the affects” (O2:160; C 509; E3.27S: 292). In this context, I follow Edwin Curley’s translation of Ethics rather than Samuel Shirley’s because Shirley frequently translates the forms of the Latin verb imaginor with some form of the verb to think and uses the word emotions to translate the Latin word affectus. Though affect as an affection can refer to an emotion, for Spinoza it also refers to anything that influences or causes a modification in something else.41 As Balibar describes the process of affective imitation, the

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individual person’s sense or understanding of who they are necessarily derives from this transindividual interaction with the other: “we identify ourselves with other individuals because we perceive a partial likeness (i.e. a likeness of the parts of the body or mind, which become positive or negative objects of desire) and we project our own affections upon them (or theirs upon ourselves).”42 This logic obviously bears a resemblance to the Lacanian theory of the mirror phase, even though it would probably be an error to read Spinoza’s transindividual imaginary as a phase in the ontogeny of the individual subject (which arguably it ceased to be in the later work of Lacan). This structure suggests the degree to which any particular individual will always have a conception of its own body that remains inseparable from the images of the bodies of others, and since, for all practical purposes, as Montag emphatically reminds us, body and mind derive from the same immanent cause in Spinoza, the thought that corresponds to the particular individual’s body relates it to the thought of other bodies.43 If human beings can come together through intellectual cooperation to produce common notions as the action of reason, they can also come together through similar acts involving the interaction of affects to produce a fiction that subverts the very nature of a common notion, and ultimately of truth itself. Spinoza argues that by natural right every human “judges what is good and what is bad, and has regard for his own advantage according to his own temperament [ingenio], and seeks revenge, and endeavors to preserve what he loves and to destroy what he hates.” Furthermore, since human beings are not always rational but are subject to affects, over which they have limited control, they frequently enter into conflicted relationships to one another (E4.37S2: 340; C 566–67). For Spinoza, each existent thing strives to persist in its own being, and this striving expresses the essence of any individual thing, that is, its virtue or power (E3.6–7: 283; 4D8: 323). The conatus or striving of the body and mind taken together is called appetite, and when the subject is conscious of this appetite, it is called desire (cupiditas) (E3.9S: 284; O2: 148). In effect, the thinking subject desires to imagine (imaginari) those things external to it that increase or support its power of action, which constitutes its natural right (E3.12: 285; C 502; O2: 150). However, without the intervention of reason in the construction of common notions, or veridical thoughts, the subject can easily align itself with a social formation, or greater singularity, that excludes other subjects from that identity and hence undermines the universal address of its truth, in that way blocking the power of the individual to transcend its own limited perception or imagination of the world. In other words, particular individuals either

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collectively reinforce an inadequate understanding of the world they live in, or they collectively pool their powers of thought in such a way as to produce a more adequate understanding of the world. According to the logic of affective imitation, individuals will hate what others hate and love what others love or vacillate between those positions (E3.31: 294–95). Ironically, the same process that drives the particular subject toward greater power through association with others, through a kind of self-annihilation or self-transcendence, can also limit and subvert that process, which, after Badiou, I would call a truth process. For Spinoza, this apparent subversion of the power of reason, which is the power of thought, is not an unnatural event, but rather one of the expressions of human nature, which is simply the expression of nature, since human beings do not constitute “a kingdom within a kingdom” (E3Pr: 277–78). Even though the imagination can subvert the desire for truth, there would be no possibility of a truth process that produces a new form of subjectivity without the operation of the imagination. This is the point of Negri’s powerful reading of Spinoza.

General intellect For Negri—though I inflect his perspective to some extent with Badiou’s—the imagination is the condition of social interactions that produce the tendency of transindividual subjectivity as a truth process that can incorporate more than an elite group of subjects endowed with superior intellects. In the TheologicalPolitical Treatise, Spinoza understood that religious belief—but we could say the same thing about any kind of belief or strong conviction that cannot base itself exclusively on rational argument—is not inherently evil or misguided but rather represents the possibility of peaceful sociability without which reason itself could never find the context in which it could express itself. In his reading of this treatise, Negri recognizes “the differentiation of the negative imagination, which becomes superstition, from the imagination as positivity, which becomes obedience.” Obedience is positive to the extent that it produces peace and creates “the possibility of establishing a contract-consensus among men.” Without the peace that such a consensus produces, civil association would be impossible as would be the free collaboration of individuals that would be able to construct a more complex and adequate understanding of the world.44 Obviously, obedience is not a virtue in itself since it would be possible for individuals to obey a set of rules derived from a negative use of the imagination. For example, Spinoza

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understands the Bible as an imaginative document (anticipating Blake, by the way) that has been “adapted to the understanding of the common people [vulgi]” and that can be further adapted by individuals in order to reinforce their obedience to laws that express their understanding of God “with fuller mental assent in matters concerning justice and charity” (TPT2 178). In this instance, I have chosen the Silverthorne and Israel translation of the treatise over Shirley’s (which translates pleniore animi consensu as “with heartier will”) because the latter virtually erases the word that means “consent” and thus the notion that the common people are engaging in a kind of constructive mental activity (TPT14: 514; O3: 173). As Montag demonstrates, Spinoza’s use of a form of the Latin noun vulgus for the common people has negative connotations suggesting “if not quite the ignorant mob then a mass prone (but not necessarily condemned permanently) to superstition.”45 Still, in the larger context of Spinoza’s work, it could also suggest a mass of people who have the potential (potentia) to become a multitude, that is, a larger and more complex form of individuality that would produce a greater knowledge and understanding of the body and the physical world it occupies. Such a positive use of the imagination only becomes negative when it operates as the basis of intolerance, when sectarians persecute those who disagree with them as the enemies of their God and those who conform without understanding as the elect (TPT14: 515). In other words, to the extent that imagination becomes the foundation of peaceful coexistence, it creates the social conditions through which reason itself produces its common notions, and therefore, for Negri, “Reason traverses the imagination, liberating the truth it contains, and meanwhile the imagination constructs the positivity of the existent and, therefore, of reason itself.”46 I would phrase it in this way. However naïve the operation of the imagination in order to produce sociability as the ground of rational action, there must be at least one rational component, one common notion that asserts itself in this process, which is that all human beings have the power of thought, and that however much one individual’s or group’s understanding of something may differ from another’s, they have something in common that legitimates the tolerance of those differences and the conviction that they can be transcended through greater understanding and social collaboration. In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza identifies fear as the primary cause of superstition and stresses that all men are susceptible to this influence (TPT Pr: 388–89). Though in the Ethics Spinoza makes the point that “The mob is fearsome, if it does not fear,” he seems to revise this perspective in the

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Political Treatise when he criticizes those who attribute faults to common or less-privileged people that are inherent in all people (E4.54S: 348; PT7.27: 719). Montag, after Pierre-François Moreau, asserts that the distinction between the sage and the fool is absent from Spinoza’s mature work, though Spinoza vacillates or remains ambivalent on the topic of the common people.47 However, this ambivalence can probably be resolved as long as we keep in mind that for Spinoza there is no natural hierarchy of good and bad, so that an individual who has achieved greater power of action and thought through cooperation with others is not therefore superior to those others since that individual would not be what it is without them. If such an individual were to despise those others or fear the ignorance of the masses to the point of withdrawing from them completely, he or she would inevitably undermine their own power of thought and action and hence their own perfection and autonomy. Perfection, in this context, means reality or the power to act, which also involves the power of thought (E2D6: 244; 5.40P/Cor: 381). The more perfection something has, the more real it is, and the nature of that reality has to do with its “force of existence (vis existendi),” what Badiou might term, in Logics of Worlds, its intensity or degree of appearance (E3GenDA/Ex: 319). We achieve increased power of activity and thought through knowledge, culminating in the third kind of knowledge, which involves understanding the essence of a thing (E5.27P: 375). The thought that would constitute the third kind of knowledge involves the thought of the body under a form of eternity, but this thought cannot be attributed to the mind of any particular individual that we would associate with everyday personhood, not even to Spinoza (E5.31P: 376–77). The thought of a particular individual is mortal only as the expression of a particular body, which is defined through duration and time (E5.23P: 374). The thought that constitutes such a mind expresses inadequate knowledge of the body, but insofar as it is thought, it has the power, the potentia, to participate in the thought that expresses the collaboration of a multitude of particular bodies that come to form a greater individuality, a greater body and mind—even, we could say, to participate in the totality of nature as a singular thing. The essence of the body under the form of eternity is nothing other than the immanent cause that lies within each individual thing, that is, within everything that exists. The mind’s essence is knowledge, and the mind’s existence expands to the extent that it participates in the knowledge of the immanent cause of the world and the things in it (E4.37P: 339). For Spinoza, the individual mind participates in God’s infinite thought (E2.11Cor: 250), though instead of God I would prefer to substitute the

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notion of general intellect, which resonates with the term used by Marx and, more recently, by Negri and other Italian philosophers. For Marx, general intellect is “general social knowledge,” and though he insists that “Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc.,” he nonetheless identifies the mental activity that governs these productions as the “human participation in nature.”48 Michael Hardt and Negri define general intellect as “a collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowledges, techniques, and know-how.”49 However, none of the machines listed by Marx, as well as the forms of artificial intelligence that dominate our own era at the beginning of the twenty-first century, would be possible without the knowledge of mathematics and science, and possibly, when we talk about the forms of social cooperation, without the truths of art, politics, and love. In others words, general intellect and infinite intellect are one and the same. Particular human beings, such as Euclid and Descartes, may have invented the different material expressions of geometry, but the concepts underlying these discoveries express infinite truths, and practically speaking, it is unimaginable that any particular individual could have arrived at any of these concepts without engaging the thoughts of many other minds and the ideas expressed by many other things. For Spinoza, a part of the mind is eternal and survives the death of the body, and I would call this part the general intellect. Through participation in infinite or eternal truths, “we feel and experience that we are eternal. For the mind senses those things that it conceives by its understanding just as much as those which it has in its memory. Logical proofs are the eyes of the mind, whereby it sees and observes things” (E5.23S: 374). Thought transcends the particular body and the imagination that governs its perception of the world through logical proofs, which are thoughts that cannot properly belong to any particular human mind associated with any particular human body. The logical proofs that constitute the principles of mathematics are not simply the property or invention of the individual human being who writes them down but represent the material being of a thought that is not dependent on any particular time or place or on any particular human being, even though there are necessarily material reasons, both physical and intellectual, why such an infinite thought finds its expression at a specific moment in time and a specific location in space. The part of Euclid’s mind that survives the death of his body are the elements of geometry that he constructed, and our ability to understand his geometry constitutes an intellectual identity that cannot be reduced to our particular finite existence but rather represents a greater

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existence and, perhaps against the grain of our common sense, a greater individuality. Euclid’s temperament (ingenium), or the temperament of the nation or culture of which he was a part, functions through the imagination only, and though imagination participates in creating the personal and social conditions in which real thought can take place, neither knowledge of the second or third kind fully depends on the imagination in the narrow sense.50 As Spinoza emphatically remarks, “The Mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the Body endures” (C 607; E5.21: 373). However, as I’ve suggested already, reason is not antithetical to imagination any more than thought is antithetical to physical being. As Balibar stresses, reason is a component of human nature, or nature itself, but so are “ignorance, imagination, and passion.”51 By temperament or natural character (ingenium), human beings create social bonds as much through the passion of hatred as through the passion of love: “each of us strives [conari], so far as he can, that everyone should love what he loves, and hate what he hates” (C 512; E3.31Cor: 294; O2: 164). Human beings come together through the force of imagination, but their being together produces conflict to the extent that each wants all the others to endorse his or her values and predispositions, and this inevitably divides the multitude into antagonistic interest groups and individuals (C 512; E3.31S: 295). However, the nature of affective imitation also means that individuals will want to love something that others love and will want to reciprocate the love of anyone or anything that appears to love them, and the result is that individuals can love and hate the same thing, which produces the mental condition that Spinoza calls “vacillation,” or what today we might call ambivalence. Most critically for Spinoza, vacillation bears the same relation to affects that doubt bears to imagination, and the difference between them is simply a matter of intensity (E3.17S: 287–88). Doubt is the intellectual power that enables us to recognize that something may not exist even though it appears to us through our powers of perception or imagination, and vacillation has a similar relation to our affective life. For Negri, this process represents the critical dimension of our affective and imaginative being, because even though the results of our affective bonds and imaginative perceptions may be “confused and partial” at the level of the particular individual, they produce a “collective tension” that “pushes beyond the existent” and hence manifests imagination’s “ontological and constitutive function.” As “the first element of the constitutive rhythm,” vacillation is the beginning of thought within the realm of opinions, common sense, and social imagination: “the critical being, the conflictual being, the

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antagonistic being becomes key to both greater ontological perfection and greater ethical freedom.”52 To the extent that we doubt our own perceptions and our own feelings, we open the door to the construction of common notions, or veridical thoughts, starting, as I said before, with the premise that all human beings, even those with whom we most profoundly disagree, have the same power of thought that we have. Furthermore, imagination plays a key role in our ability to act and think because, as already noted, the mind necessarily “strives to imagine [imaginari conatur] only what affirms, or posits, its power of activity” (E3.54P: 306; C 525; O2: 182). For example, in discussing the causes of pride, or overestimation of one’s power through self-love, Spinoza remarks that this affect has no opposite in the sense of underestimating one’s power through self-hate: For whenever a man imagines [imaginatur] something is beyond his capability, he necessarily imagines [imaginatur] so, and by this imagination [imaginatione] he is so conditioned that he really cannot do what he imagines [imaginatur] he cannot do. For while he imagines [imaginatur] that he cannot do this or that, he is not determined to do it, and consequently it is impossible that he should do it.

Spinoza qualifies this explication with the argument that individuals can underestimate themselves by imagining that others underestimate them when they don’t or through excessive fear of disgrace or failure, and so forth (E3DA28/ Ex: 315–16; C 537–38; O2: 198), but in any case the imagination conditions our powers of activity and thought, anticipating the line from Blake about how men fall according to the failures of their vision: “they became what they beheld” (J30.50–54, 17). Spinoza provides no explanation as to how an individual breaks out of this determination of the imagination, but presumably vacillation, which itself must be determined by some immanent cause, can alter our conception of ourselves and others in such a way as to enhance our powers of thought and action. Still, Spinoza always remains a political realist precisely because he recognizes that, in Negri’s words, “Politics is the realm of the material imagination.”53 In effect, though the thought of a particular individual may be able to transcend itself through the production of common notions, it cannot do this without the social collaboration that imagination makes possible. Without imagination, rational thought would remain virtually transcendent and out of human reach. Hence there is no form of social collaboration, no form of politics and the state, that is not both rational and affective or imaginary; or, as Balibar phrases it, “Sociability is therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary

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ambivalence, both of which have real effects.”54 Society arises from the imaginative interaction of individuals or singularities that produces social ambivalence, which in its turn finds a provisional solution in the formation of a state. Through the state, “society has the power to prescribe a common rule of life [communem vivendi rationem], to make laws, and to maintain them—not by reason, which cannot restrain the affects, but by threats” (C 567; E4.37S2: 341; O2: 238). The Latin word that Spinoza uses to signify “power” in this context is a form of potestas, which, as I suggested earlier, is always a provisional instrumentalization of the potentia of the multitude. Negri coins the term disutopia to describe the later Spinoza’s understanding of society and the state, which Negri imagines as a break from the pantheistic utopia of the Dutch intellectual circles of the 1660s. The latter corresponds, for Negri, to the emergence in the seventeenth century of the ideology of capitalism as the transcendental organization of human life, the basis of a state in which all conflicts are resolved through the impersonal activity of the market. This transcendental state and the market it reflects is the Hobbesian fiction, which is not the same thing as the imaginative collaboration of subjectivities that produces the state as a “dislocation of power” from the individual to the community.55 The capitalist fiction, that “efficient mystification of the social organization of production,” constitutes a form of superstition that projects the market as a “utopia of development,” an ideology with a long history from the seventeenth century to the present.56 We still hear it today: leave everything to the market, and things will work out for the best of all possible worlds. Such a vision also supports social hierarchies under the assumption that those with the greatest abilities inevitably assume the reigns of social power, or potestas, through the logic of the impersonal market. In effect, the market subordinates potentia as the power of interactive singularities to the central force of potestas and produces the state as the mirror image of itself. Negri chooses the term disutopia to describe a state in which the subjective desire for freedom as the power of action and thought—in other words, the movement of potentia as the force of the multitude—remains in constant tension with the necessary construction of instituted power, or potestas. Such a social order is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, neither the best nor the worst of worlds, but rather a state in perpetual transition, a state that responds to the force of permanent revolution. As Negri phrases it, “The only true image of republican freedom is the organization of the disutopia and the realistic projection of the autonomies within a constitutional horizon of countervailing powers.”57 The autonomies are

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the singularities that are produced imaginatively and intellectually through the collaboration of groups of individuals, and such an autonomy is a subjective tendency within the field of material being, a tendency that never achieves full autonomy except at the level of nature as a whole, though nature as a whole can never be a subject, or rather its subjectivity is manifested only by the productive tendencies that lie within it. Nature or God is the Althusserian process without a subject or a goal.58 The singularities as countervailing powers, through their own conflicts and the social ambivalence that results from those conflicts, force the emergence of new forms of being, new modes of existence, through the dislocations of being. The common notions become the ground of truths through a subtractive process that constitutes new forms of subjectivity; and through the power of thought that necessarily correlates with action in the material world, society itself undergoes a transformation. This view seems consistent with Badiou’s early understanding of the subject as the articulation of the inexistent, the embodiment of an out-of-place force that interrupts the organization of placements in a society in order to produce “another place and other rules.”59 From this perspective, the dislocation of being means forcing into existence something that does not exist, or cannot be conceived, in a particular world or social context. It means forcing something to appear and thereby expanding the power of the imagination and the understanding of what limits that power. What limits the power of the singularities is the fullness of being itself, which is not some static totality but rather the limit of knowledge and understanding at any given point in time. As Negri theorizes, The constitutive process is a process of filling the fullness, of constructing a full and gradual development of being—not emanationistic but singular in its every emergence. The horizon of the totality is fullness. A horizon that is also a limit. Not because the horizon is a border beyond which the abyss mystically opens, but because the horizon is a full limit on which cupiditas [desire] (as a human synthesis of the physical conatus [striving] and the potentia of the mind) attempts its transgression of the existent; cupiditas constructs a new fullness, metaphysically demonstrating the power of being and identifying it with the actuality of the constructive tension of cupiditas.60

The limit of any individual’s freedom in the world is the limit of its understanding or knowledge of the infinite truth. However, that limit, or the fullness of being, includes human desire and the imagination that constructively expands its own subjective force through interaction with others, and hence creates the conditions in which greater knowledge, or common notions, can be

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produced through the construction of more powerful forms of singularity, more autonomous modes of the individual. In other words, the fullness of being is dislocated through the constitutive rhythm of the imagination powered by the force of desire, and the singularity of this movement suggests the force of what Badiou would call an event. As Blake articulates this process in different terms, “Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (MHH4: 34). Energy is the constitutive force of being that operates through the imagination of singularities in order to produce its ever expanding limit or circumference in the common notions and the truth processes that produce them. Though Blake displaces Spinoza’s hegemony of reason to some extent, he does not make that power into the dualistic antithesis of energy, but rather each is the effect of its own effects, or immanent cause, which incorporates the other without either being the cause of the other.61 Stated simply, reason and energy are the same thing, expressed by two different forms of appearance. This correlates with Negri’s conclusion that in the later phases of Spinoza’s work, “natura naturata wins a total hegemony over natura naturans.”62 Or, as Spinoza postulates, “The more we understand singular things, the more we understand God” (C 608; E5.24: 374). The field of singularities in a disutopia organizes the infinity of being.63 Before I proceed any further, I need to clarify in more practical terms the political form that the constitutive process takes in a disutopian world. In the Political Treatise, Spinoza struggled against his own ambivalence toward the vulgus by attributing its lack of judgment to the governmental policy of keeping the mass of individuals in a state of ignorance. Still, as Spinoza elaborates, ignorance itself has the effect of producing more complex dialogical interactions between common people—discussing, debating, listening—with the result that they become more clear-sighted [acuuntur] and eventually realize what they want [volunt]. Something no one had previously thought [cogitâsset] gains social approval (PT9.14: 746; O3: 352). The use of a form of the verb cogito drives home the idea that the interactions taking place through the imagination can produce a thought or form of knowledge that at least approaches a truth, which transcends the inadequate knowledge of the imagination. Though Spinoza makes the distinction between adequate and inadequate knowledge, or truth and falsity, he also insists that, if the distinction between the true and the false is based exclusively on the appearance of agreement between an idea and its object in the external world, “a true idea has no more reality or perfection than a false one (since they are distinguished only through the extrinsic denomination [NS:

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and not through the intrinsic denomination])” (C 479–80; E2.43S: 269). Hence, he calls into question the correspondence theory of truth, effectively suggesting that adequation as agreement or correspondence does not condition truth, but rather truth as intuitive perception conditions adequation. A thought that is true is self-referential and constitutive of reality, since only through such a thought do we arrive at the knowledge of what actually exists. Again, falsity, in this context, is not the negation of truth but simply results from the “privation of knowledge” (E2.35: 264). So it could be argued that inadequate knowledge exists as part of human nature, or what Negri calls at one point second nature. In his reading, Negri traces the movement of Spinoza’s thought from his early conception of second nature as a human construction to the notion that there is “only second nature,” because the collective imagination of all human beings (or, more properly, all thinking beings) produces the knowledge and the understanding of being that constitutes the greater singularity to which we give the name “nature.” Thought as a truth process produces being as the effect of its own effects: “Produced, constituted being is the principle of production and constitution.”64 Within the framework of this constitutive process, adequate and inadequate knowledge are equally necessary, by which I mean equally determined by the fullness of being, and there is no natural hierarchy between human beings or human minds (E2.36: 264). The superiority of a thought has to do with its greater complexity and adequacy, but such a thought achieves this complexity and adequacy through social interaction, which cannot exclude inadequate thoughts or other imaginative perceptions of the world. As I suggested earlier, the mind is not a spiritual container that exists independently of the thought it contains. Thought is the mind, and adequate ideas are transindividual. Spinoza repeatedly makes clear, as I have already suggested, that all human beings are subject to the force of the imagination, the affects, superstitions, and other inadequate ideas. Yet, at the same time, all human beings have the power of thought, the ability to grasp some adequate ideas and participate in truth processes. As Deleuze apparently suggested in one of his lectures on Spinoza, there are no complete idiots in a society, since everybody knows or understands something.65 Even an inadequate idea expressed by one person may stimulate the thought of a truth through its interaction with another person’s idea, whether it is adequate or inadequate. For Spinoza, as Montag stresses, “the power of thought of the many is necessarily greater than that of the few.”66 Spinoza surely believes that adequate knowledge, or reason, is superior to inadequate knowledge, or imagination. But that superiority of thought cannot be

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reduced to a class of individuals who imagine themselves to have a general power of thought that is peculiar to them and that justifies their right to dominate the multitude of other individuals while ignoring their common desires and powers of thought. For Spinoza, whatever enhances the power of the body, its ability to act, also enhances the power of thought, and of course the opposite is also true. The feelings of pleasure and pain, which are passive affects, directly correlate with the transition to greater or lesser powers of activity and thought (E3.11S: 284–85). Though pleasure generally enhances the power of thought, it can limit thought when it becomes an obsession that focuses on one part of the body to the extent of disabling the body as a whole. That same rule applies to sexual love and desire, except that in those cases the pleasure is associated with an external cause (E4.43–44: 343–44). These days we might refer to these affects as forms of addiction, whether they refer to excessive sexual activity, substance abuse, or any other obsessive behavior. Pleasure is good to the extent that it guides someone toward greater perfection or reality by substituting adequate for inadequate knowledge, active understanding for passive submission to affects (E4.59P: 351; C 579–80). Still, since there is no way of predetermining the trajectory of imaginative and affective life, what society identifies as excessive passions may be productive and lead to wisdom, as Blake understood (MHH7.3: 35). Affects are implicated in the power of imagination through which the individual conceives of itself and others, and therefore imagination has to be a fundamental—if not the fundamental—constitutive power. Though Spinoza may have been ambivalent about the relation between imagination, including affects, and reason, overall his system is ultimately neither puritanical nor ascetic. As Alexandre Matheron has shown in a remarkable article, Spinoza’s concept of sexuality was broad enough to incorporate multiple forms of sexual activity as well as the general concept of sexual freedom, both inside and outside of marriage. These practices and freedoms, however, are necessarily limited by the societies in which individuals live and with which they necessarily have to compromise in order to sustain the greatest freedom of mind or thought possible in such a context.67 I will explore this issue in greater detail in the chapter on James Joyce. Ultimately, one could argue that, in the highest expression of human thought, which Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God, or knowledge of the third kind, it is impossible to separate the imagination from rational thought. First, the love of God is simply the love of truth, the expression of the general intellect, and we will love truth all the more to the extent that others love truth (imitation of affects) and to the extent that we love truth we will struggle to

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enhance the love of others for that truth (E4.18S: 331). We want others to love truth because by incorporating every particular individual, with their limited powers of thought and action, into a greater singularity, we enhance our grasp of the general intellect and hence the understanding or knowledge of our own being. This is why every individual benefits and gains greater personal freedom from participation in the general intellect through collaboration with others. To the extent that imagination carries us out of ourselves toward the collective understanding of who we are, that understanding takes on a greater significance than the life of the body itself. The general intellect of nature expresses the truth about who we really are, facilitates greater freedom while we are alive, because freedom is knowledge, and enables us to focus our thoughts not on the temporal limits of the particular body but on the knowledge of what Blake would call the human form divine, which is virtually identical with the multitude. As Spinoza concludes, “A free man thinks [cogitat] of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death” (E4.67: 355; C 584; O2: 261). Freedom, by definition for Spinoza, means that we cease to be bound by the thought of our particular individuality and the desires and passions that limit it. It means that we are able to understand ourselves in relation to all the other selves that enter into the makeup of the singularity that comes closest to the expression of the infinite or general intellect in which every individual participates. Without imagination we could never relate to others and recognize their power of thought as the condition of general intellect. Without general intellect we could never achieve the rational understanding, including the scientific understanding, of the constitutive power of imagination, which includes the nature of the empirical, or how we perceive the world. Without the power to imagine something greater than our particular individuality and perception—and yet something in no way transcendent of our own being—thought, as something more than the dream of ourselves, would be impossible.

Essence without categories Still, as Matheron comments parenthetically, “there are degrees in rationality!”68 Perhaps one could argue that this statement characterizes the very idea of reason as a truth process, as an ever expanding boundary or limit to the construction and revelation of being. In “Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo,” which I consider to be the most Blakean work in postmodern thought, Negri draws on Deleuze

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to formulate a concept of expression as “the constructive experience of that which is common to many things,” or, in other words, as the articulation of the common notions that for Negri simply become the common.69 According to Deleuze, “common notions are ideas that are formally explained by our power of thinking and that, materially, express the idea of God as their efficient cause.”70 However, since God is only the immanent cause of thought, not its transcendent origin, then a thought expresses its own immanent cause, or rather the immanent cause is the effect of its own effects. Deleuze then produces a genealogy of the common notion, which I will roughly paraphrase for the present context. The individual seeks the enhancement of its pleasures and the avoidance of pain through association with others, and if the pleasures are positive and do not result in obsessive behavior (which after all can turn pleasure into a kind of pain), they lead to the formation of common notions, or the understanding of points of agreement between different individuals. This understanding constitutes the larger singularity that enhances pleasure even more, and can lead from elementary common notions, between two or more individuals, to more universal common notions, which could apply to virtually everyone. The latter enable us to understand our enemies as well as our friends, and thus increase our power of activity in the world, even though Deleuze insists that “common notions are all the more useful, all the more effective, for being less universal, proceeding from joyful passions.”71 In my view, the meaning of the latter statement has to do with the transition from imagination to rational understanding. The elementary common notions trigger that movement and hence make possible the expansion of imagination, what amounts to its virtual self-overcoming, to use the Nietzschean term. The usefulness that Deleuze mentions, however, merely drives home the idea that there is no privileged moment in this process, no universal truth distinct from the process—which I will later describe as a subtractive process after Badiou—that constitutes the universal through the formation of new subjectivities or singularities. In effect, there is no metaphysical or ontological difference between rational expression and imagination, for both express the degrees of the understanding that we associate with Spinoza’s concept of reason. For Negri, by contrast with expression as rational understanding, imagination is “the gesture of that which, as power, throws a net over the to-come so as to construct it.” Imagination belongs to the body, which “reflects the eternal by putting it in contact with the to-come.”72 In strictly materialist terms, eternity is simply everything that has been, not because the past must extend to

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infinity, but because everything that has happened, every being who has lived, embodies “the power of accumulated life, of an irreversible and indestructible temporality.”73 This is not mysticism, but the realization that the essence—the true understanding or adequate knowledge—of every particular thing that exists and has existed is infinite, conceptually not dependent on the temporal framework in which it appeared, though that framework is a part of its infinite being. To say that we understand God the more we understand singular things means that the knowledge of God is the knowledge of the essences of things, that is to say, of their immanent causes. This knowledge of the third kind is intuitive, not in the Coleridgean sense of transcending empirical reality, but rather in the sense of expressing the truth or essence of particular things, the things that imagination delivers to our perception (E2.40S2: 267–68). Spinoza uses the example of mathematical knowledge to make his point, but I want focus on literary art and the ordinary reality to which it necessarily has to refer. When we read or witness a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we are perfectly aware that Hamlet is a fiction and not a real person. The essence of that character is not something that can be demonstrated simply by quoting this or that celebrated line from the play. The essence is not even something that we can strictly put into words, except in the sense that all the words that have been written about Hamlet indirectly suggest the truth of the character, its essence, but an essence that must be, in Badiou’s language, strictly generic, not governed by any predicate, not reducible to any finite category. The ultimate effect of everything that has been written and said about Hamlet is deconstructive because, while articulating a series of points in our understanding of the character and the play, it discloses those indiscernible elements that locate the unnamable truth and sustain, as Badiou might say, the possibility of infinity. The essence of Hamlet is universal precisely because it is generic, and that is what it means to see such a character or literary event under a form of eternity. However, the truth that such a work of art conveys in this way is not something that transcends ordinary reality, even though it can teach us how to see the ordinary under a form of eternity. To see the essence of any particular human being or of any thing is to recognize its generic truth. Through the construction of common notions, we come to recognize the points of agreement between particular individuals, but these agreements are not abstractions but rather relate to concrete particulars that one or more individuals have in common, such as language, biological composition, social practices, affects, and powers. But the common notions cannot account for or express the essences of particular things. Each human individual—but I

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would go further and say every particular thing—has a generic being, a force of existence that cannot be categorized or defined. To intuit that force is to see that thing under a form of eternity, at once singular and generic. As Blake understood, every thing and every moment is eternal.74 Every human being, precisely through its generic singularity, participates in the eternal. As Negri understands it, “the singular is the experience of the common.”75 In other words, the common, for Negri, incorporates the common notions and the knowledge of the essences of particular things, and he makes no distinction between singularity and the eternal. Anytime we look at an individual—whether it is our brother, our friend, our enemy, our lover, a politician, the parent who loved us or abused us, the hero we emulate—and manage to strip away all the categories that govern our everyday perception of the world and those who exist within it, at such a time we witness their generic being or essence, the thing that can never be replicated because it is immeasurable and because it cannot not be. It’s as if every being were a character in a novel by someone like Charles Dickens, who was famous for creating minor characters who nonetheless appear to be utterly singular, or categories unto themselves, no matter how ordinary they are within the framework of their fictional world. We are all Hamlets. Even the villains in our lives participate in the expression of eternal, immeasurable being. Yet Spinoza’s intuitive or third kind of knowledge could be taken as another form of imagination, precisely in the way he understood logical proofs as the mind’s eyes, its intellectual vision. The difference is that intuitive knowledge cannot produce logical proofs because it is a direct form of intellectual perception. For Negri—and this is the essence of his reading of Spinoza—being in and of itself is productive, and the imagination is the engine of this process. Yet this process exists on the edge of the void that it constitutes through the disruption of its own fullness. The infinity of being as a truth process is necessarily incomplete. For Negri, imagination is the bridge between eternity and the void, or the condition of its process. Expression creates or constitutes the fullness of being as the limit of understanding at any given moment in time, but “it is the imagination that gives to the body the strength to go beyond, up to the highest level of knowledge.”76 This notion is consistent with Spinoza’s understanding that imagination conditions the power of thought, since if we do not already believe or imagine that something is possible we are already determined not to be able to think or act in that direction, we are not able to overcome ourselves, to engage in the self-annihilation that conditions new forms of subjectivity in relation to thought and action. Imagination casts a net over the to-come because it makes

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visible the void that being constructs as the expression of its own process, of its eternal incompleteness. Since I have reached the place where I must negotiate the parallels or overlaps between the thought of Negri and Badiou—despite the fact that these two minds typically either ignore or maintain a critical distance from each other—I need to address Badiou’s particular critique of Spinoza before going forward. Badiou distinguishes his own ontology of immanence from Spinoza’s by insisting on the latter’s inability to incorporate the thought of the void and account for structural inconsistency in his system. This is a critique of monism, which in my view is not the same thing as immanence. As Badiou himself insists, the void foreclosed from Spinoza’s system returns as certain points of inconsistency, which Badiou situates in the disjunction between infinite and finite modes.77 How can infinity be the immanent cause of the finite? The answer may lie in Badiou’s own Blakean understanding that a mathematical infinity is something ordinary, a “neutral banality,” and never a form of transcendence.78 In his early work on Descartes’s philosophy, Spinoza commented that “God is only improperly called one and unique.”79 In a letter written over ten years later, Spinoza clarified this conclusion by using the example of two different types of currency that fall under the common name of money. He argued that we cannot consider something as one or under any numerical category unless there is something else like it, another member of a common class.80 In fact, there must be three terms, a form of currency, a second form of currency, and the third term, money or currency as a category, that incorporates or counts the two. God or eternal substance, therefore, is not-one. Is it too far-fetched to say that Spinoza’s God is the inconsistent multiple in Badiou’s thought? If this would be going too far, since Spinoza did not have the benefit of knowing one of the primary conditions of Badiou’s philosophy, set theory—still, one could argue that applying Badiouian principles to Spinoza’s text would force the proposition that the truth of Spinoza’s God, or infinite substance as immanent being, lies in the inconsistency of its unity. Spinoza certainly did postulate the indivisibility of infinite substance, but this could mean that substance cannot be measured or reduced to a count. As Sam Gillespie stresses about Badiou’s inconsistent multiple, it is “the result of an impasse internal to formalization.”81 Badiou’s inconsistent multiple could be considered a nondenumerable set, hence uncountable or immeasurable.82 Spinoza’s indivisibility perhaps responds to a similar impasse, which allows us to say, using Badiou’s language, that God always remains unpresented, despite his many names and representations. In other words, from Badiou’s perspective,

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Spinoza’s God as a completed totality beyond any process simply does not exist except in the form of a fiction, similar to the fiction of a completed truth. To say that being is not-one or incomplete simply means that, in Badiou’s sense of the word, its truth is generic, that is, without a predicate or category. Implicitly, being is a productive process of which we have knowledge only in so far as it is the effect of its own effects. I noted earlier that a complex thought, including knowledge of the third kind, cannot be attributed exclusively to a particular individual, not even to Spinoza. All real thought is necessarily transindividual because its historical significance cannot be limited to the temperament of a particular individual or even of a particular community. This is not to say that thought must not pass through the social relation between individuals up to and including the thought of what Negri would call, after Spinoza, the multitude. As Badiou claims, truths, or real thoughts, “make their singular penetration (percée) only through the fabric of opinions.”83 On the one hand, a truth process constitutes an exception to the normative understanding of a particular situation, but on the other it addresses that situation, its common sense and its encyclopedia of knowledge, and operates immanently to transform it without metaphysically transcending it. One of the strengths of Negri’s reading of Spinoza in The Savage Anomaly is the way it charts the latter philosopher’s struggle to think beyond the framework of his own historical situation, but this also foregrounds the interactive or dialogical nature of Spinoza’s thought, what it owes to the philosophical traditions that would include ancient philosophy, Neoplatonism, Jewish philosophy, the early Enlightenment of Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes, as well as to the political culture of the seventeenth century in Europe, particularly in the Dutch circles where his thought was formed. Spinoza, however, transcends himself and becomes what Negri calls the savage anomaly precisely to the extent that he articulates the logic of a monstrosity whose appearance in the seventeenth century exceeds the epistemological context that tries to contain it. In the philosophy of Hobbes, the multitude makes its appearance as the embodiment of madness: “For they will clamour, fight against, and destroy those, by whom all their lifetime before, they have been protected, and secured from injury.”84 Spinoza himself had the direct experience of such an event that might have validated this Hobbesian logic when the Dutch republic collapsed in an act of mob brutality, which concluded with the restoration of a type of monarchical power. Spinoza’s thought vacillates or remains somewhat ambivalent on this topic even as it foregrounds the ontological nature of power as inherently democratic and rooted in the

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multitude. In other words, Spinoza himself never completely transcends his own historical context, and yet the truth of his thought, the common notions and intuitive understanding that he produced, continues to live beyond that context and to construct something new, a new form of life.

Monstrous event “To live,” writes Badiou, “is to participate, point by point, in the organization of a new body, in which a faithful subjective formalism comes to take root.”85 My thesis in this book and the others that should follow from it is that Spinoza lives, not of course as the particular physical body that once bore his name, but rather as the name of a thought that is necessarily both infinite and incomplete, of a truth process that we can chart through history, in terms of its disappearances and resurrections, but that also exceeds the logic of history. From this perspective, Spinoza is a finite point in an infinite process that also, I would argue, must include the names Negri and Badiou, though of course these names do not exhaust the truth process, and there must necessarily be many others, including names that may not appear in the context of this particular world, the one in which the current writing takes place. Indeed, there is no way to limit the names of the others, or to measure the force of the multitude that thinks, because the power of thought can arise from any kind of social interaction, any exchange of ideas, adequate or inadequate, purely intellectual or imaginative. Despite Negri’s argument about the historical development of Spinoza’s thought—his movement from contract theory to democratic cooperation, from the pantheistic ideology of the first foundation to the constitutive ontology of the second foundation—Negri still insists that “There are no discontinuities in Spinoza’s thought but an infinite number of catastrophes, which reformulate the continuity of being along the line of the imagination, of a depth of productive attribution that, like the water in the earth and in bodies, circulates everywhere.”86 In effect, Negri identifies the evental nature of Spinoza’s thought, even if neither he nor any other historian could ever fully name all the events that conditioned it (though they would certainly include his cherem, or expulsion from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, as well as, in Spinoza’s own words, “the overthrow of the Dutch republic” in 1672).87 Negri describes the shift in Spinoza’s thought—from the pantheism of a unitary God who expresses himself through all existing things to the

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pervasive force of imagination that materially constitutes every social reality, which becomes the only reality—as one that refuses any notion of ontological hierarchy or a metaphysical division between the thought of the multitude and the most adequate forms of intellectual understanding, between what I would venture to call, after Antonio Gramsci, a popular understanding of the world on the one hand, and theory on the other.88 Thought as imagination circulates everywhere, and there is no absolute limit to its powers of creation. Is this the correct reading of Spinoza? From a strictly academic or disciplinary perspective, possibly not. Despite the fact that Negri follows Spinoza’s own guidelines for the historical interpretation of a text,89 his reading of Spinoza produces a surplus, something beyond what can be derived from the process of contextualization. This surplus is the expansion of the body, which means the formation of a subjective truth process, that Spinoza’s thought has worked to constitute. In other words, Spinoza’s thought not only has a life of its own beyond the mortal body that once bore the name Spinoza but that thought is not static but continues to generate new life, to reconstitute itself through the revolutionary understanding of its meaning. In the Ethics, Spinoza claimed that nature has no final purpose or goal and hence “all final causes are nothing but human fictions [figmenta]”(C 442; E1Appendix: 240; O2: 80). Since imagination conditions the power of action and thought by producing fictions, including the fiction of free will, it follows that, in the words of A. Kiarina Kordela, “the only possible truth about the cause, end, or meaning of life is, therefore, fictional—which is one of the fundamental psychoanalytic premises.”90 I refer to the fiction of free will not simply to reiterate Spinoza’s claim that the individual is determined to any form of action or thought by a cause in a sequence of causes and effects extending to infinity. It is also to make the point that the experience—the affect or feeling—of free will is productive, since when the individual imagines its power to achieve a goal as arising from its own volition, it necessarily posits an end or goal to its action in the fulfillment of its intention, without reference to how that intention may be determined by something beyond itself. In effect, the determination of the experience of free will conditions, among other determinations, the capacity or power to act or think in a particular way. Furthermore, Spinoza expands his critique of free will to the structure of thought itself when he denies the existence of any absolute faculty of understanding, desire, love and so forth and refers to them as “complete fictions” (C 483; E2.48P/S: 272). Here Spinoza anticipates Nietzsche’s critique of the subject as the effect of a “seduction of

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language,” as when in the popular mind people distinguish between the flash of lightning and the lightning itself as the subject of that action. In effect, they add the doer to the deed.91 For Spinoza, every action or thought has an immanent cause, which is the effect of its own effects, even if that cause is mediated by an infinite sequence of causes and effects. When we postulate a faculty of understanding, or, as I suggested earlier, the mind itself as an existing thing distinct from the thought process, we have in effect constructed a fiction of the immanent cause rather than its truth. But I would go further and suggest that even Spinoza’s use of the word “God” to name the immanent cause of all things is a fiction. From a rhetorical perspective, this word may have responded to Spinoza’s desire to communicate his thought to the popular understanding of his world, but at the same time it could not have failed to miscommunicate his thought through the inevitable connotations of the word itself, which can never be completely detached from its more traditional theological uses. Yet there is nothing cynical or deceptive in this choice because, as far as Spinoza is concerned, language can never be coextensive with thought, not because thought is metaphysically distinct from language, but because thought materially constitutes itself as that which interrupts or exceeds the ordinary or conventional meaning of words, which is part of knowledge of the first kind. Thought operates as the surplus of language, which we could take once again to be the effect of its effects. Thought displaces language, and the subject (insofar as it is not the expression of ideological personhood but rather the effect of a truth process) is the sign of that displacement. The subject is nothing in itself—it may even be a fiction. Indeed, even the principle of immanent causality has the structure of fiction, so that Kordela is perfectly correct to evoke the Lacanian principle that truth has the structure of fiction.92 But the point is not that thought precedes language or language thought. As Jacques Derrida once commented, language in and of itself is “uncountable,” since “the One of a language, which escapes all arithmetic (ac)countability, is never determined.”93 In a sense, therefore, terms like “French,” “English,” and “Latin” all have structures of fictionality. Thought, in a material sense, is only accessible to us through language, but thought cannot come before language any more than the immanent cause of all things can come before the things of which it is the cause. By the same token, language cannot be the total expression of a thought, because that would imply not only the unity of language as a measurable whole but also the unity of the thought to which it

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would correspond. Precisely because thought is an infinite process that can never be complete, it constitutes the real of language, the being of language that cannot be named or ever fully mastered except through the recognition of language’s own inconsistency, the way thought forces language to displace itself and articulate the incompleteness of its own being. This is why Kordela suggests, after Lacan, that a truth, despite its fictional structure in language, must emerge from the place of the real,94 except that the real has no place and is manifested precisely by the displacement of place. On the one hand, thought and language are the same thing, because thought as the surplus is immanent to language, but on the other, thought forces the incompleteness of language, its inability to measure the infinite process of being. Though Spinoza calls into question every teleological understanding of the world and human history, Negri still insists that the proper name of the materialism he derives from Spinoza’s thought is teleology. But this notion of teleology “knows no final cause from which and/or towards which it advances.”95 For Negri, as I’ve already noted, imagination forces the meeting of eternal being with the to-come, which brings about the innovation of being, its expansion, through the teleological process that imagination creates. In a sense, the teleological process operates through the construction of a fiction, or rather, of a truth that has the structure of a fiction. It is this point in Negri’s thought, inspired by Spinoza, that I cannot separate from Badiou’s—which is to say, I cannot make sense out of it without the intervention of Badiou’s thought as a clarification. For Negri, the condition of the innovation of being is kairòs, which in Greek signifies the right or proper time, the propitious moment for an action to take place, and the fullness of time, which cannot be separated from the fullness of being as a limit, except that, through kairòs, the limit appears as a rupture, an opening of being to its own incompleteness and necessary expansion. As Negri phrases it, “Kairòs is the modality of time through which being opens itself, attracted by the void at the limit of time, and it thus decides to fill that void.”96 But the process of filling the void involves the constitution of a subject, which remains inseparable from kairòs as the constitutive event. The subject is “a moment of imputation of production” that “assumes the responsibility for the production of a productive force that, in turn, can be nothing other than subjective.”97 In effect, the fullness of being reveals itself precisely at the moment of its rupture through the transformative event. Admittedly, kairòs does not mean exactly the same thing that “event” means in Badiou’s ontology, but the reason behind this difference may be more subtle than Badiou is willing to recognize when he says,

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“there is no necessity of an event in Negri, because there’s something structural in the movement of emancipation.”98 Undoubtedly, understanding democracy, or the constituent power (potentia) of the multitude, as the ontological foundation of political existence suggests a structural force that necessitates the desire for social liberation. For Negri and Spinoza, this is the truth that an ontology of immanence posits against “the teleological fiction in the metaphysical tradition” from Plato to Hegel, which “presupposes an arché [first principle] that operates in teleology so as to place being in action within a hierarchy pre-constituted by the arché.”99 However, there is nothing in Negri’s thought—or in his reading of Spinoza—to suggest that social liberation as the true expression of democracy is inevitable. I would suggest that for Negri, though he doesn’t formulate the problem in exactly this way, the movement of being operates in the tension between two kinds of fiction. On one side, the metaphysical fiction, to which I just referred, emerges as the content of what passes itself off as conservative thought, which starts from the premise that being is closed, and consequently any movement within being only represents a detour to a totalized order of things that must remain the finite product of a transcendental power that exceeds it and remains eternally detached from it. From this perspective, hierarchy, legitimated by metaphysical dualism, would be the ontological foundation of human social existence. On the other side, the fullness of being makes itself visible precisely in the kairòs that ruptures its apparent unity and forces the appearance of something that remains unaccountable to any metaphysical fiction even as it generates a more powerful but transgressive fiction that postulates the possibility of a new understanding of being and a different future from the one that would have followed logically from a closed order. Kairòs may be a historical event or a thought that comes out of nowhere and hence reveals the void that being as infinite process necessarily generates. The void is not really a place but the displacement of place, the disruptive force of being that expresses itself through a productive fiction, or the power of imagination to create the space in which the power of thought can be exercised. The fullness of being expresses itself as the propitious moment of its disruption, when it breaks through its own temporal skin, so to speak, and exposes the logic of the eternal as infinite process, always incomplete, immeasurable, and constitutive of new life. Kairòs as productive event gives ground to a different kind of fiction, not one that closes being but opens it to the creation of infinity. The fiction that imagination casts over the future is what Badiou would call forcing, which

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expresses the power of thought to generate truthful statements that can shape historical situations without projecting the metaphysical fantasy of the closure of being. The positive fiction that opens being can make something appear in the world that did not exist before the intervention of thought through acts of imagination, but such thought is necessarily limited to the creation of infinity. Otherwise it betrays itself and the infinite truth on which its verifiable statements are founded. When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream,” he wasn’t simply fantasizing or positing a utopia, but constructing what Negri would call a disutopia, what for Badiou is the fiction of a completed truth, and what Wallace Stevens may have meant by the Supreme Fiction. It is one thing to believe that the so-called “free” market will create social justice without the intervention of any human activity or thought, and another to postulate the collaboration of all human beings—regardless of race, class, gender, or any other categorical predications—in the production of thought and action that creates the possibility of infinity, the possibility of other worlds, the possibility of transformative political actions that could expand the horizon of being and maximize the power of what Negri would call, after Marx, the general intellect. The latter, of course, is a fiction, but one that expresses an infinite truth that produces propositions of provisional truthfulness in the context of a world open to the force of immeasurable change. In “this invented world,” as Stevens called it,100 we may usually offer Nobel prizes to individuals, but, as one of the recipients in the field of economics recently commented in the most practical terms: “one can’t really separate out any individual’s contributions from those of others. Even in the context of technological change, most inventions entail the synthesis of preexisting elements rather than invention de novo.” The author of these words, Joseph Stiglitz, refers to two other economic theorists who write, “if much of what we have comes to us as the free gift of many generations of historical contribution, there is a profound question as to how much can reasonably be said to be ‘earned’ by any one person, now or in the future.”101 For Spinoza, the general intellect would be the thought of God, but since every human individual participates in that thought and since no human individual can measure the trajectory of that thought in the future, general intellect, like Spinoza’s God, has the structure of a fiction, which doesn’t mean that it lacks truth but that it cannot measure the infinite being of truth. For both Badiou and Negri, the subject—not personhood or selfhood— derives from the structure of an event that produces a truth process. As Negri

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writes, “subjectivity is not something that subsists: it is—on the contrary— produced by kairòs, and … depends on the connection of monads of kairòs. Subjectivity is not before but after kairòs.”102 For Badiou, “the subject is solely the finitude of the generic procedure, the local effects of an evental fidelity. What it ‘produces’ is the truth itself, an indiscernible part of the situation, but the infinity of this truth transcends it.”103 The monads, or discrete units, of kairòs could be said to correspond to what Badiou understands as the nature of the subjective intervention in a truth process: “It is evental recurrence which founds intervention.” As such, there is no “primal event or a radical beginning,” and “the entire effort lies in following the event’s consequences, not in glorifying its occurrence.” Intervention lies in the interval between two borders, the border constituted by the event that has no name, and the border of a new event that produces a name, or, as Badiou develops this thought in his later work, an implicative statement that articulates a point in a truth process.104 As I understand the indirect dialogue between Negri and Badiou, neither thinker postulates the necessity of some big event that anybody recognizes as such without the effort of thought. In fact, the intervention or truth-procedure, in Badiou’s language, and the praxis of truth, in Negri’s, have more to do with consequences that allow one to infer the possibility of the event that has conditioned the ripeness of time, the explosive fullness that resurrects the infinity of being. Again, in a sense, the event is itself a fiction, not because it is not real, but because it must be construed in the common language “as susceptible to a decision concerning its belonging to the situation.” For Badiou, an interpretive hypothesis discloses something on the edge of a void, the possibility of an event, to which the faithful subject gives a name and from which it derives the implication of a truth.105 For that subject, the event is real, but there is no access to that real, no possibility of decision as the condition of thought and action without the force of imagination to postulate something beyond the normative understanding of the already established situation. The event is a fiction because it cannot be added to the situation in which it occurs without imagining that situation as already having been altered by the unimaginable event. Finally, Spinoza, Negri, and Badiou share a common understanding that is possibly best expressed by Matheron when he postulates Spinoza’s “communism of minds” or “the whole of humanity as a self-conscious totality, a microcosm of the infinite Understanding, within which each mind, while remaining itself, would become all the others.” This goal remains a fiction because of its eternal

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incompleteness, and because the truth, as Lacan understood so well, is not-one. Yet such a fiction is productive since, as Matheron further asserts, never will this result be effectively attained; but at least we are able to bring ourselves always closer to it. Thus we will make our way toward a partial solution to the ontological drama, which is the origin of the human drama; infinite Understanding—separated from itself by the internal necessity of thinking the modes of Extension in their existence hic et nunc—will surmount this separation to such an extent that Humanity will become more reconciled with itself.106

Matheron’s language makes all of this sound rather mystical, but the infinite understanding he postulates as the unachievable goal of human thought and action simply expresses what Marx and Negri would call the general intellect, which is simply the always incomplete body of knowledge that expresses and guides human action toward the horizon of innovation and self-overcoming. This fiction is not some fantasy that makes life bearable, but a productive interpretation of the politics of human thought and action. It is not that when two or more people sit down in a room together to write or think, they will inevitably produce a greater thought and induce a more effective political practice than could one person writing or thinking in a room by themselves. Such relations of contingency, while sometimes helpful, are not the essence of the intellectual act. To think, in any meaningful sense, is necessarily to engage with the thought of others, and someone on their own may well subtract themselves more efficiently from the traps of imagination, the lures of ideology, in one shape or another, through such an intellectual position. What passes for conservative thought is frequently nothing more than cheerleading for the victors in the struggle to subvert truth processes by insisting that the answers have already been given, being has shown its face once and for all, and anything that falls outside the normative—usually nothing more than the expression of the power of the powerful when they experience the fear of something beyond their reach—is monstrous. There is no such thing as conservative thought because thought, even if it is inadequate with respect to the fiction that animates it, necessarily disrupts the situation from which it emerges, necessarily annihilates the selfhood or conventional being of the subject who bears it, and must confront its own monstrosity, its anomalous position in the encyclopedia of knowledge that governs its world. Thought involves risk, even the risk that it may betray itself. What distinguishes the encyclopedia from general intellect is the dynamics of

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risk and the open-ended process, for the encyclopedia is the effect of general intellect, and the latter the immanent cause of the encyclopedia. As Negri sums up, “the product of innovative generation is always a ‘monster,’” but as he insists elsewhere, “the monster is not only event, but positive event.”107 The ontology of immanence that breaks with the metaphysical fiction is savage, but the content of this savagery is the common, the universal, truth. The monster, as Negri insists, is common.108 The history that follows, even if only in the form of a sketch, traces the trajectory of a common thought in voices that should never have been allowed to speak, from social locations where no one has been authorized to think, in words that break the logic of ordinary language and common sense, and with images that confront the multitude with the face of monstrosity—its own face. The king is dead, long live the monster.

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Imagination as Thought in Blake’s Milton

The political monster William Blake probably did not have any first-hand knowledge of Spinoza’s philosophical writing, though he might have learned of Spinoza through a number of sources. In his works, illuminated or unengraved, including his marginalia, he refers by name to philosophers he either had read or knew of, and with whom he usually disagreed: Locke, Newton, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Berkeley, Hume, Gibbon, Burke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. However, after Israel’s massive research on Spinoza’s largely negative reputation in the intellectual struggles both against and within the Enlightenment, it is impossible to imagine that Blake would have heard nothing of him, and he could have read a brief overview of Spinoza’s philosophy, associated with atheism, in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which also makes reference to Pierre Bayle’s article on Spinoza in the Historical and Critical Dictionary.1 Several English editions of the latter had been published by the 1740s and republished near the end of Blake’s life, though, with the exception of an early translation of Spinoza’s TheologicalPolitical Treatise, English versions of his works, including the Ethics, did not appear until late in the nineteenth century.2 Since Blake demonstrated a gift for learning foreign languages in the early 1800s, he may have had the opportunity to read some of Spinoza’s works in Latin or descriptions of his works in French, though one imagines that, had he possessed direct knowledge of those writings, Spinoza’s name would have made a more direct imprint on his late poetry, at least in Jerusalem.3 One of Blake’s contemporaries, Henry Crabb Robinson, located Blake’s intellectual perspectives somewhere “between Christianity Platonism & Spinozism.”4 More recently, Saree Makdisi elaborates a number of significant parallels between Blake and Spinoza, while Marjorie Levinson has identified Spinoza as a critical source for romantic poets in general, though so far her primary focus has been on Wordsworth, who would have learned about Spinoza from Coleridge if nowhere else.5

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From my perspective, the goal is not to prove that Blake was consciously influenced by Spinoza, since that narrows the range of what could be considered the evental history of truth. By that I mean the history not of a sequence of causes and effects constituting a logical, continuous, and predictable evolution of thought from individual to individual but rather of ruptures in the institutionalized or normalized understanding of the world that articulate the singular emergences of a truth process in social situations to which it appears monstrous or anomalous. This does not exclude the possibility of direct or indirect influences, but it also recognizes that truth has a force that exceeds any specific temporal framework, though it will always be shaped in its particularity by the framework in which it appears. Neither Spinoza nor Blake had the formal university training that was common among many of their intellectual peers, though both managed to get the educations they needed, to some extent with the help of others but mostly through their own autodidactic labor. This may help to explain why they were able to surpass the institutional and disciplinary regimes of their different worlds. After the publication of the Theological-Political Treatise in 1670 and throughout the history of the early Enlightenment, Spinoza became a scandal and, in Hume’s words from 1739, “universally infamous” for his supposed atheism.6 Israel sums up the view of a Spanish Enlightenment philosopher in the middle of the eighteenth century: Hence Spinozism is a form of frenzy, an irrational stance deflecting the light of reason so that “impious atheists can obscure the idea of God but not extinguish it” even within themselves. The truth that belief in a providential God is innate in man is not changed by the fact that a handful denied it in classical antiquity or that “there has been found in our times a man so impious, or rather such a monster, as Spinoza”: “for what do those few matter when compared with the universality of the entire human race?”7

In the case of Blake, his marginalization took a different and more subtle form. In Robert Hunt’s review of Blake’s 1809 exhibition, he referred to the artist as an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and, consequently, of whom no public notice would have been taken, if he was not forced on the notice and animadversion of the examiner, in having been held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs and professors as a genius in some respect original and legitimate.8

Throughout his life, many of Blake’s closest friends and associates thought he was mad, though those who were more generous recognized some genius in his

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madness. One cannot blame them, for Blake spoke in a language that challenged any normalized understanding of the world, particularly in his eccentric way of reading and understanding the Bible (and the similarly eccentric view of Christianity that resulted) and in his claim to communicate directly with the spirits of historical figures, angels, and his own deceased brother Robert. What is more disturbing, however—if you work your way through the Blake Records— is the near-invisibility during his lifetime of some of Blake’s most original and philosophically challenging work, particularly the two illuminated long poems, Milton and Jerusalem. There is almost no reference to them among his contemporaries, even among his most devoted followers in the group of young men who surrounded him in the last decade of his life, calling themselves the Ancients.9 Blake’s reputation, even among his closest friends, centered primarily on his designs for the 1797 edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, his designs for the 1808 edition of Robert Blair’s The Grave, and some of his more well known paintings and designs, such as the fresco and engraving of The Canterbury Pilgrims from Chaucer, which Blake discussed in his 1809 Descriptive Catalogue and a prospectus.10 Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb were impressed by some of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, but Lamb referred to him as a “mad Wordsworth,” while Wordsworth more kindly said, “There is no doubt that this man is mad, but there is something in this madness which I enjoy more than the Sense of [Walter Scott] or [Lord Byron].”11 Crabb Robinson, whose diaries and reminiscences are a primary source on Blake’s conversation, consistently describes Blake as mad or insane, with “religious & philosophical opinions” that were “a strange compound of Christianity Spinosism & Platonism.”12 He admired Blake as a man, but “as a painter his works are to me unattractive.”13 He apparently concurred with Southey’s description of “a perfectly mad poem called Jerusalem—Oxford Street is in Jerusalem.”14 Negri, at the beginning of his essay “The Political Monster,” identifies the monster as that which must be excluded from an ontological condition that begins with Greek metaphysics. The concept of eugenia means that those who are well-born—who, as Nietzsche understood, are by their own definition beautiful and good—have the right of command in a natural hierarchical social order. From the Greek democracy founded on slavery to the emergence of nineteenth-century imperialism and racism, this concept and the values associated with it produced a “‘eugenic’ form of the universal that does not include but excludes, that does not produce equality but rather intrinsically legitimates slavery.” As Negri sums up, “Classical rationality therefore dominates

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the monster in order to exclude him, because the monster’s genealogy entirely exceeds eugenic ontology.”15 What exceeds classical ontology is an alternative ontology, or an alternative system of thought, as Negri describes Spinoza’s philosophy. The political monster expresses the truth of a savage ontology that finds, according to Spinoza, its most natural expression in democracy, which, as a form of government, is perhaps always just out of reach, but as the ontological foundation of any politics constitutes the force of an infinite truth process. In other words, Spinoza may embody the philosophical turning point in the history of ontology, the first complete reversal of the classical metaphysics legitimating social exclusion and hierarchy. Though he does not say it explicitly, Negri strongly implies that at the origin of the modern theory of the state— of what would become the bourgeois state or liberal democracy—Hobbes performed what amounts to a sleight of hand. Along with a few predecessors, he transformed the monster into “a metaphor of the transcendence of power.” In effect, Hobbes took the monstrosity of the multitude that he so greatly feared and transferred it to a fiction, to a rational monster whose imaginary unity—a potestas or institutionalized power—is substituted for the constituent power of the multitude, a potentia based on real social relations and acts of cooperation. The power of the state is presumably no longer accountable to the multitude from which it derives. As Negri sums up, “The modern philosophy of the state, at the moment when it seems to make the monster reasonable, actually makes all the rest, the whole of life and society, monstrous.”16 That which had been ontologically excluded, the inexistent political being of the multitude, now appears in the world as the antithesis of the rational monster or the Leviathan of the state. In postulating a centralized sovereign power that would control the multitude, the modern state, as it was conceived by Hobbes and later realized in actual practice, responded to the emergence of the multitude as a visible presence, as a real threat to the ontological hierarchy of classical metaphysics. Although Blake doesn’t fully articulate his understanding or vision of that savage ontology until he completes his work on Milton and Jerusalem, he already reveals in the earlier period of his poetic production the basic outline of what would become the visionary forms of those later works. This is not to say that Blake’s resurrection of Spinoza’s ontology of immanence is simply a repetition of Spinoza. Precisely because truth is always an incomplete and infinite process, any local point within that singular process is necessarily singular itself, which simply means that it cannot be contained by any predication—in this case, even the predicate Spinozism. Blake is not a Spinozist, just as Spinoza himself was

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not a Spinozist, or Marx a Marxist—furthermore, just as Negri and Badiou are not Spinozists or Marxists in any simplified or reductive understanding of those intellectual relations. In Savage Anomaly, Negri distinguishes between the singularity of Spinoza’s thought and Spinozism, by which he means not the demonized object of criticism in anti-Enlightenment and Enlightenment discourses from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, but the reading of Spinoza that incorporates his work into the ideology of liberal capitalism and the state structures that give expression to it—“the ideology of the spontaneous and automatic synthesis of the singular with the totality, which it supposedly derives from the metaphysical section of the Ethics.”17 Historically, from Negri’s perspective, this tendency has centered on JeanJacques Rousseau, who may have been influenced by Spinoza or, more importantly, gives an expression to Spinozist ideas that have become foundational for modern liberal democracy. Blake’s references to Rousseau, usually in association with Voltaire, are too generic to suggest any detailed knowledge of his arguments. In the First Discourse, Rousseau referred to the “pernicious reveries” of Hobbes and Spinoza, and he may have been referring to Spinoza when he wrote negatively of a philosopher who asserts that “there is no other substance than matter, and no other God than the world. One asserts that neither virtues nor vices exist and that goodness and moral evil are illusions.”18 If Blake read this passage, he certainly would have objected to the notion that God is nothing more than matter, but that claim distorts Spinoza’s understanding of substance as incorporating both thought and material existence. Blake associated Rousseau with Deism, and if one peruses Rousseau’s writings, there can hardly be any question but that he understood God as a transcendent power. As he writes in The Social Contract, “All justice comes from God, He alone is the source of it; but if we understood how to receive it direct from so lofty a source, we would need neither government nor laws.”19 Since Spinoza understood the concept of nature or God as embracing the totality of existence, including what people in societies call good and evil, the evaluative distinction between a “state of nature” and “society” would have made little sense to him. As Susan Dunn sums up Rousseau’s social theory, “if modern individuals appeared corrupt, unequal, and enslaved, it is society—not human nature—that is to blame.”20 For Spinoza, society, which expresses the cooperative relations between human beings, is human nature, even though that nature expresses itself through both reason and imagination—through rational common notions and intuitive truths, on the one hand, and through emotions and affective imitation on the other. Rousseau’s concept of the General Will

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must be radically distinguished from Spinoza’s understanding of democracy as the ontological expression of a greater human singularity. According to Dunn, the General Will is an abstraction, or “theoretical construct,” that expresses the common interests of all and occupies a transcendent relation to the will of the majority.21 For Spinoza, the cooperative relations between particular individuals produces a greater singularity of intellect and body, whereas for Rousseau, if you subtract “the pluses and minuses which cancel one another” of all the particular wills, “the general will remains as the sum of the differences.”22 For Blake, such a General Will would be what he calls the Ratio, or a rational generalization of a set of singular beings that erases the particularity of those beings. This General Will could even be seen as the spectre of the multitude, a pure abstraction which for Blake would be a delusion of the Newtonian world of material being as it appears without the activity or vision of imaginative truth. There is no “spontaneous and automatic synthesis of the singular with the totality” in either Spinoza or Blake because being is a productive and infinite process that constitutes greater singularities without ever achieving a measurable totality that closes the process. There are wholes and even Ones in Blake, but the One does not subsume the singular in such a way as to erase its particularity. The relation between the multitude of singularities and the One is a matter of perspective. The voice of the Saviour explains this truth to Albion, or the embodiment of the British Empire and the nation-states of Blake’s own time, in Jerusalem. Speaking for the universal humanity he embodies, the Saviour notes that by contracting our senses we see multitude but by expanding them, “we behold as one.” In this context, the Saviour represents the perspective of Eden, and his words may seem to suggest a utopian fantasy when he mentions Eden’s perfect harmony (J34.17–21: 180). But the perfect harmony Blake has in mind is not the dream world that he associates with Beulah, a place that may involve sexual fantasy as a release from the tensions and conflicts of love. Rather, Eden is the imaginative location of intellectual exchanges and dialogical conflict through “the words of man to man” that create new mental forms (M30.14, 18–20: 129). As John H. Jones has demonstrated in some detail, the condition of real thought in Blake is dialogical interaction that involves what Blake called self-annihilation, by which he means not the destruction of the individual’s particular essence or concrete being but the fulfillment of that identity through the dialogical—and transindividual—construction of a truth, whose provisional effect is a mental form.23 One could argue that mental forms correspond with what Badiou means by the elements of the transcendental index or evaluation,

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which is not transcendent in any metaphysical sense, but is rather the immanent logical structure that allows something to appear in a world. Since the activity of a truth process forces the appearance of something in a situation or world— some element of being-in-itself that always is, at least as a material possibility, but has not previously appeared—it necessarily alters the transcendental of that world, in effect producing a new mental form.24 Blake might have resisted the notion of a logical structure underpinning the appearance of a world, but his concept of the imagination is extremely broad and incorporates what Spinoza meant by intuitive knowledge as the highest form of truth.

Imagination’s logic Laura Quinney has recently argued that Blake shares with other romantic poets a focus on the loneliness of the self, alienated from the natural world. According to a significant critical tradition, Blake derives much of his ontology from Neoplatonism and Gnosticism and, from Quinney’s perspective, “approves of their argument that the cure of the soul’s loneliness is to be found within itself— in the recognition and assertion of its transcendental provenance, that is to say, its integrity and freedom, and its share in eternity.”25 Because it is difficult to make this position consistent with Blake’s early claim that the energy of physical existence is the only life, she concedes that Blake’s notion of transcendence is “paradoxically immanent.”26 Nonetheless, she aligns Blake’s position with that of Kant in the Critique of Judgment,27 where the latter insists that the experience of the dynamic sublime, or “the immeasurability of nature,” forces the recognition of the infinity of the human mind and its superiority to nature. In effect, though we may feel powerless in the face of nature (for example, in the midst of a hurricane), we judge ourselves “independent of it” and learn from it “the sublimity of [the human mind’s] own vocation even over nature.”28 Quinney notes that Blake tends to conflate Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and she distances herself slightly from critics as different as Kathleen Raine and E. P. Thompson for not according Blake “enough originality in his relation to his influences.”29 My position is that Blake was surely influenced by all these sources, and the peculiar form of narrative in his work may have derived from Gnostic mythologies, Neoplatonist metaphysics, the antinomian traditions, particularly those influenced by Jakob Böhme, and, closer to his own time, Emanuel Swedenborg. Thompson may be right that Blake took a “cluster of … symbols” from Muggletonian discourses and the other

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traditions of radical dissent, a view that receives implicit support from the works of Jon Mee and Robert Rix.30 Böhme, who influenced antinomian sects including Muggletonians, derived many of his ideas from Gnostic and Neoplatonic sources and may have influenced Blake’s concept of the contraries as well as his insistence, as I will argue, on God’s immanence: “God is ALL, He is God, He is Heaven and Hell, and is also the Outward World, for from him, and in him all things originate.”31 However, I disagree with Quinney that the tendency of Blake’s work is toward the assertion of transcendence, paradoxical or not. Blake’s God is immanent and human in the specific way he understands that word, which distinguishes him from Böhme. When the latter says that God is all, he encounters an insoluble problem because he immediately recognizes that such a view corresponds to “no Religion; such a Religion the Devill receiveth into himself.”32 He understands that a pantheistic religion must attribute both good and evil to God, and hence God incorporates the Devil into his own selfexpression. He resolves this problem by theorizing that God is an irrational Ungrund, or, as it was translated by William Law in the edition that Blake may have read, the Abyss.33 More than likely in Blake’s time, such a concept would have been associated with the Gnostic “abyss,” and though Alexander Koyré effectively argued in the twentieth century that Böhme’s concept should be read as a condition of absolute indetermination, to Blake it would surely have looked like a distant and virtually transcendent origin of all being, even if all being resides within it. Contrary to Spinoza’s understanding of an immanent God without subjectivity except in its human forms, this originary abyss operates as a subject, seeking, longing, seeing, and finding.34 In the Law edition, Böhme concludes that God is the Will of the Abyss; he is himself only one; he needs neither Space, or Place. He begets himself in himself, from Eternity to Eternity: he is neither like, or resembles any thing; and has no peculiar Place where he dwells. The Eternal Wisdom or Understanding is his Delight: He is the Will of the Wisdom; the Wisdom is his Manifestation.35

In order to explain the existence of evil, Böhme hypothesized a theory of contraries, an eternal Yes and No, which are distinct, each with a will of its own, and yet are one thing, and without the conflict they manifest, “all things would be a Nothing, and would stand still without movement.”36 According to Raine, Blake’s concept of the Devourer in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell derives from Böhme’s abyss, from which all being issues and by which it is eventually

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“swallowed up.”37 However, Blake’s understanding of these terms seems to be more social than metaphysical,38 and, as I intend to argue, his use of them relates to human actions, thoughts, and relations, because for Blake God is entirely the expression of the human multitude and never a detached being that resembles nothing in the human experience. Furthermore, I want to argue that Blake is not the irrationalist thinker that many have taken him to be. Quinney’s emphasis on the loneliness of the self recalls some of the main tenets of Gnosticism: “the ideas of an antidivine universe, of man’s alienness within it, and of the acosmic nature of the godhead.” Though technically one branch of Gnosticism postulates a unitary origin of being, its myths tell the story of the “progressive darkening of the original light,” which concludes with the alienation of the divine from the human world.39 Neoplatonism is less hostile to the human world, but it nonetheless posits being as an ontological hierarchy, and despite what may seem like the appearance of such a structure in Blake’s myths, he never says of the minute singularities or particulars what Plotinus said: “All these things are the One and not the One: they are he because they come from him; they are not he, because it is in abiding by himself that he gives them.”40 Though Blake believed that the minute particulars of this world cooperate to form the one man Jesus Christ, the origin of these particulars is not a God who abides by himself or is in any way detached from humanity, for such an abstract God would be a Urizenic or Satanic delusion from his perspective. As Negri and Deleuze both recognize, Spinoza himself was influenced by Neoplatonism, though he participated in a shift from the original Plotinian metaphysical hierarchy, with its theory of creation as the degradation of being through emanations, to a philosophy that substitutes expression for emanation and transforms a philosophy of transcendence into one of immanence.41 Blake comes late in this process, and though he probably took the term “emanation” from Neoplatonic and Gnostic sources, his use of it, while related to those sources, is radically different. In Marriage, Blake emphatically rejects the dualism of body and soul, and further insists that energy, which seems to incorporate both desire and power in the sense of ability or potentia, including the power of thought, comes from the body, while reason is the outward circumference or limit of this force. By reason, he does not mean the full scope of thought as it was understood by Spinoza. As Blake had already written in 1788, reason or the ratio refers to the limit or state of knowledge at any given point in time.42 In other words, reason in this context corresponds with what Badiou would call opinion or knowledge without

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truth. Ironically, despite Blake’s lifelong suspicion of reason, he argued in these early prose writings that “the true method of knowledge is experiment,” and he postulated the “Poetic Genius” rather vaguely as the essence, or what he would later call the spiritual cause, of the body.43 One can assume, of course, that Blake’s thought developed and altered over time, and perhaps the apparent rejection of dualism in Marriage and the early writings is not a position consistently held throughout his work. Nonetheless, I find the tendency of Blake’s thought to be amazingly consistent, and when he uses the concept of poetic genius in his early work to express the human essence, he anticipates what he will later understand by human imagination, which he associates with various expressions of the divine.44 By implication, since all humans possess it, the poetic genius, like the imagination, constitutes what Negri would call the common, which, as I argued in the preceding chapter, consists of the common notions and the intuitive knowledge of essences, as Spinoza understood them. In Milton, Blake explains that “every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause,” since natural causes are delusions (M26.44: 124). To understand what Blake means by spiritual cause, you have to keep in mind what he says in Marriage about the error of believing in the dualism of body and soul. Though he continues to use the word “spiritual” throughout his life, he seems to have understood spirituality as intellectual existence or being—in other words, thought; and it is never at odds with physical existence. Though in his late work he refers to imagination as an eternal or divine body, he links these terms to the phrase, “Jesus we are his Members,” or the one man composed of all the singularities, or individual human beings, that make up the universal family, as it is named in Jerusalem.45 In other words, imagination conditions truth or intuitive knowledge through an open process that exceeds the ratio. It conditions the interactive, cooperative, and dialogical relations between particular human beings. Imagination is not the natural cause of human relations for good or bad, it is not the natural or material cause of the body, whether understood as a particular physical entity or as the larger singularity of transindividual social relations that can materially transcend the mortal physical being of the individual. Imagination and the body are the same thing, expressed in two different ways. Imagination expresses the body’s immanent cause, or its infinite being. Northrop Frye recognized long ago that the unit of intellectual existence for Blake is not an idea in the Platonic sense but a form or image.46 To this extent he aligned Blake with the philosopher Berkeley, whose phrase “to be is to be perceived” implied to Frye the further conclusion that “to be is to perceive” because “we know that we are a reality beyond others’

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perceptions of us.” So whether a human being is perceived by others or by himself through others, in effect the body is “the whole man as an object of perception.”47 For Spinoza, as I argued in the last chapter, human beings know themselves, their world, and the other humans in that world through images, and they enhance their knowledge of themselves and their world through what amounts to the intersubjective exchange of images that produces the common notions or transindividual thoughts, which are not simply generalizations or abstractions of the image but rather accumulations of particulars that make visible their points of agreement and disagreement, or what Wittgenstein might have called “family resemblances.”48 Furthermore, the force of logical proofs for Spinoza involves a kind of internal vision, through the eyes of the mind. The power of logic, the reason why we accept it as a condition of truth, derives from the same intuitive understanding that produces knowledge of essences. If logic is the rational in its highest form—when it operates through intuitive knowledge, which is a kind of imaginative perception—it can become in the everyday world, a ratio, a rationalization in the psychological sense of the word, or the common sense that Gramsci identified as the folklore of philosophy.49 Blake did not reject reason as a form of intuitive and therefore imaginative knowledge. He rejected reason as something separated from imagination that it then attempts to govern through laws and moral codes. Reason as the ratio destroys imagination by destroying its autonomy (J74.10–13: 229). Blake distrusted memory because he understood it as a mechanical reflection of external reality, which resonates with Spinoza’s view that “imagination corresponds to the actual imprint of some body in our own, and memory to the succession of imprints in time.” 50 If, as I’ve suggested, Blake’s concept of imagination incorporates Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge as well as the logic underlying the construction of generic truth, then both Spinoza and Blake would have distinguished between knowledge of the eternal essence of the human and the inadequate understanding limited to the sense perception of the particular individual. Again, Deleuze stresses that Spinoza completely rejected the idea of the soul as a singular entity of a different metaphysical nature from the body insofar as it is indivisible but nonetheless “conceived in duration” to the effect that “the soul already existed before the body began to exist, and endures when the body ceases to exist.” Furthermore, this traditional view posits a “purely intellectual memory” by which the soul has knowledge of its own duration.51 Both Blake and Spinoza understood intellectual existence as a force beyond duration and completely at odds with the rationalizations of existence

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based on the limitations of sense-experience and memory. For Spinoza, true thought is knowledge of God in the sense that the mind knows that “it is in God and is conceived through God ” (E5.30: 376). Since God is immanent in everything, knowledge of God is thought that transcends the limited perceptions and memory of the particular individual. Blake would have called the latter perceptions the delusions of Ulro, not because they are degraded forms of reality that truly negate humanity, but because they create the appearance of negating human existence when in truth even Ulro is part of eternal existence, part of the “Human Form Divine” (M32.13: 131). Berkeley insisted on an absolute difference between God and man, and the condition of this difference is the denial that God has any form of sensory or imaginative perception.52 Blake insisted that the name God refers not to something “afar off ” but to a power that resides in human beings as they reside in it (J4.18–21: 146). At the beginning of Jerusalem, the Saviour addresses those in Beulah who still can conceive of a better world and keep that thought alive through dreaming or fantasy, but he could be addressing any aspect of human existence, even the mundane world that Blake identified as Ulro, which is a kind of hell. As Blake writes elsewhere in Jerusalem, God “is even in the depths of Hell!” (J12.15: 155). These ideas echo passages from Marriage about the presence of God inside of men, and like Spinoza Blake believes that the love of other human beings, especially the best, expresses the love of God, since “those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God” (MHH22–23: 43). Though Blake recognizes the genius of individuals, he articulates a vision in Milton suggesting that no individual perceives or understands the truth of the world in isolation from others. The divine vision does not transcend the senses but rather expands or contracts them. Whereas Spinoza distinguished between inadequate sensory knowledge and adequate knowledge, which is either purely intuitive or indirectly intuitive insofar as the truth of logic is a kind of mental perception, Blake would see a continuum between these two powers of thought. But the difference between Blake and Spinoza, with respect to Berkeley, is not that great. The latter’s distinction between God and man simply does not make sense in Spinoza’s philosophy because there is no ontological difference between thought and material being. There is no denial of physical existence in the recognition that human thought consists in part of transindividual intuitions, and no denial of infinite intellect in the belief that knowledge of the body starts from inadequate perceptions or images. Thought and body can never be mutually exclusive because they are expressions of the same thing.

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Furthermore, God is nothing but the totality of thoughts and bodies, a kind of infinite set including all the particulars that compose the universe, or, in Blake’s vocabulary, the universal family. Finally, Spinoza’s theory of imagination as the essence of human perception allows that human beings can distinguish between the images of things that do or do not exist, which does not mean that there is a noumenal reality completely separate from or outside of our perception of things, the Kantian thing-in-itself. Spinoza’s position is more complex. An image conveys the property of existence unless another image or affect conveys the non-existence of that property. This doesn’t mean that there is no external world, but the existence of that world is continuous with our understanding of it and not forever detached from and out of reach of human knowledge. Sometimes the subject may vacillate as to the truth of an image, but this process can lead not only to confusion but also to more complex thoughts. Hence, as I argued in the last chapter, the power of imagination is not metaphysically divorced from thought but rather conditions it, though this doesn’t mean that thought is dependent on sensory images but rather that there is a continuum between imaginative and rational thought—even images can express eternal essences and infinite thought can express itself through images. Around 1810, Blake wrote that “Mental Things are alone Real,” and physical reality has only a fallacious existence, for “Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought”?53 In my reading of this passage from A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake is not positing an idealism but rather insisting, as he does throughout his life, that the images we associate with physical existence are inevitably delusory without the intervention of thought to distinguish between what is real and what is not. I don’t want to force a strict identity between Spinoza’s thought and Blake’s, particularly as Blake thinks through a symbolic language derived from numerous sources, as when he draws on Gnostic myth to distinguish between a transcendent and an immanent God, equating the former with the cruelty of the Old Testament God, which leads Blake to conclude about Christ: “the Son O how unlike the Father.”54 As Quinney points out, Blake combines the evil demiurge and the hidden God of Gnosticism and insists on the illusory or fallacious status of these transcendent figures.55 The created world is the error that Blake usually associates with Urizen or the state of Satan. These figures embody the existence of an objective nature that is divorced from the human intellect. Blake identified this objectification with Newton’s system of natural laws that, as he also astutely realized, forced the presupposition of a transcendent God. As Donald Ault pointed out long ago, Blake made little distinction between

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Descartes and Newton, despite the fact that in his time they were usually seen as polar opposites because the former privileged thought over perception while the latter did exactly the opposite, but both postulated a nature that is divorced from human nature and dependent on a transcendent or hidden God.56 Blake’s use of the word “nature” can be confusing, as in Jerusalem when he refers to natural religion as “Opposing Nature!” (J 77.20: 232) or in the annotations to Watson when he seems to contradict his usual perspective and identify natural religion as God’s voice.57 According to Hazard Adams, Blake probably thought that natural religions like Deism articulate “God’s voice proclaiming error”—the error of their own intellectual foundation.58 In other words, Blake never rejects nature, though to someone like himself “Nature is Imagination itself.”59 Blake challenged the ideology of his time with a critique of the notion that an objective nature exists that either determines or opposes thought. Contrary to Quinney’s argument comparing him with Kant, Blake never suggests that the human mind transcends the natural world, for, from his perspective, the view that nature is an object divorced from human subjectivity presupposes the complementary error of the superiority of mind over nature and ultimately of a transcendent God and hierarchical universe. Spinoza had argued against those who saw humankind as a nature separate from nature, which is simply the greater singularity that expresses itself through the interaction of all individual beings, or Blake’s minute particulars. As I noted in the last chapter, Spinoza rejected a correspondence theory of truth: rather than the truth of a thought or idea deriving from its correspondence with a physical object, its correspondence with an object follows from its truth. Since thought and physical being express the same thing, then the intellectual conviction that something is true and exists, unless it is confronted with a more powerful idea that expresses the opposite, necessarily forces the appearance of something. The intellectual experience of truth makes little sense unless it calls into question something particular to our understanding of the world; otherwise there would be no reason to assert the truth of anything since everything would be given. There is no real thought in the knowledge that reflects our everyday perception of the world, and to take that perception as the objective truth about the world is to mistake the ratio or abstraction of everything that has been thought in the past for the infinite truth. Truth must necessarily question that abstraction by articulating a particular existent that does not conform to it. In its Spinozian sense, imagination plays a role in this process when an image appears that is associated with contradictory ideas of existence, what Badiou would call an undecidable. Such an image

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requires a decision that exceeds the current ratio or transcendental of a world and forces the existence of a minute particular. As Negri asserts, “The truth lives in the world of the imagination.”60 Blake anticipated this thought in Marriage when he wrote, “What is now proved was once, only imagin’d” (MHH 8.33: 36). For Negri and for Blake, adequate ideas do not simply reflect reality but constitute it because without the thought of their existence, certain things would not appear, even though it is possible for something to appear that does not exist. This supplementary power to imagine the inexistent can also play a critical role in the construction of a truth that forces the appearance of something. In Blake, this is the labor of Los. For Spinoza, the Cartesian argument about the existence of God as the guarantee of the truth of our thoughts and perceptions of the world is simply unnecessary.61 Truth is self-referential, and God is the immanent intellect that resides in the multitude of humanity and any other intelligent beings that may exist.

Conversing with spirit and body Our knowledge and experience of the world and of ourselves requires the existence of others. Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem both articulate this truth, one from the perspective of the individual subject as a point in a process of constructive, intersubjective thought, and the other from the perspective of the multitude as the intellectual potentia that brings about human redemption through understanding. But even in his early writing, Blake understood thought as a collaborative or dialogical process. In his annotations, he notes that humans experience pleasure or pain through each other and are “united in thought” through images, so that they know “God or heavenly things” only in conjunction with others. To think with others is the meaning of spirituality: “all who converse in the spirit, converse with spirits.”62 Spinoza also understood that pleasure or joy involves the enhancement of perfection, which means an increase in the body’s active force or power, while pain means exactly the opposite (E3DA2–3: 311; GenDA: 319). Since greater perfection or existence involves greater knowledge through the interaction with others, or the production of a greater singularity through human cooperation, which means greater participation in the divine nature, then the love of God—or the love of the truth of the general intellect— is enhanced through association with others who love and share knowledge in a similar way (E4.45S: 345; 5.36Cor: 378). Blake understood that human

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or intelligent beings think through images, and further that it is impossible to engage in such thought without the exchange of ideas between human subjects, which enables them to grasp the interconnections between their different images of things and to distinguish not only between things that exist and things that do not exist but also between things that are possible and things that are not possible. To know God is to understand the truth of human existence, which means to recognize the power of imagination—which is the power of thought— to shape our perception of the world. Ultimately, the minute particulars with which Blake is concerned are not simply impressions from the outside world, since, as Ault stresses, Blake distinguishes between perceptual particulars— “the vanishing particulars … projected by Blake as Vala, the Veil of nature, the ‘Emanation’ of the Zoa Luvah”—and minute particulars as the eternal forms or singular essences that enter into the composition of Jesus as the greater singularity or general intellect.63 Blake would have agreed with Spinoza that we have inadequate knowledge of things external to us if we rely exclusively on our perceptions. Nevertheless, seemingly contradicting himself, he also insisted, against Berkeley, that we do not arrive at the correct understanding of the world indirectly through deduction but directly by perception.64 To complicate things even more, against Sir Joshua Reynolds he wrote that, when it comes to knowledge of ideal beauty for example, every human is born with innate ideas, but then he implied that beauty lies in the particular, minute details of a form, which may even be associated with an imperfection.65 In my judgment, Blake uses the term “innate ideas” to express the power of thought to distinguish the essence of a minute particular from the shadowy existence of our everyday perceptions, and he may have associated the shadowy nature of everyday perception with the generalizations of the ratio, or what today we would call ideology, opinion, or common sense. Hence he believed that truth is the effect of direct perception or sense in the same way that Spinoza believed that the force of logic is an intuitive perception by the mind’s eyes, its intellectual vision. In effect, innate ideas are innate powers, or the immanent causes of thought. Similarly, as Spinoza asserted in a passage already cited, we understand God by understanding singularities, which, as I noted before, are not limited to particular individual beings or bodies. Rather, when humans cooperate and interact, they become larger singularities through the expansion of their knowledge and power of thought, and the tendency underlying this transindividual process is the subject of a truth. Blake’s Milton explores this process through the author’s dramatization of his own dialogical interaction with the emanation, or creative

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expression, of the poet John Milton. In effect, through this creative dialogue, Blake achieves a greater understanding of the singularity that is Paradise Lost, which means to understand its true as opposed to its intended significance. When Blake the living body and intellect imagines Milton as “Unhappy tho in heav’n,” he is not postulating a particular soul that exists in some place outside of human existence, in another metaphysical realm, but rather he takes his own imaginative perception of Milton, the Milton who expresses the power of Blake’s own thought, as the real Milton, or Milton’s authentic intellectual existence (M2.17: 96). The body of the poet John Milton is long since dead, but the intellectual and eternal expression of that existence continues to live, and furthermore the thought that expresses that existence is not limited to the particular words that compose this or that individual work, especially Paradise Lost. The true significance of those words, the true understanding of those minute particulars, includes the thoughts, the corrections, and the revisions to which they give ground, including the words and thoughts of Blake. But it is misleading to say that the Milton in Blake’s imagination expresses Blake’s thought in a proprietary sense. Blake already understands that his own thought incorporates the thought of Milton as its condition, and of course that Milton’s thought is itself already conditioned by multiple traditions as is Blake’s own. In one of the most remarkable books ever written on Blake, Mark Bracher describes Milton’s virtually infinite being in Blake’s imagination as the effect of “what we might call mediated presence, the fact that in every influence or effect which one individual has on another, part of the unique intrinsic being of the first individual becomes indirectly actualized in the second.”66 Still, I would go further. From a Spinozian point of view, the essence of a human being, the part that survives the death of the body, is his or her thought, through which humans are able to interact with one another without the necessity of a particular physical presence, whether it be spatial or temporal. Yet whenever a thought is expressed, there is some physical existence to which it corresponds, because there is no metaphysical division between thought and physical being. Blake says as much in the first lines of the first book of Milton, when he appeals to the Daughters of Beulah, his muses, to descend from his brain “down the Nerves of my right arm” (M2.6–7: 96). An individual’s thought that survives and continues to produce effects in the thought of another corresponds with a physical existence, and requires another’s physical activity that would involve both the brain and the rest of the body in the process of writing as well as, in Blake’s case, the labor of drawing, engraving, and printing an illuminated book.

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As points in the process of an infinite truth, Milton and Blake, without losing any of the particularity of their historical existences, participate in a singularity that incorporates the thought of Milton into the physical existence of Blake’s body. This transindividual thought does not cause the existence of Blake’s body, since both the thought and the body have the same immanent cause and are two expressions of the same thing. To express this idea in another way, by laboring to understand the truth of Milton’s writing, a truth that exceeds Milton’s own words or expressions, Blake arrives at a greater understanding of the truth of his own existence, and hence at a greater freedom to act through that existence. He enhances his own individuality, even as a particular physical being, by giving up the limited perspective of his immediate historical experience, and participating in dialogical thought, which makes his own body the expression of a greater singularity that includes Milton and an uncountable number of others, even if they remain unnamed and unrecognized. In a sense, though Blake occasionally refers to human forms in the plural, the concept of the human form is necessarily singular. Particular individuals assume the human form when they understand and act on the knowledge that freedom of thought and body requires social collaboration and intellectual dialogue. From this perspective, even Bracher’s use of the term “mediated” can be questioned. Concerning Spinoza, Negri insists that “The denial of the concept of mediation itself resides at the foundation of Spinozian thought.”67 The same is true of Blake. Only if we limit the real existence of Milton or of Blake to their historical existence as persons, are we obligated to see the dialogical exchange in the poem Milton as a kind of mediation. Jones, who uses Bakhtin’s theories of the dialogical to understand Blake’s concept of dynamic thought, points out that, starting with Marriage, Blake stopped using the term “author” to identify himself but chose the more pedestrian terms associated with his craft, “printer” or “publisher.” The exception to this practice, however, was Milton, where the words “The Author & Printer W Blake” appear on the title page in large letters near Milton’s left foot.68 Later in the poem, the narrator, presumably Blake speaking in the first person, sees Milton as a falling star that descends to the tarsus of his left foot and enters there (M15.47–49: 110). Milton enters Blake just as the Bard in eternity “took refuge in Milton’s bosom” (M14.9: 108). Erdman saw the reference to the bones of the tarsus as a pun naming Saul of Tarsus and suggesting that Blake undergoes a transformative experience through a kind of inspiration.69 Harold Bloom suggests that this event “alters Blake’s stance,” and, by implication, his visual and intellectual perspective.70 Just as Saul, in Acts 9:1–18, was blinded for

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three days by his experience on the road to Damascus until Ananias put hands on him and revealed that the Lord who had appeared was Jesus, which led to Saul’s baptism possibly as Paul, so Blake did not know at first it was Milton who entered him, “for man cannot know/What passes in his members till periods of Space & Time/Reveal the secrets of Eternity” (M21.8–10: 115). By locating these events in his members, as he earlier described the movement of inspiration from his brain to his right hand, Blake implies that, while the intellectual existence charted in the poem is real, it all takes place within his own physical being. Yet by emphasizing his authorship and authority on the title page, Blake actually calls the conventional understanding of those terms into question, for the whole movement of the poem virtually deconstructs the principle of a unitary or univocal origin to any text or any thought. Blake locates the words designating his authorship next to Milton’s left foot, possibly to suggest that the historical Blake who facilitates the production of the poem is the material, physical expression of an eternal truth that the poem itself resurrects, a truth that is transindividual and whose subject is the multitude that Blake usually names Jesus, though its most immediate agent in the poem is Milton. Blake starts from the knowledge of his own physical existence and his historical relation to Milton’s poetry, particularly Paradise Lost. Milton lives in that poem, but his existence is limited by the limitations of his own creation and by the understanding of his readers, including Blake. The Milton who appears unhappy in the heaven of his own creation is the canonical Milton, the Milton who constructed himself through certain tendencies within his own poetic expression and who was constructed by the traditional readers who accepted his vision of a transcendent, abstract God and of the cosmos as a metaphysical hierarchy that mirrors social hierarchies and is governed by a supreme power, or, in Spinoza’s terms, potestas. Yet the unhappiness of this Milton also expresses Blake’s affective relationship with this image of the poet, his own refusal of Milton’s God and cosmos, despite his great admiration of the poet and his poetry. Milton is unhappy because Blake, in whom Milton’s thought lives, is unhappy with this Milton. This affect also suggests that the essence or truth of Milton’s thought—or rather of the irreducible thought process of which Milton’s writing is a local point or expression—contradicts Milton’s more conservative intentions and the tendency of the traditional reading of his poetry. In other words, Blake’s unhappiness with Milton suggests something in Milton’s thought, its infinite part, that already constitutes a criticism of itself.

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As Nelson Hilton stressed long ago, Blake’s imagination is literal, not because it is plain or direct in its references, or because we can translate his allegories into concepts that tame his savage ontology, but because his words operate in a “forcefield of sound, etymology, graphic shape, contemporary applications, and varied associations.”71 It is no accident that Blake begins this poem with an apparently absurd condemnation of classical literature, associated with the names Homer, Ovid, Plato, and Cicero, whose stolen and perverted works are “set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible” (M1: 95). Despite his hyperbole, Blake surely has in mind, as Julia Wright emphasizes, the use of Greek and Latin models to reduce the understanding and practice of literature to the arbitrary rules established by “the neoclassical national culture to which Milton was iconically related.”72 More importantly, Blake means to apply the Biblical reading practices that derive from his background in and knowledge of the traditions of radical dissent to his understanding of Milton and other literary traditions. Though, as Christopher Hill notes, the principle of “private interpretation” of the Bible that Luther had originally championed by inventing “the priesthood of all believers” was frequently betrayed by the organized religions and sects founded on it, it nonetheless remains a crucial force in Blake’s understanding not only of the Bible but also of all literature. Though for many dissenters and Milton himself the elect alone would have this right of interpretation, the only other limit on it within the dissenting traditions was the congregation where “interpretations were tested and approved.”73 Blake had a completely different use for the word “Elect,” and for him the true significance of congregational testing would be the “mental fight” and the intellectual wars of eternity. In effect, Blake rejects Milton’s canonical status as a constraining force on the understanding of Milton’s own work, while insisting that all art, like the Biblical text, is open to the perspectives and readings of the multitude. For Blake, the members of the multitude, far from being ungodly as Luther came to believe, were God.74 When Blake condemns the Greek models, he actually repeats the ideas expressed by Milton’s Jesus in Paradise Regained when he praises the literary style and wisdom of the Bible and notes that “rather Greece from us these Arts deriv’d:/Ill imitated.”75 Blake’s larger point, however, is that no work, not even the Bible, as he makes clear in Marriage, transcends the power of interpretation in the search for an infinite truth. Despite the force of Jones’s Bakhtinian reading of Blake, he sometimes oversimplifies the dialogical process by making Blake out to be a relativist in the contemporary sense of the word. Just as the Bard, Milton, and Blake engage in self-annihilation, individual readers must self-annihilate

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by acknowledging other viewpoints and not asserting their perspective as the one and only truth—indeed they must allow for a “multiplicity of viewpoints” and resist any finalization of truth. It practically follows that there is no absolute truth and one must “accept the discourse of others, however contrary, as representations of ‘truth’ as valid as one’s own.”76 The conclusion, perhaps not intended by Jones, is that all expressions of truth are equally valid. Against such a view, Badiou argues, “Our experience is that something true must be absolutely true, because if something isn’t absolutely true it isn’t true at all, absoluteness is a predicate of truth.”77 This proposition follows as well from Spinoza’s proposition that truth is its own standard, while for Blake truth requires conviction that certainly goes beyond relativism when he says in Marriage that if a truth is told in a way that can be understood, it must be believed (MHH10.69: 38). In Milton, the Bard defends his song simply by claiming “I am Inspired! I know it is Truth! for I Sing/According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius” (M13.51–14.1: 107–8). Still, Jones correctly recognizes that truth can never be finalized because the infinity of truth means that it is always incomplete, and no local expression of truth, despite the conviction that it requires, can ever be coextensive with the truth process itself. Jones emphasizes Blake’s critique of Locke’s theory of language, which was based on the idea of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign with respect to its referent. In effect, as Jones summarizes Locke, since the relation between words and things is mediated by the subjective association of words with ideas in the individual’s mind, communication becomes impossible without a strict adherence to convention in the use of language.78 From Badiou’s perspective, this would make a Locke a constructivist, who assumes that language must be legislated by the state of the situation, or social convention, so that for every element in a situation there must be a term to which it corresponds without excess or remainder.79 This Lockean perspective correlates with Leibniz’s idea of “the well-made language,” which attributes to language, in Badiou’s words, “the role of a law of being insofar as it will hold as identical whatever it cannot distinguish.”80 In effect, well-made language is coextensive with truth, and if something cannot be expressed clearly, it simply does not exist or remains inaccessible to thought. Blake’s perspective is antithetical to constructivism, for it assumes that thought exceeds language to an infinite degree. When Blake says that truth must be believed if it is expressed in a way that can be understood, he necessarily takes into account the challenge of making it understood. The poetic genius is constituted not only by the power of thought common to all intelligent

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beings but also by the body of linguistic as well as other finite expressions— including the visual and the aural—that struggle toward the articulation of a truth process that they sustain but can never circumscribe or fully express. For Badiou, because truth requires subjective conviction as the entry point to its infinite process, it also requires a cautionary ethic that recognizes the power of truth to subvert itself. In Marriage, the prophet Isaiah admits that he never saw God in the physical sense but insists that “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God” and that conviction or “firm perswasion” is the condition for the construction of any imaginative truth. However, Ezekiel adds that this conviction also led the prophets of Israel to believe that all Gods, as expressions of poetic genius, would eventually be proved to derive from theirs. To the extent that poetic genius is the common ground of all human thought—its immanent cause, so to speak—then Ezekiel and Isaiah are right, but Ezekiel continues by recognizing the error that subverted the truth of the prophets when the love of their God inspired them to reject all the others and regard them as rebels. Ironically, the conviction that the poetic genius is common to all intelligent beings and, as corollary to that, the view expressed in Blake’s earliest pamphlet that all religions are one, are betrayed by the construction of a simulacrum, the one true religion that mistakes the poetic genius as the unique property of one particular group, which led to the vulgar misconception that all nations would finally be “subject to the jews.” Thanks to the historical triumph of conventional Christianity, Ezekiel believes that all nations worship the code and God of Judaism, a historical overstatement that expresses the fact of a false universality (MHH12–13: 38–39). In effect, the expressions of the poetic genius are betrayed whenever they are taken to be the final and complete expression of the infinite truth. Such an error represents the falsification that can be immanent to a truth process, translating the true universality of the common that protects minute particulars to the false universality that generalizes one particular identity.

The error and the terror The Bard’s song in Milton illustrates the subversion that is immanent to the truth process itself. Such an event awakens the Milton in Blake’s thought to a greater understanding of the true meaning of his own writing and the existence expressed by that writing. So many of Blake’s critics write as if Blake presupposes a conventional Christian view of the fallen state of humanity or as if he has

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appropriated the Gnostic myth of fall through creation. Most agree with Frye’s early assessment that the fall is a mental state that nonetheless involves “a corresponding fall of the physical world” since everything real in that world is “a matter of perspective and associations.”81 I would argue that for Blake the fall is an immanent dimension of human existence, virtually inseparable from the human form divine. Just as for Spinoza there is no good and evil beyond the human desire for greater perfection or potentia, which leads him to the conclusion that a free human who had only adequate ideas or knowledge of things would have no concept of good and evil (E4.68: 355)—so for Blake the human fall has nothing to do with the movement away from some transcendent origin that legislates values or moral laws but rather with the process of intellectual error that may well remain the inseparable byproduct of a truth process. In Jerusalem, conversing with his spectre, Los expresses his complete indifference about whether a man is good or evil, wise or foolish, and rejects the holiness associated with morality in favor of intellectual understanding (J91.54–56: 252). Like Spinoza in his Political Treatise, Blake would have understood any concept of sin as a human construction whose authority lies in the transindividual understanding of the multitude. In Jerusalem, Blake formulates the principle of mutual forgiveness as the basis of the mental war that would be the true foundation of human freedom. Since Jesus is the manifestation of the multitude as one man, the condition of his existence is necessarily the “continual forgiveness of Sin” (J3: 145). Jesus is God because, as Blake said to Crabb Robinson in 1825, “We are all coexistent with God—Members of the Divine body—We are all partakers of the divine nature.” Jesus is God but then “so am I and so are you.” He even attributes error to the historical Jesus, who should never have put himself in the situation of being crucified. He notes that there is error in heaven as well as on earth. Though Blake uses the word “sin” for perspectives with which he disagrees, he rejects Plato’s emphasis on “Virtues & Vices, and good & evil.” “There is nothing in all that,” he says, “Every thing is good in God’s eyes.”82 God, in this context, can only be the principle of immanent causality, and hence it makes no sense to refer to its preference of this existent over another existent. And yet there is intellectual error, though I am inclined to imagine that Blake would have gone along with Lacan’s notion that the non-duped err—or, as Lacan apparently put it in the unpublished seminar of that name, “The non-duped are the twice duped [Les non-dupes sont les deux fois dupes].”83 Error derives from the truth process, or, to give it a more Blakean formulation, it derives from the

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mental form of humanity, its power of thought. Without thought, without the commitment to truth, error would not exist; but at the same time, without the intellectual risk of error, there would be nothing immortal in human beings, no divine humanity. In the Bard’s song, the three sons of Los—Rintrah, Palamabron, and Satan—manifest three modes of relation to an eternal truth process and are associated with three classes: the Redeemed, the Reprobate, and the Elect, respectively (M5.14: 98). Rintrah is the prophet who engages in the bold assertion of a truth with a conviction that guarantees his status as the Reprobate, “form’d/To destruction from the mothers womb,” in any particular historical context (M7.2–3: 100). In the process of eternal creation, he governs the plow that breaks new ground, but his prophetic conviction would quickly destroy itself and the truth process without the intervention of his brother and contrary, Palamabron. Though the latter is described as “mild & piteous,” which led S. Foster Damon to associate him with the “poet’s Pity for the oppressed,” he more accurately embodies the intellectual spirit of mutual forgiveness, though that term does not become significant until Jerusalem.84 He is Rintrah’s contrary because he can forgive the opposition of others, which causes him to live in doubt and fear (M25.36: 122). Without his willingness to forgive others in the intellectual wars of eternity, mental war would quickly become corporeal war, and Rintrah’s conviction would betray itself to violence by naming the unnamable and disavowing the existence of other minute particulars. In effect, Palamabron’s forgiveness is a form of love or compassion, which is the counterpoint to Rintrah’s wrath. The forgiveness of love and the wrath of conviction are both necessary, however, in the constitution of Jesus or the multitude (J34.14–16, 19–20: 180). In eternity Palamabron governs the harrow that further breaks up the ground that Rintrah has opened, protecting the minute particulars. At the same time, Palamabron’s tolerance and love leave him susceptible to and tormented by Satan’s false pity, though Palamabron is called the Redeemed because, despite his productive vacillation, he is “redeem’d from Satans Law, the wrath falling on Rintrah” (M11.23: 105). In effect, between wrath and pity, Palamabron discovers not so much a middle ground as the force to sustain a tension between the two positions. True pity or compassion is simply love that must confront its contrary in the commitment to truth, while Satan’s pity is a cover that hides his desire to appropriate the other’s singularity and subordinate it to his own identity. The contrary of Rintrah’s conviction of the absolute

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truth of something is the ethical subject who recognizes the infinity—and therefore incompleteness—of a truth process. Without Rintrah’s conviction, no truth would emerge in a historical context, but without Palamabron’s ethical caution no truth would sustain its own infinity. By contrast with these contraries, however, Satan is the state of error, or the negative form of reason (M5.14: 98). As the “Miller of Eternity,” Satan refines the minute particulars to the extent that they become indistinguishable from one another (M3.42–43, 4.2: 97). The error that Satan embodies is not something peculiar to a person but is rather a state or condition of being, associated with the Zoa Urizen, whose name echoes not only the phrase “your reason” but also the word “horizon.” If Urizen is the circumference of energy, then Satan is the error that results from taking that boundary as the limit of human existence itself, a limit that misconstrues and closes the infinity of being. As Los says to Satan, mortals take his arbitrary constructions as everything, an “invisible & incomprehensible” natural law (M4.12–13: 98). There are two sides to this error: first, it takes the necessity of a limit, which could be understood as the finite point of an infinite process, for the totality and closure of the process; second, it transfers the constitutive power of being from an immanent to an absent or transcendent cause. Blake associates Satan’s harrow with Shaddai, or the Almighty God of Abraham and Moses and the one who tested Job.85 By postulating a transcendent cause of the human singularities, Satan erases or degrades their true natures or eternal essences by privileging the potestas of the one over the potentia of the many. As Blake insists, Satan is not a person but a state, and states, as the Seven Angels of the Presence explain to Milton later in the poem, are “Combinations of Individuals.” The Seven further comment, on the same plate, that “States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease” (M32.10, 23: 131–32). In Jerusalem, Blake may seem to say exactly the opposite when Albion enters the state of Satan and the voice of multitudes call for the permanence of the state (J31.13: 177), and later in the poem there are other references to the necessary permanence of states (J32.38: 178; 73.44–45: 229). Still, the contradiction here is only apparent. Blake’s use of this concept of a state begins in The Four Zoas, where he refers to both Satan and Luvah as states (Luvah actually enters the state Satan) and insists on the distinction between states and the individuals who enter them (FZ115.23–27: 380). In Milton and Jerusalem, he gradually

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refines this concept, though the general idea remains consistent. By making the states permanent in Jerusalem, Blake destroys the usual scenario by which we would understand a fallen condition. In Milton, states are created, and the whole poem is about the state named Milton “about to be Created/ Called Eternal Annihilation” (M32.26–27: 132). However, if we understand eternal annihilation as the annihilation of selfhood or the social identity that one derives from categories such as nation, class, gender, religion, and other interpellations, to use the Althusserian term, then creating such a state would involve accepting the physical body’s mortality as the condition for embracing the eternal life or infinity of thought and the material world to which that thought will always correspond, human history as the expression of infinite being. If we apply the refinement of the concept of a state in Jerusalem back onto Milton, then states change or appear to be created insofar as individual identities enter those states and activate them, though in fact those states represent permanent human possibilities. Blake further characterizes the state of eternal annihilation with the qualification that only the living can enter it and triumph over death and the concept of eternal punishment (M32.27–29: 132). By entering this state, Milton, who lives in the thought and body of Blake, recognizes a permanent condition for individuals within human existence that can be cast off or moved beyond. Eternal annihilation means nothing more than the knowledge that death is irrelevant to the true meaning of life, since, as Spinoza insisted, a free man does not concern himself with death. Rather than postulating a fantasy heaven as the afterlife in which we live much as we lived in our physical existence, only without material scarcity and suffering, and a hell for those who refuse to accept our moral code and therefore must suffer eternally, the state of eternal annihilation means that we cast off the existence founded on the fear of death, which Blake would name Satan, and embrace the power of thought that enables us to interact with other minds and bodies without losing the particularity of our human existence. The body that dies or is eternally annihilated is simply part of the infinite expression of being, but it is neither the end of thought nor the end of physical existence. It is, however, the end of selfhood in the sense of our everyday and inadequate understanding of the individual beings that we are. Satan, or the state that this name embodies within Blake’s later poetry, is neither evil nor fallen in the traditional Christian sense of those terms. On the contrary, Satan is the inventor of evil and the theory of sin and the fall

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that can be associated with that concept. Such a state is immanent to human existence and, in that sense, permanent or static, but for that very reason it can be surpassed through the power of imagination, which is the power of true thought. Satan and Adam are both permanent states, or limits to human existence. Satan is the limit of thought, or opacity, and Adam is the limit of physical being, or contraction, insofar as he embodies the understanding that death is the horizon of personal existence (M13.21: 107). As the limit of thought, Satan would be something like common sense or opinion congealed into the principles of law that combinations of individuals in such a state follow without question and even have a tendency to raise above themselves or to misconstrue—that is, to imagine in the negative sense of the term—as transcendent, and therefore not a product of the human imagination that is infinite and dynamic, never static. In the Bard’s song, Los identifies Satan with Newton’s Pantocrator and with the empirical philosophy of John Locke (M4.10: 98). In effect, Blake recognizes the tendencies of the Newtonian universe, which exiles infinite truth to the realm of transcendence while incorporating the Lockean assumption that all knowledge must be based on sense impressions. However, even here, the error is not in Newton’s construction of a system, but in the tendency of science to name the unnamable, to postulate itself as a totality beyond which thought is impossible, and therefore to postulate imagination as the thought of the impossible. As Quinney points out, Jerusalem seems to conclude with a redemptive vision of Bacon, Newton, and Locke side by side with Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer among the chariots of the “Almighty” in heaven (J98.9: 257).86 The Almighty is a term used ambivalently in these long poems, since, on the one hand, it can refer to a unitary, transcendent God, or, on the other, to the power of the multitude as eternal humanity (M30.15: 129). Basically, when it refers to the former, it is the human form divine inflected by the state of error. However, from a different, more Edenic perspective, the Almighty is associated with Palamabron’s harrow, which represents the creative process of protecting the minute particulars even as they are prepared for the harvest that brings them together as the expression of their maximum ontological power. In effect, when the Almighty appears in its redeemed form—which simply means in its true and undistorted form—at the end of Jerusalem, Bacon, Newton, and Locke appear with it in their true intellectual forms, along with the great British artists who have passed through their own errors. Their knowledge has been redeemed from the errors to which it gave rise.

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In the Bard’s song, when Satan convinces Palamabron to change positions with him in the labor of human creation, these acts bring about the distortion of the eternal truth procedure. Satan as the ratio—ideology, opinion, common sense—takes over the harrow and creates madness by trying to force the minute particulars to conform to his arbitrary categories or abstractions. Meanwhile, Palamabron takes over Satan’s mill and feels only useless pity for the minute particulars who no longer recognize their own singularity. Satan maddens singular individuals with arbitrary laws, while Palamabron confuses conformists who take his pity for Satanic judgment. In other words, Palamabron is also a state, or combination of individuals, and though at his best, as the contrary of Rintrah, he represents the human compassion that facilitates the formation of the multitude as the one man Jesus, he also embodies another kind of error in which compassion becomes an end in itself, without its contrary of revolutionary conviction. It becomes pity in the negative sense, which “would be no more,/If we did not make somebody Poor.”87 Eventually, after Palamabron and Satan have disrupted the creative process of being, Los realizes his own error, which is to have allowed pity to divide the soul (M8.19–20: 102). In other words, human beings betray their humanity, or eternal existence, by pitying the oppressed and fostering their fear of death rather than encouraging and participating in their revolt against their oppressors. However, Rintrah’s wrath, or revolutionary conviction, can also betray itself, as he does through his own indignation at Satan’s “dissimulation of friendship!” (M8.35: 102). At this point in Blake’s text, there is an ambivalence that critics tend to read one way or the other but that could possibly be read as an intentional conflation of perspectives. After Los declares a pause in the creative process of being, Satan and Palambron mourn together and plow in tears, since they have become virtually identical in the state of error. In other words, through mutual pity they have taken over and neutralized the revolutionary force of Rintrah’s plow, while Theotormon and Bromion join forces with Satan through pity of “his youth and beauty” (M8.23–31: 102). In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Theotormon expresses the state of those who are theologically tormented by the fear of death, while Bromion embodies aggressive Newtonian science that also sees death as the horizon of life while positing a transcendent God. In Milton, Michael, or the expression of angelic or transcendental justice, and Thulloh, or friendship, oppose Satan, but their reproof is faint (M8.32–33: 102). Only Rintrah has the conviction to see through Satan’s posturing, but his rage apparently causes Satan to act violently. While Michael sits down in tears, unable to rectify the situation,

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Satan stands “angry & red” and smotes Thulloh, while urging Michael to rise up (M8.36–40: 102). In other words, Satan destroys friendship and demands that justice serve his own interests. In his reading of this section, Damon has Rintrah killing Thulloh, while Martin Nurmi later corrects him since the grammar of the sentence would suggest that Satan is the murderer of the friend who reproves him, however faintly.88 Still, after Palamabron calls down the Great Assembly of Eden to decide the issue, their judgment falls on Rintrah whose rage has taken possession of Satan, as expressed by the proverb, “Satan is among the Reprobate” (M9.10–12: 103). In plate 10 of copy D of Milton (Plate 8 in the other copies), Rintrah stands on a plinth engulfed in flames, while his foot touches the foot of the figure in the left background with the mild face (Figure 1). Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi speculate that the latter figure is Palamabron, but I think he’s more likely to be Satan, who hides his rage and will to power behind a face of mildness (M7.4, 13, 21: 100).89 That would make the bearded figure in the left foreground Palamabron, whose hands appear to be folded as he looks on Rintrah with compassion bordering on pity. Though the assembly may erroneously judge Rintrah as the guilty one in this case, Blake may be suggesting that Rintrah has also entered the state of error that aligns him with Satan. In other words, his revolutionary conviction has gone so far that it embodies itself in an absolute law—Satan’s law—that brings about the murder of Thulloh, who has been too mild in his opposition to Satan. In effect, Palamabron’s acquiescence to Satan out of pity has cut him off from his contrary, and his contrary is no longer restrained in the force of his conviction by Palamabron’s compassion and willingness to forgive and hear those who oppose him. These two figures as states are both absorbed by Satan’s state of error. Furthermore, Rintrah compounds the error when he uses rocks, rivers, and moats of fire to separate himself from the unified Palamabron and Satan. Rintrah may not be wrong to want to isolate himself from Palamabron and Satan’s error, but insofar as all three figures are states—or, as the children of Los, could be considered states within states—the solution to their error is not separation but cooperation, which would transform their conflicts into creative energy. In response to Rintrah’s separation, Satan “not having the Science of Wrath, but only of Pity:/Rent them asunder, and wrath was left to wrath, & pity to pity” (M9.43–47: 103). Satan, almost in imitation of Rintrah, reinforces the division between wrath and pity or effectively deploys Rintrah’s wrath to his own advantage by destroying affirmative compassion and forgiveness.

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Figure 1 Milton, copy D, plate 10. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2015 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

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In effect, one can only defeat Satan, not by separating him from the states associated with the other two brothers, but by recognizing that, in a certain sense, Satan does not exist. Blake can be confusing on this point, but Satan is clearly associated with death, which, along with hell, is a state that only seems to be (M32.28–29: 132). He is a negation or negative form of reason, and in Jerusalem Los comments that while contraries exist, negations do not (J17.33– 34: 162). Later Erin, who could be seen as the Irish form of Jerusalem,90 tells the Daughters of Beulah that Satan is not a form of human existence but death itself (J49.67: 199). Satan does not exist because he is the illusion that leads to error. As a state, he contains the false or illusory states of death and hell, because error derives from the fear of death and the refusal of forgiveness. In my reading, nearly all of Blake’s hypothetical characters, with the exception of Jesus or the human form divine, are states, or limited combinations of individuals. Furthermore, there are states within states, so that even Los is a state which contains the states embodied by his sons, particularly the ones who represent the three classes. Critics frequently note that Milton begins with one of Blake’s typical images of the creation-fall when Urizen appears isolated in darkness, enchained by his own mind or thought. At this sight, Los seizes his hammer and tongs in order to work and create (M3.6–7: 98). In effect, the appearance of Urizen and Los as separate intellectual functions is the fall itself, though it is a fall that is immanent to the constitutive force of being. Urizen, or the principle of rational thought, withdraws into himself by mistaking his own horizon for the totality of being, while Los, or the power of imagination, labors to sustain the constitutive force of being by giving form to error so that it can be cast off. Hence he creates the three classes of human beings, as we read in the first lines of the Bard’s song, even before we learn of Urizen’s fall and Los’s labor. Ultimately, their supposed fall—and that of the other Zoas by implication—is simultaneous. Urizen is never strictly identical with rationality any more than Los is identical with imagination. Los is the state of humanity that struggles to preserve the constitutive force of being in a world in which rationality has been separated from intuitive knowledge or imagination. However, within Los the same conflict that brings about the separation of Los and Urizen replicates itself in the relations between the three sons, only one could argue that they refine the first separation in a way that produces greater understanding. Los can only act through the power of his conviction about and commitment to truth, which Rintrah manifests. However, he will succumb to Urizenic delusions unless he

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balances that commitment with a willingness to forgive others, including his own spectre or the Other in himself, who may resist his conviction and even force him to revise it. Palambron is that part of his makeup. These two forces exist as necessary contraries in every human mind and operate in every human relationship, but when they betray themselves as truth processes, they virtually betray their own existence as human mental forms, and negate themselves. As a consequence, they enter a state of nonexistence, which is Satan. As Los and Enitharmon, his emanation, eventually realize, Satan is a version of Urizen that has been dragged into the physical world of generation by Orc and the Shadowy Female (M10.1–2: 104). These two are forms of Luvah and his emanation Vala that have not only detached themselves from the other Zoas but also have fallen into a state of error in which they can no longer recognize the constitutive or creative power of being but rather have completely given themselves over to death and an objectified natural world. At the same time, Orc is the first-born of Los, which suggests that the error, which both Orc and Satan represent, is already present in the state that constitutes Los, even in his imaginative labors. Orc is closely related to Rintrah, a name used for the first time in the Argument to Marriage, which seems to identify him with the wrath of the just man (MHH2.1–2, 19–20: 33), while in the “Song of Liberty” at the end of Marriage, the figure who will become Orc appears as the new-born terror or fire challenging “the starry king,” who grabs him by his “flaming hair” and hurls him into the western sea, but the terror returns from the east and “stamps the stony law to dust” (MHH25–27: 44–45). From a Biblical perspective, Rintrah would be John the Baptist and the Orc figure would be the Jesus Christ who was crucified but then resurrected, though in this case the resurrection would be the American and French Revolutions. However, as what Christopher Z. Hobson calls “the emblem of elemental resistance,” Orc incorporates Rintrah’s prophetic wrath into his own being as the condition of the power to produce social and political transformation. Hobson further elaborates that in the Lambeth prophecies of the 1890s, Blake seemed to imagine the impulse of the Orc figure as “adequate to accomplish the momentous changes he envisages in society, psyche, religion, and sexuality.” However, in the later poems, particularly Milton, he uses Orc to criticize “the inadequacy of mass elemental resistance” and to attack “elitist tendencies in revolutionary movements that turn against their own mass bases in submissive competition with established power.”91 In America and Europe, dated 1793 and 1794 respectively, Orc is identified with terror, which could associate him with the Jacobin terror of that period,

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though, as Hobson stresses, Blake did not simply justify or condemn the Reign of Terror but placed such “revolutionary events in the context of far deeper social and psychic changes.” Even after the revolution had failed, these “underlying processes … remained valid.”92 In effect, as Hobson argues persuasively in his reading of The Four Zoas, Orc’s error is the loss of wrath to Urizenic or Satanic meekness, which ironically amounts to the institutionalization of revolt, the process that betrayed the French Revolution.93 However, I would qualify this position somewhat. When Orc responds to Urizen’s efforts to restrain him in Zoas, he remarks that “When I rage my fetters bind me more” (FZ80.30: 356), suggesting that rage without compassion as its counterbalancing contrary may well have been what led to the extremes of the Jacobin terror and hence paved the way to Thermidor and eventually to the Napoleonic betrayal of the revolution. I am not suggesting, however, that Blake necessarily judged the Terror as it has largely been judged by history, including by some Blake scholars, who see the Jacobins and Robespierre as “worse than the monarchists they sought to depose in the name of the poor, harried Sans-culottes, and they were themselves destroyed.”94 Later in the 1790s, Bishop Watson criticized the falsehoods that can result from principles and conscience by referring to “a Robespierre, who massacres innocent and harmless women.”95 In his annotation, Blake called this view a wicked, contemptible lie and then added that a person can change their opinions but not their principles, and whoever claims to change a principle has merely disguised it and is therefore a dissembler.96 In Badiouian terms, a principle would be a point in a truth process and to change it—in the sense of erasing it rather than adapting or recontextualizing it—would betray that process. This hardly constitutes a defense of the Terror, but it suggests that Blake’s view was more complicated than contemporary scholars would take it to be. Sophie Wahnich has recently produced a compelling defense of the Terror as responding to democratic pressures and indeed as “a desperate and despairing attempt to constrain both political crime and the legitimate popular vengeance that could result from it.”97 Ironically, it may be that the Terror was a form of caution. During the reactionary Thermidor period that followed the Terror, one could not “voice one’s support for the constitution of 1793 and the revolutionary people without the risk of losing one’s life,” and those who did risk their lives included the insurgents of 1795 who associated that constitution with their demand for bread and were “bloodily repressed.”98 The 1789 Declaration of Rights and the later constitution were altered to eliminate the right of resistance to oppression and the duty of insurrection.99 Blake seems to

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have associated the name Robespierre with principle and understood, perhaps, that the principle he stood for—which was fundamentally democratic—had betrayed itself through excess, not in the sense that it was entirely wrong but in that it miscalculated the reaction to it that eventually suppressed the French multitude whose interests the principle was meant to express. According to one source, the official number of people guillotined throughout France during the Terror is 16,000, though the real number of executions in one form or another, over a year, is probably over 30,000.100 Those who remain shocked by these numbers rarely show much awareness of or interest in the 20,000–30,000 who were murdered or executed within a week during the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871.101 For Blake, Thermidor may have represented the betrayal of the multitude through the loss of the virtuous wrath that had driven the Terror, though that loss may have partly been the result of an excess of wrath, a refusal of forgiveness and dialogue. The Shadowy Female seems to be the manifestation of Orc’s submission to Urizenic law. In Zoas, she appears over Orc’s flaming presence and uses her expressions of sorrow and pain to subvert his rage and cause him to “lose himself in meekness” (FZ91.3–5: 363). The Shadowy Female is usually seen as the embodiment of conventional materialism, the thought of an objective nature that closes itself off from the infinity of truth and suppresses the force of imagination to transform human existence. In this sense, the Shadowy Female is thought that betrays itself. In pulling Urizen down into the world of generation, the thought of Orc—which, as his emanation, the Shadowy Female could be said to express—limits itself to what appears to be objectively possible in a fixed or unproductive natural order. In other words, in Spinozian terms, it limits itself to inadequate knowledge by refusing to imagine the possibility of another world. This error takes the form of an apparent gender division because the conviction that male and female are inevitable and fixed categories correlates with the belief that thought and imagination have no productive relation to physical existence. In effect, by surrendering to the state of error that Satan embodies, Orc transforms his contrary into his negation, or, in effect, Luvah as Orc and the Shadowy Female as Vala cease to represent the dialogical basis of real thought and simply embody the polar opposition of negations. The mildness that Orc assumes in this context betrays the principle that his terror once signified and points toward the Satanic logic of the false universal, which involves, as in Satan’s case, “making to himself Laws from his own identity” and then compelling others to serve him through submission

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and grateful deference (M11.10–11: 104). In historical terms, if one can accept Wahnich’s argument, the Terror that was driven by the desire of the multitude gives way to reaction that subordinates the multitude to a law that negates its desire. It is no accident that Jean Valjean, the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, acts on the demand for bread by stealing in the year 1796 and spends the rest of his life in a struggle with the law, embodied by its immovable agent Javert, who refuses to recognize the singularity of any human identity that cannot be reduced to moral and judicial categories. In effect, Satan, as the father of law, invents good and evil and posits himself as the God who authorizes these judgments. At the end of his song, the Bard introduces the story of Leutha, who claims responsibility for Satan’s sin. Indeed, she is Satan’s sin, or his daughter, as Sin was the daughter of Satan in Paradise Lost. However, though Leutha’s identity varies in Blake’s different works, I agree with Northrop Frye that in Milton she appears as Satan’s “emanation or imaginative world.”102 In Fearful Symmetry, Frye defined the emanation as “the total form of all the things a man loves and creates.”103 In Jerusalem, the intellectual dialogue in eternity that constitutes the highest form of human thought depends upon the exchange of emanations, through which individuals achieve transindividual understanding (J88.3–11: 246). Though emanations are both male and female, virtually all of the emanations in Blake’s works appear as female, with the significant exception of Shiloh, who expresses the thought behind the French Revolution. The term “thought” describes my understanding of the emanation in Blake’s work as long as one keeps in mind that, pace Spinoza, for Blake thought incorporates the imagination as the intuitive or visionary understanding—Spinoza’s knowledge of the third kind—that exceeds the limit of everyday rationality. Blake’s emanations usually appear as feminine forms because—aside from the gender stereotypes of his time that Blake never fully transcended—their appearance as detached beings expresses their separation from the form of humanity, which correlates with the emergence of the spectre as the detached form of rationality, usually represented as masculine. Bracher interprets Leutha as the expression of the Satanic quid pro quo metaphysics, which presupposes the homogeneity of individuals, with the result that Leutha wants to atone for Satan’s sin by substituting herself for Satan just as she wanted to express her love for Palamabron by substituting herself for Elynittria, his emanation. Homogeneity in this context means that each minute particular can be substituted for another without any betrayal of the ontological truth of singularity.104 Leutha’s separation from Satan derives from

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the rigidification of thought that becomes distinct from a subjective process or, to use Badiou’s phrase, from the infinite truth process. Further, the thought she expresses is the love for Palamabron, which should be able to interact with the thought of Palambron that finds expression in Elynittria—his self-love if you want, but self-love as the condition of compassion for others. That interaction becomes impossible when the truth of thought is understood as absolute but finite—that is to say, when truth has become doctrine that can be legislated as a law and, by naming the unnamable, subverts the infinity of truth. The unnamable in this context would be Elynittria as the thought of Palamabron’s compassion, what I have identified as his particular way of understanding pity. In effect, Leutha’s love of Palamabron negates Elynittria’s love, which means that Satan’s understanding of pity negates Palamabron’s, so that there can be no dialogical interaction between the two. Finally, the fact that Palambron’s emanation Elynittria appears to be separate from him suggests that Satan’s error is not simply Satan’s. When Leutha says that she “stupified the masculine perceptions” in Satan and “kept only the feminine awake” (M12.5–6: 105), she unintentionally expresses the error that masculine and feminine can ever be separated into rigid and reified categories without destroying their contrary relation to one another, which one could also understand as a deconstructed displacement of these conventional gender categories. For this reason, when Leutha flees from the assembly of eternals to Palamabron’s tent, which means that she solicits his compassion as the condition of forgiveness, she is received by Elynittria who takes away her arrows and bow—symbols of Satan’s phallic desire in thought, his understanding of sex as a weapon—and, soothing her with soft words, brings her to Palamabron’s bed. However, this apparent reconciliation between Satan’s false pity and Palamabron’s compassion still sustains the state of error, since, through Leutha’s interaction with Elynittria and Palambron, in dreams she gives birth to death as well as to Rahab and Tirzah, or natural religion and vulgar materialism, and to the institutional forms of knowledge that derive from these errors, associated with Cambridge and Oxford (M14.40–43: 107). Since Leutha dreamed these things, they are less hard facts than ideological perspectives that limit human understanding. Once Satan has emerged as the force of error in thought, the redemption of thought, which means the redemption of the emanations, requires the building of the world of generation, which can be achieved only through the full elaboration of the error, associated with Deism and the philosophical understanding of Newton and Locke, that colonizes thought in the Ulro world.

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The minute particulars of multitude Later in the poem, Milton’s emanation, Ololon, who embodies the thought of the multitude that Milton apparently misunderstood in his own work, cannot see or come to Golgonooza, the city of art or process of aesthetic understanding, without “passing the Polypus,” which means accepting mortality or the limitations of physical existence. Only the Saviour can pass through it without annihilation because he manifests the multitude from the perspective of eternity, “a Four-fold Vision,” or the totality of everything that has been thought and done (M35.19–24: 135). In effect, for the Saviour, there is no division between eternal art and mortal existence. Ololon, which sounds like “all alone,” remains detached from Milton as long as he misunderstands the true meaning of his own writing and the way he projected a false image onto the others in his life, his three wives and three daughters. Even more important, Ololon expresses the truth of Milton’s own subjectivity as the author of Paradise Lost and the other works. Just as Milton subordinated his wives and daughters to his arbitrary law, which was legitimated by patriarchal traditions, and which he then projected onto his image of God in Book III of Paradise Lost, he also subordinated the power or potentia of the multitude, the true form of humanity, to the arbitrary laws of his identity in a hierarchical social order. He failed to understand that the true author of Paradise Lost and his other works was the multitude, including his wives and daughters and all the other human beings who contributed to the formation of his thought and the truth it expressed. However, in order to redeem that thought, the truth that is his emanation, it must be born again— that is, it must embrace the death or mortality that is the condition of generation, without which thought can never find its true expression. For Blake, without coming to terms with generation and mortality, humanity cannot undergo its regeneration through the power of poetic genius that Golgonooza, or the city of art, manifests. The whole force of Milton and Jerusalem lies in the intellectual effort to redeem the emanations or thoughts of humanity, in order to bring them back into relation to the infinite truth process in which gender and other generalizing categories express but do not govern the singularities of human existence. I have insisted on the necessity of understanding thought as bound to a subjective process, but in Milton and Jerusalem it is necessary to distinguish the irreducible subject of truth, which can never be counted as one, from the selfhood, or the state that Satan embodies. When Milton announces that he “will go down

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to self annihilation,” he makes it clear that he cannot truly exist in eternity without doing two things: first, annihilating the rigid, categorical identity he derives from social law in a temporal context; and second, redeeming the true understanding of his own thought, manifested as the emanation he abandoned by reducing it to a passive understanding or reflection of his own particular existence. He fears that the Last Judgment could find him “unannihilate” (M14.22–23: 108). As Blake wrote around 1810, the Last Judgment is not something that takes place at the end of history but rather whenever a subject rejects error and commits itself to truth,105 which for Badiou would be the foundation of a truth process. Milton tells the eternals that in his selfhood he is Satan, the “Evil One” (M14.30: 108). However, evil, like Satan himself, has no real existence for Blake, and when Milton identifies Satan in this way, he indicates that he is still locked within the moral vocabulary of error. His first step toward self-annihilation is to enter his shadow, which he describes as “hermaphroditic: male & female” (M14.36–37: 108). Milton’s shadow is the projection of his thought, or rather the inversion of the truth of that thought. It amounts to the objectification and rigidification of thought by taking its effect in a temporal context for the totality of the thought itself, and hence, from Badiou’s perspective, destroying its infinity. The shadow covers or hides the truth, and when Blake qualifies it as hermaphroditic, he uses that term in a completely counterintuitive way to signify the constraining categories of sexual difference as a binary opposition through which the existence of one gender or sexual identity implies the negation of the other. The hermaphrodite is the human body understood exclusively through its apparent division into two sexes, a division that virtually erases the singularity of the minute particular or individual. In effect, Milton has to embrace or recognize his own error, and in doing so, he resurrects himself as the subject of a truth process, a subjectivity that is not exclusive to the historical Milton but rather expresses itself through the dialogical interaction of Milton’s thought with Blake’s intellectual and physical being. Through this transindividual process, which is the true meaning of self-annihilation, Milton recognizes for the first time the truth about his wives and daughters. Blake makes a distinction between the gender category “female” and the wives and daughters who were constrained by that category to the extent that it reduced them to representations or containers of meaning. Blake doesn’t deny the existence of sexual difference as one of the minute particulars that constitute human form, but he postulates the error of subordinating an incommensurable singularity to a social category that erases it. Such a rationalization produces a shadowy existence. In Blake’s mind, Milton

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now knows that he and his wives were human, but in order to express that humanity he must do battle with the error that his own work propagated, which is why he now wanders “thro Death’s Vale/In conflict with those Female forms” (M17.1–7: 110). Milton’s error is also Blake’s error, and the error of all those who live in Milton’s shadow, or who abide by the ontology of transcendence that his work projected onto the world. As soon as Milton enters his shadow, there is a brief exchange between the Shadowy Female and Orc that foregrounds the complex significance of Blake’s understanding of the category “humanity” and the nature of error. As Los, Urizen, and Tharmas witness Milton’s descent into the material world, which simply means that the truth of his thought has been resurrected in Blake, the split identity of the fourth Zoa, Luvah, appears again as the division between the Shadowy Female and Orc, or objectified material existence, on the one hand, and the power of thought and imagination trapped in a misunderstanding of material existence, on the other. While Blake is usually described as some kind of irrationalist, which would make him very different from Spinoza, he postulates the fall into error in terms that actually deconstruct the opposition between rational and irrational. In Four Zoas, Ahania, Urizen’s emanation, refers to Luvah’s primordial revolt and criticizes Urizen for giving the “immortal steeds of light to [Luvah’s] deceitful hands.” Those horses became intoxicated by Luvah’s wine, which obliterated the divine vision (FZ39.2–3, 6–7: 326–27). Later in the poem, Urizen associates his fall from the sublime throne with his intoxication by “the wine of the Almighty,” stolen by Luvah, to whom Urizen has transferred his power (FZ65.5–8: 344). In this context, the conflict between Urizen and Luvah anticipates the conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Nietzsche’s philosophy, although it more closely resembles the tension between reason and affects in Spinoza. In Jerusalem, Albion seems to accept the judgment of his sons, Hand and Hyle, that his daughters instructed Luvah on how to undermine the clarity and rationality of his thought or intellectual vision (J21.19–31: 166). Later, in a remarkable passage, Albion’s fall is associated with a vision of the “Prince of Light,” which should be Urizen when he is in harmony with the other Zoas, but as this figure appears with faded splendor, it becomes a shadow and then a “sweet entrancing self-delusion” before which Albion falls prostrate, in effect becoming subservient to his own projection, which soon reveals itself: “Luvah descended from the cloud” (J43.35–41, 56: 191–92). Luvah, in this context, is Albion’s passion or emotional existence that has taken over his rational faculty.

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In Milton, the Shadowy Female embodies the crippled vision of rational thought that limits its knowledge to empirical perception. The world she envisions is dominated by scarcity, as Jean-Paul Sartre might suggest, which is the origin of all human struggle, “both between man and his environment and between man and man.”106 Her garments are woven from human expressions of misery in conditions of poverty, sickness, imprisonment, and slavery. She intends to dominate the life and thought of every form of human existence, so that from infancy they will have to read and memorize her writings or doctrines in order to fill and justify a lifetime of famine, pestilence, and war. Her progeny, Rahab and Tirzah, express the crude determinism of religious doctrine and natural law over which thought and intellectual vision have no power. The Shadowy Female claims that she will present herself as human or in the image of God, but she imagines God as a mixture of both pity and cruelty, justified by the cover of holiness, so that she will decorate herself with “gold of broken hearts,” “precious stones of anxiety & care & desperation & death,” and other negative emotions. She does all of this to defend herself from the terror of Orc (M18.5–25: 111). In other words, the Shadowy Female is the raw embodiment of the fear of death, which is the psychological expression of material scarcity. Orc inspires terror in her because he appears to be bound down or imprisoned by the chains of the material world without the power of thought to transform that world. Insofar as Orc embodies the social desire that ignited the French Revolution, the betrayal of that revolution in the Napoleonic era induces the conviction that human desire can never transcend its material limitations. While the Shadowy Female illustrates the error of transforming the fear of death into the human essence, Orc compounds this error through his incomprehension of the Female as his own projection. He demands that she take on a female form instead of the human form because he shares her own misunderstanding of the nature of human existence, which he also sees as a cause of terror and associates with Satan (M18.26–30: 111). This fear of the human form, which is ultimately the manifestation of true individuality through social cooperation, is why Vala, the emanation of Luvah, has become the Shadowy Female in the first place, and Orc’s demand that she refuse the human form and assume a passive feminine form denies the sexual and ultimately intellectual autonomy of the other. Orc wants the female to limit her being to the erotic fantasy associated with Beulah so that she will function as an escape from masculine reality. Blake apparently believed that gender categories and other cultural expressions of sexual difference, when they are understood as expressions of essential being,

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misrepresent the truth of human identity. The intellectual perception of woman as the other who exists to complete the identity of the universal masculine subject produces a categorical division of being that postulates social hierarchy as the ontological ground of human existence. The Shadowy Female represents what all women have become in a patriarchal society, and Orc embodies the error of the human subject that imagines itself as imprisoned by the immovable laws of physical existence. As Orc addresses the Shadowy Female, Oothoon and Leutha hover over him as openings into the interior of Jerusalem and Babylon within the Shadowy Female herself (M18.39–42: 112). In the Bard’s song, Oothoon, who embodies the desire for sexual freedom, was placed as the guard of Leutha in Palamabron’s tent (M13.44: 107). In this context, both Oothoon and Leutha participate in the existence of the Shadowy Female to the extent that they mistakenly understand their own existence as subordinate to the existence of masculine identities. Sexual and any other form of freedom can be achieved only by subjects who liberate themselves from the binary logic of sexual difference (which also condenses within itself all the other hierarchical categories, including class differences) not through the homogenization of identities but through the understanding of human singularity, the minute particulars. At the same time, these two figures express the historical experience of women that produced the division between Jerusalem and Babylon, and all of these figures are contained by the Shadowy Female, who resides in the darkness of inexistence, something that is but cannot be represented. In effect, Oothoon is to Leutha as Jerusalem is to Babylon, or the desire for sexual freedom (Oothoon) is constrained by sexual jealousy (Leutha) as the vision of human freedom (Jerusalem) is constrained by the material limitations of human institutions and laws (Babylon). In the world of error, however, there are no correct visions, and even Los tries to block Milton’s descent into the material world (M17.34–36: 111). Initially, Los fails to understand Milton’s mission, which is ultimately to erase the division between thought and material existence. Though Los is usually identified as the power of imagination, in practical terms he is the embodiment of the creative force of human labor, without which the imagination has no direct effect on human existence. Consequently, as Nicholas Williams points out, he has “ambiguous status” as “the result of his inability to perceive Eternity after having engaged in an act of creation.”107 Or, as another critic puts it, Los is the guardian of a lost vision that he doesn’t actually possess himself,108 although I would qualify these views by suggesting that Los embodies the sense of loss as the manifestation of the eternal vision in the temporal world. As I suggested

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earlier, Los and all the Four Zoas, insofar as they have fallen out of relation to each other as constituents of the human form divine or Jesus, have become states, and as such they participate in the state of error that is Satan. Los, however, expresses the loss that results from the division of Urthona, his eternal form, into spectre and emanation. When Los attempts to block Milton’s path, he represents Blake’s own resistance to the radical revision of Milton’s thought, a revision of which Blake himself now becomes the agent or subjective support. The ultimate form of that resistance is Urizen who rises up to challenge Milton, but while he pours “icy fluid” onto the latter’s brain, Milton uses the “red clay of Succoth” to create a new body for Urizen, a new human form (M19.9–14: 112). The transformation of the rational power into a human form, which reunites infinite thought with physical being, could be considered the point of Blake’s Milton. Ololon, from the perspective of Milton’s selfhood, still remains all alone, and Milton must reclaim these combined female counterparts that the error of his vision sent into the realm of abstraction or Ulro. As I’ve suggested already, the issue here is not simply Milton’s patriarchal ideology that had the effect of reducing the relation between men and women—in this case, between Milton himself and his wives and daughters—to a master–slave relation. Milton’s selfhood is an abstraction of his real existence that derives from the misunderstanding of what his true autonomy would be. Ololon is not simply the congregation of women in his life, but the thought that expresses the being of the multitude. In the second book of Milton, the Starry Eight—the Seven Angels of the Presence “who appear in human history as seven progressive conceptions of God, ending with Jesus,”109 along with Milton in his Edenic existence—witness the descent of Ololon as the vision of multitudes who reach “from Ulro to Eternity” (M35.37–38: 135). In the first book, Ololon is referred to as a river in Eden where those dwell “who Milton drove/Down into Ulro.” Yet, as the passage continues, Ololon, referred to in the plural, laments that her multitudes drove Milton into Ulro. In this context, it would follow that Milton and his emanation, or the subject and its thought, are coextensive with one another, so that Milton’s action during the time of his historical existence parallels or finds mental expression in the error of his thought. Ololon, as the passage further notes, has not heard the Bard’s song that incited Milton to redeem himself through incorporation with the physical being of Blake, which suggests that, at this point, Blake has not fully articulated the intellectual truth that Milton’s work expressed, even without Milton’s knowledge (M21.15–17, 31–35: 115–16). As I’ve already noted, when Milton entered Blake’s

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foot—or rather when Blake subjected himself to Milton’s truth process—he didn’t really know who Milton was or the true meaning of his work. Milton’s descent and Ololon’s descent are two expressions of a singular event in historical time, the event of Blake’s reading of Milton, which necessarily incorporates into itself the transindividual thought of the multitude. Since the path of Ololon extends from Ulro to Eternity, and since Milton’s path follows the same trajectory, they are both in some sense expressions of the Saviour or Jesus, who is nothing but the multitude. The Seven Angels of the Presence make this clear in Book 2 when they narrate their own history as states “Compelld to combine into Form by Satan,” until the divine humanity, through freedom and cooperation, gave them a human form. In the margin of these lines, Blake inserted the incorrect form of the Hebrew word transliterated as “kerabim,” with the translations “as multitudes, Vox Populi” (M32.10–15: 131).110 In effect, the angels are the historical forms of the multitude that eventually constituted itself as a human form. The seventh angel or Eye of God is Jesus or the imagination of the fully realized multitude, which for Blake must be the voice of the people as the ontological foundation of political existence. It is Jesus whose being extends through every level of human existence, because nothing imagined or understood by human thought is exterior or superior to that existence. In other words, Ulro or hell is not the negation of imagination, though the state of error itself would lead us to think so, but rather another imaginative dimension of the infinite truth if rightly understood. Hence, just as Los beholds “the Cloud of Milton stretching over Europe,” the divine family responds to the same vision with the message to Ololon that inspires her to descend, which is also their own descent as they unite with her and with Jesus in the “Clouds of Ololon” (M21.36–60: 116).

The homoerotics of generic being Ololon expresses Milton’s thought not in the sense that she is the signifier that bears the meaning produced by the masculine subject as the father or source of all meaning, the truth beyond or transcending every material expression of thought. On the contrary, in her true form, Ololon is the multitude that manifests the unity of thought and physical existence, in the Spinozian sense, so that to act is to think and to think is to act. Ololon embodies the truth that is immanent to Milton’s physical and intellectual being, the truth that his life and

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works struggled to express. Ololon’s decision to descend is preceded by Blake’s reference to his unification with Milton, which concludes with his binding the vegetable world or material existence to his left foot in the form of a “bright sandal” that enables him “to walk forward thro’ Eternity” (M21.12–14: 115). Then, following the passage in which Ololon unites in her descent with the one man, Los descends to Blake and stands behind him, a “terrible flaming Sun.” Blake turns around in terror as Los stoops down to bind Blake’s sandals. Then Los kisses him and wishes him health until Blake becomes “One Man with him.” Los enters his soul so that his terrors now possess Blake, who nonetheless arises “in fury & strength” (M22.6–14: 116–17). Through his intersubjective engagement with Milton’s thought, Blake reconciles himself with his own physical existence; and the world of generation, of birth and death, is no longer a burden but the means, the sandal, that enables him to walk through eternity or to commit himself to the expression of infinite truth. Los’s descent means that Los himself, as the expression of Blake’s power of imagination, has resolved his resistance to Milton’s truth, and, by binding Blake’s sandals, recognizes the continuity between thought and physical being. Los–Milton–Blake, in this context, has undergone a last judgment through Ololon’s descent that reveals nothing less than the transindividual nature of the human essence. The visual expression of this apocalyptic moment is the image of Blake’s union with Los through the act of fellatio. In copies A and B, this image on plate 21 immediately follows the passage referenced above on plate 20 (plate 22 of Erdman). However, in copies C and D, this image comes at a climactic moment near the end of the poem, plate 47 (Figure 2). W. J. T. Mitchell and Hobson suggest that plate 47, in its new context, contrasts dramatically with the different image of homosexual contact on plate 45 of copy D, which is 41 in copy C.111 Plate 45 provides the image of Urizen’s collapse before Milton’s naked beauty, which has been on display since after the Bard’s song when Milton “took off the robe of promise, & ungirded himself from the oath of God,” visually represented in plate 16 of copy D. As Essick and Viscomi note, the promise and the oath refer to the thirty-nine articles of the Anglican Church that Milton “had to subscribe to as a Cambridge graduate.”112 More generally, by refusing the laws and regulations of organized religion, Milton discards both narrow materialism and rationalism in order to reveal the human form divine, which means that he no longer seeks “his heavenly father … beyond the skies” (M20.32: 114). Just as Christ cast off his burial clothes at the moment of his resurrection, Milton does something similar in the process of his own regeneration, though in this case he defeats death

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Figure 2 Milton, copy D, plate 47. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2015 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

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by surrendering to it, at least with respect to his particular body.113 Ironically, by embracing the eternal death of that body, he reveals its eternal beauty; and before that beauty, Urizen faints and buries his head in Milton’s genitalia, an act signifying the transformative power of generation. In plate 45, the expression on Milton’s face is one of enduring patience, while he resuscitates the virtually impotent or passive Urizen. By contrast, when Blake buries his head in Los’s genitalia in plate 47, Los’s arms are raised in a gesture that suggests ecstasy or uninhibited joy, which in this image cannot be distinguished from sexual joy. In the text preceding this image in copy D, Milton stands before Ololon’s eternal form, and as Blake observes, their acts inspire wonder in him even though he does not fully understand them (M40.2–3: 141). Although these acts are not specifically designated as sexual, one could associate these words with the illumination on plate 42 of copy D. As Stephen Behrendt speculates, this image can be interpreted in more than one way, but the eagle hovering over the man and woman in a postcoital embrace possibly stands for Blake himself. In this perspective, the man would be both Milton and Albion, and the woman Ololon and Jerusalem, while the eagle signifies Blake’s status as a visionary prophet like John of Patmos.114 Since the vision is postcoital, Blake’s image forces the reader to imagine the acts that may have preceded what we see, suggesting a polymorphous perversity that even Blake is challenged to imagine. The two fullplate images that follow this one depict homosexual contact from two different perspectives, suggesting that the liberatory force of sexuality is associated with “a visual image of moral transgression,” as Hobson notes.115 In the plate preceding 47 of copy D, Ololon recognizes that Milton’s ontology of transcendence in Paradise Lost and other major works inadvertently anticipated and supported Deism or natural religion, which she calls an “impossible absurdity,” while imagining herself as its cause (M40.9–14: 141). Then, as Ololon weeps for the “little-ones,” or the minute particulars, that she imagines will be annihilated in Milton’s self-annihilation, Rahab Babylon appears “in Satan’s bosom” as the manifestation of moral virtue that derives, in part, from a division of the sexes, which in turn supports or legitimates the other social divisions: “A Female hidden in a Male, Religion hidden in War.” The division between male and female not only conduces the religious ideologies that become the conditions of acts of war, but the innumerable nations of Ulro and other categorical social divisions ironically cause the intermingling of natural forces and the erasure of the singular being of minute particulars through generalization. Rahab Babylon is a shining monster, “A Dragon red & and hidden Harlot” (M40.20–21: 141–42).

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Blake explicitly aligns his vision with that of John of Patmos, but Blake is able to see beyond the hermaphroditism of rigid sexual divisions and regulations toward a sexual understanding that rejects categories in favor of irreducible singularities, what Badiou would name the elements of a generic set. They are generic because they express the raw force of being in itself. In other words, the truth conveyed by images of heterosexual or homosexual love lies precisely in the particularity of the passion and not in some abstract concept or social regulation that it may seem to express and legitimate. Ololon’s error is not that she has detached her sexual being from the more generalized being of Milton as the father of the law. On the contrary, her error, which is Milton’s error, is mistaking physical difference for the expression of categorical being. Hobson explains Blake’s use of the term “hermaphroditic” in this way: “Not transgression but sexual orthodoxy … is hermaphroditic, because in suppressing the inferably dual impulses present in everyone, it forces female to hide within male, and male within female. Sexual transgression, in contrast, becomes a source of highest moral heroism.”116 The last phrase is surely a correct reading of the Blakean perspective, but I would push the significance of Blake’s counterintuitive understanding of “hermaphroditic” further to imply the deconstruction of any sexual category. The appearance of a dual impulse is itself the effect of social regulation, which forces the particularity of any human desire outside of the social norm into the category of inexistence that finds expression in the world of appearance as repression. The female within the male, the male within the female, are themselves expressions of the normative categories, since repression is the governing logic of the heterosexual norm that extends even into the unconscious being of the subject. Milton responds to Ololon’s selfaccusation and fear of the process of self-annihilation with the assertion that the annihilation he seeks will not destroy the minute particulars but redeem them: everything that can be should be annihilated in order to liberate the children of Jerusalem from slavery. In this passage, Blake explains the relation between a negation and the contraries by insisting that the negation—or human rational power that has become rigidified as the spectre—is a “false body” or delusion that covers the “Immortal Spirit.” The spirit is the transindividual understanding that can see beyond selfhood though self-examination, which could be the deconstructive power of thought (M40.30–37: 142). This passage comes immediately before plate 47, which offers a visual enactment of a sexual desire that cannot be reduced to or governed by the heterosexual norm. By contrast with plate 45, which suggests a repressed relation to homosexual desire

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in Urizen’s passivity and the absence of joy in Milton’s facial expression, plate 47 foregrounds two active subjects who physically unite with uninhibited force. Fellatio becomes the figure of passionate intellectual exchange or collaboration beyond the law and repressive order of the social categories. What can and must be annihilated are the categories insofar as they have become natural laws that erase the singularities of being. These categories are the effects of negation. For example, in the heterosexual norm that Milton’s own patriarchal ideology fostered, the meaning of relationship is the erasure of one singularity by another, or 1 + 1[–1] = 1. In a relationship between contraries, neither party surrenders their singularity, so that 1 + 1 = 2, though the two can only sustain their relationship through acts of mutual forgiveness that are critical to intellectual dialogue and social collaboration. Selfhood is itself a social category that one could associate with the Sartrean concept of seriality since it erases the singularity of being with the dualistic structure of hegemonic social identity, by which each individual sees itself as the reflection of its imaginary other, as in the case of individuals standing in line to get on a bus: “Everyone is the same as the Others in so far as he is Other than himself.”117 In other words, I am as I imagine others to be and as I introject their image of me through the mediation of a category that transcends all of us. The serial self negates the singular, incommensurable being even as it postulates a legal concept of individuality that says, I am unique in precise imitation of all the others. The contrary constitutes the disjunctive relationship between irreducible, immeasurable beings that are generic only in the sense that they are not governed by any general category. Furthermore, the truth of this being is not bound by a particular physical existence or the mind that corresponds to it. The relation of contraries involves the production of thought that is transindividual and hence irreducible to the finite existence of a particular body. Still, Blake doesn’t hypothesize some sort of androgynous utopia as the solution to the contradictions of gender. Nor does he suggest that there is something evil in the categories of reason, the logical ordering of the world, or, as Badiou might put it, the logical conditions of the degrees of appearance in a given world. Only when these categories cease to express common notions and become rigid prescriptive laws do they become negations in Blake’s sense. With regard to gender, one has to distinguish between the singular being of any particular human body and the categorical understanding of such a body as one in a series. Furthermore, when Ololon responds to Milton’s great speech on plates 40–41 of the Erdman edition, she refers to the feminine portion of

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both herself and Milton, and then comments, “Altho’ our Human Power can sustain the severe contentions/Of Friendship, our Sexual cannot: but flies into the Ulro” (M41.29–30, 32–33: 143). When Ololon despairingly speaks these words, she is in the form of a 12-year-old virgin (M36.17: 137). The reference to herself as the feminine portion reflects the categorical perspectives of Ulro, even though she has begun to remember the perspective of eternity when she asks Milton if they are not contraries and wonders how they were led to become each other’s negation in the “Wars of Death.” She recognizes that they are in the “Void Outside of Existence” that can become a womb in order to generate new forms of being. She concludes with the recognition that she and all the multitude must go with Milton to eternal death because death of the particular body itself conditions the immortality of thought (M41.34–42.2: 143). To the extent that Ololon embodies the alienated thought of Milton, she expresses Milton’s understanding of sexual difference and the sexual relation during his historical existence. In other words, our perception of the empirical world is determined by our intellectual understanding, and Milton’s understanding of gender was shaped by a binary logic that formulated difference as negation, so that the being of man depended on a negative perception of the being of woman. In such a binary logic, difference is negative, since the existence of one term necessarily excludes the existence of the other, or, in political terms, one category subsumes the other and subordinates its being to the existence of the One. As I noted earlier, in this case 1 + 1[–1] = 1. As Claire Colebrook comments, in Blake’s epics “sexual difference … provides the figure through which the problem of the unified whole of ‘man’ is negotiated.”118 Colebrook draws heavily on Deleuze, though she largely ignores his work on Spinoza and rejects Badiou on the basis of a very superficial reading. Her perspective differs from my own in postulating difference for Blake as a positive term that must be asserted against “‘hermaphroditic forms’ or political bodies … that create indifference.”119 I would argue, after Badiou, that Blake understands the truth of sexual difference as a subtractive or generic category—in effect, a category that subverts the categories of everyday perception. Blake’s void outside of existence could be construed as the empty set, which for Badiou is “the proper name of being-qua-being,” though its local expression within any given world—that is, with respect to appearance—is the inexistent, something that is but does not appear because it has no perceptual value in that world.120 Badiou insists that the inexistent in a given world of appearance has a univocal value, so that there can be “one (and only one) inexistent.”121 This means

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that everything that inexists in a situation has the same value, which is zero. In the world of the historical Milton, the world that produced not only Paradise Lost but also Hobbes’s Leviathan, the hypothetical name of the inexistent (and this can only be hypothetical until an event and a truth procedure forces the existence of the inexistent) could be woman as an autonomous subject or the multitude as the constitutive power of society or homosexual love—for in that world these terms, while not synonymous semantically, are nonetheless equivalent expressions of the minimal degree of appearance. In a very real sense, Ololon expresses not only Milton’s relation to women but his relation to the multitude and to all the forms of sexual joy and love that the potestas of his God forced into inexistence. At the end of Jerusalem, the Four Zoas, or states of humanity, appear to rejoice “in Unity” (J98.21–22: 257). Still, one has to keep in mind the words at the beginning of The Four Zoas that “a Perfect Unity/Cannot Exist” (FZ3.4–5: 300). In Jerusalem, Blake locates the “Sanctuary of Eden”—or the eternal truth about human existence—in the circumference rather than the center, which means that nothing is privileged: “every Minute Particular is Holy.” Furthermore, in eternity, or the perspective of infinite truth, sexual love expresses itself polymorphously without any natural center or law, it is never a “High Priest entering by a Secret Place” (J69.41–44: 223). Homosexuality or any form of sexual expression is holy to the extent that it produces joy and enhances the singularity of the human individual through its interaction with another individual. As Spinoza insisted, joy is the affect by which the intellect enhances its own perfection or reality (C 501; E3.11: 285), which also means that the body enhances its perfection. As Matheron argues, for Spinoza sexuality in all of its forms is potentially joyful, and nothing prohibits him “from admitting a nongenital sexuality,” or, for that matter, an “infinite diversity of sexual behaviors.”122 Later in Jerusalem, Blake writes that the circumference is inside and expands to an infinite degree, while the “Selfish Center” is outside. There can be no complete unity, in the conventional understanding of that term, without a center, but the center is the property of the eternal states, which Blake now explores because understanding them is necessary to the quest for truth though they are never identical with the truth (J71.7–9: 225). Hence the reconciliation at the end of Jerusalem is not a conventional unity. When the “Four Faces of Humanity” converse together “in Visionary forms dramatic,” they walk through eternity as one human form because each face is reflected and clearly seen in the others (J:98.38–40: 258). This appearance in eternity, Blake’s Jesus, is itself the

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vision of a circumference without center that expands to infinity. Jesus embodies the cooperation of the minute particulars, the transindividual singularities that constitute the generic set, and their reflections in one another do not produce a serial identity but rather constitute a truth that remains irreducible to the logical categories and predications that govern the states. The image of fellatio on plate 47 of Milton concretely depicts the reflection of each singularity in the other through a practice of love that refuses moral categories and postulates a transindividual relationship that does not negate but enhances the power of the individual.

Forgiving our Satan In the same passage from Jerusalem, the eternal human forms produce “exemplars” or models of memory and thought, creating new forms of space and time through the imagination (J98.30–32: 258). These historical visions are what Badiou might call transcendental legislations of particular worlds. Such a legislation becomes evil or Satanic only if one confuses a world with a state, the delusion of a permanent condition, that becomes the ground for “Refusing all Definite Form,” as Urizen does in Milton. Albion is slain in that poem because he envies definite or living form, which is not a Platonic ideal but a singularity that is necessarily generic in Badiou’s sense (M3.1–2, 9: 96–97). Albion’s fall is that he takes the state he himself has created as the limit of his own existence. As Colebrook stresses, “It is the judgement that the world is fallen that constitutes the fall”123 and thereby transforms a concrete but changing world into a permanent state. In one of the greatest passages in Milton, Blake locates himself within Satan as the latter looks on Milton as the form of his own “sleeping humanity.” Blake stands in Satan’s bosom and beholds its desolations: “A ruind Man: a ruind building of God not made with hands.” The passage is dominated by images of a hardened world, with “pits & declivities flowing with molten ore & fountains/ Of pitch & nitre.” Angels and emanations, or the human forms, are turned into machines themselves when their powers of thought are subordinated to labor and their naked beauty “blackend” in the interest of expanding “stupendous ruins” and when the legitimation of this process comes in the form of a religion, “Mystery Babylon,” that substitutes for the clarity of imaginative vision the rule of mysterious doctrines that incite humans to war in the name

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of simulacra, or false universals, like the white race, the one true religion, Western civilization, human nature, and so forth. Religion poisons humanity when thought is constrained by dogmatism that substitutes the negation of the other for the infinite truth process, which is all positive. It binds the affirmative vision of humanity, or Jerusalem, in chains (M38.10, 15–27: 139). In Jerusalem, Blake notes that he has astonished his friends who nonetheless forgive his “wanderings” in the struggle to “open Eternal Worlds … the Worlds of Thought” (J5.16–20: 147). At least one critic has read this passage as Blake’s confession of error (“wandering” is the primary sense of the Latin verb errāre) through acts of self-assertion that have strained his friendships.124 At the end of the passage, Blake calls on the Saviour to annihilate Blake’s own selfhood (J5.22: 147). In other words, the risk of thought that goes beyond the current order of knowledge and common sense is error that would betray the truth itself. Blake can stand in Satan and behold his desolations and compassionately identify with a ruined humanity because it is his own humanity that he witnesses. God made this humanity, but God is the human imagination and its power of thought. In Milton, the rest of the passage on Satan’s ruined humanity consists of images that, as Jacob Bronowski recognized long ago, allude to the Industrial Revolution, and Bronowski mildly criticized Blake for “blaming in the machine,” and presumably in the scientific understanding that lies behind it, “the evil of which it is merely the tool.”125 However, the William Blake who understood the value of the machines he used to create art would perhaps have understood perfectly well that machines, like Los’s hammer, are merely tools, and that the world they produce becomes a form of affliction that ruins humanity only when the imagination fails to grasp its own power to understand and transform that world through affirmative thought and action. Even the apparent negativity of the contraries is positive in the sense that, through mutual forgiveness, the tension of the contraries induces greater understanding and protects the infinity of truth. As Negri writes with reference to Spinoza, “Constitutive thought possesses the radical character of negation but transforms it and puts it to use by grounding it in real being.”126 If the states are themselves eternal, that only means that they are finite but irreversible points in an infinite process, finite expressions of the eternal, and only when we imagine them as something else, only when we take any given world as the only possible world, do we fall into the error of imagining the fall. But mutual forgiveness cannot simply be forgiving our contrary but must entail forgiveness of the negation that the contrary can

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all too easily become in the intellectual wars of eternity. Mutual forgiveness sustains the relation of contraries that always risks the fall into negation, or the state of Satan. Therefore, what must be forgiven is the state of Satan, even though this act of forgiveness necessarily destroys Satan, at least to the extent that it raises the human subject out of that state. But such an act is not the negation that betrays the relation of the contraries but is the negative force of constitutive thought, for Negri, and imaginative vision, for Blake. Forgiveness restores the contraries by exposing the truth about Satanic negation—that it does not exist, or rather that it can be made to inexist through acts of constitutive understanding. In Jerusalem, Blake places the phrase “Minute Particulars” in apposition to the phrase “Mutual Forgivenesses,” which would seem to make these terms virtually interchangeable (J38.61: 185). The immeasurable singularities of being can transcend their erasure by categories only through acts of mutual forgiveness, which means effectively that the subject of a truth process forgives or gives ground to the very force that would negate it—in Badiou’s terminology, either the reactionary or the obscure subject—in order bring it back into the process of dialogical exchange.127 As Blake notes in the preface to the third chapter of Jerusalem, there is no friendship without the continual forgiveness of sins (J52: 201). Without such forgiveness, love itself surrenders to eternal death, and the force behind Los’s hammer, the force of its creative power, is “eternal Forgiveness” (J64.24 215; 88.50: 247). However, the power of forgiveness is not a matter of compromise or the betrayal of a truth process, nor does it concede the relativism of truth, as Jones seems to imply. Forgiveness does require the recognition that the power of truth is a force that must be deployed with caution and that, to repeat Blake’s perspective, if you fail to communicate a truth, that failure lies as much in the expression of the speaker as in the resistance of the listener, since truth cannot be expressed in a way that can be understood and not be believed. For these reasons, when Milton confronts Satan, while Blake stands in Satan’s bosom, he does not mean to annihilate him in the conventional sense of the negation of the other who opposes your point of view, but rather to annihilate himself, his selfhood. If he were to do the other, he would simply become Satan’s pawn, a covering or new version of Satan until someone comes along and covers Milton in the same way (M38.31–32: 139). In one sense, Satan is Milton’s spectre, or the rigid, doctrinaire dimension of his own thought that he must cast off, but Satan is also the image of this spectre that Milton projects onto others, the limit of his imagination and understanding of others. By annihilating that image in

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himself rather than the other whose existence is mediated by that image, Milton engages in a productive negation that expands his understanding of the other as a minute particular or singularity. The other ceases to be a negation and becomes a contrary. Naturally, Satan resists this self-annihilation—and since Blake stands in Satan, he also resists the thought his own poetry suggests—because the subject’s conviction of a truth always runs the risk of error or betrayal should the subject mistake that conviction for universal law that requires submission rather than dialogical exchange. Hence, Satan sees himself as a transcendent God who can dictate justice (M38.51, 54: 139–40). His goal is to remake the world and human existence in his own image, a false unity that would oppose mercy or mutual forgiveness and destroy Jesus or the multitude by calling it a delusion (M39.1–2: 140). What Satan cannot endure is the one who is not one—that is to say, not one in a way that generalizes all the human singularities into an abstraction of themselves. Blake’s ontology extends to his understanding of what counts in art when he argues that distinct form in art is always particular and never general.128 After Urizen faints in terror on plate 45 of copy D, Ololon realizes that Milton’s self-annihilation gives life to his enemies (M40.8: 141). You defeat Satan and the perversion of reason that articulates itself as one universal law by forgiving yourself and others for the errors of thought that blind and contract their understanding of the infinite truth process. Furthermore, pace Hobson, Blake recognizes that the arbitrary use of terror to defeat the forces of oppression and tyrannical law requires the construction of another tyrannical law, which only reinstalls the state of Satan with a new covering. As Milton sums up, the purpose of Satan’s religion and laws is to instill in human beings the fear of death, while Milton’s new purpose teaches people to despise death and to annihilate the selfhood by “laughing to scorn” the terrors that arise from erecting law as a transcendent power over humanity (M38.38–42: 139). Like Spinoza, Blake knows that the key to power as excessive potestas, the power that negates the potentia or constitutive power of the multitude, is the fear of death. Because of this fear, thought is crushed by power, which requires Los to put both the oppressor and the oppressed into his wine press for regeneration (M25.5–6: 121). In his great speech on plates 40–41 of Erdman—plates 46 and 48 in copy D with the image of Blake’s physical communion with Los on plate 47 in the middle—Milton effectively redeems the contraries, which means the power of thought, by washing off everything that is not human. His self-annihilation is the defeat of Satan within himself. Milton criticizes the abstract rationality

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that Blake associates with the works of some of the founders of modern science—Bacon, Locke, and Newton—not because he is against the intellectual understanding that even these men were able to achieve but because, in their names, memory and positivist observation came to be substituted for the power of thought: in their systems, to use Spinoza’s terms, knowledge of the first and second kind virtually negated knowledge of the third kind, which is intuitive or imaginative understanding. By transforming the thought of these men into universal laws, the culture of the eighteenth century also produced poetry and principles of art that Blake rejected in his criticisms of Pope and Dryden, on the one hand, and Reynolds, on the other. Such a world attributes madness to any poetry and art founded on inspiration and privileges mechanical aesthetic practices that operate within the boundaries of a strictly rule-governed discipline. In art as well as politics, Blake’s Milton rejects the idiot Questioner because he only questions and never answers. Of course, in this speech, Milton proceeds to associate this figure of the skeptic with the ulterior motives of envy, despair, condescension, and, by implication, what Nietzsche would call ressentiment. In the practice of thought, when you formulate a question, you have to take the risk of answering it, even if you must also remain open to the possibility that in that very act you may fall into error through the conviction that makes truth possible. The Idiot Questioner, or Badiou’s reactionary subject, instills doubt in the name of knowledge because, from this perspective, any expression of understanding that does not fall within the parameters of what we already know must be subjected to doubt as a way of validating the current state of knowledge (M41.1–20: 142). In other words, this position confuses knowledge with truth. In the end, for Blake, the only antidote to the necessity of error is not law, which only consolidates and generalizes the error, but the relation of contraries that can lead to the separation of truth from error.

The name of the common is Jerusalem In Milton’s speech, the reactionary or obscure subjects destroy Jerusalem and murder Jesus (M41.21–22: 142). They murder Jesus not by denying his divinity or his resurrection as they are presented in the New Testament, but rather by erasing the singularities of existence through the abstractions and generalizations of conventional thought. In Milton and Jerusalem, Blake leaves the conventional understanding of Christ’s divinity and resurrection almost completely out of his

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account because, just as Milton must embrace the eternal death of his particular body as the condition of his eternal life in a transindividual human form, at the end of Jerusalem the redemption or reconstitution of the human form requires that one drive “outward the Body of Death in an Eternal Death & Resurrection” (J98.20: 257). From this perspective, far from something to be feared, death itself participates in the process of regeneration (J98.30, 33–34: 258). The intellectual worlds that Blake means to open through the writing of his great poems do not refer to a spiritual bodiless metaphysical realm that transcends human existence but rather to the immanent expression of that existence. That’s why the premise of Jerusalem, in which Blake explores the redemption of the multitude through the redemption of the human thought that Jerusalem herself embodies, is Milton, which demonstrates the intersubjective nature of human thought that nonetheless always corresponds to a contemporary physical existence—Milton’s existence in the thought and physical being of Blake. Milton’s thought, which exists in his poetry, is regenerated through the intellectual labor of Blake who participates in the truth process of the imagination that assumes the symbolic name of Los. For Blake, the Holy Ghost is not a transcendent being but the thought that derives from “Mental Studies & Performances.” Art and science express the true human existence, and hell is ignorance. Hence, the production of knowledge creates Jerusalem, but knowledge is not just an objective fact but a creative vision of human possibility that can be made into a reality through labor or work. From this perspective, those who despise knowledge—or the free inquiry that leads to truth, a critical vision that breaks through standardized knowledge that has become an oppressive fiction—are the enemies of God— the only God who is not a fantasy or a tool of oppression (J77: 231–32). In any case, for Blake knowledge is not a rule-governed process because truth is beyond any rule. Therefore, poets who establish and follow specific rules create a false concept of poetry in order to destroy poetry. Furthermore, Blake associates poetic conventions with social conventions, including the conventions of sexual difference, “the Sexual Garments” that actually hide the truth and beauty of singular human forms (M41.23, 25–26: 142). On the penultimate plate of Milton, Ololon in the form of a Virgin divides with a dolorous “shriek” into a “Double Six-fold Wonder” (M42.34: 143). The image of the Virgin Ololon, as several critics have suggested, is the image of a conventional and pure feminine identity, one that essentializes the categories of sexual difference.129 In the world of opinions and common sense—that is to say, the realm of error in the particular world in which Blake finds himself, which he

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associates with the Polypus or material existence that does not fully recognize the power of thought—Ololon has to assume a conventional feminine identity in order to descend into Blake’s garden and become visible. After she steps into the Polypus and becomes the twelve-year-old virgin, it may seem that Blake recognizes this image as an illusion (M36.17–20: 137). Despite some confusing grammar in this passage, it seems clear that Ololon—at least in her eternal form as the multitude—knows that this particular feminine identity is a Satanic delusion that supports Blake’s own limited understanding at a particular point in time. Blake reveals this understanding when he asks Ololon to enter his cottage in order to comfort his “Shadow of Delight,” the wife whose fatigue and sickness perhaps suggest that she has been overwhelmed by Blake’s visionary practices (M36.31–32: 137). Just as Blake did not know that Milton had entered him until enough time had passed to allow for his understanding, he also confuses his initial perception of Ololon with a conventional feminine identity that would nurture and comfort his own limited understanding of his ailing wife. Ololon ignores this request as she explains the real purpose of her descent. At the end of the poem, when Ololon divides and virtually explodes the conventional identity that Blake has projected onto her, she becomes the expression of the multitude that Milton failed to recognize as the true image of divinity during his historical existence. She shrieks because true knowledge and understanding are painful since they challenge opinions or common sense, the encyclopedia of knowledge that has been established by everyday practices. Her pain and suffering at this moment are really Blake’s as he incorporates the transindividual thought that the poem Milton has struggled to express. Then Ololon descends to him again, only this time into the fire of his intellect with “clouds of blood, in streams of gore, with dreadful thunderings” (M42.8–10: 143). These images articulate Blake’s historical existence during a revolutionary period that has transformed and regenerated human thought. Ololon is accompanied by the Seven Angels of the Presence—all the states of human history—as well as Milton himself, now become one with Jesus, who, as I have argued, is the generic set of all human particulars or singularities. Around Milton’s body, Ololon’s clouds fold as a “Garment dipped in blood/Written within & without in woven letters: & the Writing/Is the Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression:/A Garment of War” (M42.10–14: 143). In effect, Ololon now embodies the thought of the multitude in Blake’s world, though the fact that she is written within and without suggests that, in this case, the signifier remains indistinguishable from the signified, which is why the Revelation she expresses

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is literal. In political terms, Ololon, like Jerusalem, embodies the reality of democracy as the ontological foundation of human existence. Nonetheless, her expression in the material world where Blake still exists signifies revolutionary war, because the ontological condition she manifests must appear savage and monstrous to the common sense of that world (M42.15: 143). In this context, Jesus enters Albion’s bosom as the condition of his regeneration and the regeneration of the true thought he should have embodied—namely, Jerusalem. But at this moment, as the Zoas attempt to blow the four trumpets that would summon humanity back to the knowledge of its own truth, Blake collapses and virtually returns to his mortal condition with his wife trembling at his side (M42.25–28: 143). For the moment, his imagination has reached its limit, as he is not yet ready for the thought to which the writing of his poem has brought him, though he will explore the greater consequences of that thought as he writes his other masterpiece, Jerusalem. In the last lines of the poem, Oothoon weeps over the multitude while Los hears the cry of the poor in London, which incites his anger (M42.32–35: 144). Milton ends with the image of a human harvest, which is the process of social revolution that once and for all will express the truth of the “Vintage” or essence of nations (M43.1: 144). On the final plate of Milton, plate 50 of copy D, we see the naked image of Ololon between the image of a man and a woman wrapped in vegetable or organic forms. The man and woman could be Blake and his Shadow of Delight, who witness their true existence in the naked beauty of Ololon. For Blake, naked beauty is not simply nudity but the human form that has shattered the categories of social perception, including categories of class, sexuality, and gender. This final plate of Milton corresponds with plate 92 of Jerusalem, in which Jerusalem, though not naked, arises in freedom from a world divided into nations and, presumably, genders. These categories have been shattered by the thought of human singularity that undermines such social divisions because it rejects the predications that articulate them. Earlier in the poem, Albion recalls the time when Jerusalem embodied the common desire or thought of all humanity, the time when with common love every nation walked in London and London in every nation, because “Albion coverd the whole Earth, England encompassd the Nations” (J24.42–44: 170). One could read this line as a sign of Albion’s fallen state because, in the fashion of European imperialist thought, he generalizes British national identity as the norm of all nations and, to that extent, detaches himself from the infinite thought that refuses such categories.130 However, as Makdisi recognizes, even within his particular historical location, Albion experiences

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“memory-like glimpses” that are really “prophetic glimpses of a future,” and this future is the infinite truth process that Jerusalem embodies.131 Blake understood that you do not adequately address the infinite truth by constructing some kind of general category that would appear to embrace all humanity through abstraction. On the contrary, the common or true universal must be located in the minute particulars, and so instead of generalizing he deconstructed his own particular location by insisting that the truth of England’s or Albion’s identity lies in the singularity of each and every other nation, as they are all composed from the singularities of the multitude. Jerusalem embodies the thought of this singularity, the thought or understanding from which Albion and all nationstates have become alienated. On plate 20 of Jerusalem, she addresses Vala, or her own physical being and beauty that has become alienated from the thought of its immanent cause. Albion had witnessed the unity of thought and physical being when he found Jerusalem in the arms of Vala, but he misunderstood that relation which led him to rend Vala’s veil, which means in effect to divorce physical sexuality from thought, hence creating the dual images of woman as either virgin or whore. This division leads to the abstraction of human existence, which is why Jerusalem begs Vala not to slay her “little ones,” her “infant loves & graces” (J20.27–28: 165). In this passage, Vala is the virgin because Jerusalem has been reduced to the general category of woman as whore, according to the misogynist logic that says all women are whores because all women are potential property in the marketplace, except for my woman who is my property and therefore no longer in the marketplace. In effect, Jerusalem speaks out for the minute particulars, her little ones, including all particular women and men. On plate 23, Albion accuses her of reconstituting Vala’s veil, which suggests that she protects the minute particulars of natural existence against Albion’s categorical and moral certainty. However, Albion takes the veil and turns it into a law, the natural law that effectively subordinates minute particulars to the conceptual categories of Newtonian science and the moral codes of religion. To Albion, Vala and Jerusalem become “Two bleeding Contraries equally true,” which suggests that they are fantasies of Beulah, ideological categories rather than expressions of human singularity (J24.3: 169). On plate 39 of Jerusalem, Blake explains that Jerusalem is the generic name of thought itself, since humans connect intellectually to other humans through their emanations, which is Jerusalem or the transindividual thought in them. Vala as her shadow is the objectified world created by a form of rationality that has been separated from such imaginative thought (J39.38–40: 187). In effect,

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Jerusalem is the common thought, the common desire, that corresponds with the physical existence of not only Albion but also the Saviour or Jesus Christ who contains the physical existence of the multitude. Hence Jerusalem is the thought of the multitude, in both senses: the construction of the multitude’s intellectual interactions, and the expression of the multitude’s existence as the generic set of human singularities. Later Jerusalem explains that she cannot be Albion’s wife because the minute particulars, whose thought she embodies, are all equally holy, and belong only to God (J45.44–45: 195). She cannot be an empirical object, which is equivalent to a form of property, because as the generic set of all minute particulars she belongs to everyone—because everyone is God. For Blake, spirit and matter are two expressions of the imagination, which is the divine vision or what Spinoza would call immanent being. When they are divided, according to a dualist logic, they become a repressed desire for freedom (Jerusalem) and an oppressive material existence (Albion), who projects onto Jerusalem the image of his possessive desire (Vala). On plate 60, human slaves, who manifest the exploited condition of the multitude, sing the song of the Lamb, which suggests that they are the minute particulars of the Saviour or Jesus—the transindividual voice of the immanent God—and that their appeal to Jerusalem is the demand for true liberty. “Why wilt thou rend thyself apart, Jerusalem?,” they sing, because their desire and their freedom have been alienated from them by Albion’s state and Vala’s morality (J60.22: 210). Indeed, on plate 69, the final formation of the masculine category—“all the Males combined into One Male”—produces a raw materialism of “Reasoning Doubt Despair & Death” that devours “Jerusalem from every Nation of the Earth” (J69.1–5: 223). Albion’s error, like Milton’s error, is his conviction that his physical existence and his thought are ontological negations of one another, and the result is the betrayal of his imagination, or intuitive understanding, that would liberate him and the masses who identify with him from the conviction that whatever is is all that can be and that the power of thought has no relation to the social conditions of existence. In effect, Albion does not understand that the circumference of human existence is within, not without, because thought has no external limit. It is translucent, and there is no limit of translucence—no limit to the possibilities of vision and the human labor that vision can direct in order to transform the world. The center is without because it creates the illusion of a whole that is complete, that can be counted as one in the sense that it constitutes a circle of exclusion.

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Finally, on plate 96 of Jerusalem, Albion is liberated when Jesus stands at his side in the likeness of Los. Albion admits that his selfhood has attacked the divine vision, but Jesus surprisingly says that he, Jesus, must die so that Albion can live, though Jesus will rise again with Albion in friendship and brotherhood. Even Jesus is a form of selfhood that must be annihilated and reborn in each individual human to the extent that Jesus as the image of the multitude varies in every individual and that image becomes part of the self that must die so that cooperation through mutual forgiveness can take place. In other words, self-annihilation is a continuous process of negotiation in the wars of eternity, and the nature of true human form, which is radically individual and particular, requires continual acts of forgiveness in order to achieve the brotherhood and human cooperation that allows human beings to realize the true measure of their creative power. Albion eventually realizes that he has been asleep while his friends were in danger. Perhaps he also knows that Jesus is all those friends who constitute Albion’s own existence. He rouses his cities and counties and throws himself into the furnaces of affliction because he recognizes his own selfhood as part of the Covering Cherub, or institutional knowledge and religion, that has divided him from Jesus or the multitude, and the transindividual understanding of intuitive knowledge. After annihilating his Selfhood, for Albion everything becomes a vision and a dream, because Albion sees the false reality or the false dream that he once postulated. All of his children, the minute particulars, awaken, and the Four Zoas arise into his bosom (J96.36–37: 256). In effect, Albion becomes One or whole again through the visionary realization that he is not-One. Jerusalem is Blake’s greatest and most complex poem and could be compared, as the most mature expression of his thought, with Marx’s Capital. From that perspective, Milton would be Blake’s Grundrisse. Just as one could argue that the writing of Capital would probably have been impossible with the preliminary and in some ways more open project of the Grundrisse, which also expresses everything in the later work in the more subjective and speculative mode of a notebook, similarly Blake’s Milton, although it is a finished work, not only anticipates the writing of Jerusalem through its allegory of the poet’s formation as a transindividual subject, but also expresses the same truth of self-annihilation as self-overcoming as the later poem in a more personal way. In these poems, Milton’s crisis in the history of literature parallels Albion’s crisis in the history of nations. Just as Milton seeks to recover and redeem the transindividual thought of his emanation, Ololon, Albion must recover the truth of his own infinite desire

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and the condition of human cooperation that is Jerusalem. Blake, who may never have read Spinoza, does not simply repeat the latter’s savage ontology but innovates it by recognizing imagination and art as forms of thought in their own right. For Spinoza, logical proofs are the eyes of the mind. For Blake, the eyes of the mind, or imagination, produce their own logic, which exceeds not only the empirical understanding of the world but also the logic of any particular world. Logic itself is both exceeded and innovated by imaginative forms of thought.

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The Savage God of Hugo’s Les Misérables

Reading by misreading Spinoza Victor Hugo believed in God—about which there can be no doubt, since he concluded the long philosophical preface to Les Misérables, never published in his lifetime, with the simple statement, “Je crois en Dieu” (PP 400). Furthermore, he believed in a transcendent God, a transcendent subject, if one can attribute to him the thought of the old Conventionist interviewed by Bishop Myriel in the first book of Les Misérables: “Infinity is. It is there. If infinity had no self [moi], the self would be its limit; it would not be infinite. In other words, it would not be. But it is. So it has a self. This self of infinity is God” (ME 38–39; MF 37). The sense of this passage, grammatically speaking, is that God is like me—an ego, a subject. In a recent article, Macherey has demonstrated the extent to which Hugo was aware of Spinoza’s philosophy, which he probably knew through a “superficial reading” of Émile Saisset’s introduction to his translation of Spinoza’s works, originally published in 1842.1 At least, that is Macherey’s surmise as he gathers together variant readings and other unpublished passages from Hugo’s Religions et religion, a work published in 1880 that derived from material in the dossier of the unfinished long poem Dieu, which he began writing in the 1850s. In these passages, Hugo directly responds to what he takes to be Spinoza’s thought, though the latter’s name was removed from the published version of the text, leading one to conclude that Hugo never intended to make public his reaction to that thought. Still, one could argue that the very effort Hugo made to repress the name Spinoza in his writing suggests an event in Hugo’s intellectual life with which he couldn’t come to terms. Hugo’s misunderstanding of Spinoza seems rather outrageous when he attributes to him a kind of nihilistic atomism in a world without center in which everything dies (OC14: 785n2). Hugo imagines Spinoza as such a monster that he calls on the abyss—his way of imagining an incomprehensible God

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reminiscent of Gnostic traditions—to take Spinoza back and give us Satan in his place (OC14: 789n10). Obviously, Hugo was profoundly shaken by Spinoza’s notion that the death of the body is the death of the particular being and that the infinity of thought cannot be attributed to God as a form of personhood that metaphysically transcends and governs human thought and action. Yet in another fragment entitled “Spinoza—Suite” from the “Reliquat” to Religions, also not published in Hugo’s lifetime, he resentfully surrenders to Spinoza’s thought because, in his view, Spinoza has mercilessly proven all of his points, effectively demolishing everything Hugo wants to believe. Consequently, Hugo has no alternative but to pursue his hedonistic desires, since the only rule that can guide him is to enjoy himself, something his biographers would all agree he knew how to do. Yet in this context he hardly celebrates this “somber law/ Which founds egoism by destroying the self.” Such a savage ontology, he claims, makes it impossible to distinguish human from vegetable existence, or to make a moral distinction between a man like Nero and a man like Socrates. Everything is change and transformation. The abyss from this perspective is “useless, blind, unlimited,” and if there is something eternal, it is not any particular thing but “a fatal mass in which everything is dissolved.” Such an abyss or God is “without entrails, without voice, without end.” God is simply the inexorable and the pitiless, “the monstrous inanity of things,” and spirit is replaced by causes and effects. The world belongs to the strongest, not to the best. Hugo concludes this passage with the image of Spinoza as an intellectual Achilles dragging around in triumph the wounded body of Christ on a cord passing through the holes in his flesh (OC14: 800–1). Macherey explains Hugo’s bizarre reaction to Spinoza as more than the effect of ignorance, but rather as Hugo’s insistence on his own poetic philosophy that sees the entire universe, from top to bottom, as “the affirmation of a principle of personality,” which “is found in the least of beings and attests to the living presence of the divine in them.” Otherwise, there is no Providence but only fate or necessity, since the former requires a subject to which one can appeal,2 a someone who hears our prayers, so to speak. Hugo saw a threat to this principle of selfhood in Spinoza’s concept of the human body as a composite thing: “The body, this disintegrating unit [groupe croulant, or, in another variant, ensemble fuyant, ‘this vanishing whole’] from which the self results,/Comes undone, and the self is extinguished, and what falls [ce qui tombe]/Consists of other selves, dust of the tomb [tombe]” (OC14: 801). Actually, Hugo may have understood Spinoza better than we want to admit, at least when he recognizes that if substance is

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indivisible and the modes of substance are in some sense infinitely divisible, but only as modes and without in any way contradicting the indivisibility of substance, then the notion of God as a unitary, fully autonomous self, in some way metaphysically different from its creation, is a fiction. Saisset makes almost exactly this argument, and furthermore criticizes Spinoza’s concept of the soul or thought as a “collection of ideas,” the unity of which, like the unity of the parts of the body, is simply a matter of proportion. Such a model supposedly ignores the “authority of consciousness [conscience],” which refuses to see itself as an abstraction that cannot give foundation to “the individuality of a real being, a true force, a living unity”: “The self simply does not recognize itself in the image Spinoza traces, and this false image accuses the whole system of error.”3 As I argued in Chapter 1, for Spinoza, the self, to the extent that it is not imaginary, always consists of other selves in the sense that it depends on the existence of others—or rather, following Balibar, the subject is a transindividual process, since for Spinoza the subject expands its power (potentia) to the extent that it approaches God through the expansion of its thought to incorporate the truth processes that pass through and incorporate the thoughts of others. However, what Hugo sees as a fall that amounts to the death of the self, echoing the verb tomber in the noun tombe, would be for Spinoza the very condition of the subject’s intellectual autonomy, which could be understood as a kind of transcendence of the mortal self within the immanence of God or the infinity of being with its infinite thought. Hugo correctly sees that the decomposition of the self as an imaginary unity gives ground to the recognition of other selves that constitute real being or the power of thought, even if he doesn’t like that complication and sees transindividual thought as a kind of death, “dust of the tomb.” He would apparently reject Blake’s concept of self-annihilation, which is the condition of transcendence within immanence, or the opening of the self to the general intellect of the transindividual subject—Jesus, or the human form divine. Spinoza insisted, as I noted in Chapter 1, that God or substance cannot act from freedom of will because an act of will requires a cause outside of itself. Acts of will nonetheless relate to this God in the same way as motion and rest relate to their immanent cause. In other words, you could argue that God is not a self or a subject though there are selves and forms of subjectivity in God, both finite and infinite, of which God is the immanent cause. To use Hugo’s own logic when he says that the self would limit the infinity of God if God were not a self, one could argue that if we attribute to God a free will to choose between

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alternative forms of being, then those alternatives would transcend and limit God’s infinity in some way—they would not be expressions of God but limits that require choices, and must in some sense precede, or exist outside of, God or substance. Still, as Macherey demonstrates, despite Hugo’s protests, his position may not be as far from Spinoza’s as he imagines.4 In the “Querelles” section of Religions, Hugo clearly sides with philosophers against theologians who want a God who conforms to the fantasies and beliefs of the masses: “The crowd would never acknowledge/The pure being, the infinite complicated by the abstract” of “a God without papers [un Dieu sans papiers]” (OC14: 763–64). This God without institutional sanction, of course, is a God who is not like me except to the extent that the particular self is a mode of this God. In the same text, Hugo rejects the fanaticisms and terrors that derive from a fable imposed on the closed eyes of humanity by priests, apparently to manipulate them in the interests of power—in this case, potestas (OC14: 783). Against the priestly fables, Hugo evokes a concept of pantheism with the phrase “Tout n’est qu’Un,” or “Everything is only One.” In the context, he rejects the elaborate constructions of religions that “want to embrace the mystery with a single look;/To see the point of arrival and the point of departure” and virtually postulate that one can rise up to God, through mediating metaphysical steps, as if one were climbing a stair. In other words, he rejects any sort of transcendental hierarchy and concludes this passage by saying of God: “He is in a hive as well as in Rome;/The worm is no further from the infinite than man” (OC14: 775–76). In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza argues that the common people or mob (vulgus) associate their admiration of God with those things of which they are most ignorant and so imagine that God’s power (potentia in this case) transcends the laws of nature, which can be suspended according to his will (TPT6: 444; O3: 81). In effect, they reduce God’s potentia to a form of potestas. Spinoza concludes that a miracle, for example, is nothing more than a work or act of nature that exceeds the grasp or comprehension (captum) of humans, or at least they believe it does (TPT6: 448–49; O3: 87). In his “Philosophical Preface” to Les Misérables, Hugo addressed the revolutionary democrats, with whom he was in sympathy for the most part, and whom he praised for their bravery, honesty, generosity, and knowledge, but whose atheism, which took the form in one case of the rejection of any form of supernaturalism, he challenged. But his challenge took the odd form, at least initially, of an agreement: in effect, there is no such thing as supernaturalism because what people reference by that name is what Hugo would call naturalism. Ironically, his position comes very close to

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Spinoza’s when he argues that science doesn’t know the “limits of Being” or the “frontier of the Unknown,” even with tools like the microscope and the telescope. Science cannot strictly draw the boundaries of nature: “Supernaturalism? who then can say, reality begins here and ends there? who has the alphabet of the possible? who can write the alpha? who can read the omega?” (PP 382). Hugo certainly emphasizes the unknown and celebrates the unknowable to an extent that would be inconsistent with Spinoza’s position, but it should be clear enough in this passage that Hugo’s understanding does not contradict Spinoza’s, and there are many other passages in the preface that would support this view. It’s as if Hugo read Spinoza, or at least Saisset’s introduction, before 1860 when he began reviewing and revising the early version of Les Misérables and writing his preface, and found in Spinoza a marvelous clarification of his own philosophical position except for one thing, the apparent refusal of a divine moi in an ontology of immanence that would seem to reject any form of metaphysical transcendence, a view, as Hugo would have known, that had led to Spinoza’s reputation throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as an atheist. One needs to keep in mind, however, that Spinoza would never have seen himself as an atheist, and if his God is savage—in the sense that God and nature are one and the same, the immanent cause of every form of existence—then, transcendent or not, Hugo’s God would seem to participate in the same savage logic. One could even argue that what Hugo really means by God’s free will is what Spinoza would call the free cause, which he defined in one of his earliest works, not as a force that can choose to do or not to do something but as a force not determined by anything outside of it.5 Sometimes Spinoza seems to imply God’s subjectivity insofar as there is an implied action, but such an action is necessary and not the result of free choice because there is nothing outside of God or nature that would require such a choice. There is nothing for God to choose between since whatever is derived from the immanent cause of being is the expression of its nature or law. In the “Philosophical Preface,” Hugo addresses a telling question to a form of being that he describes as both obscure and indivisible, and that would incorporate the universe and our world, life and death, and humanity from its highest intellectual expressions down to the mire (fange) of human wastes: “Of what nature is the prodigious being in which is realized at the foundation of the absolute the incredible identity of necessity and will?” (PP 347–48). At the least, one could argue that Hugo’s thought vacillates on the question of God’s

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free will, for he surely distinguishes between human will and the will of God, because will and necessity become indistinguishable in God. Hugo implicitly understands that for this savage God, without papers or priestly authorization, free will is a meaningless qualification since what we might call his will is the expression of the necessary laws of his nature, which is nature itself, including human nature. Hugo rarely uses the Spinozian term “substance,” except when he puts a Spinozian thought into the mouth of the atheist Anatole Leray, with whom Hugo apparently had a conversation in Brussels in 1852 that he recreates in the preface. In arguing for the equality of all material things, Leray describes organisms as “modes of substance,” which, “inevitable [fatals] and blind in themselves,” produce the mirage of a hierarchy through the process by which “you name first intelligence, then conscience, then soul, the rungs of a ladder mounting up to God.” This hierarchy supports the scaffoldings of religion that Leray wants to destroy at every level, step by step. Hugo, of course, can’t accept the principle that all life forms are the same or ontologically equal, but then neither would Spinoza, with his theory of power as potentia or virtue. Against Leray, for whom the goal of human existence is happiness, Hugo counters that for him the goal is rather duty (devoir), though he defers any explanation of that view, possibly because the whole of Les Misérables constitutes its explication and defense. Still, Hugo insists that the logical consequence of Leray’s view is the rejection of any reason for a human being to sacrifice him- or herself for another, to surrender some of their happiness if it contradicts or infringes upon the happiness of another (PP 387–89). Given the references to Spinoza in Hugo’s manuscripts, it makes sense to see Leray as a kind of substitute for Spinoza, though he makes a rather easy target by comparison with the figure whose arguments even Hugo found more or less irrefutable. However, it is important to keep in mind that Spinoza’s theory of power does not exclude the possibility that one human being would sacrifice some of their apparent happiness for the happiness or good of another, though the motive of that apparent sacrifice would be the pursuit of a greater good, or rather the enhancement of power that could result from such an act. Such an enhancement of power would include the blessedness that Spinoza associated with knowledge of the third kind or intuitive understanding. Since Hugo invokes the name of Socrates as an ethical ideal in the unpublished manuscripts of Religions, he would surely have seen Socrates as a model for his notions of duty and self-sacrifice, and he said as much in the posthumously published Post-scriptum de ma vie in which he cited Socrates’s last act as an example of the good death since he died for la raison—reason

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and intellectual understanding—in the same way that Jesus died for fraternity, the love of his fellow human beings.6 Yet Socrates is not a bad example of the Spinozian concept of blessedness. In Book V of Ethics, Spinoza equates blessedness with freedom, which, as the title of that book indicates, involves the full realization of the power of the intellect (E5Pr: 363). As I’ve frequently noted, intellectual power is not simply the power of a particular mind, as measured by something as ridiculous as an intelligence test, but rather the force of a thought in and of itself, which frankly cannot be measured. In Book V, Spinoza insisted that the mind is less affected by external things—or by the emotions that they produce—to the extent that it understands such a thing as necessary, which simply means that it has a rational understanding of its cause (E5.6P: 367). Furthermore, affects are not limited to perceptions or the imagination, since they can arise from the knowledge of the common properties of things, knowledge of the second kind. Since this knowledge is necessarily transindividual, or represents the enhanced power of thought, the affects that arise from it are necessarily more powerful than affects arising from imaginary perceptions, from inadequate knowledge that may or may not point toward a truth (E5.7P: 367–68). In Book V, Spinoza claims that images can be joined with other images, and through this process the mind can form clear and distinct concepts that are related to the idea of God, which simply means that they express adequate knowledge or understanding of singular things (E5.13–14: 370–71). For Spinoza, understanding produces joy in the sense that, when images come together to express ideas or truths, these more powerful thoughts create a greater autonomy of the subject because it understands itself and the necessity of its own affects and, one might add, of its desires. The joy associated with such understanding is identical with the love of God or truth (E5.15P: 371). Spinoza insists that God has no passions or passive affects, but that simply means that God is the substance, not the subject, of fully adequate understanding that would eliminate any passive relation to things outside of it (E5.17: 371; C 604). In other words, even if no particular human being can achieve a fully adequate understanding of God or the universe that expresses this fullness of being, such an individual knows that a fully adequate thought exists because he or she can achieve adequate knowledge of some particular things. Since God or infinite thought is indivisible and uncountable, then to understand any particular thing adequately is to recognize the infinite truth in which such a thought necessarily participates. Such infinite thought constitutes the

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general intellect that survives the existence of any particular body and mind. Therefore, if I may return abruptly to Hugo’s view of Socrates, to die for reason and thought is not simply to sacrifice oneself for others but to enhance one’s happiness and power through commitment to an infinite truth. In Badiou’s terms, Socrates remained the faithful subject of a truth process. For Spinoza, blessedness is a joyful condition, but realistically he was perfectly aware that human beings must struggle to overcome their affects and may perceive that struggle as a form of suffering or sacrifice. But this suffering is a passive emotion that could be associated ultimately with the fear of death. Spinoza stresses that the masses (vulgi) commonly believe that religion and morality require suffering and sacrifice that they can lay aside in the afterlife as a reward for their submission (E5.41S: 381). The truth is quite the contrary, since for Spinoza, in the final proposition of Book V, “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. We do not enjoy blessedness because we restrain our lusts. On the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them” (E5.42: 382; C 616). Hence, in Hugo’s debate with Leray, one could argue that both parties are wrong from a Spinozian perspective. If human beings act in such a way as to appear to sacrifice themselves for others, then they are acting in a way that seeks their own advantage, and the end of this process, though perhaps not the goal, is some form of happiness. It is not the goal because one does not achieve virtue in order to be happy, but virtue is literally its own reward or the condition of happiness. In a sense, neither Socrates nor Jesus sacrificed himself for others, in the sense of dying in order to save others from physical death; rather they both chose to die rather than betray a truth that had implications for others, because it was universally addressed. That truth included the view that death itself is irrelevant to the realization of human potentia through thought and action. Still, Leray’s view that anyone who gives his life for another or several others is a dupe misconstrues the nature of human virtue and power (PP 389). Human thought exceeds the life of the individual as the case of Socrates powerfully demonstrates, since his thought continued to live and expand itself in the writing and thought of Plato. One can debate as to which of the two, Socrates or Plato, truly owns a particular idea, but the truth is that the thought process exceeds both particular subjects and historical beings. There is no copyright on truth. Even if someone sacrifices his or her life in order to save the lives of others, they die not for others simply but in order to remain faithful to the truth that the act of protecting those lives expresses. Of course, one cannot say that every act of self-sacrifice is rational, or fully understood by the actor, but at the very least action itself

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expresses thought, and if many human minds recognize the nobility of an act, they recognize the thought that directs them toward the immanent cause of the act. The death of Socrates expresses such a thought, and that has resonated through time in such a way as to suggest the infinity of the truth in which it participates.

Divine immanence The life of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables also expresses such a thought and explores the balance between, on the one hand, suffering at the hand of others in society, and, on the other hand, the happiness that derives from virtue as the self-realization of human potentia through love. However, before taking that up, I need to take one more lesson from Hugo’s “Philosophical Preface.” Though Hugo clearly longs for a transcendent God whom he continually associates with the Abyss as a figure of the unknowable, the uncountable, the infinite—still, the term he uses for the active presence of this God in nature is immanence: The immanent, the bottomless and the limitless, all points of the infinite expanded themselves into as many infinities, the possible penetration of thought in every direction beyond everything, the place and the thing bound together and repeating themselves for ever in the visible and the invisible, the ether without end, the space of the prodigious.

He concludes this passage with “Abysses, abysses, abysses. There is the world” (PP 344). Hugo’s perspective here borders on what Hegel would have called a “bad infinity” in the sense that “in wanting to maintain the infinite pure and distant from the finite, the infinite is by that very fact only made finite.”7 Spinoza, of course, would never have focused on the unknowable mystery but rather on the knowledge of the essence of a particular thing. If I may speculate, for Spinoza ignorance does not produce the sense of mystery but the beginning of the process of understanding by recognizing the limit of the current state of knowledge. Hugo challenges the skeptical views of atheism, which may create breaches in the infinite the way a bomb momentarily disrupts the surface of the sea, but these breaches close and everything continues: “The immanent persists … always present, always tangible, always inexplicable, always inconceivable, always incontestable.” It is this force or power before which human beings kneel down (PP 345).

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One is reminded of Wittgenstein’s propositions about the mystical at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, particularly when he writes, “The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is [Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist].” In a similar way, Hugo seems to suggest that the mystery lies not in the degree of our understanding of an immanent cause but in the mere fact of its existence. Still, Wittgenstein’s proposition is preceded by one that posits a transcendence that Hugo would surely not have accepted: “How the world is, is for the higher [power] completely unimportant. [Wie die Welt ist, ist für das Höhere vollkommen gleichgültig].”8 In effect, as Spinoza would have agreed, how the world is remains unimportant for the immanent cause of the world, since the world cannot be anything other than the expression of its immanent cause. However, Spinoza would have rejected the rest of Wittgenstein’s proposition: “God does not reveal himself in the world.”9 For Spinoza, knowledge of the world is knowledge of God. It is not a matter of the revelation of something hidden, but rather everything that exists expresses the immanent being of what Spinoza would call God. If Hugo sees the immanent as inexplicable but tangible, as inconceivable but incontestable, what does that imply? Despite the insistence on paradox, how different is his perspective, in practical terms, from Spinoza’s own axiomatic thinking? Isn’t it the nature of the axiom to be, in some sense, both inexplicable and incontestable? Isn’t Spinoza’s singular thing, like Blake’s minute particular, tangible or concrete? And if an essence or immanent cause seems inconceivable, that would only be in the sense that it cannot be reduced to a predicate or category that would amount to an abstraction of its concrete being. As Macherey stresses, Hugo resisted what he took in Spinoza’s thought as “the will to understand, which claims to dominate the abyss.”10 If Hugo had read Spinoza’s text itself more carefully, speculates Macherey, he might have recognized a thought that was in many respects “visionary, and whose resonances go beyond the limits imposed by an abstract rationalization.”11 For example, Spinoza implicitly understood that what human beings designate as good and evil are not qualities that reside in any particular thing but in the thoughts that humans apply to things.12 In Ethics, the concepts of good and evil derive from the affects of joy or sadness, pleasure or pain, which simply have to do with those forces in nature that either enhance or decrease human perfection, the powers of physical activity and thought (E4.8P: 326; C 550–51). In the “Philosophical Preface,” Hugo phrases things rather differently though the overall result overlaps in many ways with Spinoza’s thought. In the face of an infinite universe in which darkness seems to prevail and in which one must

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come to terms with “all the inexplicable forms of evil in life” and with suffering that has “the dimension of the universe,” the thinker is forced to consider “the hypothesis of a world punished.” For Hugo, this concerns his notion of the immanent cause of suffering: “Nothing exists without cause; therefore, suffering is invincibly either a punishment or a test, and, in every case, a redemption.” He continues by positing the world here and now as a kind of hell, while insisting that there are other worlds, by which he seems to refer to transcendent worlds. On this point, religions are closer to the truth than philosophy when they claim that hell is eternal, but the eternity of this world as hell is not eternal damnation. Like one of Blake’s eternal states, “one passes through it; one suffers there only for a time; one enters it and exits from it.” Finally, though this state is “immanent and persists” and is eternal only in that sense, “The permanence of my prison cell does not prove the permanence of my pain” (PP 342). Does Hugo mean to imply that life on earth is always hell, but when we die, if we are good, we go to heaven? In the “Philosophical Preface,” Hugo only once suggests that heaven is a transcendent place, but that is in the speech of Leray, who mentions such a heaven only to reject it (PP 386–87). Hugo uses the word “paradise” to refer more to a state of mind or human perspective than to the metaphysical afterlife of religious doctrine. When Hugo thinks of the sun, he postulates a physical phenomenon that science struggles to understand but can never fully master, another image of the abyss, or the infinity of immanent being. Then he notes that “Religions are no less than science lost in [contemplation of] the sun. Hell for those who believe it fire; paradise for those who believe it light” (PP 337). This perspectivism reminds one of Blake’s claim that where others see the sun as a “round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea,” he sees a “Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”13 Blake’s point, as I demonstrated in the last chapter, is not that you have to believe in a transcendent God in order to see the world aright, since God is the human form divine, or Spinoza’s multitude. Rather, the point is that there is no metaphysical division between thought and perception, and everything we see expresses the limits of our thought or understanding. Hugo makes a similar argument when he insists that, first, “Nature, created by God, creates God in man,” but then, second, “The universe does more than demonstrate; it shows. It shows first the palpable, then the visible, then the inaccessible, then the incomprehensible.” For Hugo, the world is not the trace of an absent God but the immanent expression of something divine. What he calls the ideal or idealism is not something distinct from reality but immanent to reality. Like taking someone’s pulse, human beings are able to

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feel in their perception of the world “the palpitation of a cause.” This immanent cause is both in human beings and beyond them, which amounts to saying that thought and truth extend beyond the understanding of any particular individual, though every mind has access to this infinity to the extent that it recognizes the infinite power of thought. For Hugo, “the unknown face looks at everything,” and every phenomenon mirrors or expresses this look. Every human being reflects in itself this power of nature, which Hugo would call the conscience. By this term, he clearly means more than the moral sensibility but rather the consciousness and understanding of the immanent causes of things, their common properties and essences, à la Spinoza. Philosophers and scientists experience this understanding whether they adhere to any formal religion or not. In that sense, “God is involuntary in man” (PP 360). In effect, though Hugo would like to see God as a person, he also suggests that this immanent cause of everything that exists cannot be reduced to human projections and, in that sense, remains inaccessible and incomprehensible though visible in the material world. Far from rejecting human perception and understanding, Hugo takes a position that bears a striking resemblance to Spinoza’s when he says, “Sensation confirmed by reasoning, this is quite simply the double form of the real, and the former has some affinity with evidence.” In this context, sensation would correspond with Spinoza’s imagination, which can produce knowledge of the second kind only through the intervention of reason. But for Hugo, there is also an act of faith involved, since, to employ a kind of Blakean logic, if human beings see the world as resting on a nihilist void, they become an extension or expression of such a vision. To understand a particular thing, in the Spinozian sense, is to understand the necessity of its existence through its immanent cause. For Hugo, “From the moment one admits that something exists, one can be irresistibly transported up to God.” He concludes that the antithesis of this movement, nihilism, would imply that the world does not exist, because it would deny the power of thought in human beings that enables them to distinguish between perceptions that are real and perceptions that are false (PP 360). Though Hugo’s thought may have been somewhat confused or inconclusive on this point, it seems clear enough that his idea of hell or the world punished refers a state of mind or perspective. There is no eternal damnation, but, as Blake would have understood, there is an eternal state of mind that amounts to a form of confusion and limits our perception and understanding of the physical world. This state of mind, hell or the world punished, is not simply the

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world of experience as opposed to a divine world that transcends experience, because if that were true, one would have no knowledge of the possibility of any other world through experience, which is clearly not Hugo’s position. Still, perhaps “confusion” is not the right word for Hugo’s own state of mind if Macherey is correct in suggesting that Hugo’s thought involves the systematic practice of obscurantism, “exploited like a weapon put into the service of the humble and turned against the sinister alliance of knowledges and powers.”14 This obscurantism may derive from Hugo’s insistence that any articulation of the infinite must necessarily take into account the impossibility of any singular thought or human expression embracing the whole. Though he would never put it this way, infinity in its very nature is not-whole, not-one, not-complete, not-countable. For Hugo, knowledge of the infinite in the universe and in the individual is the condition or state of what he calls heaven. In Les Misérables, he uses that word in its conventional Christian sense when he represents the conscious thoughts of those like Fantine or Jean Valjean or Bishop Myriel because he accepts the principle that the language of philosophy or poetry has no exclusive rights in its attempt to articulate the truth. Still, poetry or any literary style can illuminate the truth behind these ways of understanding the world by expressing what the intellectual eyes see—as when Jean Valjean stands over the sleeping Bishop whom he intends to rob and witnesses something in the man’s face that he will spend the rest of the novel learning how to understand. In that face, he recognizes “contentment, hope, and bliss [béatitude],” “almost a radiance [rayonnement].” The “inexpressible [inexprimable] reflection of a light invisible to the naked eye” lies on his forehead, as if he contemplates “a mysterious heaven (ciel),” which lays over him, but is really inside him, the “internal light of his conscience” (ME 86; MF 82–83). So if hell is an eternal state to which the human mind can subject or limit itself, heaven is also an eternal state of the human individual’s consciousness or conscience. Since the consciousness (which would include conscience) is simply thought, it may incorporate into itself what I would call the ontological unconscious. In the Julie Rose translation, I have substituted the word “inexpressible” for the word “ineffable” because my more literal translation captures the substance of Hugo’s thought. The connotation of ineffable is transcendence, not merely something for which words fail us, but something for which there should be no words. But Hugo’s point is that the inexpressible light in the face of the Bishop expresses something the origin of which may be invisible in that it cannot be reduced to a sensation, but which is also immanent to this world, something that lies in the thought of the Bishop

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and something Jean Valjean can recognize, however inadequately, through the power of his imagination. Though the Bishop and Valjean may confront on a daily basis a world that appears to be a form of punishment, the Bishop has already achieved the true heaven of thought, the beatitude or blessedness that would constitute for Spinoza and Hugo the true happiness or joy immanent to this world. In the second part of Les Misérables, Hugo clarifies his understanding of the relation between thought and divinity in the “Prayer” section of Book 7. First, he posits the infinite as “immanent, permanent” and “necessarily substantial.” However, despite the Spinozian resonances in this section, Hugo does not use the word “substantial” in the same sense as Spinoza; on the contrary, he equates substance with matter, and argues that infinity would not be infinite if it were limited by matter or intelligence (ME 427–28). From Saisset’s introduction to Spinoza’s works, however, Hugo would have understood Spinozian substance as practically a synonym for infinity, Hugo’s preferred term. Saisset argues that Spinoza’s substance has attributes that express its essence, which would be infinity; but the infinity of the attributes, Thought (la Pensée) and Extension (l’Étendue), is a relative infinity with respect to the absolute infinity of substance.15 Now, though Hugo still insists in this section on the selfhood of God, he nonetheless posits two infinities, one that is outside of the particular individual and one that is inside, one that is absolute and the other relative. Prayer is thought that puts “the infinite below in touch with the infinite above.” He refers to conscience as the “compass of the Unknown,” and this understanding of conscience corresponds with Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge of the third kind (ME 428). Through such intuition, human beings contemplate infinite truths, and the conscience of Bishop Myriel, his heaven in this world, manifests such knowledge as the condition of beatitude or blessedness. For Spinoza, blessedness is the pleasure or joy associated with intuitive knowledge (E5.32–33: 377). This perspective does not completely deny the implication of selfhood in the divine, since Spinoza insists that the human love of God expresses God’s love of himself or, more properly, itself. Further, God contemplates itself through the human contemplation of the idea of God as an immanent cause. From this point, Spinoza comes to the startling conclusion that, “insofar as God loves himself, he loves men [homines], and consequently that God’s love of men and the mind’s intellectual love of God are one and the same” (C 612; E5.36P/Cor: 378; O2: 302). If God’s love of human beings and the mind’s intellectual love of God are the same thing, then it follows that the love of God is the love of other human

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beings. Hence, when Valjean looks down into the beatific face of the Bishop in his sleep, he sees “something almost divine [presque de la divinité]” (ME 87; MF 83). At the risk of offending Hugo scholars everywhere, the authors of the English version of the musical Les Misérables were not entirely off the mark when they imagined that Hugo would have endorsed their concluding thought: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”16 Still, perhaps the most Spinozian moment in the “Prayer” section comes in the last paragraph, in which Hugo contextualizes his specific way of using the term “mystery” as a dimension of religion. The goal of the latter should be to “crush fanaticisms and venerate the infinite,” and not only to have people prostrate themselves “under the tree of Creation” with its “immense branches full of stars.” Hugo accepts mystery, the incomprehensible, and the inexplicable, while rejecting miracles, the absurd, and superstition. He has a duty “to work on the human soul” and “to rid God of worms [écheniller Dieu]” (ME 428; MF 409). A few pages later, Hugo stresses that “We are for religion as opposed to religions.” Religion, presumably, is rational in recognizing the limits of human understanding, the impossibility that any individual being will master the infinite truth, coupled with the empirical evidence confirmed by reason that transforms experience into thought and understanding. For Hugo, prayer should contain a high quantity of thought (ME 431), which enables the individual to reject fanaticism, such as that of Javert who understands the law as an absolute order, a closed system, that allows no exceptions or revisions. Though Hugo uses the word “mystery” in a positive sense to express what Wittgenstein would have called the mystical, his position differs very little from that of Blake who rejects what he figured as the tree of mystery in religion, though he understood mystery as superstition or abstraction. Like Spinoza, Hugo rejects miracles, superstitions, and all other absurdities in the interest of knowledge and understanding that remains committed to mystery only in the sense that there can be no finitude to the thought process. Though his thought may be somewhat confused, Hugo’s mystery cannot be entirely associated with a bad infinity. At the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes, “The contemplation [Die Anschauung] of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as—limited—a whole [als—begrenztes—Ganzes].” To my mind, the dashes separating the word begrenztes from the word Ganzes suggest that the perception of a whole derives from the limitations of perception. Wittgenstein then says, “The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical.”17 The emphasis here is on the subjective perspective associated with feeling and contemplation. From the viewpoint of

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eternity, the world feels limited and therefore a whole, but at the same time this feeling of limitation—not only of the world but also of our perception of it— constitutes the mystical as the postulation of the infinity that lies beyond the limit. For Blake, the mystery is a reductive abstraction of human thought as the title of one song of experience suggests. It involves the error of substituting our perception of the world as a limited whole for the limit of human understanding itself, which produces what Blake in another poem called the “mind-forg’d manacles.”18 Despite his use of words like “abyss” and “gulf ” for the infinity of divine immanence, Hugo also insisted in another section of “A Parenthesis” that “There is no nothingness” (ME 429). Spinoza similarly argued that there is no vacuum in nature—that is to say, from the perspective of eternity or the infinite—since “corporeal substance, insofar as it is substance, cannot be divided” (E1.15S: 226). Everything, even that which appears as nothing, has substance or an immanent cause.19 The gulf, the abyss, the mystery, or the mystical—these are all words for the indivisibility of being, the savage God that lies beyond the limits of our current understanding or perception—a God who is savage because for many, in the established religions, he or it would not be a God at all. As Hugo wrote in a letter from June 12, 1860, “It is necessary to destroy all the religions in order to reconstruct God. I mean to say: to reconstruct him in man. God is truth, he is justice, he is goodness; he is right and he is love” (OC12: 1100). When Hugo associates his concept of religion with the duty to work on the human soul, which would presumably mean to reconstruct God in man, he has implicitly come to associate the divine self with the transindividual singularity that Blake would call the human form divine. For all practical purposes, therefore—and despite Hugo’s longing for metaphysical transcendence—to know and understand God is to know and understand humanity, to understand justice and goodness is to witness these practices in human beings as the expressions of human thought, to know what is right or a duty is to engage in such transindividual thought, to love God is to love other human beings.

Job on a dunghill At the end of the “Philosophical Preface,” Hugo insists that the metaphysical and religious concerns in this document represent the origins of Les Misérables in his thought. He sees the novel as a kind of dissection or autopsy of society, and yet insists there is nothing strange about the fact that such an autopsy should

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be preceded by a meditation that constitutes “an opening of wings toward the infinite.” “The real,” he continues, “is only efficaciously painted in the brightness of the ideal. A dunghill is only a dunghill; put Job on top, God descends to it; and then all this rot emits something magnificent.” Though God’s person may be transcendent in Hugo’s thought, there is really no way of distinguishing the appearance and knowledge of such a God from the human being who stands on the dunghill of human experience and history. The face of God is the face of Job or humanity. In Les Misérables, Hugo intends to paint two forms of unhappiness or misery: first, that which derives from destiny, or, in Spinozian terms, the necessary order of causes and effects that extend to infinity; and second, the social misery that derives from other human beings. Spinoza might have been skeptical that one could actually distinguish between these two orders of causality, but his commitment to democracy—as both the ontological condition of all governments or political arrangements and as the best or most “natural” form of government precisely because it would be consistent with that ontological condition—suggests his belief that there are social conditions that produce human unhappiness as well as social actions that can address and potentially reverse those adverse conditions. For Hugo, because misery is a material condition, “the book of misery should be spiritualist,” by which I take him to mean that to contemplate the material causes of human misery is to recognize the power of thought to transcend and transform those causes since it is the limitations of thought that permit those conditions to operate unhindered as if human beings have no power over their world. When Hugo claims that he writes in order “to search for the ray of light even in the sewer [pour chercher le rayon jusque dans le cloaque],” he forces the understanding that there is no contradiction between the spirituality of thought and even the lowest forms of material human existence (PP 399–400). For all practical purposes in Les Misérables, thought and material existence are two expressions of one immanent cause. Finally, the novel not only makes the strongest argument for the ontological unconscious, of which Hugo’s savage God would be the expression, but also continues to elaborate the Spinozian understanding of democracy as an ontological condition that postulates the human desire for freedom and autonomy as an irrepressible, universal force in human history. Just as Spinoza argues that the potentia of the multitude, which is the ontological basis of democracy, is the expression of nature as the immanent cause, Hugo makes a similar claim: “The solidarity of men is the invincible corollary of the solidarity

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of the universe. The democratic bond is of the same nature as the solar ray.” In the same passage from the “Philosophical Preface,” Hugo insists that a truth has no location in the world unless it is virtually everywhere—or, in the language of Badiou, unless it is universally addressed. The solidarity between men or human beings is necessarily a solidarity with infinity because the basis of this bond is not the flesh that dies but what Hugo would call the soul (l’âme), which is the “moral atom,” “the being conscious and one,” and the self or “geometrical point of the mind.” Hugo notes that the particular mind that depends on the human brain (le cerveau) eventually breaks down or falls apart with the body that dies, but then it enters “into the prodigious receptacle of the imperishable self [moi impérissable], into the thinking solidarity of creation, into the rendezvous of consciousnesses, distinct, although in communion; … into the vast equality of universal intelligence or enlightenment [la vaste éqalité de la lumière universelle]” (PP 368). Hugo would seem to imply that transindividual thought is only possible after death, but his emphasis here is simply that the end of the particular body is not the end of thought. If the supernatural is the natural, and if the democratic bond or thought has the same ontological status as the solar ray, then the receptacle of the imperishable self is indistinguishable from nature and physical existence. The particular brain may perish, but other brains or modes of mental activity continue to exist, possibly in physical forms that we cannot yet imagine. A truth remains a truth even if there is no physical organ that can express it. Since the democratic bond is an intellectual exchange, its power or irresistible force lies in its direct connection to the imperishable self that Hugo would call God, but that also signifies the infinity of thought as the transindividual understanding of all human beings or any other thinking creatures, Matheron’s communism of minds. To use language that resonates with the thought of Negri, the imperishable self is the singularity of the multitude in action, as a subjective force that, despite historical setbacks and repressions, never completely goes to sleep. The immanent or savage God is Job on top of a dunghill. In the “Prayer” section of Les Misérables, Hugo writes that “The grandeur of democracy is to deny nothing of and reject nothing in humanity [c’est de ne rien nier et de ne rien renier de l’humanité].” In other words, democracy as an ontological condition recognizes the parallel relation between the physical and intellectual being of humanity. It recognizes that all humans have the power of thought and action as well as physical and intellectual needs. As Hugo concludes the passage, “Next to the right of Man, or at least alongside it, is the right of the Soul” (MF 409).

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Jean Delabroy has argued that the stumbling block for Hugo, as he moved from his preliminary intellectual self-examination in the “Philosophical Preface” to the final version of Les Misérables, is the concept of soul. As a transcendental or metaphysical essence—what Hugo, with reference to Jean Valjean, calls “an initial spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the next, that good can bring out, prime, ignite, set on fire and cause to blaze splendidly, and that evil can never entirely extinguish” (ME 77)— the soul contradicts the intellectual origins of the nineteenth century. Around 1815, the date of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and of Valjean’s release from prison, “there was,” according to Delabroy, “a foreclosure of the ontology and of any chance of a positive metaphysic that would permit the delineation of an essentialist evolution [devenir] of the subject.”20 Perhaps you could summarize Delabroy’s argument in this way: as a prelude to God’s death at the hand of Nietzsche, the classical concept of the soul, for all practical purposes, was destroyed by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. In effect, Delabroy argues that Hugo’s ontology is essentially negative and privative, since the essence of being remains immanent and yet unknowable. As Badiou might suggest, being only appears in the phenomenal world as the inexistent, the empty set that is the foundation or truth of everything that appears. Furthermore, though Hugo poses the question about Valjean’s soul as something immortal and transcendent in the mortal being, he implicitly rejects this perspective in the final version of the novel when he has Bishop Myriel do something that contradicts the action of his counterpart in Rousseau’s Émile. In effect, rather than facilitating the soul’s natural evolution toward redemption through a pure act of generosity in the manner of Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar, Myriel attempts to bind Valjean to a promise that the latter never actually makes. In Émile, when the Vicar has been given some alms for the poor, the young Jean-Jacques announces his own poverty and asks for some of the money. The Vicar responds, “we are brothers, you belong to me [vous m’appartenez], and I cannot touch this trust for my own use,” but then gives the young man exactly the amount he asked for from his own funds.21 According Delabroy, the generosity of Rousseau’s Vicar contributes “to the development of a pedagogy of reconciliation, which postulates the essence and aims at the renaturation of the self, little by little given back to ‘self-esteem,’ the object of the ‘insensible’ work of goodness in its soul.”22 Rousseau presupposes an inherent goodness of the soul, a divine spark that exists quite independently of the social conditions that have led to the appearance of its corruption. It can be redeemed simply by

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lifting the social constraints, such as hunger and poverty, that have blocked the evolution of its true essence. For Hugo, according to Delabroy, one of the premises of Les Misérables is its refusal of the bourgeois ideology of progress, which has the effect of rationalizing the present conditions of those who live in poverty as a necessary moment in a process that inevitably leads to the improvement of human existence. This teleological understanding of the end or goal of history inadvertently legitimates or makes tolerable the scandal of poverty in the present. It presupposes misery’s inevitable reduction through “possible resorption” by the historical process, so that the effect of the mere “study and portrait of poverty” would find itself limited to “charity and reform” that effaces the scandal of human misery in deference to the natural “bourgoisification” of humanity.23 Hugo’s solution to this problem is to posit a spirituality that virtually disrupts the linear historical process and produces an ideal light in which to paint the truth about reality. As Delabroy sums up this strategy, “The ideal restores to the real its unsustainable disfiguration, the real restores to the ideal its incomprehensible disproportion.” Hugo neither accepts the rationalization of human misery as a necessary phase in human progress, nor believes in a God whose existence can be fully guaranteed by reason. This latter perspective would seem to put Hugo completely at odds with Spinoza, but if one keeps in mind Spinoza’s idea that the highest form of knowledge, which is knowledge of God, is intuitive, then it follows that God’s existence cannot be guaranteed by a narrow concept of rationality that philosophers of the twentieth century would refer to as instrumental reason. If Hugo’s concept of the ideal is a form of intuitive knowledge, then it disfigures the real by exposing the possibility that our everyday perception, our common-sense understanding of things, produces illusions or, in more contemporary terms, participates in ideologies. In Spinozian terms, it forces the knowledge of the nonexistence of things that appear to exist in the imagination. At the same time, the real exposes the incomprehensible disproportion of the ideal as the infinity of truth to which no particular subject is ever fully adequate. These principles are not at all inconsistent with Spinoza’s ontology, and when Delabroy suggests that the relation between the real and the ideal postulates an essence that “does not derive from any of the available systems of ontology,” he misses the connection to Spinoza that Hugo himself would have disavowed and misunderstood.24 The relation between the real and the ideal could be taken as a dialectical relation in the larger sense of dialectical reason that, as Fredric Jameson notes in his reading of Adorno, opposes the autonomy of instrumental reason by

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subsuming that reason into itself and resituating means or process in relation to ends.25 However, the idea is not that means or process can be governed and legitimated by projected ends, which is what the ideology of progress presupposes, but rather that the rationality of ends disrupts the linear order of means that produces the appearance of an irreversible sequence of causes and effects. From this perspective, the end of history does not lie in some posited goal but rather in the infinite truth process that reveals itself through the force of an event, in Badiou’s sense of the word—what Walter Benjamin would call “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”26 In disclosing the truth that underlies the historical process, such an event allows for the possibility of rewriting the past from the perspective of the present, not the present from the perspective of the future. Adorno associated the rationality that opposes and completes instrumental reason with the rationality of art: “Art completes knowledge with what is excluded from knowledge and thereby once again impairs the character of knowledge, its univocity [den Erkenntnischarakter, ihre Eindeutigkeit] … Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it.”27 In effect, art, if it is a truth process or has truth content, expresses what Spinoza would call intuitive knowledge, which means that it would expose the limit of other forms of rationality, including the limit of art as a form of knowledge. Art points toward the infinity of truth that its expression necessarily fails to express as a completed totality. It completes knowledge by revealing its necessary incompleteness in relation to its own truth content. For this reason, artworks, according to Adorno, are struck with “an ineluctable imperfectness that repudiates the idea of perfection toward which artworks must aspire.”28 This imperfection can also be associated with “the compulsion toward disintegration” in artworks, which derives from the conflict between inner coherence and truth content. From this conflict derives the significance of the fragment in modern literature, or “that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality.”29 Hugo’s insistence on the unknowable essence of immanent being in some ways anticipates the modern critique of instrumental reason even as it also reaches back to the Spinozian concept of the immeasurable—and therefore inexpressible—infinity of the immanent cause. Since knowledge and understanding in any given historical context can never be complete in themselves, the essence of the soul—whether we think of it as a metaphysical entity or as the power of thought that would be an attribute of being—cannot necessarily be good or bad in itself. Thought must be disciplined since, as Spinoza noted, all human beings are subject to the affects and only through collaboration and the exchange of different imaginative

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perceptions of the world can any particular consciousness arrive at a greater understanding of its own being through the expansion of that consciousness to incorporate the thought of others. Furthermore, this intervention of others results in the formation of a society that appropriates to itself every individual’s right to determine what is good and evil and, as noted in Chapter 1, to prescribe a common rule through force. This perspective contradicts Rousseau’s notion that the soul is intrinsically good as long as it has not been subdued or suborned by arbitrary social laws and forms of corruption that produce the consciousness of evil. As Allan Bloom summarizes Rousseau’s perspective, “a division within man’s soul resulting from man’s bodily and spiritual dependence on other men … ruptures his original unity or wholeness.”30 Hugo may have wanted to believe in the full autonomy of the soul, but in rejecting the ideology of progress he also implicitly rejected the theory that the essence of the soul remains incorruptible in such a way that time must necessarily unfold or restore its essence or truth by simply allowing it the freedom to be what it is. If, by contrast, the soul is simply understood as the power of thought, then the conditions that make thought possible have to be constructed through human intervention, and that intervention may involve something more than the use of reason itself, at least in the narrow sense of that term associated with the concept of instrumental or analytical reason. Hence, the difference between the approaches of the Savoyard Vicar to young JeanJacques and Bishop Myriel’s approach to Jean Valjean represent a difference in the understanding of soul itself. When Myriel buys Valjean’s soul back from evil and commits him to the promise of using the wealth he gives him in the form of silver candlesticks in order to become an honest man, he does not give him a new freedom in order to become who he truly is but, as Delabroy stresses, binds him to a form of “total alienation, in order to commit the subject, not to the joyous effulgence [rayonnement] of the good, but to the payment without end of the eradication of evil.”31 As many critics have noted, Valjean never formally commits to the promise and the Bishop’s words stun him because he has no memory of having made the promise to which the Bishop refers in the past perfect tense. Then the whole episode with Petit-Gervais, whom Valjean robs through a virtually unconscious gesture, drives home the principle that mere generosity in and of itself will not transform the “soul” of this damaged human being. Unlike Rousseau, who sees society as in conflict with the good of the individual, Hugo recognizes society as the source of both good and bad for the individual. It was

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society that took away Valjean’s freedom and imprisoned his mind and body through the arbitrary construction of a concept of good and evil, enshrined in law, which, at the very least, can be critically interrogated and challenged. Yet, at the same time, it is equally clear that the individual is nothing without the other, and that Valjean would never have been able to transcend his resentment— and, following from resentment, the commitment to self-interest and selfpreservation above every other interest—without the intervention of the Bishop. Though Myriel may not even fully understand the significance of his own act, he doesn’t merely accommodate Valjean’s natural desire for freedom in the manner of the Savoyard Vicar. Rather, he forces Valjean to challenge his own selfunderstanding, to engage the power of thought against the inert habits that the brutality of imprisonment has inculcated in him, and to summon the intellectual strength to produce the critique of the social order that will be necessary if he is to construct a new life for himself as a positive transformation of the values that sent him to prison in the first place. Surely the Bishop did not intend such a critique as the effect of his action but merely summoned Valjean to lead a good life according to the Bishop’s Christian principles, but the implications of his actions express a thought that may exceed the action itself, particularly when he lies to the police. Whether he knows it or not, this is a critical lesson for Valjean that will shape the rest of his life. Early in the novel, the Bishop demonstrates the level of his own critical understanding of the world he lives in, though he frames it in the language of Christian discourse. Sainthood, he says, is the exception, but “to be a just person, is the rule.” The French word for rule in this context, la règle, suggests not simply a law to which one must conform, but a pattern or model that guides human behavior. In this context, Myriel clearly privileges justice above moral purity, suggesting that one struggles to avoid sin, though complete avoidance is impossible, because “Sin is like gravity [Le péché est une gravitation]” (ME 13; MF 14). In Hugo’s French, the emphatic equation of sin and gravitation suggests the understanding that human beings are subject to laws of physical and emotional existence that are as much a part of nature as of human nature. As I have already demonstrated, the tendency of Hugo’s thought was more or less consistent with Spinoza’s view that human beings could not be understood as a kingdom within a kingdom whose affects and actions are “outside Nature [extra Naturam]” (E3Pr: 277; O2: 137). Both Hugo and Spinoza understood that the supernatural—at least when it is real—is only the natural beyond our immediate understanding. By lying to the police, Myriel puts the principle of justice above the law and above

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the narrowly constructed moral code of Christianity itself. It would be naïve to think that Myriel’s understanding of the truth about justice would be identical with Hugo’s or that Hugo himself would claim to have an absolute knowledge of what constitutes justice above and beyond human-constructed laws and moral codes. Still, Myriel’s actions suggest an intuitive grasp of a truth for which the rest of the novel makes the case. His act of lying to the police is later validated, for example, by the act of Sister Simplice, whose entire identity remains inseparable from a commitment to telling the truth in every conceivable situation—a person for whom, in the strictest Christian sense, the lie is absolutely evil, the “face of the devil,” and the alternative name of Satan (ME 179). And yet, after the death of Fantine, Sister Simplice lies to Javert twice in order to facilitate Valjean’s escape from the jail in Montreuil-sur-Mer. Without knowing it, she permits Valjean to arrange his worldly goods in a way that will later affect his ability to take care of Cosette and himself. As Kathryn Grossman has argued, both Sister Simplice and Bishop Myriel engage in what she calls “saintly lawlessness [that] opposes both criminality and conventionality as the realm of originality, creativity, poetry, good lies, and genuine romanticism.” Grossman adds to this group Fantine, who “misrepresents herself to the Thénardiers,” and of course Valjean, who lies and misrepresents himself throughout the novel as the condition of the good he can do and of his own self-redemption. What Grossman would call the “romantic sublime,” however, I would call, after Badiou, a truth procedure.32 Myriel’s willingness to lie and virtually violate the law in order to redeem a soul suggests that he learned a lesson from G— the Conventionist, who insisted on a concept of progress that may be distinguished from the bourgeois ideology, which could be described in Adorno’s words as “the irrational and mad reversal of means into ends.”33 As G— insists to the Bishop, the French Revolution can be justified rationally only in terms of its outcome: “a better world.” Revolutions are the “brutalities of progress” with the result that, even if there is change for the better, the people have paid a price in suffering (ME 38). In the end, the essence of G—’s argument to the bishop is that the brutality of history, including the violence of the social hierarchy under the ancien régime, produces the violence of revolutions, which can be justified by the result but never incorporated in the result as if there were no contradiction between means and ends. Hence, Hugo’s use of the word brutalités (MF 37). Since, as we know, the Conventionist believes in the power of infinite thought, the ideal as he calls it, and recognizes that in the process of revolution abuses occur that have to be combatted (ME 39), he understands the necessity of making a decision in the

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interest of a truth process, even against the agents of a good cause—in this case, the advancement toward human freedom against the tyranny of social violence. Again, whether or not the Bishop fully understands the implications of this thought as the right—or what Spinoza might call the inevitable necessity—of human revolt against unjust power, potentia against potestas in the collective self-assertion of the multitude, he still expresses through his actions a thought that will transform the subjectivity of Jean Valjean. Ironically, Valjean learns a form of self-preservation that transcends the brutal self-interest that governed his resentment as a convict released from prison after nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread to save the life of his nephew. When the Bishop buys his soul for God, the very language he uses (“it is your soul that I am buying for you [c’est votre âme que je vous achète]”) belongs to the commercial world of emerging capitalism, which transforms the law into an institution of social domination that the Bishop challenges through his action (ME 90; MF 86). The epitome of this world is the senator, who had been a member of the reactionary Directory and an imperial senator under Napoleon, and whose way of life ignores such “stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty.” Though as senator and a former prosecutor he embodies social authority, he never deviates in his career “from the path of self-interest and his own advancement” (ME 25–26). He professes his atheism and, insisting that there is nothing immortal in human beings, recognizes no ontological foundation for any kind of social value that derives from human cooperation rather than self-interest, so that one must rationally choose the path of pleasure rather than suffering: “It’s eat or be eaten. I eat.” Still, though he cynically rejects religion for himself, except as a kind of social fascade, he happily concedes that ordinary people without wealth need such fables or chimeras like “the soul, immortality, heaven, the stars. They eat that up” (ME 27–28). Curiously, the man in the novel who most uncritically swallows these chimeras and who would happily prostrate himself before someone like the senator, is Javert. He is also, as I will argue later, the one authentically tragic figure in the novel. Though Valjean learns a lesson from the Bishop, he cannot simply accept the Bishop’s gift as redemption without cost. In fact, Hugo, as the narrator, strongly suggests that Valjean can barely understand what has happened to him. In response to the crisis Valjean undergoes, Hugo poses the question as to whether there is a voice in the ex-convict’s mind that expresses the transformative force of the Bishop’s intervention—that tells him he must choose between becoming either the best or the worst of men: “he now had to rise higher … than the

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bishop or fall even lower than the galley slave.” It is a choice between becoming an angel or a monster (ME 95). Ironically, Valjean implicitly or unconsciously realizes that in order to become an angel he must become what society would consider a monster, he must carefully and strategically violate the law in order to redeem himself. The lesson of his encounter with Petit-Gervais makes clear to him that without challenging the authority of the state and the social structure it fosters and protects, he will never be able to become a better man and serve the good of society in the manner of the Bishop. With the image of his own damaged being before him after the robbery of the boy, Valjean implicitly chooses the path of his own redemption, which also amounts to a critique of the social order. As Grossman suggests, he becomes a lawless saint, except that his sainthood is always an uncompleted truth process that has little if anything to do with the conventional concept of holiness. In order to model himself on the Bishop, he has to become more than the Bishop, who never experienced the brutality of prison and never had to overcome the same habitus.34 In the case of Valjean, prison produced “the animal [bête] who, out of habit and instinct, had stupidly stuck its foot over the money [of Petit-Gervais] while the intellect tried to grapple with so many new and bewildering obsessions” (ME 95; MF 91). Even if the Bishop as an educated man is more articulate than Valjean, the latter’s decision to break his parole derives from a more profound understanding of the social order that he resists. His action starts from the premise—even if that premise is unconscious, both for the fictive character and for the author—that the soul, before it can be redeemed, must be made. It must be created through the expansion of mind or thought; and one could argue that the new obsessions with which Valjean now struggles are truth processes that have seized his being and are virtually reconstituting his subjective existence. Within the frame of the novel, Jean Valjean’s life—which from this point forward could be considered a work of art through the process of self-making, what could be called after Adorno a mimetic comportment toward reality—becomes the determinate negation of the emerging nineteenth-century bourgeois social order.35 Similarly, Les Misérables as a whole is the determinate negation of the world from which it derives, including, as I will suggest later, Hugo’s own position within that world in 1848. And yet this determinate negation possesses constitutive force. Valjean’s existence, despite the constant setbacks and struggles in his life, becomes an affirmation of the potential (potentia) of the multitude. However, the condition of that affirmation must first be what Blake would call mutual forgiveness, which

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also includes Valjean’s forgiveness of himself and the monster he imagines he has become. In prison, Valjean learned to read in order to use that skill as a weapon and “to strengthen his hate” (ME 76, 365). In effect, in relation to the law that sent him to prison, he became its negation in the Blakean sense, which also could mean its inverted mirror image. Just as Satan in Blake’s Milton revolts against the authority of his father by declaring himself a law unto himself and then seeks to universalize that law and force others to submit to it, so Valjean was driven in a similar direction by hatred and could have become such a Satanic figure, someone like the paternal Thénardier, who in the ambush of Valjean in the Gorbeau slum reveals the depth of his resentment against the rich when he attempts to victimize someone he suspects to be both wealthy and as lawless as himself. In a sense, he is right. He is, after all, Valjean’s double, since they both live on the edge of the legal system and the social order that it protects; they both use pseudonyms, they both escape from different prisons, and they both criticize the world as it is currently organized through their different modes of existence. In order to avoid Thénardier’s fate, Valjean must actually forgive the Satanic dimension of his own being, and, contrary to Delabroy’s thesis, when his soul is flooded with “a glorious radiance [un rayonnement magnifique]” (ME 96; MF 92) that derives from his imaginative perception of the Bishop, it is not simply a form of total alienation but Valjean’s absorption of not only the Bishop’s words but more importantly his thought. This thought expands Valjean’s mind and remakes his soul by initiating a process of critical self-understanding. While he weeps after the encounter with the Bishop and the robbery of Petit-Gervais—apparently with joy, though perhaps the better word would be jouissance—“the light of day penetrated more and more into his brain, an extraordinary light, a light ravishing and terrible at the same time [le jour se faisait de plus en plus dans son cerveau, un jour extraordinaire, un jour ravissant et terrible à la fois]” (MF 92). I have translated this passage more liberally than Rose, except when she converts the French cerveau into “spirit,” which conforms to previous translations that use either “spirit” or, more commonly, “mind” (ME 97). Ironically, only the translator of the first British edition in 1862, Lascelles Wraxall, used the word “brain” in this context.36 This translation describes itself as the “authorized” English translation, but it seems doubtful that Hugo had much contact with the man he referred to in 1863 as “the inept translator of Les Misérables” (OC12: 1231). Still, while cerveau can signify mind or spirit in the sense of intellect, intelligence, or even wit, it nonetheless carries the primary denotation of the physical instrument of thought in the head or brain. If Hugo

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had wanted to emphasize an experience of transcendence in the metaphysical sense, there would have been no reason even to write this line since he had already described Valjean’s soul, âme, as flooded with radiance. In effect, the choice of cerveau suggests Hugo’s implicit understanding that the spiritual transformation Valjean undergoes is necessarily a transformation of body and soul together. The radiance that floods his soul is the light that enters his brain, which leads to the culminating vision of this section, and the premise of the novel, when Valjean sees his own monstrosity transformed, “Satan in the light [lumière] of paradise” (ME 97; MF 92). Valjean’s self-forgiveness is necessarily a mutual forgiveness because the light or enlightenment that disrupts his thought is the beginning of critical understanding that requires the engagement in a transindividual truth process. Forgiveness is understanding, and Valjean forgives himself in grasping the intuitive truth of his own particular being and the social forces that shaped it and continue to determine it. Later in the novel, he conveys the lesson of his experience to Fantine after her terrible fall into poverty and prostitution: “this hell you’ve just come out of is the first form of heaven.” I have altered Rose’s translation of the French phrase la première forme du ciel as “the first step to heaven” (ME 169; MF 159), which conforms to the first English translation by C. E. Wilbur, “the first step towards Heaven,” and, at least in meaning, to Wraxall’s “the ante-room to heaven.” Isobel Florence Hapgood’s 1887 translation was the first to provide a literal version of the phrase.37 This may seem to be an insignificant point, but this minute particular is critical to the understanding of Hugo’s thought. Probably, the translators interpreted the phrase in this way because of the sentence that follows: “Il fallait commencer par là,” or, translated literally, “It was necessary to begin there” (MF 159). The assumption of the translators has been to see the hell of experience as a passage to heaven, which is nonetheless distinct from it, even antithetical to it or what Blake might call a negation. Hugo’s phrase is much more emphatic in suggesting that the hell of experience—even at its worst, as it has been for both Valjean and Fantine—is a contrary and not a negation, and a contrary can be considered a form or property of its apparent antithesis, in the sense that the contraries need each other and betray their identities through separation, as happens in the relation between Rintrah and Palamabron in Blake’s Milton. From a Spinozian perspective, experience, even in its most negative form, cannot be antithetical to God or nature, since every particular of existence, which would include every possible social relation and the events that derive from those relations, is a mode whose immanent cause

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lies in nature. Though Hugo clearly wants to project a teleological necessity into the relation between experience and redemption, so that in the aggregate human suffering will somehow inevitably lead to the spiritualization of humanity, he obviously recognizes in the theory of a world punished that material existence may always remain at odds, to some extent, with the power of thought; and yet without experience thought itself runs the risk of becoming empty abstraction. If thought and material existence or experience are contraries, and if human suffering through experience is the first form of heaven or what Spinoza would call blessedness, then the first form of heaven would be, in effect, to achieve an intellectual understanding of experience just as Valjean has come to some understanding of the forces that shaped his existence as a convict. In theory at least, such understanding requires experience as its condition, but it also requires the intervention of others, even if those others bring to the subject of inadequate knowledge only other forms of inadequate knowledge. As I’ve argued in Spinozian terms, inadequate knowledge derived from the imagination, when it is joined with other forms of inadequate knowledge, through the interaction between particular individuals, can produce the movement toward blessedness or the adequate knowledge of God, which would entail an adequate understanding of the immanent causes of the individual’s own experience. The subject of such knowledge is not the particular individual, however, but the larger singularity in which the individual participates, the subject of a truth process. In the encounter between Valjean and Bishop Myriel, or even between Valjean and Fantine, neither individual brings fully adequate knowledge or understanding to the other individual, but each manifests through their actions more than through their words the process of understanding and the mutual forgiveness that results from this process.

Immense incomplete The life of Jean Valjean, as it is charted in the novel, demonstrates both the affirmative power of a truth process to constitute new forms of being and, at the same time, its pitfalls as a force that divides the particular individual or person from itself and its world. However, the larger significance of Valjean’s being only fully emerges if we relate it to Badiou’s theory of the subject positions and the typology I derive from Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem, based on the two contraries and a negation, embodied in Palamabron, Rintrah, and Satan. Obviously,

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Valjean would constitute a form of the faithful subject, according to Badiou’s logic, though not without critical challenges to the consistency of his position. In Blake’s triad, both Palamabron and Rintrah would be forms of the faithful subject, though as contraries they represent two sides of the subjective principle in a truth process. Palamabron represents the power of truth that takes the form of a kind of powerlessness.38 In Spinozian terms, I would equate this power of powerlessness with potentia, which conditions the consistency of a thought process or its continuation beyond any immediate situation or location. Despite his critique of and distancing from Spinoza, even Badiou recognizes that the power of thought is virtually identical with love.39 Palamabron embodies the love or compassion that allows for the intellectual understanding required in order to sustain the universal address of a truth. As Badiou writes in Ethics, “Truths make their singular penetration … only through the fabric of opinions.”40 In the book on Saint Paul, he is even more emphatic: “these fictitious beings, these opinions, customs, differences, are that to which universality is addressed; that toward which love is directed; finally, that which must be traversed in order for universality itself to be constructed, or for the genericity (généricité) of the true to be immanently deployed.”41 Humans are fictitious under the rule of hegemonic norms and ideologies that force the truth of their potentia, their real being, into inexistence. But one cannot force the truth on the masses or the multitude through the dogmatic erasure of their hegemonic understanding of their world without subverting the truth itself, which requires the universality of its address. By contrast, no truth would have any continuity or consistency without the strength and courage of conviction that could even take the form of terror, which Badiou identifies as one of the four affects associated with a truth process.42 Terror need not be an act of violence, though one cannot exclude violence from a revolutionary situation, since without some degree of terror one offers no resistance to the power of the rich or whoever attempts to subvert the constitutive power of the multitude in the interest of the dominant class whose address is not universal.43 However, Badiou also refers to the terror of Pierre Boulez’s public criticism of contemporary French music in the 1950s when he was practicing and advocating serialism.44 This kind of terror would include the “terror of the matheme.” According to Badiou, one can postulate that political terror threatens harm in a way that intellectual terror doesn’t only if one holds that “life, suffering and finitude are the only absolute marks of existence. That would imply that there exists no eternal truth into the construction of which the living being can incorporate itself—sometimes, it is true, at the cost of his or her life.”45 Rintrah

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would be Blake’s exemplar of this kind of terror, as I already pointed out in the last chapter. If Rintrah manifests the affects of courage and terror in a truth process, his contrary Palamabron manifests the other two critical affects, anxiety and justice. One could argue that anxiety over the necessity of making decisions without the guarantee that such decisions are absolutely correct conditions justice, which requires the understanding of how the contexts of worlds or situations determine the different necessities of war and peace, violence and gentleness.46 From these perspectives, Jean Valjean may seem to fall strictly on the side of gentleness and forgiveness, but that would be to forget the terror that his forgiveness causes in the mind of Javert to the point that the latter takes his own life. If Valjean is Palamabron, then Rintrah would be the revolutionaries as a group, the Friends of the ABC, though primarily manifested in the characters of Enjolras and Marius, the former expressing the terror of political thought and its consequences in action and the latter the courage necessary to sustain it. Clearly, each character expresses more than these qualities, but in their relations to one another they are possessed, so to speak, by a particular ruling affect and the resolution of the tests to which they are subjected expresses the force of these affects. Valjean, in particular, illustrates more than the principles of anxiety and justice in the power of human thought. He is, if not the most complicated character in nineteenth-century European literature, at least the one who most powerfully expresses the contradictions of the world from which he derives. He anticipates James Joyce’s l’homme moyen sensuel, Leopold Bloom, in the sense that they are both presented as average men who are not average at all. One should not forget, though it is almost never asserted by critics and scholars, that Les Misérables, like Ulysses, is an encyclopedic novel. By comparison with Bloom, Valjean could be construed as l’homme moyen spirituel, but in any case neither he nor Bloom can be said to practice a conventional form of sexuality—though, in practical terms, both are celibate, which, according to Benjamin Kahan, can be considered a sexual identity in its own right.47 Valjean, of course, is not Jewish, but like the Jewish Bloom he is an outsider in conventional society; and from the criminal world to which he is more or less condemned, he makes a further break in choosing a life course founded on forgiveness rather than vengeance. In different ways, both Bloom and Valjean congeal into their singular forms of being what Negri would call, after Spinoza, the multitude. Against his own predisposition to project his concept of God into a form of transcendent power (a kind of potestas), in practice Hugo can only imagine the

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subjectivity of God in a human form, and in Les Misérables that subject, even more than Bishop Myriel, is Jean Valjean. He is Job on top of a dunghill—a kind of savage God. In one of the most remarkable passages in the novel, in the midst of a description of two small boys wandering through the Luxembourg gardens while the battle at the barricade on rue de la Chanvrerie enters its final phase, Hugo engages in a meditation that amounts to both a critique and a defense of his own philosophical position. Almost contradicting his position in the “Philosophical Preface,” he criticizes those who choose to privilege and worship nature’s infinity at the expense of the finite, or that which can be touched and transformed through human labor (ME 1001). In the preface, in the passage that celebrates the immanence of being, he wrote in a rather different tone that one discovers the true infinite by focusing on the particular thing or experience, “this fact, this escarpment, this vertigo, this obsession, this urgency” (PP 345). In Les Misérables, Hugo insists that a passion for the infinite must be supplemented by a passion for what he calls the indefinite, which combines the infinite and the finite into something “half-human, half-divine” (ME 1001). This perspective begins to make more sense in another passage from the preface, one in which it is difficult not to detect the thought of Spinoza when Hugo describes the relation between geometrical ideas and units of material being. He insists on a necessary “confluence of idea and matter at the extremity of reality,” which becomes an opening to the vision of God. Though, in the same passage, Hugo compares molecules to geometrical points and stresses their indivisibility (which would not be Spinoza’s position), Hugo nonetheless insists that the infinity of thought is more than a reflection of the infinity of matter (l’infini dans les faits)—more than a reverberation, more than an intersection, “it is an identity” (PP 349). In the aforementioned passage from Les Misérables, Hugo argues that those who choose the contemplation of nature over involvement with humanity, those “magnificent egoists of the infinite,” including, for example, Horace, Goethe, and La Fontaine, “These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac is such a big thing for them that it prevents them from seeing the child crying. God eclipses their souls.” In describing what is missing from such a perspective, Hugo claims that “the All is not in it; the true All remains beyond it” but then seems to contradict himself: “The immense incomplete exists in nature” (ME 1001). The implication is that the All of being enters appearance as the immense incomplete. The object of Hugo’s critique in this passage is what I already referred to, after Hegel, as a bad infinity, since by projecting infinity beyond the immense incomplete of nature and into a transcendent order beyond everyday existence, you make

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infinity finite, you make God into something divorced from human experience, something indifferent to human suffering—in other words, the God of Javert. Nonetheless, even as Hugo proclaims the force of the immense incomplete, he continues to project the image of God as “above the sun” and behind the stars. However, what you should feel in such contemplation is not the infinite whole in the distance but “the prodigality of the inexhaustible” (ME 1001–2). So, to sum up what would seem to be Hugo’s contradictory perspectives, God is the nature that embraces the supernatural as only an inadequate understanding of the natural—the one, the infinite, and yet the incomplete. He is immanent to the stars, beyond the sun, but he also resides in the worms, the mud, and the shit of the Paris sewers. He, of course, is not a he, except to the extent that he becomes a subject through the mediation of a singularity like Jean Valjean. In Spinozian terms, Valjean is a mode of divine substance, and as such his existence expresses the savage God of Hugo’s world. As I argued in Chapter 1, God is not a subject except insofar as the word “God” refers to the immanent cause of those singularities that have become subjects of a truth process. As the immanent cause of all things, God neither loves nor hates anyone or anything (E5.17Cor: 371). Yet every human mind—though I would prefer to translate Spinoza’s Mentem humanam as “human thought”—participates in God’s intellect (E2.11Cor: 250; O2: 94). In a way, Hugo’s old Conventionist was right. If the immanent cause of all things had no self—or rather, no form of subjectivity—it would be limited and therefore not infinite. On the other hand, if it were a univocal subject that transcends all human forms of subjectivity, it would necessarily relate to objects that must exist outside of itself and therefore would be limited again. The savage God has subjectivity through the intellectual activity of the multitude of thinking beings that constitute the world. Implicitly, for Spinoza the essence of thought is love because this enables the particular being to transcend itself and the limitations of its body through interaction with the thought of others. Ultimately, to think is to love, and to love is to enhance the power of thought. By expressing his love for Valjean, Bishop Myriel engages him in a thought process, including both words and actions, that becomes the dominant passion of Valjean’s life. From that point forward, Valjean participates with the Bishop in a truth procedure that constitutes the subjective love of God, which is the love of truth. Marius clarifies this truth in the notebook he leaves for Cosette in the wild garden of the house on Rue Plumet: “The reduction of the universe to one single being, the expansion of one single being into God: That is what love is” (ME 766). This thought correlates with Spinoza’s understanding

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that knowledge of God comes through knowledge of singular things, even if those singular things are composites of particular individuals. The face of God in Les Misérables is the face of those individuals who love other human beings, primarily Jean Valjean, who also becomes the expression of the composite power of humanity.

Amorous superhero Hugo conveys the association of Valjean with the savage God through a series of references throughout the novel. As Valjean exits the courtroom in Arras after revealing his identity in order to save the man who has been mistaken for himself, Champmathieu, he has “something divine about him [je ne sais quoi de divin]” that “forces the multitudes to draw back and make way before a man” (ME 235; MF 222). Valjean’s revelation, though it initially inspires disbelief in the courtroom, nonetheless forces the multitude to behave in a way that expresses their awe before a sight that could be said to express their own truth, a revelation of potentia, the divinity of their own humanity, as opposed to a transcendent power that always remains beyond the reach of human thought and action. When the miserable young Cosette, while lugging a bucket of water through the dark woods near Montfermeil, cries out in despair, “Oh, my God! My God!,” suddenly the bucket becomes weightless as a hand seizes and lifts it in response to her prayer, the hand of Valjean (ME 326). To Cosette, in their first encounter and repeatedly thereafter, Valjean becomes the manifestation of Providence (ME 331, 342). Escaping from the Thénardiers with him, Cosette “feels something as if she were next to the good Lord” (MF 334). Later, when Valjean teaches her how to read, he remembers his intention of using that skill to avenge himself on society and feels in himself “the impulse of premeditation from on high, the will of someone not man, and he would become lost in thought [la reverie].” Though in this passage Hugo seems to suggest a transcendent will, he further qualifies Valjean’s revery with the recognition that “Good thoughts have their bottomless pits [leurs abîmes] just as bad ones do” (ME 365; MF 346–47). As I’ve already noted, in the “Philosophical Preface” Hugo associates the bottomless, limitless abyss with the immanence of a divine principle in the world, the infinity of truth. In effect, the God in man and beyond every particular human being is thought. For Cosette, only a few paragraphs before the passage cited, there is no ambivalence when she reflects that Valjean’s entry into her life was “the coming

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of God” (ME 364). Her perspective is later validated by Fauchlevent after she and Valjean appear to drop out of the sky into the convent of Petit-Picpus: “You’re not like other men, father Madeleine” (ME 451). Of course, the reader knows that Valjean did not fly into the convent, but Fauchlevent, whose life was saved by Valjean’s prodigious strength in Montreuil-sur-Mer, perhaps recognizes that this man manifests, even in his body, the power of human beings to resist and transcend the limits of any particular world or social order. In some ways, he is the first superhero, a peculiar ancestor of twentieth-century graphic fictions. Valjean exhibits his almost superhuman strength and capacity for survival on numerous occasions. In addition to making several daring escapes from impossible situations, he also survives being buried alive by Fauchlevent in the scheme to smuggle him out of the convent of Petit-Picpus. Still, the most dramatic example of Valjean’s virtually superheroic expression of human potentia comes when he descends into the sewers of Paris bearing the injured and unconscious Marius away from the defeated barricade. The sewers themselves become a figure of the abyss of thought in a section of the novel bearing the ironic title “Mud, but Soul [La boue, mais l’âme]” (MF 1007). Since, as Hugo would have learned from reading Saisset’s introduction to Spinoza, the soul is a collection of ideas, or, more accurately in my view, a generic set or truth process that expands with the expansion of thought or truth content, and since emotions that would include physical suffering and trauma can also express thought processes that arise from reason, then Valjean’s physical struggle to save Marius, despite his own ambivalent feelings about the man who threatens to take Cosette away from him, expresses a thought process that involves mastering—in the sense of coming to a greater understanding of—his passive affects through the force of a positive and therefore rational affect. This scene is another example of Blake’s mutual forgiveness. Before coming to the barricade on rue de la Chanvrerie, Valjean inadvertently intercepts from Gavroche the letter of Marius to Cosette announcing the imminence of the young man’s death. At first, Valjean feels enormously relieved that he will not lose Cosette after all: “he had before his eyes that splendour, the death of the hated being,” which causes him to “let out a hideous cry of inner joy.” He continues in this celebratory mode until suddenly he becomes gloomy, and without Hugo’s providing any transition or description of his thought process, Valjean puts on his National Guard regalia and heads out for the barricade (ME 953–54). In other words, Hugo allows actions to replace words in the expression of Valjean’s thought and motivation. As Hugo phrases

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it elsewhere in the novel, “Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with two focal points. Acts are one, ideas the other” (ME 809; MF 779). Later, after he climbs down into the darkness of the sewer carrying Marius, he is virtually blind at first, which characterizes not only his physical relation to the immediate environment but also his intellectual relation to his own actions. Then, his vision begins to alter: “The pupil dilates in the night and ends up finding a kind of daylight there, just as the soul dilates in misery and ends up finding God” (ME 1047). In effect, Valjean’s descent into the sewers is both a real and a symbolic action, a physical and an intellectual act. To be strictly faithful to Spinoza, it must be understood that the thought is not the immanent cause of the physical act, nor does the act induce the thought. Act and thought are two expressions of one and the same thing. Hugo’s refusal to posit a causal relationship between thought and act signifies the operation of the ontological unconscious in the novel, an implicit rejection of hegemonic dualism. Valjean struggles with his emotional response to the threat that Marius poses, which is the loss of Cosette, because the love that governs his relation to Cosette is more powerful than his jealousy over the possibility of her loss. As Hugo notes after Valjean discovers that Cosette is in love with Marius, this is the greatest suffering and test the ex-convict has ever experienced because, though he loves Cosette “only as a father,” his virtual widowhood or bereavement (la viduité) has nonetheless invested in this love “every other kind of love.” Hugo insists that nature “does not accept nonpayment” so that the natural passion Valjean would have had for a lover or wife has been invested in his love for Cosette, who, in addition to being a daughter, has taken the place of a mother and a sister. Yet, though this passion is “pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious,” and though Hugo uses language that would associate it more with agápe than with éros, he nonetheless calls it “an attraction (attrait), imperceptible and invisible but real” (ME 947; MF 911). One must insist on Hugo’s point here. Though Valjean’s paternal love of Cosette is strictly celibate, it is nonetheless also unconsciously erotic, which is to say that his celibacy is not a repression of desire but a thought process and understanding of his own and her particular modes of being, which must also take into account the reality of their world, including its social determinations and moral codes. As the object of this love, Cosette becomes for Valjean a singularity in the Spinozian sense, a divine thing insofar as she is the expression of her own immanent cause. In this love, Valjean again anticipates Leopold Bloom, who, despite sexual fantasies and indiscretions (including public

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masturbation), comes to express his sexual desire and feelings—I would venture to say his love—for Molly Bloom through the practice of a kind of celibacy. I will have more to say about Bloom’s celibacy, and why that term not only makes sense but also has the constitutive force of love, in the next chapter. As far as Valjean is concerned, one might conclude that his celibacy is, to use Kahan’s word, “a placeholder” for a more conventional sexual desire that would take Cosette as its object, though the reason this desire requires such a sublimation is that it is inappropriate to the extent that Valjean sees himself in conventional terms as her father.48 After all, the ex-convict’s history has made a conventional sexual relationship virtually impossible, even though one can imagine that if it were something he truly desired, he would have found a way. Still, the point of Lacan’s celebrated and frequently misunderstood remark about the nonexistence of the sexual relationship could imply that both the sexual drive and sexual desire do not exist, in the sense that there is only the drive and the desire it generates without ever being strictly contained by the category of sexuality.49 In the passage cited above, Hugo refers to nature as the origin of such a drive but then displaces the very concept of a drive. He first describes it as an indestructible yet unconscious feeling, then the concept of feeling is negated by the concept of instinct, then instinct by attraction, and finally all seem to be subsumed by the concept of love that is expressed through the feeling of tenderness. The meaning of love is knowledge of the infinite, the immanent, through knowledge of a particular being. Tenderness is the truth process by which the self, as an imaginary construction that reflects a social norm, dissolves itself into a larger singularity that involves interaction with another subject or subjects, while preserving the disjunctive relation between the two. Hence love is not only an emotion or a feeling but also a form of knowledge—Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge—that ultimately becomes the condition for ethical action in the world. Valjean’s tenderness expresses his self-annihilation in the face of a truth that finds physical and spiritual expression in Cosette’s being. Though with the discovery of Marius’s love of her Valjean’s emotions vacillate between hatred and compassion, in the end the tenderness of his feeling for Cosette compels him to love what she loves and to sacrifice his own immediate condition of happiness for the happiness of these young lovers. He remains faithful to the truth process that his protection and love of Cosette has always expressed. To love and understand Cosette is to love and understand her love of Marius, which means that such love cannot be a threat to his happiness because the truth of that love lies in nature,

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not as something distinct and separate from human culture but as the immanent cause of that culture. Valjean has to save Marius for Cosette in order to save his own love of Cosette, and so in fighting his ambivalent feelings toward the man who threatens his happiness, he is nonetheless fighting for his own happiness, even if Hugo can only imagine this goal as a kind of duty. In a sense, Valjean embodies the struggle of God or nature to love itself through the love of one human being for other human beings. Cosette is to Valjean what Bishop Myriel’s sister was to him, as Hugo describes it at the time of the Bishop’s death: “palpable God—what rapture! [Dieu palpable, quel ravissement!]” (ME 141; MF 133). The French word ravissement suggests more than “rapture” or “delight.” It carries an erotic overtone that would be expressed by the English “ravishing,” which means intensely attractive or beautiful but with the connotation of something that overpowers and, as the word “ravishment” would suggest, even violates. Hugo deploys the rhetoric of mystical writing that uses erotic language to convey the relation to a transcendent God, except that his God manifests itself in a physical being, a human form. It is perhaps ironic that the most intense expressions of erotic love in Les Misérables—Myriel’s love of his sister, Valjean’s love of Cosette, and even Marius’s love of Cosette—require celibacy as the condition of their manifestation, though in Marius’s case it is only a temporary condition. The intensity of Hugo’s own sexual drive is well-documented, but one could argue that he followed Spinoza’s thought in another way, at least unconsciously, in that he made no metaphysical distinction between éros and agápe, between physical and spiritual love. That Spinoza did not maintain such a distinction is one of the implications of Matheron’s already cited article, “Spinoza and Sexuality.” When Valjean embraces Marius’s body and descends into the sewers of Paris, he becomes “like the prophet, in the belly of the monster” (ME 1048; MF 1010). Valjean is not only in the belly of the monster, but he is confronting his own monstrosity, the hatred and resentment that his thought has never fully relinquished, though his love of Cosette has made it possible to forget or placate these impulses in his being. In effect, this crisis and the vacillation it produces force him to doubt or question his emotional bond with Cosette and the particular nature of his love. At one point, he rips up his own shirt to bandage Marius’s wounds, and then, according to Hugo, “in this half-light bending over the still-unconscious and almost unbreathing Marius, he glared at him with inexpressible hatred” (ME 1056; MF 1017–18). Ironically, this hatred, even in the act that expresses it, is ineluctably transformed into the feeling of tenderness, the same emotion that has originally governed his relation to Cosette. In that

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relationship, through the impulse for possessive fusion, Valjean had gradually assumed an identity that may have betrayed the truth process that the disjunctive, generic relation of the two initially expressed. Vacillation has forced Valjean to confront once again his truth, even his monstrosity, and to transform it into love that cannot be reduced to a categorical signifier, not even paternal celibate love.

Revolutionary vacillation This act is also the moment of mutual forgiveness that reconciles the revolutionary terror and militant force of Enjolras, Marius, and the other fighters on the barricade, with Valjean’s intellectual understanding that expresses itself through nonviolence. Like Blake’s Rintrah, the revolutionaries express both the wrath and the conviction that are necessary to any kind of social transformation, but it is clear from Hugo’s elaborate reconstruction of this historical event that he underwent his own vacillation in the contemplation of such a process. To my mind, the critical event in Hugo’s life leading to this vacillation was his involvement in crushing the June insurrection of Paris workers in 1848. This event may also have been critical to the transformation of the manuscript Les Misères, which Hugo had started writing in 1845 and stopped writing in February 1848, into the final version of Les Misérables, which resulted from the process of revision, expansion, and publication in 1860–1862. As Graham Robb demonstrates in his biography of Hugo, at the time of the 1848 revolution Hugo’s class loyalties were divided and his commitment to a republic not yet fully formed. He had allowed a “Messianic image [of himself] to swell in the popular imagination,” which made him “a Christ of the barricades … the Victor Hugo of the cabinets de lecture, the well-loved author of Notre-Dame de Paris, Claude Gueux, patriotic anthems and parlour songs, the nemesis of the death penalty, the Napoleon of the Romantic movement.” This fantasy was ruptured after the insurrection in February 1848 when Hugo stood on the balcony of his home in the Place Royale and announced the new provisional government and, apparently on his own authority, “a Regency, with the Duchess d’Orléans as acting head of state.” Needless to say, the “Regency” didn’t go over well with the people, and at the Place de la Bastille a similar declaration nearly got him shot.50 Though the poet Lamartine, acting head of the provisional government, supported the republic, he couldn’t persuade his fellow poet to accept a ministry, because Hugo considered such a people’s government impractical at the time.51 As he later

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commented in Napoleon the Little, published in both French and English after his exile in 1852, “The republic, we repeat, is the future; it would have come, but step by step, by successive progressions, by conquest after conquest, as a river that flows, and not as a deluge that breaks in.” Though he considered the republic to be “indestructible,” presumably as a social desire, it had to await its proper time when it would be “free from all possible reaction.”52 However, in 1848, after a lot of hesitation and losing an election, Hugo ran a proper campaign and was elected to the National Assembly on June 4. The workers’ insurrection started on June 23, and on June 24 Hugo was among fifty-nine representatives from the Assembly sent to negotiate with the insurgents in order to avoid further bloodshed.53 In Les Misérables, Hugo introduces the struggle at the barricade on rue de la Chanvrerie with detailed descriptions of the two barricades that Hugo witnessed in 1848 and against which he personally led full-scale assaults. As Robb summarizes the facts, For the next three days [starting on June 24], pausing only to sit for a few moments on a pavement, Hugo harangued insurgents, stormed barricades, took prisoners, directed troops and cannon, and unexpectedly remained alive. This means that he was directly responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of workers, whom he himself considered innocent and heroic; misguided, but justified by their misery.54

Readers who want to see Javert as the villain of Les Misérables, instead of the tragic figure I think he is, should keep in mind that Hugo’s actions in June 1848 were dictated by a principle: “To save civilization … to save the life of the human race [genre humain].”55 Hugo’s ambivalence toward the workers’ insurrection remains a problem in the novel that he never fully resolves. In the “Notice” to the online critical and genetic text of Les Misérables, Guy Rosa explores the differences between the version of the work that Hugo stopped writing in 1848 and the final version. The early version is more blatantly Bonapartist, Catholic, and more or less negative in the view it takes of the riot of 1832. In rewriting and expanding the story of the barricade during his exile, Hugo systematically substituted the French word “insurrection” for the word “émeute” or riot.56 In the finished work, to the question, “what is the movement of June 1832 in the eyes of history? Is it a riot? Is it an insurrection?,” he responds quite simply, “It is an insurrection” (ME 867). Hugo admits in the novel that he will sometimes use the term émeute with reference to “surface events,” but he always maintains “the distinction between riot as form and insurrection as foundation” (ME 867; MF

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833). In the same chapter, he clarifies the difference in a way that clearly suggests the distinction between the ontological foundation of society (the multitude as a generic set) and the limited interests of a specific group identity: “In all the issues that arise from collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is an insurrection, the attack of the fraction against the whole is a riot” (ME 864). Still, in referring to the events of June 1848 in the novel, Hugo falls back, to some extent, on the position he must have held during that period, and his ambivalence toward the multitude finds its most visible expression. He insists that sometimes “this great desperate one, the rabble [la canaille], protest—and the mob [la populace] does battle with the people [au peuple].” The word canaille has extremely negative connotations. Hugo goes on to say that “the rascals [les gueux] attack the common law; mob rule [l’ochlocratie] declares its opposition to the demos.” Yet even as he condemns mob rule in these harsh terms, Hugo implicitly criticizes his own language when he notes that his obviously insulting words “register the fault of those in power more than the fault of those who suffer; the fault of the privileged more than the fault of the dispossessed.” Though the masses who become a mob may be “against principles, even against liberty, equality, and fraternity, even against the universal vote, even against the rule of all by all,” their actions derive from anguish, discouragement, poverty, ignorance, and general misery. Hugo’s position could not be more contradictory, as he seems to identify the people or demos in 1848 with the elected members of the National Assembly supported by the National Guard and those who stand on the other side of the barricade with some kind of narrow self-interest, the fraction that stands against the whole. Yet, at the same time, he realizes that the privileged, who surely are a fraction, are more responsible for this situation than the masses. He more or less inverts the negative meaning of the words he chooses to describe the rioters, words that cause him grief, by noting that “when philosophy probes the facts to which they correspond, it often finds plenty of greatness bound up with all the misery.” He then makes several historical references to the power of these masses, concluding with the phrase: “the rabble [la canaille] followed Jesus Christ” (ME 961–62; MF 925). A few pages later, Hugo writes one of his most celebrated lines in reference to the canaille of 1848 at the Saint Antoine barricade: “The spirit of revolution spread its cloud over that summit where the voice of the people rumbled like the voice of God.” Even here, Hugo’s practical understanding of the immanence of God in the multitude can only express itself ambivalently, since, as he writes in the next paragraph, the

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barricade itself attacked the revolution. In effect, through this heroic insanity, the revolution attacked the revolution (ME 964). In legitimating his actions in 1848, Hugo implies that he is the “man of integrity” who must put down the riot “for very love of this crowd [cette foule]” (ME 962; MF 926). The question is, was Hugo’s commitment to the concept of a republic—and by implication, democracy—fully formed in 1848? As Marx understood, universal suffrage, which Hugo thought legitimated his war against the people he supposedly loved, was not magical, nor was the cult of the people: “Instead of their imaginary people, the elections brought the real people to the light of day, i.e., representatives of the different classes into which it falls.”57 Hugo was himself a representative of a class, a pair de France, and, as Marx noted, “in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves, from their reality.”58 Yet three and a half years after the June insurrection—during which period the principle of universal suffrage had become a pawn in the political struggle between factions of the bourgeoisie that had defeated, in part thanks to Hugo, the Paris workers—Hugo went into exile in protest against the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte. In May 1850, the Assembly had passed a law that disenfranchised 3 million voters and, as Marx declared, “excluded [the Paris proletariat] from any participation in political power.”59 Eventually, Louis Bonaparte wanted to repeal the law in an opportunistic bid for mass popularity. Hugo and the left supported this act, which led to nothing, but it was not out of any admiration for Bonaparte, though Hugo later argued in Napoleon the Little that the restoration of universal suffrage would have prevented the coup d’état.60 In any case, in recreating the insurrection of 1832, Hugo made these issues seemingly irrelevant, since there was no question of universal suffrage at that time. Still, in writing the final version of Les Misérables, Hugo struggled to reconcile himself with the militancy of revolutionary desire, which, as he had learned through his own experience, truly was irrepressible and could never be properly timed because it represented a rupture with everyday temporal processes. Hugo never overcame his vacillation on the question of violent revolution, though clearly in Les Misérables he aligned himself with the militant students and workers, even as he had Valjean as his stand-in on the barricades, a man who refuses to use violence but nonetheless takes the side of what Hugo himself must have seen as the expression of a truth. Hugo says as much in his own ironic way: “Tomorrow’s truth borrows its method—battle—from yesterday’s lie.”

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Yet, though Hugo appears to believe that violence, even in the name of a truth, somehow deserves the violent response it provokes, he nonetheless admits to his admiration of “the glorious fighters for the future, the confessors of utopia [les confesseurs de l’utopie]” (ME 1014; MF 976). I have altered Rose’s translation “utopia’s confidants” to “confessors of utopia,” which conforms to the early translations of Wraxall and Hapgood. Wilbour translates it as “the professors of Utopia.”61 In the context, Hugo suggests that the revolutionaries commit themselves religiously, even to the point of dying, to a truth, what Hugo calls utopia and by which he means democracy as the foundation of the republic of the future. Though he insists that peaceful solutions are possible, he believes that the revolutionaries who sacrifice their lives for progress commit a religious and providential act. They are venerable and majestic, perhaps most so when their efforts fail. Hugo insists that the insurgents miscalculated the will of the people, who did not finally support their insurrection, and he does not accept that LouisPhilippe, the Citizen King “with one foot in the monarchy and the other in the revolution,” was their real enemy or the object of their hatred. They wanted to overthrow royalty in France in order to overthrow “the usurpation of man over man and of privilege over justice throughout the world” (ME 1015–16). Though Hugo stresses that the goals of the revolutionaries in 1832 may have been “remote, perhaps vague” (ME 1015), the words he puts into the mouth of Enjolras suggest something different. To his cohorts as they face almost certain defeat, he identifies their struggle as “the revolution of the True.” The meaning of this truth is “the sovereignty of mankind over itself [de l’homme sur lui-même]” (ME 977–78, MF 941), which recalls Spinoza’s concept of potentia in the claim that individuals have as much right as they have power (TPT16: 527). Hugo could have come across this principle in the Theological-Political Treatise, which was included in the first volume of Saisset’s Oeuvres de Spinoza, along with the introduction that Hugo is likely to have read.62 For Enjolras, although liberty is this sovereign power over oneself, he also recognizes that “Wherever two or more such sovereignties gather together, the State begins” (ME 978). As Spinoza wrote in the Political Treatise, “If two men come together and join forces, they have more power over Nature, and consequently more right than either one alone; and the greater the number who form a union in this way, the more right they will together possess” (PT2.13: 686). Though what follows in Enjolras’s speech may seem to resemble Rousseau’s theory of the social contract more than Spinoza’s thought, there is nothing in it that resembles Rousseau’s concept of the General Will. When individuals come together to form a state,

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there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain portion of itself to form the common right. This portion is the same for all. The identical nature of the concession that each makes to all is known as Equality. Common right is nothing more nor less than the protection of all shining on the right of each. (ME 978)

Though Spinoza would not have agreed that each individual’s potentia is strictly identical, he did argue two points about equality in the Political Treatise: first, “Citizens are indeed rightly regarded as equals, because the power of the individual compared with the power of the entire state is of no account,” and second, “the abandonment of [equality] must entail the loss of general freedom” (PT9.4: 742; 10.8: 750). Furthermore, in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza made it clear that no one ever cedes all their power to any state or sovereign, and will inevitably conspire or revolt against unjust power (potestas) that alienates the potentia of the multitude (TPT17: 536; 20: 566). Enjolras, who regards the “social contract” and the “social bond” as the same thing, qualifies his notion of equality, which is not leveling but rather recognizing that all people should have the same opportunity to develop their aptitudes, their votes should have the same weight, their consciences the same right. Enjolras’s position conforms to Hugo’s philosophy of education: “From the school that is identical springs the equal society” (ME 978). Of course, the revolutionary act that Enjolras is engaged in and for which he argues goes beyond the conviction that education alone will bring about the kind of democracy that both Enjolras and Hugo envision, even though the word “democracy” is never used in this speech. As Hugo noted in introducing the character, he is “both officiating priest and militant; a soldier of democracy, … a priest of the ideal” (ME 536; MF 514). By ideal, Hugo ultimately means thought. Scholars have frequently identified Marius as the character most obviously based on Hugo. To the extent that this is the case, Hugo’s characterization of Marius could be construed as a form of self-critique. Hugo devotes a significant amount of space in the novel to the evolution of Marius’s critical consciousness, but the fact that Hugo places this version of himself on the side of the revolutionaries suggests some degree of regret for the role he played in the June insurrection. And yet what finally motivates Marius to join his comrades on the barricade is his despair at the loss of Cosette, so that the whole sequence of events seems like a “monstrous nightmare” to him, which leads Hugo to describe him as “the spectator of his own drama, like a person at a play he doesn’t understand” (ME 934). One could speculate that such a state of mind

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may have been Hugo’s own in 1848. Furthermore, the courage Marius shows on the barricade, which borders on a death wish, resonates with Hugo’s own courage and possible death wish when he was on the other side of a barricade.63 In the events that transpire after the defeat of the insurrection, when Marius learns the true identity of Monsieur Fauchlevent without realizing that it was this Jean Valjean who saved his life in the sewers, the same man whose creative labor contributed to producing the wealth that will enable Marius and Cosette to lead their privileged bourgeois lives henceforth, Hugo may be exploring the conflict between his own revolutionary aspirations and the limitations of his class perspective and pretensions. Even before he learns that Cosette’s father is an ex-convict, Marius senses something lacking in Monsieur Fauchlevent’s language despite a “certain elevation” (MF 1068). After Valjean’s confession, not only is Marius shattered but certain class predispositions begin to reveal themselves. Though a democrat, Marius still accepts the judgment of the law that has stripped Valjean “of all the quantity of humanity it can take away from a man,” making the convict “no longer the like [le semblable] of the living” (ME 1153; MF 1109). Perhaps it is nothing but a minor coincidence, but it’s difficult not to hear in the word semblable an echo of Baudelaire’s address to “—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!” in the preface to Les Fleurs du Mal, published in 1857.64 Though Hugo had savaged Napoléon III and his empire in Napoleon le Petit (1852) and Les Châtiments (1853), and though he would never win Baudelaire over to his progressive view of human history, yet he surely knew that in 1848 Baudelaire, however conflicted his own political views may have been, had fought on the other side of the barricades from himself.65 Perhaps Hugo recognized that somewhere on the other side one of his victims could have been someone like Jean Valjean. The division between Enjolras and Marius may represent Hugo’s own vacillation on the project of revolutionary social change, a fear that militant terror may become excessive and that courage may be guided by other forces than principle. Nonetheless, this vacillation leads him to the expression of a political truth to this extent. Both Enjolras and Marius require the compassion and understanding of Jean Valjean, which means the intellectual power to control the extreme consequences of political hatred, on the one hand, and passionate love, on the other. Badiou argues that, while there is a “similarity between politics and love,” they should not be mixed up.66 The difference is that love does not require enemies while politics does, though Badiou admits that the problem in politics is not simply naming the enemy but controlling the passion of hatred that the

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enemy conduces in the political subject. In order to control the consequences of hatred in politics, a political organization must “provide the most limited, precise definition possible of the political enemy.” Badiou adds that this was not usually the case in the twentieth century when every sort of progressive political movement seemed to produce “the vaguest, most far-reaching definition imaginable.”67 Still, I cannot fully accept the absence of a critical relation between love and politics, at least if one takes into account the Spinozian principle that love is the understanding that leads to adequate knowledge of particular things. At one point, on rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras executes a man named Le Cabuc for murdering a porter who refused to open the door to a house that would have made a good location from which the insurgents could shoot. In reality, Le Cabuc is probably the criminal Claquesous, but Enjolras doesn’t know that. He executes him because the crime he committed is more serious “under the gaze of the revolution” than elsewhere. Still, Enjolras recognizes that he has condemned himself through his holy service to the republic, even though he acted out of necessity. “But necessity,” he argues, “is a monster of the old world,” while in the new world monsters will disappear “in the face of angels,” and fraternity or social cooperation will put an end to fatality. He then invokes the word love, which even at such a “bad moment” must be glorified because it is the force that shapes the future. Enjolras makes other comments that seem narrowly utopian rather than critically disutopian in Negri’s sense, but the larger point is that love embodies critical understanding—even critical consciousness—that must be defended even if the goal it seeks cannot be achieved in the immediate context. Enjolras’s critical consciousness is disutopian in the sense that it rests on a tension between the utopian desires that animate his political actions and the dystopian result to which he knows they will inevitably lead. So that utopia will come, he says, “we are going to die” (ME 916; MF 879). Hugo clearly does not condemn Enjolras’s actions, though he does strongly suggest, through the agency of Valjean, that hatred must be subordinated to love as a form of critical understanding. In this context, Valjean seems to represent the intersection of love and politics in a way that accepts the indistinction between éros and agápe. As a convict who has suffered the brutality of social injustice, he cannot but identify with the revolutionaries, and though he refuses to participate in the actual fighting, he uses his skill as a sharpshooter to scare away snipers on the roofs without killing them. As already noted, what has driven him to the barricade is the love of Cosette that has the secondary effect of producing his hatred of the rival, Marius. Badiou argues that the rival in love,

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by contrast with the enemy in politics, is external to the truth process, because the subject of love does not have to identify “an external rival before it can declare itself, before it can begin.” However, once love has been declared, “the immanent difficulties of love, the internal contradictions of the Two scene can crystallize around a third party, a rival, imagined or real.”68 This explains the crisis Marius represents to Valjean and his need to transform resentment of the rival into love. By contrast, with Enjolras, whom he really doesn’t know, Valjean sets a limit to the revolutionary’s militant terror. After Javert has infiltrated the group of revolutionaries and been exposed by Gavroche, Valjean takes the policeman’s fate out of Enjolras’s hands and sets him free. Just as the Bishop once lied in order to redeem the convict, Valjean lies to Enjolras and the other revolutionaries in order to save the man who could be described as his enemy. Hugo offers virtually no explanation concerning Valjean’s motivation for doing this, though everything up to this point in the novel suggests that Valjean shares Hugo’s own estimation of Javert as a man who, “though horrifying, had nothing of the ignoble about him” (ME 243). I will come back to Javert in a moment, but the important point in this context is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with the most limited and precise definition of the political enemy, in Badiou’s formulation, without understanding—and that means loving—your enemy. In other words, the social bond that Enjolras mentions in rallying his revolutionary forces requires the scene of Two, or love, as its basic unit, and furthermore, to the extent that love itself seeks a truth about difference that is universally addressed, then the politics of love requires not only identifying but also trying to understand and forgive the political enemy without allowing that enemy to destroy the political truth procedure and its subject. Terror may be necessary to the revolutionary process, but it should not be allowed to destroy the compassion and understanding that conditioned the formation of critical consciousness, which is necessarily transindividual understanding, in the first place. Rintrah and Palamabron, the contraries, need each other. As for Marius, his apparent inability to forgive Valjean for his past derives, at least in part, from his love of Cosette, though it is also a betrayal of that love and of the political truth for which he almost died. After Valjean’s confession, in addition to his emotional conformity to the social and legal judgment on the ex-convict, Marius is virtually scandalized by Cosette’s association with this man. Though he never doubts Cosette’s angelic nature, he sees Valjean as “the wolf [who] loved the lamb,” “the fierce being [l’être farouche],” “the monster,” “this outlaw [ce bandit],” “this cesspit,” “this figure of darkness,” and “this tender

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Cain.” He sees a miracle in the fact that God used Valjean as his instrument, his collaborator, in the creation of Cosette’s soul. He poses a question to himself: “Is it the first time that manure has helped spring make a rose?” (ME 1152; MF 1108–9). The reader’s recognition of Marius’s error may owe more to the ontological unconscious of this work than to Hugo’s intention. It derives from Marius’s assumption that God is a transcendent force rather than an immanent presence, the idea that God uses Valjean as a tool rather than realizing that the actions of Valjean express the immanent being of God. He accepts the categorical judgments of society as truths and, consequently, in Hugo’s view, has not learned “to distinguish between what is written by man and what is written by God, between the law and justice” (ME 1153). I would argue that what we see in the novel suggests something different—that Marius actually confuses law with justice and fails to realize that the face of a savage God might be the face of a man who falls outside the law. If the truth of the political movement in which Marius participated is democracy as it was more or less defined by Enjolras in the speech to which I’ve already referred, then Marius has betrayed that truth through misunderstanding love or the scene of Two, as Badiou names it, which should, in establishing the truth of difference, have the power “to slice diagonally through the most powerful oppositions and radical separations.”69 The oppositions and separations in this context would be the social categories enforced by the law that virtually betray the truth of Valjean’s being as the expression of Hugo’s savage God. The truth of difference is the singular being that exceeds social categories and identities but can be comprehended adequately, in the Spinozian sense, through love as a form of intuitive understanding. Marius’s passion for Cosette also blocks his understanding in the sense of undermining his intellectual courage. He wonders whether the “hideous clarity” of Valjean’s revelation might not contaminate Cosette, produce an “infernal glimmer … on that angelic brow?” (ME 1154). With this thought, Marius betrays his love for Cosette by failing to understand the singularity of her relation to Valjean, which also expresses the truth about her own social formation. Even though she doesn’t fully realize it herself, she is not the angel of the privileged classes but the product of a singular history that questions the logic of any inevitable class order. The origins of the angel were, if not in, then very close to the gutter. Eventually Marius learns the truth about Valjean through the unintentional intervention of Thénardier, but if Marius embodies Hugo’s own self-criticism, then one could argue that the issue is left to some extent unresolved. The future of Marius would appear to be the

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life of a bourgeois, as was Hugo’s life after 1848 and after the publication of Les Misérables in 1862, since even the Paris Commune in 1871 met with a mixed response from him. According to Robb, though he was considered a hero to the people of Paris when he resigned from the National Assembly shortly before the republican insurrection that led to the Commune, he told the leaders who sought his support that he thought their cause just but their means criminal.70 The Commune was admirable for its democratically elected revolutionary committee and deplorable for its acts of retaliation, though, as Robb notes, The worst acts of ideological cleansing were performed, not by the anarchists who ran Paris quite efficiently for two months and became an inspiration to Lenin, Mao and the students of May 1968, but by the monarchist parliament which rained incendiary bombs down on its own capital city from Versailles.71

In his 1876 history of the Commune, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray commented that the “800 or 900 arrests made under the Commune” hardly compared to the record of the bourgeois government, 30,000 arrests in December 1870 and 50,000 in May after the defeat of the Commune.72 After leaving Paris for Brussels, Hugo publicly criticized the Belgian government for treating political refugees from the Commune as criminals and extraditing them to France, and he personally offered asylum to any Communard who knocked at his door. To this extent, he distanced himself from the betrayal of the Paris workers by Louis Blanc and the French left, and he went on to seek unconditional amnesty for the Communards.73 Though Hugo would never completely resolve his political contradictions, he at least gave them a formal expression in Les Misérables.

Destructive redemption One of the questions Marius has about Valjean’s confession involves the fate of Javert. Did the ex-convict murder the policeman? Curiously, Marius never displays any qualms about Enjolras’s intention of executing the spy who infiltrated the camp of the revolutionaries. In the end, of course, Marius discovers the fact of Javert’s suicide, but never the truth of it. If Javert is the Satan of this novel, but only in the Blakean sense of the name, then one could say that Marius, despite the revolutionary courage that locates him with Enjolras as a Rintrah figure, also participates in the Satan figure to the extent that he uncritically conforms his judgment of Valjean to the law. Yet if Marius discloses Hugo’s lifelong political

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contradictions, the fate of Javert conveys a more tragic view of the man who blindly follows the law and conforms to the hierarchies of social order. It would be naïve to see even Marius as a direct representation of Hugo himself, much less Javert, and yet it is almost impossible to imagine Hugo’s final characterization of Javert as not having been influenced by his experience of June 1848 when he allowed unquestioned principles to dictate the brutality of his actions. After Valjean saves Javert’s life by releasing him from captivity by the revolutionaries, he causes a collapse of the intellectual perspective that has governed Javert’s actions, especially toward Valjean, throughout the novel. Without explanation on Hugo’s part, Javert enables Valjean to save the life of Marius and then permits him to go free when he has the duty to arrest and imprison him once and for all. In the chapter “Javert Derailed,” the reader confronts Javert’s inner life as he struggles with the meaning of his own actions. Javert has betrayed his principles and his duty to society as he understands it in order to remain faithful to something in his own conscience. It is a thought that produces conflicting emotions, including pain since “Thinking was not something he was used to.” In other words, once again Spinozian vacillation has produced a thought that one could argue is transindividual in that it forces Javert to open his mind to the thinking and experience of another, to a truth process that punches a hole in the status quo to which he has always subordinated his mind. As Javert recognizes, this thought constitutes a kind of intellectual rebellion because it disrupts the order of meaning in a given situation with the truth of some inexistent that has been forced into existence in such a way as to transform a world (ME 1080; MF 1040). Suddenly, a galley slave has become sacred, and the axioms that governed Javert’s social being have collapsed before the image of this man. Not only is Javert devastated by the ex-convict’s generosity toward himself, but the events of the past, the deeds of Valjean that he judged as lies and mad acts come back to him in the light of truth and force his admiration and respect for the convict. Ironically, the goodness that Javert now recognizes in Valjean congeals into the image of “this monster, this infamous angel [cet ange infâme], this vile hero, who outraged him almost as much as he amazed him” (ME 1081–82; MF 1041). In Javert’s eye, Valjean has finally become the political monster, even though to the reader Valjean hardly fits the paradigm that Negri describes, since he does not seem to embody—at least not consciously—the subjective attack on ambiguity, limits, margins, and the other subject identified as the enemy, through which the monster “becomes power.” Yet in the mind of Javert, Valjean confronts him

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with just such an exterminating force. In effect, Valjean unconsciously destroys the ambiguity between the monster and its other by inducing the vacillation of the enemy.74 If Valjean embodies the constitutive power of the multitude, and Javert has been the instrument of the hegemonic power of wealth and social privilege, then to destroy the ambiguity between them by inducing vacillation in the man who felt no uncertainty or doubt about any of his actions produces the truth that, in Negri’s terms, “this monster is common,” or manifests the essence of the human beings who constitute the multitude, their power of thought and understanding that is the actual foundation of justice and the law that should sustain it. As Negri might suggest, Javert discovers the monster in himself, realizes that he is “inside a multitude that is monster” and has only two choices, either “to shudder in unison with the multitude” or to kill it, a reactive course that “would be suicide.”75 But that’s what Javert does, he kills the monster, which means himself. Without his former certainty, Javert is forced to recognize that “the monstrous could be divine” (ME 1082–83; MF 1042). As I’ve argued before, one way to describe Badiou’s truth procedure is as an obsession, and for the first time in his life Javert has become obsessed with undesirable truths. His experience with Valjean has called into question the dogma and code of society and the infallibility of law. Hugo describes Javert’s subjective experience as a “shattering against God [se brisant à Dieu]” (ME 1084; MF 1044), but this appearance of God that unbinds Javert’s social identity is Jean Valjean whose actions have become the event in Javert’s life that requires the production of a new form of subjectivity. Badiou’s three categories of the subject—faithful, reactive, and obscure—are helpful, though they do not entirely work in this context. Within the formation of the “body of a truth,” the first subjective category is fidelity to the process that disrupts “the laws of the world” by recognizing their incompleteness and the necessity of their revision. The reactive subject assumes that the event is inconsequential, that it changes nothing. The obscure subject is more hostile and treats “the new body as a malevolent foreign irruption that must be destroyed.”76 What is the event in Les Misérables that conditions the production of a new form of the subject, a new truth, to which Valjean and the other faithful subjects in the novel commit themselves, even if that commitment is unconscious and contradictory, and of which Javert struggles to disavow the consequences? It can only be the French Revolution to the extent that it constituted the historical moment when the multitude asserted its subjective force within human history. One of the consequences of this event is

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the encounter of Bishop Myriel with G— the Conventionist, which may have conditioned the Bishop’s recognition that there are truths that supersede or overrule the law. It was this redeeming truth that he transferred to Valjean. If Valjean is the faithful subject of a truth procedure, as I have suggested, Javert seems to occupy the space between the reactive and the obscure subject. For most of the novel, to the degree that he becomes obsessed with the capture of Valjean, he is the reactive subject who denies the subjective formation of a truth. Perhaps more than anyone else in the novel, he knows the truth about Jean Valjean, whether as Monsieur Madeleine or Monsieur Fauchlevent; he has witnessed the man’s generosity toward other human beings and his willingness to forgive any transgression, including those aimed at himself. To the extent that it is possible in the world of the novel, Valjean embodies the principle of love that expresses itself through the recognition of social and intellectual equality between human beings, the essence of the multitude. When Javert thinks he has made a false report against Monsieur le maire, he demands his own punishment as the vindication of his absolute conviction that the law is transcendent and can tolerate no exception to its rules. Hugo even recognizes that there is a kind of beauty to this obsessive conformity when he comments that Javert’s tone in demanding his own dismissal “was humble, proud, desperate, and convinced, which gave this strangely honest man an indescribably weird grandeur” (ME 177). Ultimately, Javert remains as implicated in the truth process as Valjean, since, as Badiou notes, “the form of the faithful subject nonetheless remains the unconscious of the reactive subject.”77 Nonetheless, there are times in the novel when Javert borders on becoming the obscure subject precisely because of his commitment to the law and social hierarchy as, in Badiou’s words, “the invocation of a full and pure transcendent Body, an ahistorical or anti-evental body,” a simulacrum that “has the power to reduce to silence that which affirms the event, thus forbidding the real body from existing.”78 This is the Javert who wears “the face of a demon” when he confronts Valjean after he learns his true identity because of the Champmathieu affair. At that moment, Javert is ecstatic with a “confused intuition” as he imagines his own embodiment of “justice, enlightenment, and truth in their heavenly function of crushing evil.” He sees himself as the agent of “public vindication [la vindicte publique]” as natural as the stars above, and in the service of the absolute he manifests “the superhuman bestiality of a bloodthirsty archangel,” a “monstrous Saint Michael” (ME 243; MF 229–30). In effect, Javert has transformed the law into a simulacrum of the truth, something that destroys the infinity of a truth process, something that

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requires no thought on his part, no anxiety as to the justice of his convictions, no ethics in Badiou’s sense of the term. He has reduced truth and the God he imagines to lie behind it to a bad infinity, which is no infinity at all. To some extent, Hugo admires “the idea of duty” that Javert’s “probity” manifests, since it was duty that drove Hugo to turn against the people in 1848. At the same time, he recognizes that duty and the virtues associated with it, “by deceiving themselves [en se trompant], can become hideous, but that, even hideous, remain grand; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists even in horror.” Javert’s tragedy, which should arouse our pity and terror, is that, “like any other ignoramus who triumphs,” he engages in hideous acts for reasons that may be noble (ME 243; MF 230). In the end, the collapse of his principles destroys him. One could argue that Javert’s suicide is his one gesture of truth, which finally gives significant meaning to his life. His last vision of the world is that of a monstrous dystopia: “society, and the human race, and the universe were reduced from this point forward in his eyes to a simple and terrible design [un linéament simple and terrible]” (MF 1045). All the absolutes have collapsed, and “on this whole ruin, there was one man left standing, with a green cap on his head and a halo over his brow” (ME 1085–86). Like Satan in Blake’s Milton, Javert is a ruined building of God or nature; and just as Blake stands inside Satan, Hugo stands inside Javert. Even the latter’s negative vision of the world in which he lives participates in Hugo’s theory of a world punished. As close as Javert will come to a true image of God may be the image of Valjean with l’auréole au front (MF 1045), but this halo may be less the property of Valjean than of the expanded imagination of Javert. Throughout the novel, Hugo makes clear again and again that Valjean’s struggle to become an “honest man,” for which Bishop Myriel bought his soul for God, is fraught with pitfalls and potential errors. The robbery of Petit-Gervais, the failure to save Fantine when she was dismissed from his factory, the temptation to let Champmathieu go to prison in his stead, the hatred of Marius as his rival for Cosette’s love, and what must have been the temptation to kill Javert when he had the chance—these events remind us that Valjean is no less subject to intellectual and emotional error than Javert. Yes, the non-duped err in imagining they cannot err, because the path of truth requires the risk, bordering on a necessity, of error. What is divine about Valjean is not his transcendence but his humanity, his willingness to submerge himself in the shit of the world, as he does when he carries Marius through the sewers, in order to redeem his humanity from the error to which it is inevitably subject. At the moment when Javert is on the verge of plunging to his death, the words Hugo

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uses echo the special language he developed to describe his own concept of an immanent God in the “Philosophical Preface” and elsewhere. As Javert stands over the Seine, what he sees below him “was not water, it was a chasm [c’était du gouffre].” The wall of the embankment seemed like “a cliff of infinity.” He looks into what seems to be a void, and “A savage breath rose from that abyss” (ME 1088; MF 1047). Javert’s tragedy is also his redemption in the sense that, whether he knows it or not, he finally transcends the legalism of religions toward a vision of the savage God, the immanent, that remains indistinguishable from Blake’s human form divine. Commitment to truth, as Badiou notes, has its unconscious dimension, since even the ignorant can risk themselves for a truth they may not fully comprehend. Before concluding this chapter, I need to make a brief statement about the cinematic versions of Les Misérables. Though I have not seen all the films, and all the ones I’ve seen have their own particular failures in doing justice to the novel (which may not be a flaw in the films themselves, by the way), they all share one significant problem—the representation of Javert. One of the more imaginative approaches to Javert’s suicide was perhaps that in Raymond Bernard’s 1934 expressionist film from France. Ironically, in a film that is nearly five hours long and generally more faithful to the plot of the novel than most of the versions, the director chose not to show Javert’s suicide at all. Instead, before freeing Valjean (Harry Baur), Javert (Charles Vanel) simply asks him why he didn’t kill his enemy when he had the chance, and Valjean responds, “Each man has his own notion of duty. Just because your duty is to condemn the wretched man [le misérable], doesn’t the wretched man have the right to save you?” Then, after Javert sends the carriage away, he leaves the area on foot while displaying facial expressions and performing actions that convey his own confusion: for example, when he apologizes to a woman he bumps up against who is probably a prostitute. In the next shot, there’s an image of the Seine with ripples on the surface, and then a cut to a shot of the prefect of police being informed of Javert’s suicide. Vanel’s performance in his final scenes could be described as almost comic. Other versions of Javert—Charles Laughton’s in 1935, Bernard Blier’s in 1958, Anthony Perkins’s in 1978, Geoffrey Rush’s in 1998, and John Malkovich’s in 2000—capture the inhumanity of Javert without capturing any of his virtue or humanity. The moment of Javert’s transformation in these films is rarely believable, and sometimes borders on comedy, as in Vanel’s and Laughton’s cases. The one exception to this rule, in my estimation, is the performance of Russell Crowe in the 2012 film version of the musical Les Misérables. Perhaps

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the music makes the difference because it forces the spectator to identify with Javert’s point of view, at least in the great scene when he sings “Stars” while facing Notre Dame de Paris from his balcony ledge. Crowe is able to convey the sensitivity as well as the fanaticism of the man, his grandeur as well as his intellectual poverty, a contradictory perspective that Hugo certainly put into the novel.79 In any case, it is critical to the novel that Javert not be seen simply as a demon or autocrat, but as one of the wretched, a man born in a prison who thought he could transcend his origin through faithfulness to law and social order, without question or even anxiety, the affect that may be most critical to the production of justice, which requires the interweaving of seemingly contrary affects and social practices. As Badiou argues in Theory of the Subject, “Justice requires a dialectical precariousness of the law, susceptible of being shaken up in the process of its scission. This is not the precariousness of this or that particular law, but of the very principle of commandment itself.”80 The tragedy of Javert, to state it differently, is the overwhelming of justice by the anxiety he finally experiences beyond the bounds of his own intellectual understanding. Though Hugo insisted in the “Philosophical Preface” that Les Misérables is “a religious book,” he also commented that “Religion is nothing other than the shadow cast by the universe onto the human intellect” (PP 318, 350). When this shadow is cast over the mind of Javert, it produces an eruption of anxiety that both redeems him, in the sense that he will no longer participate in the punishment of other human beings, and destroys him, because he cannot master the emotion that has subverted the order of his world. Previously, his life had been compartmentalized because the order of the world as he understood it had nothing to do with its transcendent cause, the God of religions but not of religion; and when Javert suddenly discovered the immanent God who existed even in the sewers of Paris, he was confronted with the God in his own being, his conscience and his consciousness. The gulf, the void, that opened up in his thought was more than his body could sustain, but though his body dies, the thought his life expressed in its final chapter necessarily has consequences in the minds and bodies of other human beings within the imaginative world of the novel. Valjean also dies in a conclusion that may seem overly sentimental to many, but his indifference to death along with the legacy—not merely financial, but also, indirectly, intellectual—that he bequeaths to Cosette and Marius and their descendants, has the power to sustain the truth of human equality and the power of the common, the power of the multitude, that his life illustrated. The death of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables is still part of nineteenth-century

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literary traditions, but the philosophical implications of the novel, the eruption of an ontological unconscious that forces Hugo toward a truth that undermines the transcendence he so desperately wanted to believe in, is a chapter in the passage of a thought that will achieve even greater realization in the twentieth century with the cultural eruption known as modernism.

4

The Amorous Production of Being in Joyce’s Ulysses

The Joyce of Spinoza Years ago I wrote about James Joyce’s admission of the human body into literature in Ulysses. I meant the body as a set of biological or material processes. I even went so far as to say that Joyce had “revised, reinstituted, and reinvented the human body” in his two final masterpieces. With those words, I had in mind Judith Butler’s critique of any understanding of the human body that would posit its essence as a thing-in-itself—and fails to see it as a cultural construction that could be said to undergo constant revision through performance or social interaction.1 Today I would revise these positions slightly, as I intend to do in this chapter. To my mind, Ulysses—and beyond that, Finnegans Wake—represents the culmination of the ontological revolution I’ve been charting in this book. As such, it also represents the point of extreme contradiction within Western culture between a view of the world and the human body as the product of immanent causality, on the one hand, and, on the other, the hegemonic view that still governs our “normal” social and political discourse. The latter view separates material being from its transcendent cause and subordinates the power (potentia) of the multitude and any other form of physical and intellectual being to the transcendent authority of a God that only a specially designated group of people can legitimately access in order to convey his directives. Obviously, the emphasis on the masculinity of such a God reflects the implication of this ontological condition in the patriarchal, imperialist order that—possibly with a new face, as Hardt and Negri would argue—still posits the world as a natural hierarchy that delegitimates the voice of the many in the interest of the few, who not only control wealth and monopolize power (potestas) but, through various mediations, claim proximity to the transcendent cause that legitimates their privileges, if not in the name of God, then in the name of a static natural order

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that governs values beyond any form of critical interrogation. Even genetics can be another name for transcendence when it is used uncritically to establish hierarchies of intellectual being. Unquestionably, every living organism is genetically determined, but that doesn’t answer the question as to the nature and worth of a singular human intellect or thought. In chapters on Spinoza’s relation to modernism that anticipate the arguments in this book, Anthony Uhlmann suggests that works like Ulysses and Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse should be understood as “analogues of thought as a whole, rather than representations of consciousness.”2 The only term I would qualify in this formulation would be “analogue,” which implies that the work of art is modeled on or resembles a thought from which it is totally detached— hence making the work a kind of representation of something other than what it is. Though in this writing I sometimes formulate phrases suggesting that a work expresses a thought, a more strict formulation would insist that the thought does not precede its material expression but rather that they are two different expressions of one immanent cause. Thought exceeds its material expression only with respect to the latter’s particular, finite being. For every thought process, there will always be a correlating form of material being, even if that being has no consciousness of the thought. But it is in the nature of extension, or material being, that its particular forms are finite, though the chain of causes and effects that link these forms to one another are necessarily infinite, or rather participate in an infinite process. Spinoza says as much in the Ethics (E1.28: 233; C 432), a perspective that Macherey elucidates in his discussion of mediate infinite modes: Nature is thus comprised of nothing but composite bodies, or individuals, because every finite mode is determined by an infinite sequence of causes, which signifies that all finite determination is also infinite, at the same time through the infinite power (puissance) of its immanent cause, which is substance itself, and through the infinite multiplicity of its transitive causes.3

Every form of existence is a composite, starting from what we perceive as the individual body that we would identify as a particular person or self on up to nature taken as a singular thing. Nonetheless, at every level, Spinoza insists that the composite being, whose elements “are distinguished from one another only by motion and rest, speed and slowness,” will “still preserve its nature” (C 461–62; E2.13L7S: 254–55). It follows from this that the nature or essence of an individual cannot be reduced to the concept of a self, either as a unitary origin of thought or as the essence of the singular being.

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In my judgment, there is no compelling evidence that Joyce read Ethics in a systematic way, despite Uhlmann’s claim to the contrary.4 In the notes to Exiles, which Uhlmann cites, Joyce quotes the Latin text of Ethics, slightly inaccurately, in a brief comment on Othello, but he more likely came across that passage in a footnote to one of the chapters on Othello in the second volume of Georges Brandes’s study of Shakespeare, which is one of the principal sources of Stephen Dedalus’s argument in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode.5 The translator of Brandes’s book was William Archer, the translator of Ibsen with whom Joyce was acquainted. As I’ve argued in the other chapters, one has to look for the passage of Spinozian ontology in specific textual effects, rather than in the limited traces of authorial intention and influences. Still, there is no question that one singular thought from Spinoza imprinted itself on Joyce’s mind since he alludes to it in the essay on Giordano Bruno in 1903 and in Ulysses many years later. In the early essay, he notes that Bruno anticipates Spinoza in “his attempt to reconcile the matter and form of the Scholastics”—that is, in his implicit rejection of what would become the hegemony of metaphysical dualism during the Enlightenment—and particularly in Bruno’s conviction, which made him fearless in the face of death, that “The death of the body is … the cessation of a mode of being,” which, in the context, implies that some formal property or intellectual principle remains after the death of the body.6 In Ulysses, there are only two philosophical works in Bloom’s library, Philosophy of the Talmud and Thoughts from Spinoza. In her soliloquy, Molly remembers Bloom “talking about Spinoza and his soul thats dead,” which Bloom also remembers earlier in the day and seems to associate with the thought of Molly’s body (U11.1058, 17.1372, 18.1115). In Book V of Ethics, Spinoza argued that only that portion of the soul is mortal that is constituted by the idea of the individual body, by the appearance of its “actual existence …, which is explained by duration, and can be defined by time” (C 607; E5.23P: 374). To that extent, one can argue that the particular soul—that is, the thought that is limited to the perception of the individual body—dies, which may have been, in a confused way, what Bloom was trying to convey to Molly, a thought to which he was possibly incited by his awareness of the sensuality of her body. However, Spinoza recognized that the finitude of a mode of being, whether such a mode is a physical body or a singular thought, is not the whole story. In Book V, Spinoza further claims, “there is necessarily in God an idea which expresses the essence of this or that human body under a form of eternity” (E5.22: 374). If you substitute for the word “God” the phrase

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“immanent being” and understand by the verb “expresses” the unfolding of this immanent being, so that there is no metaphysical but only a logical distinction between God or being, the idea, and the body itself, then the phrase could be translated into something like this: “In so far as the human body can be thought, it is eternal.” Such an eternity, however, does not refer to indefinite or endless time but is completely outside of time, though perhaps you could say that the adequate idea of the body, its eternal essence, includes the notion of its mortality. Yet Spinoza’s understanding of the relation between thought and body implies a similar relation between eternity and time: they are two ways of expressing the same thing. In God’s mind—or what I have elsewhere called the general intellect—the thought that expresses the body’s essence is eternal (E5.23S: 374). In other words, the knowledge of the essence of any singular thing presupposes transindividual understanding or thought that has already displaced, if you will, the idea or thought of the particular body, which could be said to constitute the selfhood that can only naively be identified with the essence of that body. In Gebhardt’s Latin edition of Ethics, he inserts a phrase into Proposition 24 of Book V from the posthumous 1677 Dutch translation of Spinoza’s works that does not appear in the original Latin text (O2: 296). Curley points out that Gebhardt’s edition was the first to check the Latin text of Ethics against the Dutch translation, which was based in part on the manuscript rather than the printed text of the Opera Posthuma, published the same year (C ix–x). A literal translation of the phrase, provided by Curley, suggests that Proposition 24 could be revised as follows: “The more we understand singular things, the more we understand God, or the more we have God’s intellect.” Curley dismisses this translation since the added phrase from the Dutch text could be taken as “an idiomatic paraphrase of ‘the more we understand God.’” Furthermore, he adds, even if Gebhardt is right that there may be a phrase missing from the Latin text, the phrase itself doesn’t shed any light on the meaning of the proposition (C 608n). Though I don’t have either Gebhardt’s or Curley’s erudition on these texts, it seems to me worth considering that the phrase does more than restate what has already been said in the proposition. It could be said to shed light in the sense of verifying what is already implicit in Spinoza’s thought. To understand a singular thing is to understand God, or rather the general intellect, and to understand the general intellect is to participate in it, to recognize the power of thought that exceeds the perception of the individual subject and the idea of the particular body that will perish with that body, except to the extent that the general intellect

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understands the essence of the body. To have God’s intellect is simply to engage in transindividual thought. In his earliest work, Spinoza already anticipated the argument in Ethics to the effect that truth is its own standard, or rather is the object of intuitive understanding. He refers to an “inborn power” of intellect, which he identifies with innate or “inborn tools” that condition the production of other intellectual tools and can lead to greater knowledge or understanding. Perhaps we could say that the innate condition of all the other intellectual tools that thought creates is simply the reflexive understanding of the power of thought itself as a force that conditions an individual’s perception and understanding of the external world (C 17).7 Spinoza illustrates this point with the claim that, though people may deploy a mathematical principle through some practical method they learned in school, the principle itself is understood by mathematicians through intuition.8 This idea works with assertions such as the geometrical proposition that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but what about the truth or essence of a human being or a character in a novel or play? On this point, perhaps the most useful way of approaching Spinoza’s concept of essence, as I’ve already suggested in Chapter 1, is through Badiou’s notion of subtractive ontology. I realize, of course, that this reading may not be exactly what Spinoza intended, but Badiou’s theory has the effect, surely unintended, of clarifying Spinoza’s distinction between common notions, which could be taken as concrete categories of the relations between things, and essence, which is the truth about a thing that we know through intuition, a truth that cannot be categorized or subjected to a predicate.

Essence of equality In one of his essays, Badiou makes a point about what you could call axiomatic thought with respect to mathematical propositions: “The value of the axiom consists precisely in the fact that it remains subtracted from the normative power of the one.”9 As Spinoza himself recognized about God or substance, if there is no other like it, then it cannot strictly be one, which is to say, it cannot be counted as one, the member of a class. In the case of the most elementary propositions, the normative power of the one would be a category that could govern and limit them, such as the way the category “blood” governs all the properties of blood, including its chemical composition and behavior. Stated rather naively, the

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properties of blood presuppose and derive from the concrete existence of blood, which is itself governed by other categories, such as the general concept of biological process. In Spinozian terms, blood is a common notion that governs other common notions as the properties of all instances and forms of blood. However, an axiom of geometry, such as the one mentioned earlier, cannot be categorized in the same way. The axiom does not derive from the concept of geometry but rather institutes that concept as one of its conditions or its intuitive foundation. As Badiou puts it, with such a proposition, “thought—albeit at the price of the inexplicit or of the impotence of nominations—tears itself from everything that still ties it to the commonplace, to generality, which is the root of its own metaphysical temptation.”10 One could argue, as Spinoza certainly would, that the nomination that governs the axioms of geometry (and eventually of something like set theory) would be God or nature or simply being. However, these nominations are inexplicit or impotent precisely in the way that Badiou understands a mathematical infinity as a neutral banality. It is not that nature itself is impotent but rather that the term that names an immanent cause can never be strictly adequate to that cause and the cause itself is never transcendent or strictly distinct from the thing it causes. In another essay, Badiou equates the postulation of an axiom with intuition, though he understands intuition as an “axiomatizing decision.”11 The use of the word “decision” may seem to separate Badiou’s perspective from that of Spinoza, but since Badiou would argue that the subject is constituted by an event and the truth process that follows from an event, the decision he refers to does not express a selfhood or personal will but rather the disruptive force of thought itself and the subject it founds, a subject that is not necessarily identical with the individual person. For Uhlmann, essence—at least insofar as it concerns human beings—is “a system of relations within the self.”12 On this point, I have to start distinguishing my position from his. First, from a Spinozian perspective, such a statement doesn’t make sense because the self, to the extent that it can be said to exist, is nothing more than the idea of a particular body, which is always inadequate. This would be something like the psychoanalytic notion of the ego. It is only through the production of common notions, which require transindividual understanding, that one can arrive at some knowledge of the system of relations that make up the human body, which is necessarily the understanding of what any particular body has in common with other bodies and necessarily implicates the particular intellect, or thought of the particular body, in the general intellect, God’s intellect if you want, but which is indistinguishable from the intellect of

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the multitude to the extent that such a concept incorporates all the intellectual production of human history and the infinite thought that represents the possibility of everything we do not yet know. In other words, what we call selfknowledge in everyday language is transindividual and amounts to what Blake called self-annihilation. Because of his commitment to a classical concept of the self, which owes more to Descartes than to Spinoza, Uhlmann reaches another conclusion that I find problematic: while our true essence is eternal for Spinoza, it is not certain that everyone will achieve or realize this essence. Our essence, then, seems to be potential: we must strive to realize or reach this potential and it is only in achieving this that we express our power to the fullest and become “eternal.”13

Uhlmann comes to associate the knowledge of essence with “our true selves,” which makes the self a metaphysical entity that we are apparently in danger of losing when “we are passively following the desire of another body which has the potential to overcome or even destroy us.” An example of such an external body would be a drug to which we are addicted or perhaps someone with whom we are sexually involved to the point of engaging in destructive behavior. The result, according to Uhlmann, is not only that you drift apart from your true self or essence but that “essence might even be destroyed or effaced as the former essence or desire is replaced by a second desire.”14 Spinoza did say that desire is “man’s very essence,” which, by comparison with mere appetite, requires consciousness of the affection, whether it is an internal or external relation, that causes someone to do something, but he also said that appetite in any form is “the very essence of man” (E3.9S: 284). Furthermore, the proposition in which he defines the difference between appetite and desire—a minimal difference at best—makes it clear that this human essence is not dependent on adequate understanding or knowledge, since the persistence of mind or thought, its striving (conatus), operates through both adequate and inadequate ideas (E3.9: 284; C 499–500; O3: 148). Since the mind is thought, it is necessarily conscious of its own striving and the appetite of the body to which it corresponds. However, there is no requirement that this essence be understood adequately as the condition of its eternal being as a truth of the general intellect. Uhlmann’s understanding of essence enables him to construct a metaphysical hierarchy in which he associates perfection with the realization of essence and imperfection with the loss of essence even to the degree that some individuals, some selves, lose their souls or intellects altogether.15 However, his commitment

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to an idealized or metaphysical notion of the individual self forces him to produce what I take to be a misinterpretation of Spinoza’s concepts of perfection and essence. Spinoza notes in the definitions to Book 2 of Ethics that reality and perfection are virtually synonyms (E2D6: 244). Furthermore, in Book 3 joy is defined as the “transition [transitio] from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection” (E3DA2: 311; O2: 19). I would put the emphasis here on the word “transition.” Even in his earliest work, Spinoza, as he attempted to articulate an idea of the supreme good, understood that the concepts of good and bad, as well as perfect and imperfect, cannot be attributed to things “except,” according to Curley’s translation, “in a certain respect [nisi respectivè]” (C 10; O2: 8). Shirley translates “respectivè” more freely by suggesting that these evaluative terms are relative, which seems consistent with what follows in both translations. Anything considered in its own nature is considered in terms of its essence, and so the essence of something cannot be perfect or imperfect, but rather simply is.16 Elsewhere in Ethics, Spinoza explains that changes in the degree of perfection or reality of an individual are not changes in essence but merely increases or decreases in its “power of activity” (E4Pr: 322). In other words, the more perfect one’s knowledge of one’s own essence or nature, the more power of activity, in both mind and body, one possesses. Of course, in Ethics, Spinoza does say that “by perfection we mean the very essence of a thing.” However, in the context, it seems clear that perfection refers to the immanent cause of a thing—Spinoza’s God—which means the maximum power of intellect that no particular individual ever achieves but that expresses the essence of every individual. No one is completely without knowledge or relation to others. No one is completely perfect (or imperfect, for that matter), except God who is no one or everyone—that is, not-One. Understanding enhances reality, but the essence of a thing is eternal, not in the sense that it cannot express itself through becoming or process, but in the sense that it derives from what Badiou might call a generic truth, which I will attempt to explain in what follows. Uhlmann derives a thought from Spinoza’s philosophy that he supports with what I take to be a rather telling misreading of Ulysses. He argues that “The ignorant person is one who fails to achieve any understanding: such a person has, in effect, no remaining essence; they have, to put it another way, no soul … Nothing of them remains after death, because there is nothing positive, no joy, in their being.”17 If I may be permitted a general comment, I find nothing in Spinoza or in Joyce that would suggest that any human being is so utterly lacking in knowledge or thought that they could be said to be without any understanding

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at all—Deleuze also said as much as I noted in Chapter 1. Furthermore, is there anyone who has never known some degree of joy or pleasure? From his reading of Spinoza, Uhlmann comes to the conclusion that, by contrast with Bloom— who, according to Joyce, passes into eternity—Blazes Boylan “does not possess a soul.”18 Uhlmann takes authorization for this interpretation from Molly’s comment that “he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one” (U18.141–43). Now, in my judgment— and I suspect that most Joyce scholars would agree with me—Uhlmann has been misled by Molly’s rather arbitrary use of pronouns, the tendency of her thought to assume antecedents—since after all she is more or less speaking to herself— rather than clearly stating them. Yes, the passages preceding and following these words refer to Boylan, but the antecedent of “he” in this case is almost certainly Bloom. It is impossible to imagine Molly having a conversation with Boylan about the soul and its relation to the brain, but Molly will later mention Bloom’s reference to Spinoza’s concept of the mortality of the particular soul and it seems likely that Bloom would contemplate the reduction of mind to brain. In the “Penelope” episode, Molly implies that Bloom is an atheist (U18.1563–66), and the “Lotuseaters” episode makes that fact perfectly clear (U5.553–68). Of course, Spinoza would not agree with the thesis that the mind is nothing but the brain, and yet, since one could argue that the brain is the instrument of language, which enables the material expression of thought, either speech or writing, one could also say, after Spinoza, that mind and brain are two expressions of one thing, one immanent cause. In Ulysses, however limited the intellect or soul of Blazes Boylan may be by comparison with that of Bloom or anyone else, before we construct an ontological hierarchy, we need to apply Spinoza’s virtually mathematical definition of equality, to which I already referred in the last chapter. The difference between the power of any two individuals when compared with the power of either of them and the multitude—which could be said to include the intellectual and historical contributions of everyone, living and dead, to the general intellect and the material conditions of the world at any given moment in time—is insignificant. By historical contributions, I mean the physical actions and material processes that constitute the chain of causes and effects that determine the present state of the world, which would include the intensities or degrees of existence of things and the necessary production of inexistence according to the logic of a transcendental index, to use Badiou’s language. In effect, this transcendental, despite the association of the term with metaphysical transcendence, is actually

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a form of immanent causality that determines within the realm of appearance the degrees of identity and difference between any two elements in a situation, from which one can infer that the more elements in a situation that can be said to share an identity, the greater the degree of their existence or appearance as reality. As Badiou explains, “Given any being appearing in a world, we call ‘phenomenon’ of this being the complete system of the transcendental evaluation of its identity to all the beings that co-appear in this world.”19 Elsewhere he adds, “the pure essence of being-there, or appearing,” which is not the same thing as Spinozian essence, “consists not of a form of being but of forms of relation.”20 One could associate this transcendental index with Spinoza’s common notions, which, as I noted earlier and Uhlmann suggests, express the concrete relations between and within things. In other words, common notions, or categories, express the degree of existence or the possible inexistence of an object in a world, or the thing imagined. By contrast, essence in the Spinozian sense does not appear in the world, does not take the form of images or perceptions, precisely because it cannot be governed by the transcendental index or a common notion. Early in his text, Uhlmann produces another useful insight that I accept with some modifications. “Art,” he writes, “in composing relations between the first, second, and third kinds of knowledge can offer us an image of a particular essence of thinking.”21 I would phrase this rather differently with respect to the third kind of knowledge and say that the image that art produces forces the awareness or intuition of an essence that does not appear in the form of a perceptual image. Art expresses truths or essences through the mediation of its images, a mediation that to some extent subverts or negates itself through its very articulation. Since Uhlmann would argue that the essence of Blazes Boylan is the absence of essence or soul, let’s consider Bloom by contrast. In Ulysses, to the extent that some parts of it are meant to produce an image or representation of Bloom’s mind or conscious thought, it seems evident that there is as much (and probably more) ignorance or inadequate knowledge as there is adequate knowledge in that thought; and since Bloom is only the creation of Joyce, the material expression of Joyce’s thought—and, ever since Richard Ellmann published his biography, one possible image or persona of the middle-aged Joyce himself—one might conclude, according to Uhlmann’s logic, that Ulysses is a soulless book—or at least the book of a damaged soul, to echo the thought of Adorno about a “damaged life.”22 From a certain perspective, that is exactly what Ulysses is, one of the most powerful representations of damaged life in Western literature, perhaps only surpassed by Finnegans Wake, which goes much further.

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Still, one can’t ignore the fact that the final impression—and I am tempted to say, emotion or affect—that Ulysses leaves with us can hardly be described as negative, despite the challenge the book offers to the common-sense values of hegemonic culture to this day.

Sexual ethics Whatever one may think of Blazes Boylan, the character Joyce created surely expresses a kind of essence, something unnamable, that is critical to our understanding of the essence of the sexual relation between Bloom and Molly. First, to say that Boylan takes no joy or pleasure from his interaction with Molly’s body—or she with his, for that matter—is to ignore her own testimony. Second, Uhlmann’s own reading of Joyce’s apparent disagreement with Spinoza in the notes to Exiles suggests that Joyce associates Spinoza’s theory of jealousy in the Ethics with a negative or “sensationalist” view of sexual relations,23 one that emphasizes hatred and repulsion when a jealous lover “is forced to join the image of the thing he loves to the shameful parts and excretions of the other [rei amatæ imaginem pudendis, & excrementis alterius jungere cogitur].” Whatever Joyce may have meant by the word “sensationalist,” there is nothing in Spinoza’s thought that would take a negative or moralistic view of the amorous triangle in Exiles or would see the relations between Bloom, Molly, and Boylan in Ulysses as anything other than strictly natural acts that cannot be described as good or bad in themselves. Uhlmann cites another passage from Ethics in which Spinoza defines jealousy as “a vacillation of mind born of love and hatred together, accompanied by the idea of another who is envied” (C 514; O2: 167; E3.35S: 296–97). Joyce doesn’t quote or refer to this sentence, probably because Brandes omitted it from his footnote, though in the Latin text it immediately precedes the passage Brandes quoted. Nonetheless, Uhlmann correctly concludes that, based not only on Exiles but on the references to Othello in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses, Joyce recognized that “jealousy involves a mixture of love and hate.”24 In any case, as I argued in Chapter 1 following Negri, vacillation for Spinoza can be a positive force that pushes thought beyond the realm of opinions and common sense and has a constitutive function with respect to being itself. There’s no reason to assume that Spinoza privileged hatred over love in the emotion of jealousy. More importantly, when he associates the element of repulsion in jealousy with the thought of the sexual intimacy of the loved one

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with another, of their intermixing of those body parts that have socially and historically been deemed obscene or sources of shame if they are exposed, he is not positing a human essence but describing a social value that may itself be open to question with respect to truth. At this point, I need to consider in more detail Matheron’s construction of Spinoza’s views on sexuality. Matheron derives this theory from a careful reading of ten passages in Ethics that never directly express Spinoza’s position on the subject. Admitting that his reading is necessarily speculative, Matheron insists that, while we may “never know with complete certainty” if Spinoza would accept the inferences derived from these passages, “is it not better … to give credit to the author of the Ethics?”25 Though Matheron studies ten passages, he relies centrally on Proposition 41 of Book 4: “Pleasure [Laetitia] is not directly bad, but good; Sadness, on the other hand, is directly bad” (C 570; O2: 241; E4.41: 343). The Latin word laetitia can mean joy or pleasure, particularly insofar as these affects are unrestrained, which does not mean that they are excessive but rather a form of exultation. However, in Proposition 43 of Book 4, Spinoza qualifies the earlier proposition in noting that “Titillation [titillatio] can be excessive and bad. But anguish [dolor] can be good to the extent that titillation or pleasure is bad.” The word Shirley translates as “pleasure” in this proposition is also laetitia, and that suggests that pleasure can become bad or excessive when, in Spinoza’s words, some part or parts of the body are more affected than other parts (E4.43: 343; O2: 242). This proposition and the succeeding one, which says that “Love and desire can be excessive,” refer to the possibility of obsessive or addictive behavior, which is not the same thing as the expansive enjoyment of a sexual act (E4.44: 343). Curley distinguishes between laetitia and titillatio by translating them as “Joy” and “Pleasure,” respectively (C 570). However, this simplifies what would seem to be a more complex expression in Spinoza’s Latin. Spinoza does not say that titillatio is always bad or excessive, only that it can be, since any sexual act would seem to affect some parts of the body more than others. However, as Matheron stresses, “The excess … does not come from the intensity of the pleasure taken absolutely, or from its frequency, but from the obsessional character that it takes on for our imagination.” From this phrase and what follows, Matheron suggests that a free human being gains nothing but advantages from sexual joy or pleasure insofar as she or he understands their own nature, including their sexual nature, and presumably the sexual nature of their partner.26 However, it also follows that if someone misconstrues their sexual nature, by allowing sexual desire or love to dominate or destroy the other parts or powers of the body, they transform a

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positive good into something bad. If one construes love, in the Spinozian sense, as understanding, then one benefits from the pleasures of passion precisely to the extent that they lead to a greater understanding of both one’s own material and intellectual existence and the same of one’s sexual partner. According to Matheron, Spinoza’s rejection of all final causes eliminates “the perpetuation of the species” as the cause of sexual desire and consummation. On the contrary—and this view seems consistent with modern evolutionary science—“There is procreation because there is sexuality, not sexuality in order that there be procreation.”27 In Ethics, Spinoza provides two definitions of lust [libido]: first, “an immoderate Love or Desire for … sexual intercourse [coëundi … immoderatum Amorem vel Cupiditatem]” (C 527; O2: 185; E3.56S: 308); and second, “a Desire for and Love of joining one body to another [in commiscendis corporibus].” What follows the second definition in Spinoza’s text suggests that no strict moral distinction can be made between moderate and immoderate sexual desire, since both are “usually called Lust” (C 541; O2: 202; E3DA48/Exp: 318). This leads Matheron to conclude that “the object of this affection is the sexual relation itself, not the partner, properly speaking.”28 Though this phrase may seem to say the opposite, it actually means more or less the same thing that Lacan meant when he said that there is no sexual relation, and it implies something about the nature of sexual pleasure itself that Lacan formulated in this way: “Phallic jouissance is the obstacle owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas) … to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.”29 To put this thought into more Spinozian terms, titillation or organ pleasure can become the obstacle that inhibits one body and its intellect from fully enjoying the body and intellect of another, and frankly this rule would apply to both male and female bodies, since even Lacan recognized that men and women experience phallic jouissance, though women presumably have a “supplementary jouissance,” something in addition to organ pleasure.30 However, from a Spinozian perspective, “There is no affection of the body of which we cannot form a clear and distinct conception” (E5.4: 366). In this proposition, Spinoza recognizes that any affection of the body has its corresponding common notion in thought, which means that the pleasure of the organ that blocks the union of bodies nonetheless agrees with a thought that constitutes transindividual understanding or love. Lacan argued that love is what makes up for the absence of a sexual relationship, or the social idea that two human beings were made for each other.31 Love makes up for this absence not by fusing two beings into one but by annihilating the selfhood that

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the thought of the body projects as a univocal whole. To understand another human being is to love them, but this understanding does not fuse but opens self and other to the infinite and therefore always incomplete general intellect. The common notion is the start but not the end of understanding. The truth of each being—indeed its essence—is not-one, and to love another is to confront this truth and to experience this essence as the unnamable, Badiou’s generic set, which is ironically the purest singularity, the only true individualism that is not in reality a kind of conformity. As Badiou notes in his book on Saint Paul, “Every particularity is a conformation, a conformism,” and by particularity in this case, he means that which we take to be an individual according to common sense, or “opinion, custom, law.”32 In one of his seminars, Lacan said that “love is giving what one doesn’t have to somebody who doesn’t want it.”33 What you don’t have and can’t own—in other words, what cannot be treated as a possession—is your singularity because it has no category, and for that reason it can’t be what someone wants because it is not an object. Matheron considers it “almost an obvious Spinozist fact that sexual excitation is in reality already agreeable in itself ” since it enhances “our power to act” and, as I have just suggested, our power of understanding and love.34 As I noted in Chapter 2, Matheron designates Spinoza as the only classical philosopher whose thought implicitly authorizes the practice of nongenital sexuality. He even suggests that monogamy can have negative as well as positive effects, though overall “flexible monogamy is what is best adapted to the civilized countries for which Spinozist constitutions are conceived.”35 Along these lines, Matheron makes reference to a passage from the Theological-Political Treatise in which Spinoza comments that “What cannot be prohibited must necessarily be allowed, even if harm often ensues,” and among the list of problematic behaviors is the Latin luxu from luxus, which can mean debauchery or wanton pleasure (TPT20: 569; O3: 243). Certainly, Spinoza did not celebrate thoughtless sexual freedom, because it is precisely thought and understanding that underlies sexual or any other kind of freedom. For example, consider Bloom’s act of public masturbation, however discrete it may be, on the beach in front of Gerty MacDowell, who is apparently fully aware of what is going on. Both Bloom and Gerty achieve some kind of pleasure from this activity, though it would be difficult to argue that either of them attains a full understanding of their own action, much less an understanding or knowledge of the other through the participation in a transindividual thought or truth process. In other words, they don’t love each other. It would be difficult to derive from Spinoza’s philosophy an outright

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condemnation of such an act, although there is an element of pragmatism in his thought suggesting that by violating social laws and practices Bloom puts his freedom, including his intellectual freedom, at risk. The pleasure derived from public masturbation may not be bad in itself, but it can produce other negative effects that derive from its social construction as a vice. Overall, every human act that produces pleasure of any sort must be evaluated in terms of its positive and negative effects within a social context. As Matheron stresses, marriage itself as an institution has both positive and negative effects that have to be evaluated critically.36 In Book 4 of Ethics, Spinoza specified that marriage is a rational choice if the desire for physical intercourse [miscendi corpora] be engendered not simply by appearance or looks [non ex solâ formâ] but also by love of begetting children and rearing them wisely, and if, in addition, the love of both man and woman has for its cause not merely appearance or looks [non solam formam] but especially freedom of the intellect [animi]. (E4Appendix20: 360; O2: 271–72)

This definition implies that if a man and a woman want to engage in sexual acts exclusively because of their mutual attraction to one another, there is not only nothing inherently wrong with that, but it is rationally preferable that they have sex outside of marriage and probably in a way that will not produce children. Still, the social consequences of such an act must be taken into account, even if those consequences are not strictly rational—since societies frequently produce irrational rules and laws. If two people meet Spinoza’s two conditions—the desire to have and rear children and a shared intellectual freedom—marriage makes sense, but, according to Matheron, it should not require “exclusivism, … since free man and free woman as such are incapable by definition of any jealousy.” Despite what sounds like a totally idealistic proposition, Matheron, like Spinoza, is perfectly aware of the fact that people are never completely rational, and hence marriage is never the product of an ideal arrangement but a mixture of rational and irrational elements.37 If Spinoza had had the knowledge that we have today of genetic hard-wiring, would he have altered his position? That would be unlikely in my view, at least with regard to its critical foundation, though I have no doubt that Spinoza was influenced by the social values of his time and world. Let’s just say that whatever our genetic predispositions may be, there is nothing of which human beings are capable or which they have accomplished that can be designated unnatural. A wise human being is not one who denies him- or herself sexual pleasure or love in the more profound sense,

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but one who strives toward the maximum understanding of human relations, which means, as much as possible, to bring the particular intellect into harmony with the general intellect. Ultimately, this concept of love as understanding that makes up for the contradictions and inconsistencies of desire in the sexual relation will become the key to understanding the relation between Leopold and Molly Bloom.

Bloom Christ In the last chapter, I argued that Jean Valjean anticipates Bloom, despite their obvious differences, as the expression of what Blake might call the human form divine. In the first chapter, I identified the human form divine with the multitude and tried to elaborate that idea more fully in the second chapter. In the third chapter, I identified both Valjean and Bloom as expressions or manifestations of the multitude, though not in the allegorical sense that they represent the multitude through a universalization that incorporates the many into an abstract One, the Everyman who generalizes the being of all. And yet I don’t want to discard completely the common view that Bloom is a figure of Everyman, despite the archaeological baggage that such a term necessarily carries with it. That baggage has to do with the contemporary distrust of any form of the universal, a result of over three decades of critique that has by this time become a form of institutional reflex, which means, in Spinozian terms, a passive thought or emotion.38 But the concept of a universal that is not a generalization did not make sense to me until Badiou formulated his subtractive ontology, founded on the principle that being is an inconsistent multiple, or, as noted in Chapter 1, a formal impasse to any consistent construction of a world—to what appears. As Badiou notes in the preface to Logics of Worlds, The mathematics of being as such consists in forcing a consistency, so that inconsistency will expose itself to thought. The mathematics of appearing consists in detecting, beneath the qualitative disorder of worlds, the logic that holds together the differences of existence and intensity. This time, it is consistency that demands to be exhibited.39

One could possibly extrapolate from this argument the principle that being shows itself, outside of mathematical discourse, as the impasse or point of incompleteness in the overall consistency of any appearance or phenomenon in

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a given world. It makes itself known through an event that ruptures the logic of a world. Another name for this impasse could be the universal. In his reading of Ulysses, Uhlmann draws on anthropology to conclude that universals in Western culture “displace and take the individual out of relation to his or her place, so that the center can reside only within that individual which is necessarily understood in universal terms, paradoxically through being emptied of any individuality.”40 An individual from any cultural location in the world is abstracted from his or her immediate social and cultural context and reduced to an element counted within a larger category such as the human being. To the extent that each subject is counted as one element within the category, its center or identity can be said to lie within itself, especially since all the others are virtually identical to it. There can be no relation where there is strict identity. Yet this identity as the effect of the count erases the particularity derived from the subject’s relation to its immediate environment and social structure, even its transindividual understanding in Spinozian terms, which is always based on a concrete relation between subjects. In effect, the subject counted as one within the larger category is reduced to an abstraction of the count. As a human like all other humans, this subject is everyman, but as a being without any particular identity through concrete social relations it is an empty signifier. To complicate this situation, the emptiness of the signifier allows the dominant power in the world to occupy the universal and force all other individuals from different locations to accept the rules of its society and culture as an implicit universal law or norm, even though such a law virtually erases or devalues the rules governing other societies and cultures. Such a universal resembles what Lacan might have termed a master signifier. Such a signifier must be distinguished, however, from what Spinoza called a common notion. The concept of the human being is an empty abstraction or generalization unless it is approached through the common notions. For example, one could say that all the individuals that we identify as human have blood in their veins as one of the elements of their physical being. Or all of these individuals require water in order to sustain their life, which is something that all socalled human individuals have in common with all other forms of life. One could assert that all humans have the power of thought to the extent that they participate in the multitude that we nominally identify as human. Still, thought in this context must be understood concretely and not abstracted or objectified as a set of measurable characteristics. A category like the human is meaningful only when it is subordinated to the production of common

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notions. In other words, it is the name of a set of common notions. Further, since thought is transindividual and autonomous, it cannot be reduced to the brain of any particular individual. The thought of a particular individual bound to a particular body does not transcend the idea of that body. Therefore, in the fullest sense of the word, only the multitude thinks, and there is no way to measure the transindividual force of that thought. Since the multitude is not-one but composed of an infinite number of subsets capable of thought, there is no unified subject of thought, or rather the subject of thought is always incomplete. No standardized test or objective measurement of brain functions can account fully for the power of thought. In the multitude, there may be individuals without language, such as a person with severe autism and some other mental disability, but there is no way to measure the precise value of their contribution to transindividual thought, either by means of direct communication to others through gesture, or simply by being with others that can itself become the ground of thought and understanding. A mere expression of the face or the absence of expression can enter into the thought process of the multitude or its various subsets. There is no way to distinguish absolutely the human animal, as a general category, from all other animals, not even with reference to the extent of its participation in the general intellect, which is at least conceivably true of other animals. As Spinoza notes in one of the first axioms of Ethics, “Things that have nothing in common with one another also cannot be understood through one another, or the concept of the one does not involve the concept of the other” (C 410; E1A5: 218). The human individual understands itself to the extent that it understands other human individuals and other animals and cannot understand itself without this knowledge. Adequate understanding is based on what we know, not on what we do not know. Yet it is not based exclusively on empirical observation either, since thought has to provide the means of determining which perceptions or images are real and which are not. As an undergraduate in a seminar on Ulysses pointed out to me a few years ago, the recent Joyce critics seem to have one obsessive idea: Ulysses is incomplete. One could go further than this and argue that in Ulysses Joyce manages to produce the worldly appearance of a generic multiple. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou refers to truths as this type of multiple that cannot be discerned by any linguistic predicate or fully designated by any proposition.41 The truth of Ulysses doesn’t lie in the success of our arguments as to whether it is or is not a novel, or a national epic, or even a work of art, or any of the other predicates

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and categories that attempt to contain it within the safety of what Badiou calls the state of the situation or the encyclopedia of knowledge. The truth of Ulysses resides in the force of the work to resist or refuse any predication that we would impose on it. The styles of Ulysses articulate its truth in the subtractive mode precisely because, as T. S. Eliot recognized, they are futile, which is simply a way of saying that they are not coextensive with the thought of the work.42 The writing machine that is the “Ithaca” episode names that thought “the incertitude of the void,” which Leopold Bloom understands not verbally but substantially (U17.1014–17). The radical nature of Joyce’s linguistic experiment in Ulysses exceeds that of any other modernist writer, including Proust, Lawrence, Woolf, and Beckett, though in their different ways, through different stylistic practices, they participate in the same subject of truth. Nonetheless, I am not suggesting that Ulysses is unreadable or that the truths to which it gives a worldly or bodily expression cannot be postulated through the decision of another truth procedure. Elizabeth Anker, in one of the few other essays to address Joyce’s relation to Spinoza in some detail, emphasizes the “Ithaca” episode’s “preoccupation with infinity and its association with questions of the ethical strikingly linked to matter’s inextricable infinity and immanence in Spinoza’s philosophy.” She interprets Bloom’s final decision not to interject himself into the relationship between Molly and Boylan—in other words, to accept the autonomy of Molly’s desire and possible sexual needs—as expressing a stoicism that bears comparison with Spinoza’s. She associates Bloom’s decision with what she sees as a Spinozian conviction as to “the fragmentary nature of human knowledge.”43 However, the passage from the Ethics that she has in mind, though she misattributes it to the Theological-Political Treatise, says something more complex than her paraphrase would imply. She relies on Shirley’s translation of mutilatam as “fragmentary,” but Curley more literally translates the word as “mutilated.” Furthermore, the whole passage from the Ethics makes clear that the Latin word does not refer to some general epistemological condition: the mind does not have an adequate knowledge, but only a confused and mutilated knowledge, of itself, its own body, and external bodies, whenever it perceives things from the common order of nature, that is, whenever it is determined externally—namely, by the fortuitous encounter with things—to regard this or that, and not when it is determined internally, through its regarding several things at the same time, to understand their agreements, their differences, and their oppositions [my italics]. (E2.29S: 262; C 471; O2: 114)

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Clearly, Spinoza makes the distinction here between ordinary perception and the understanding that produces commons notions (knowledge of the agreements, differences, and oppositions between things). Ordinary perception responds to the world passively and hence produces mutilated or inadequate understanding, while thought can produce understanding of the common notions, which are determined internally, though this doesn’t mean internal to the particular individual but internal to the transindividual thought process itself. Anker associates Bloom’s mode of understanding with Spinoza’s description of the Biblical prophet in the Theological-Political Treatise. She particularly emphasizes the prophet as someone who has knowledge of the future and cites the passage from “Ithaca” that recollects Bloom’s earlier walk to the Turkish Baths on Leinster Street “with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction” (U17.339–41).44 Anker completely ignores the irony of this passage, since the language of prediction was, as she notes herself, “unwitting” when Bloom handed his copy of the Freeman’s Journal and National Press to Bantam Lyons with the remark that he “was going to throw it away,” which reveals the secret of the horse race that Throwaway will win later that day. While he still carries the paper under his arm, the light of inspiration in his face may well reflect his thought about possibly masturbating in the bath, which he was contemplating before meeting Lyons (U5.503–4). However, though he has an anticipatory vision of himself reclined in the tub at the end “Lotus-Eaters,” we learn after he has masturbated in “Nausicaa” that he didn’t actually do it at the baths (U5.567–72, 13.786–87). The phrase about inspiration shining in his face alludes back to the speech of John F. Taylor, recited in “Aeolus,” which refers to Moses “bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw” (U7.867–69). One could argue that Joyce recognizes in Taylor’s speech an unconscious Nietzschean grasp of Mosaic law as the human construction of values that requires as its condition the breaking of the tablets of the old law. As Zarathustra proclaimed, a new law betrays its own truth whenever it applies to itself the concept of the holy.45 In other words, such a human construction of law or value never derives from a transcendent cause. Spinoza may seem to say something different from Nietzsche, but that difference disappears upon closer analysis. Though Spinoza clearly sees Moses as a prophet, he distinguishes him from the other prophets because they “did not hear a real voice.” God communicated to Moses through the production of a voice in the air (voce aërea), but Christ was the only person who was able to

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communicate with God “from mind to mind” without material mediation. Yet Spinoza also insists that God can communicate with human beings directly since “he communicates his essence to our minds [menti nostræ] without the use of any physical means.” So Christ could be said to have exceeded ordinary human beings, to have had a superior mind, only in the sense that he knew things “which are not contained in the first foundations of our knowledge and cannot be deduced from them,” though Spinoza does not exclude the possibility that another human being could attain such knowledge. Then, in the next paragraph, Spinoza qualifies everything he has said by claiming that he infers it from scripture, without regard to what the churches may affirm of Christ. He neither affirms nor denies but frankly admits he doesn’t understand (TPT2 19; TPT1: 398–99; O3: 20). Spinoza derives from his reading of the Bible the idea that Christ was not a transcendent but a human being with a superior mind. If he was able to express the mind of God through his actions and words, it related to the quality of his thought and intuitive understanding. In the early work on Descartes, Spinoza notes—without using the name of Christ—that the son of God is not a creature, but “he is, like the father, eternal.” The meaning of the Latin word creaturam in this context would be a created thing—in other words, an effect or mode of immanent being.46 In a letter to Lodewijk Meyer from 1663, Spinoza referred to an earlier version of this passage that he gave Meyer permission to revise, in which he asserted that “the Son of God is the Father himself,” which followed from the axiom that “things which agree with a third thing agree with one another.”47 In other words, if Christ can be said to be the son of God, he is such not insofar as he is a physical body or insofar as he has a particular mind that expresses the idea of that body, both of which can and will perish, but rather insofar as he raises his thought to the level of the general intellect through intuitive, transindividual knowledge. Furthermore, in the work on Descartes, Spinoza also claims that he does not know how to distinguish, with respect to God, “his essence, his intellect by which he understands himself, and his will by which he wills to love himself.” In particular, in this passage and in the aforementioned letter, he rejects the theological use of the term personalitas as meaningless, though he perfectly well knows “what philologists mean by it.”48 To me, these views strongly suggest Spinoza’s understanding that neither God nor the son of God is a person in the philological sense of the term. God’s essence cannot be put into words because it is the result of the subtraction of all words in the form of categories and predicates from the relation of thought to the immanence of being. The intellect

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that facilitates this process of subtraction is the active thought of the multitude, since, as I noted in the last chapter, God understands and loves himself through the understanding and love of human beings for one another. Finally, the will of God is the conatus or desire of all human beings that drives them through transindividual thought to love and understand one another. The mortal man called Jesus—insofar as Spinoza accepts the historical testimony of the Bible—was a person, but the thought to which that physical and intellectual being gave ground was transindividual and ultimately led to the experience of something Spinoza might have called blessedness, which bears some comparison with what Lacan termed a “jouissance of being” that he primarily associated with women and mystics. “Thought is jouissance,” he said, and yet for Lacan women and mystics experience this thought, this blessedness, without knowing anything about it.49 Spinoza’s knowledge of the third kind cannot be reduced to categories that allow us to locate it in the encyclopedia of knowledge, and it is perhaps better to think of this kind of knowledge as something beyond language or everyday discourse. That would be truth itself. Hence if women and mystics know nothing about the jouissance of their thought, it isn’t that they are ignorant or excluded from rational understanding, but rather that they have access to a truth process that disrupts the finite order of the encyclopedia with its infinity and is therefore never complete, always pas-tout, to use the Lacanian formulation. Similarly, Jesus, who to Spinoza may not have been a mystic but a philosopher,50 reminds us that anyone, male or female, who annihilates the self, can participate in a truth process. It isn’t Jesus the person who is the son of God but the truth process that passes through his physical and intellectual being, a truth that may not even require the full understanding of his particular mind but participates in the general intellect that is not a mode, a creature, of immanent being, but the expression of its truth. You might say that Christ is the truth that transforms the thought of Jesus. Now Anker wants to insist that it is a mistake to identify Leopold Bloom as a Christ figure because “such a significant association would suggest the successful attainment of salvation and transcendence; in the world of the Old Testament, as well as Ulysses, however, redemption and spiritual meaning are tentative, uncertain, and without guarantees.”51 It’s almost curious that in an essay that associates Joyce’s text with Spinoza, Anker fails to recognize the link between Spinoza’s understanding of Jesus as human, all too human, and Bloom’s identity, since at one point in “Ithaca” Stephen visually recognizes in Bloom “The traditional figure of hypostasis” (U17.783). According to the

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OED, hypostasis can refer to any of the three persons of the Trinity, but with reference to Christ it means the unity of his divine and human natures. Gifford and Seidman associate this concept with early Christian theologians, but the notion that the human and the divine are two expressions of one indefinable substance or being is consistent with Spinoza’s thought.52 To the extent that Bloom’s intellect is constituted by the understanding of some actual truths, he is like Christ—but then so is Stephen or any other human being. Elijah, or the voice of Alexander J. Dowie, makes this point in the “Circe” episode through his address to “Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ” (U15.2195–97). To the extent that any particular mind or thought participates in the general intellect, and in that way annihilates the selfhood, it becomes the equivalent of Christ or the son of God who is identical with the father, since “things which agree with a third thing agree with one another.” The terms “son” and “father,” of course, are simply metaphors, or gestures of language, always rooted in the culture of a particular moment, that attempt to articulate the unnamable essence of immanent being. Keeping this in mind, there is some value in associating Bloom and virtually any ordinary human being with the prophets, if we recognize that the construction of thought like his involves the power of imagination. However, this power may have less to do with his ability to predict things than with his general understanding of the world and its expression in Joyce’s text. As Spinoza stressed, the prophets “perceived the things revealed by God through their imaginations,” which enabled them to grasp “much beyond the limits of the intellect.” He added, “For far more ideas can be formed from words and images than from the principles and concepts alone on which all our natural knowledge is built” (TPT2 26; TPT1: 403). In other words, the power of imagination can enhance our understanding when used as a supplement to or expression of thought in general. One could argue that Bloom is a prophet in the Blakean sense that every honest human being knows that if things continue in a certain way, they will produce a certain result, even though that result is not inevitable.53 This idea may not apply to Bloom’s unintentional prediction of a horse race, but it certainly applies to his understanding or knowledge that the encounter between his wife Molly and Blazes Boylan will take place on that day. Furthermore, his understanding of the causes that will produce this event go much deeper than any simple prediction, though one could say that he is like a prophet in expressing this understanding more through words and images than through principles and concepts.

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Everyman and Noman One needs to keep in mind that principles and concepts—such as the thought expressed by Spinoza’s Ethics—find their material expression in words, and in several places in his writing Spinoza admits to the “poverty of language.” For example, in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, when Spinoza explains the requirements of any valid definition of a thing, he insists that such a definition must be affirmative, though he immediately qualifies that statement: “I am speaking of intellectual affirmation, disregarding verbal affirmation, which, because of the poverty of words [verborum penuriam], may sometimes be expressed negatively, although understood affirmatively.”54 In Ethics, Spinoza insists that his readers avoid any confusion between “an idea, or concept, of the mind” and either images, on the one hand, or “the words we use to signify things,” on the other (E2.49S: 273; C 485). The knowledge derived from words and images would be knowledge of the first kind if, and only if, it were devoid of thought, if one took these words and images as signs that reference our everyday understanding—what Gramsci would call “common sense” and Badiou “opinions”—which is to say, the way in which, according to Spinoza, “we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them similar to those [similes iis] through which we imagine the things” (C 477–78; O2: 122; E2.40S2: 267). This line of thought goes against the grain of much postmodernist thinking after the so-called linguistic turn, with the critical exception of Badiou, who, as Christopher Norris stresses, privileges thought over language in a manner similar to Spinoza’s.55 In any given situation, Badiou concludes, “it is in no way guaranteed that this language will suffice for the discernment of a truth.”56 Yet, precisely because words and images are not identical with thought per se, though both thought and these material expressions derive from the same immanent cause, the expression of thought becomes an ethical act in itself, which led Spinoza to choose his geometrical method and Badiou to recognize that mathematics is a form of thought that expresses ontological truth. Badiou’s mathematical ontology and a phenomenology that substantiates itself through mathematical logic are critical expressions that exceed Spinoza’s attempt to express his thought through a mathematical analogy. They exceed, however, only in the sense that they expand our understanding of the relation between thought and expression, but not in the sense that they have a monopoly on the expression of truth in thought. On the contrary, Badiou’s rigorous mathematical demonstrations only make the emphatic case that truth or essence is not-one,

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or pas-tout. Every language is mathematical to the extent that it deconstructs the illusion of the natural sign that remains bound to the image of our everyday perceptions. Someone like Jacques Derrida or James Joyce—not to mention Blake or Hugo—may enact a different mode of expression, but as Badiou recognized in the work of Derrida, “his speculative desire was to show that, whatever form of discursive imposition one may be faced with, there exists a point that escapes the rules of this imposition, a point of flight.”57 In mathematics, the proofs of inconsistency that derive respectively from the works of Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen, and in literature, the radical breaks in style and form of Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, all force the appearance of something unnamable—something virtually inexistent to ordinary perception and understanding. No single word suffices to name it, and yet language can be orchestrated in such a way as to circumscribe the thing it misses—not something mystical or transcendent, but what Lacan would call the real, what Badiou would call the inexistent, and what Spinoza would call the essence of a thing. As Nadler points out, though Spinoza distrusted the intellectual perceptions of most of the Biblical prophets who rely primarily on imagination in order to articulate their understanding, he also recognized that “sometimes people who work with images and concrete ideas have a quickness of mind and depth of insight into ethical situations that the more abstract thinker lacks.”58 I would push this point a little further. Whatever Spinoza’s distrust of imaginative understanding may have been, the only true measure of any verbal expression is the truth it sustains, even though it will necessarily, if it expresses a truth, make visible its own incompleteness, since in the end the essence of anything, even of God as Spinoza understands that word, is not-one. In the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses, Joyce sums up Bloom’s categorical being in the most abstract terms possible as both “entity and nonentity”: “Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman” (U17.2006–8). This passage may seem to support Uhlmann’s concept of the empty universal, and that would make sense if these words were taken out of their context. But coming near the end of the elaboration of this character—if we can call him a character in any conventional sense—the terms “everyman” and “noman” resonate with the entire novel, including what is to come in Molly’s soliloquy. Since Bloom is both something and nothing, Joyce is not following the Linnaean logic of classification by genus and species, but rather a logic of contraries by which the same singular being is simultaneously, on the one hand, the member of a general category (one could say

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generic category but not in Badiou’s sense of the word) that incorporates all the signifiers that could designate a human being and, on the other, the inexistent or empty set within that category (Badiou’s generic set) that virtually refuses all the signifiers or categories in the sense that “no predicate ever collects together all its terms.”59 The phrase “assumed by any” suggests that it is not possible for anyone to read Ulysses without organizing or assuming the multitude of signifiers that circulate around the name Leopold Bloom into various categories, including some sort of ultimate general category such as human being or “Everyman.” We can think of the process as resembling Badiou’s understanding of the countas-one in ontological or mathematical discourse. For Badiou, the presentation of being is the result of a count, a pure operation, and “What will have been counted as one, on the basis of not having been one, turns out to be multiple.” However, because the multiple is “retroactively apprehended as non-one as soon as being-one is a result,” it is inconsistent, neither one nor multiple—hence, the inconsistent multiple.60 Badiou’s concept of presentation means the condition of an element that belongs to a situation or world even if it has no particular phenomenological value in that world—that is to say, for all practical purposes, it may not be represented or recounted as a part of anything and therefore may not appear to any form of social, political, or cultural consciousness. All the signifiers that constitute Bloom’s being in Ulysses are presented, but only the operation of the count can produce something like a unified character. The text itself as a set of signifiers that can be counted constitutes the presentation, while the operation or practice of a second count that produces subsets or parts constitutes the representation or interpretation. Yet one of the effects of Joyce’s writing is to deconstruct any interpretation by forcing the awareness that, while Bloom can be assumed or constructed by any—that is to say, incorporated into any number of particular categories through the operation of interpretation, he ultimately remains unknown, his essence unnamable. Joyce produces this effect in two ways. First, he undermines our confidence in the signifier’s power of signification through the disclosure of what I once called “style as ideology,” which simply means that Joyce reconstructs the history of styles as the imaginary organization of linguistic expression into a sequence of wholes, each one presumably representing a world and its consciousness. By presenting his own world through the configuration of these wholes, he further decomposes the referents of that world into the imaginary projections of style— in other words, into self-reflexive signifiers that force the knowledge of the inconsistency or incompleteness of any style in itself. The thing that language

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articulates is always not-one, never fully presented, because there is always at least one element in the world that remains unnamable and language cannot properly name itself. Hence, as Lacan said and Joyce showed, there is no metalanguage. Second, Joyce exposes the illusions of interpretation as representation by incorporating multiple interpretations into the text in the form of all the many perspectives on or constructions of not only Leopold but also Molly Bloom throughout the text. Joyce possibly locates the reader in his text in the scene from “Circe” in which the man-woman Bello demands that Bloom reveal his most obscene acts in a career of crime. Joyce inserts a parenthetical stage direction: “Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom, Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny, Cassidy’s hag, blind stripling, Larry rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other the, lane the” (U15.3042–46). Though there are a number of sentences or fragments in Ulysses that end with the article “the,” they are usually in an interior monologue or free indirect discourse in which the completed phrase is implied, or in a fragment in which the phrase is completed by another fragment. In this singular instance, however, the article produces a formal hole in the text. In the synoptic edition of Ulysses, Hans Walter Gabler indicates that he restored the reading of this passage from the Rosenbach manuscript, though a different reading, which appears in all the other editions, derives from Joyce’s own revision of a possible error in a typescript. He changed “the other, she …” in the typescript to “the other, the …”61 In either case, the readers of Ulysses are invited to join all the other characters who comment on Leopold or Molly Bloom by inserting themselves into this hole, and if I may be permitted to quote myself from many years ago, Among the mute inhuman faces the reader sees himself or herself peering into the text, folding it inside the gaze, discovering his or her desire as the desire of the other or the others, whose mute inhuman faces peer back at the reader, through the mirror of his or her gaze, in a mirage of signification.62

There is something I may not have fully grasped when I wrote those words in the 1980s. If signification is always a mirage—at least to the extent that we imagine it as finalized, which may be the same thing as saying that it is coextensive with a truth—that doesn’t mean that this mirage or fiction does not participate in an infinite truth process, which it can never express as one or whole. It is the hole in the text and the incompleteness of our readings that give us some kind of knowledge of the truth content in Joyce’s art, the goal of a process that Adorno would have named second reflection.63 As readers,

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we can experience the jouissance of the other, the jouissance of thought and being, ironically through the subtractive process by which we arrive at the understanding of Bloom’s essence as both everyman and noman. To transform Bloom into a signifier of everyman as a generalization, the name of a coherent set, would be to miss the truth of what Joyce achieved precisely through the overdetermination and overparticularization of this character. Let me make a few points clear. The name Leopold Bloom is itself a signifier, and as such it expresses the thought that, by long-standing tradition and conventional practice, we would be inclined to associate with the name James Joyce. We could also say the same thing about the names of all the other characters in the novel, who all derive from the experience and knowledge of the subject who could be said to enunciate this text. Of course, just as the interior monologues and free indirect discourses of Bloom are overloaded with bits of knowledge and forms of misunderstanding that derive from a multitude of sources, including gossip and hearsay, one could say something similar about the intellect of Joyce. In a Spinozian sense, the power of Joyce’s thought expresses itself not simply in the accumulation of details, indifferently true or false, that constitute the consciousness of his character, but in the means he uses to distinguish between expressions that participate in a truth and others that do not, or things that exist and things that do not. Joyce perhaps innovates on Spinoza’s thought and anticipates Badiou’s to the extent that he also forces the existence of something that did not exist or remained inexistent to the common way of understanding a world. Take, for example, a simple phrase in Bloom’s monologue from the “Hades” episode: “If we were all suddenly somebody else” (U6.836). Through the fiction of Bloom’s thought, Joyce expresses something that may be true not only of his novel but of any novel. He the author has become somebody else. But he arrives at the truth of the character, which may also be his own truth, through the accumulation of concrete particulars that in the last analysis do not add up to a unity but come to signify the infinity of the names that could be associated with any individual being. To use a seemingly trivial example, in the Gabler edition of Ulysses Joyce uses the word “moustache,” in singular or plural forms, at least thirty-six times by my count. The first time the reader gets a sign that Bloom has a moustache is in the free indirect discourse of Gerty MacDowell when she imagines Bloom as the image of “Martin Harvey, the matinee idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she wasn’t stagestruck” (U13.416–18). Since she isn’t stagestruck, one could deduce that Martin Harvey doesn’t have a

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moustache, but given the frequently elliptical style in this episode, one could also argue that the moustache is what Bloom doesn’t have and she likes him that way. The existing photos of Martin Harvey suggest that he normally didn’t have a moustache, but that is extra-textual evidence that only confirms the incompleteness of Bloom’s image in the book itself. In any case, a reader could easily miss this cue since Bloom’s appearance is refracted by a fairly unreliable consciousness. The second reference comes in the “Circe” episode, in a stage direction, when someone with Bloom’s pseudonym Henry Flower “combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb” (U15.2627–28). This passage appears in a hallucinatory sequence that doesn’t clearly identify Bloom with Flower, and even in Joyce’s own famous drawing of Bloom, he has a moustache but not a beard.64 Except for these two references, there is nothing in Joyce’s text that directly and unambiguously describes Bloom as having a moustache, much less a beard. However insignificant this detail may seem to be, it illustrates something that is true of virtually everything we learn about Bloom in the course of the novel. The accumulation of details and particulars in this fiction ironically has a subtractive force. The reader of this novel probably learns more about Bloom than he will learn about any other character in the history of literature, and yet in the end the net effect of these particulars is to foreground the emptiness of what Lacan might call the master signifier that would govern the set of signifiers that constitute Bloom. In a sense, one could argue that the name Leopold Bloom governs a set and, at the same time, is a member of the set it governs. In Badiou’s terms, that would be a generic set or subset. One could associate this concept with the empty set that belongs to every set, according to the axioms of set theory, but it is important to realize that the set is empty only in the sense that it lacks categorical force that would subordinate and govern its elements without being incorporated into them. As Badiou stresses, because no predicate can subsume all of its terms and hence restrict its possible significations, the generic set “contains a little bit of everything” and the totality of nothing, and hence it is “subtracted from predication by excess.”65 There are several signifiers that come to be associated with this excess in the novel, but perhaps two of the more significant ones appear in the “Cyclops” episode, associated with Bloom’s national and supposedly racial identity. Bloom’s definition of a nation—“The same people living in the same place … Or also living in different places”—produces a kind of generic set, since it necessarily includes a little bit of everything or everyone and with that gesture removes itself from the power of the one that would be

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the normative understanding of a nation (U12.1422–23, 1428). In a slightly less obvious way, Bloom says possibly more than he knows when he responds to the Citizen’s anti-Semitism with the claim: “Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.” In fury, the Citizen responds that the Saviour had no father, which can’t be entirely true no matter how you look at it. Then Bloom comes back with an emphatic restatement of his claim: “Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me” (U12.1804–9).

Generic Jew Bloom’s listing of Moses Mendelssohn (though he could also be referring to the grandson, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the composer), Karl Marx, and Spinoza in the same category produces a particular effect if one keeps in mind that they were all Jews in one way, but not Jews in another. Felix Mendelssohn eventually converted to Christianity. According to Willi Goetschel, the most self-consciously Jewish member of this group would have been the elder Mendelssohn, who, particularly in the 1780s, became a champion of Jewish emancipation, and who, along with his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, embraced with some qualifications the philosophy of Spinoza, which led, after Lessing’s death, to the controversies over pantheism that were initiated by Johann Kaspar Lavater.66 As Goetschel further argues, Mendelssohn took from Spinoza the principle that the universal lies in the particular, which led him to associate Judaism with “the project of a universality of worldwide liberation that includes all of humanity without any exception.” For Mendelssohn as for Blake, Jerusalem in its historical and religious specificity expresses the generic truth about all religions.67 Mendelssohn rejected most Christian doctrines as irrational, and clearly thought that Judaism was more rational in expressing the essence of the universal, since it did not claim to be a revealed religion in the same way as Christianity. Instead Jews have divine legislation, which consists of laws and rules that guide their ethical existence, but these are less doctrines and absolute truths than practices. While Moses in the Bible received the divine legislation through an apparently supernatural experience, truths and rational understanding are revealed “through nature and thing, but never through word and script.”68 In effect, Mendelssohn distinguished between the historical forms of Jewish ceremonial law and religiosity.69 Neither Christian revealed doctrine

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nor Jewish ceremonial law was in itself universal, but rather the universal resided in religiosity as an expression of human nature.70 Though Spinoza is often cited as the first secular Jew, that title may more properly belong to Mendelssohn in the sense that he accepted Jewish ceremonial law but understood Judaism in its singularity as a historical formation that served a pragmatic function for a specific group of people. As he explained in his 1782 note to the translation of Ben Israel’s 1656 Vindication of the Jews, providence allows for diversity of form in religious practice, which effectively means that Jewish religious customs, the “inheritance of Jacob’s community,” are not for everyone.71 Though religiosity is the essence of every religion, that essence can only be understood or intuited through the understanding of the particular practices that constitute any religious formation. Without such understanding, the desire for religious unity across all cultural divisions can become a ground for discrimination, since so-called tolerance had historically reduced Jews to the status of a colony within the different states in which they were born, what Mendelssohn referred to as their extraterritorialization.72 As he wrote in his early debate with Lavater, “Where the most loving tolerance rules it is practiced the least with respect to us.”73 According to Nadler, Spinoza would have rejected the idea of a secular Jew or a “nonsectarian sectarian” as nonsense.74 Yet, in a sense, that is what Mendelssohn was. In the view of Shlomo Sand, he anticipated Reform Judaism,75 while he also argued against what would become the ideology of Zionism. In his view, Jews conform to the same tendency of human nature as everyone else when they love the soil on which they thrive—that is, the countries in which they live and work. Furthermore, he stressed that the Talmud forbids us even to think of a return {to Palestine} by force {i.e., to attempt to effect Redemption through human effort}. Without the miracles and signs mentioned in the Scripture, we must not take the smallest step in the direction of forcing a return and a restoration of our nation.76

When Bloom associates Mendelssohn with Spinoza and Marx, not to mention Mercadante the Italian composer who was not a Jew, he has created a kind of generic set that is not without relation to his concept of the nation. If there is a concept in contemporary critical discourse that links these generic configurations, it would perhaps be, however counterintuitive this may seem, the idea of “national consciousness” in the particular sense given to it by Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. I have argued elsewhere that national consciousness is a process and a desire for social autonomy that exceeds what Fanon called the

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“sterile formalism” of nationalism.77 It emerges as the unbinding of imperialist social identity, which represents both the identity of the imperialist and the identity of the colonized as mirror reflections of each other. The critical issue here is that nationalism as an ideology merely substitutes one master signifier that binds the masses into a unified representation or category for another master signifier that takes its place. In either case, singularity—or the essence of being in Spinoza’s sense—is erased as a form of existence. By contrast, national consciousness—at least as Fanon theorizes it—has an unbinding force that produces what Badiou would call “communist consciousness,” or a thought whose unbinding effect liberates singularity and ironically makes possible an authentic collective or transindividual relationship that is not a matter of social fusion. Such a thought and its correlate action produces “the unbound multiplicity of consciousness, its anticipatory aspect, and therefore the precariousness of the bond, rather than its firmness.”78 The bond is precarious because the truth of the unbound politics is the communism that, according to Negri, “takes the form of the transition,”79 a kind of perpetual process that continually refuses the identities and categories that shape the multitude of singularities into the unity of Spinoza’s vulgus, the mob or crowd governed by public opinion. Naturally, such a process doesn’t mean that there are no more master signifiers, but rather that politics itself lies in the resistance to the force of that signifier, in the unbinding of the identities that derive from it. In Ulysses, such national consciousness as the expression of generic being lies predominantly in the unpresented being of Leopold Bloom, who has many names and is categorized in many ways, but always embodies something that exceeds the various names that represent him, even the name Jew. As Ellmann noted about Joyce’s average man, “To be average in Ireland is to be eccentric. Joyce knew this, and moreover he believed that every human soul was unique.”80 Ezra Pound suggested that Bloom signifies “the basis of democracy,” not only because he is “the man in the street, the next man, the public,” but also because he is “Shakespeare, Ulysses, The Wandering Jew, the Daily Mail reader, the man who believes what he sees in the papers, Everyman, and ‘the goat.’”81 When Pound refers to Bloom as “the goat,” he probably means the “goat of Mendes,” as the surreal Alexander J. Dowie refers to him in the “Circe” episode (U15.1755). This can be taken as a reference to Bloom’s sexual perversity, since not only did the sacred goat of Egyptian mythology manifest the generative principle of the god Osiris, but his cult at Mendes, as Herodotus noted to his embarrassment, involved the public copulation of a priestess with a goat.82 In the same passage

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of Ulysses, Bloom is identified as Caliban—in other words, a kind of monster— which recalls the image of Jean Valjean promoted by Javert, who could be taken as the eye of society in Les Misérables. If Bloom is the goat, as Pound hints, then he is a kind of god, since, as Herodotus also noted, Pan is represented in both Greece and Egypt as a goat. In effect, Pan is usually seen as a god of nature, whose mother, according to Herodotus, was Penelope the wife of Odysseus (though this identity is far from certain).83 The root meaning of the Greek word pan is “all,” which suggests that Bloom manifests an essence that is common to all, even though such universality can only be expressed through the configuration of the particular elements of his being. Joyce’s decision to make Bloom an Irish Jew is not unrelated to his generic being. As Badiou notes, the name “Jew” has a historical connection to “universalism, in particular with revolutionary universalism.”84 In part, Badiou may allude to the impression that the Jewish community historically was a place that was outof-place—that constituted a generic set without a categorizing national signifier that would contain it. The arguments of recent historians that the history of the Jewish Diaspora was not necessarily the product of forced expulsions, as Zionist historiography has usually insisted, only makes more emphatic the generic status of the Jew at the dawn of modernity.85 More importantly, this out-of-place has repeatedly conditioned a further displacement that becomes embodied in the secular or philosophical Jew whose ironic forbearer would be Saint Paul. In other words, just as Paul broke from established Judaism, Bloom can be incorporated into the universalizing subject of a Jewish displacement of Judaism itself that would include Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Marx, possibly Wittgenstein, Derrida, and many others.86 To the extent that the works of these thinkers articulate truth processes, they can be said to express universals that are revolutionary. Now since for Badiou the universal is not a generalization but a subtractive category, if it can be called a category, the European Jews of Joyce’s world were universal in the sense that they embodied the unpresented being that results from the subtraction of the categories of national and racial identity, and, perhaps indirectly, gender and sexual identities as well. To force the Jews into the category of a separate racial identity was the tragic achievement of the world’s anti-Semites culminating with the Nazis, what Sand has termed “European culture’s ‘ethnic’ defamiliarization of the Jews.”87 Ironically, to the extent that national consciousness embodies the unpresented being of the Irish world in 1904, no character in Ulysses embodies it more than Bloom and possibly Molly. Both are Jews in one way and not Jews in another. Both are Irish in one way and

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not Irish in another. As I have already noted, though we probably know more about Bloom than any other character in literature, we never know him as a consistent unity. Though he has many names, the name of his unpresented being belongs only to Molly, not because she calls him Poldy but because her entire monologue could be considered the nameless name of Bloom’s unpresented, immeasurable essence, the man she can never know the way she knows the all too measurable Blazes Boylan. Similarly, only Bloom knows that all the representations of Molly that have circulated through Dublin during the course of his day never add up to the unpresented being whose discourse locates the void on which Ulysses is constructed.

Celibate love When I refer to Bloom’s unpresented being, I mean something in excess of every particular signifier that we associate with this character. Obviously, Bloom exists in the Irish community of 1904 Dublin in the sense that he has been counted as not-counting, which we see most dramatically demonstrated in the “Hades,” “Aeolus,” and “Cyclops” episodes. The novel itself forces the existence of the inexistent element in Bloom’s being, which in Spinozian terms would be his essence. This essence is something that the novel allows us to intuit or perceive intellectually as the void or unnamable thing that only appears through the subtractive inventory of the particular elements of his conscious and unconscious being. This process is subtractive because the recognition of each element forces the knowledge of its inadequacy or incompleteness and produces as its effect the awareness of an infinite excess—infinite in the sense that it cannot be counted and remains unaccountable. How does Joyce express the inexistent or unpresented being? It is through the articulation of an event, in Badiou’s sense, that virtually exposes Bloom as something more than what appears to the various citizens of Dublin with whom he interacts during the course of his day. I would identify that event as the amorous relation between Bloom and Molly, which ironically becomes an event in response to the non-event of Molly’s adultery. The latter is a non-event only in the sense that it does nothing to disrupt the order of the world within which it takes place, and it conforms to a predictable law of heterosexual desire as well as to a moral sanction that it ironically legitimates through transgression. What distinguishes Molly’s relation to Bloom and his relation to her is a love that is not strictly in conformity with any moral law or

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social order, and which presupposes the absence of a sexual relation in the sense of an inevitable unity of desire. I already suggested in the last chapter that Bloom expresses his love of Molly through the practice of a kind of celibacy. Naturally, one could argue that the word “celibacy” is an extreme term for Bloom’s sexual practices since he obviously masturbates—and at least once in public. According to Molly, he ejaculated on her bottom on the night after one of her recent encounters with Boylan, and she makes it clear that this is not an uncommon practice for Bloom (U18.77–78). Furthermore, at the end of “Ithaca,” Bloom seems to attempt such a sexual act as he contemplates the universality of a woman’s breasts and bottom. What follows in this passage is difficult to decipher as any casual survey of what Joyce critics have said about it would indicate. Bloom kisses Molly’s bottom after achieving an “approximate erection.” Before doing that, the text refers to his “solicitous adversion,” which could suggest that he has merely turned his attention to Molly’s bottom with desire or anxiousness. It could also suggest that he has verbally addressed Molly with his desire. After the kiss, he experiences a “solicitous aversion,” which, as the logical opposite of the “solicitous adversion,” could simply mean that he has turned his attention away from Molly’s bottom, but it could also mean that he has experienced a kind of repugnance or antipathy to what he is doing. This results in the notorious “proximate erection.” The adjective “proximate” can mean almost exactly the same thing as “approximate,” but it can also mean something close or near spatially, as well as something close in the sense of intimate. In other words, Bloom may have started to do something and then hesitated. Most critics, like Jean Kimball, interpret the “gradual elevation” and “tentative revelation” before the kiss as Bloom’s act of lifting Molly’s nightdress and revealing her bottom, which is followed by a “tentative velation” and “gradual abasement,” or the lowering of her nightdress (U17.2232–46).88 This makes obvious sense, but there could be another interpretation. In “Penelope,” Molly complains about her nightdress getting “all rolled under me besides him and his fooling” (U18.660–62). Though Molly associates her nightdress rolling up with Bloom’s sexual advances, it could be that she responds to the concurrence of these events. In other words, since Bloom and Molly sleep with their heads at opposite ends of the bed, it could be that Molly’s bottom was already exposed by her rolled-up nightdress and that Bloom’s unveiling and veiling was of his own sexual organ in approximate and proximate states of erection. After all, Bloom is also wearing a nightdress. Furthermore, “proximate” in this case may not mean “approximate” but rather that his erection is close or

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next to Molly’s bottom. In any case, Bloom stops himself from going any further with this sexual advance, even after he clearly knows that Molly is awake. The text tells us what follows these events: “Somnolent invocation,” presumably Molly either half-asleep or half-awake; “less somnolent recognition,” since Bloom is fully awake; “incipient excitation,” which probably refers to Molly, since Bloom is already excited and possibly has an erection that Molly can feel against her; and finally, “catechetical interrogation,” something that Molly initiates (U17.2248–49). Is it possible that Molly starts interrogating Bloom in order to keep him awake so that he will pursue his sexual advance further and perhaps in a direction that Molly would prefer? It has to be considered a possibility, despite her later protests against Bloom’s perversity and sexual nuisance, especially when we know that Molly won’t be able to go back to sleep for quite some time. In any case, Bloom stops his sexual advance, and probably not because he is exhausted after a long day. Other reasons suggest themselves when we learn about the couple’s sexual history as Bloom responds to Molly’s interrogation through the “intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration.” The listener, Molly, contemplates the limitations of her fertility, and the reason becomes clear when we learn about the hiatus in her sexual relations with Bloom: “a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ” (U17.2271–84). Bloom has not had complete sexual intercourse with Molly since the death of their son Rudy. Having avoided penetrative sex with Molly hardly constitutes celibacy if by celibacy you mean the avoidance of any form of sexual contact. However, is it possible to limit celibacy to such a strict formula? Does a priest cease to be celibate if he masturbates? And why does Molly contemplate her fertility at this precise moment in the precisely imprecise language of “Ithaca”? The words seem to suggest that she is concerned about Bloom’s refusal to engage in a sexual act that could produce another child. Yet in “Penelope,” when thinking about the death of Rudy, she says to herself, “I knew well Id never have another our ist death too it was we were never the same since Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any more” (U18.1449– 51). Before the death of Rudy, Molly liked the way Bloom made love and thought “he knew the way to take a woman” (U18.328–29). Since that time, however, Bloom has become “so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I suppose who he has” (U18.1400–1). Presumably, Bloom performed oral sex on Molly over a year after Rudy’s death when they lived on Holles Street. Molly resisted but finally let him do it, though,

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in her view, he didn’t do it right (U18.1249). In whatever way they arrived at their current mode of relationship, Bloom seems capable of sexual relations with Molly—relations she finds unsatisfying—only when he approaches sleep or is semi-conscious, which may explain why on the night of June 16 he starts and then desists from sexual touching, since in waking Molly he wakes himself. Though Molly finds Boylan vulgar, without manners or refinement, and doesn’t like the way he slaps her bottom, at the same time she wants “to be in love or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there sometimes,” and even considers that she might “go around by the quays there some dark evening where nobodyd know me and pick up a sailor off the sea thatd be hot on for it and not care a pin whose I was” (U18.1388–69, 1409–12). Clearly, Molly’s feelings are ambivalent. She may want Bloom to want her in a way that could produce another child, but at the same time she doesn’t want another child. She wants to be loved but makes little distinction between love and casual sex. In Spinozian terms, she vacillates, as does Bloom throughout the day in his various responses to the anticipation of Molly’s adultery. As Richard Brown noted long ago, Joyce was familiar with the Catholic literature that condemned any sexual act that resulted in ejaculation outside of the vagina and hence avoided the reproductive function of sexuality. He wrote about it in the notes to Exiles.89 Since Molly tends to be a little more conventional in her thinking than Bloom—as indicated by her annoyance at Bloom’s claim that “Our Lord” was “the first socialist” (U18.175–78)—one might assume that her sexual attitudes more or less conform to Catholic doctrine. But Molly’s vacillation extends to her moral values, and one could apply what Joyce says of Bertha’s relation to Robert Hand in Exiles to Molly’s relation to Boylan: she “is reluctant to give the hospitality of her womb” to his seed.90 Though Boylan “must have come 3 or 4 times,” Molly only allows him to penetrate her the last time, and she takes some comfort in the fact that he “hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him … in case any of it wasnt washed out properly” (U18.143, 154–57). She imagines that Boylan could produce “a fine strong child” but then adds that “Poldy has more spunk in him” (U18.167–68). As Brown notes, by “applying the most rigorous definition” of “natural” sex according to Catholic ideology, mostly through Molly’s soliloquy, Joyce isn’t promoting moral values but displaying “the extent of everyday, observable sexual experience that falls outside this narrow ideal,”91 especially when these values can so easily be turned around to serve completely contrary purposes. For example, in “Wandering Rocks” Father Conmee wonders whether adultery has been committed if no sexual penetration

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has taken place, though his main concern seems to be that the woman in the case “would half confess if she had not all sinned as women did” (U10.166–69). Ultimately, Molly can be taken as a kind of unconscious Spinozian in her insistence, virtually against her own religious convictions, that sex is the natural outcome of human desire. She asks, “what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know” (U18.1397–98). Molly senses that Bloom may have in some way wanted her to commit adultery, or in any case “its all his own fault if I am an adulteress” (U18.1510–16). Furthermore, while she consistently criticizes Bloom’s “unnatural” sexual desires and practices throughout the soliloquy, in the end she considers giving in to some of Bloom’s sexual proclivities, as she has done in the past with oral sex. On recalling a particularly irritating occasion, when Bloom played the know-it-all on a boat in a rough sea at Bray Head, Molly fantasizes about how she would “like to have tattered [his flannel trousers] down off him before all the people and give him what that one calls flagellate till he was black and blue do him all the good in the world” (U18.962–64). Given her knowledge of Bloom’s relative perversity, Molly would surely know how much Bloom might enjoy such an act, at least in a more private setting, as the fantasy sequences in the “Circe” episode reveal. Near the end of “Penelope,” Molly decides to let him come on her bottom as long as “he doesnt smear all my good drawers O I suppose that cant be helped” (U18.1527–29). Even at this point, though Molly thinks about how she can manipulate Bloom’s sexual desire in order to make him want her, she nonetheless keeps in mind that she will “wipe him off me just like a business his omission” (U18.1538–40). Molly’s substitution of the misnomer “omission” for “emission” suggests two contrary things. On the one hand, she doesn’t want to get pregnant even if it seems unlikely that she would from Bloom’s version of anal sex without penetration. On the other hand, Bloom’s omission may be exactly what she is wiping off, his fear of penetration and the consequences of an amorous relation that involves the risk of loss, not only the loss of another child perhaps, but the loss of the woman whose desire he recognizes he cannot possess or force into a complementary relationship with his own. Yet Bloom’s vacillation finds a counterpart in Molly’s own vacillation, and her forgiveness of herself for the affair with Boylan could just as easily apply to Bloom: O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men (U18.1517–20)

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Though Molly sees God as a transcendent male, and despite her constant appeal to the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural,” she implicitly recognizes that human desires have their own immanent logic. If they exist, they must be a “natural” part of being, since, as Spinoza would argue, human desires and sexual practices are never outside nature. Whatever her religious or moral convictions may be, Molly’s thought is beyond good and evil in the sense that she implicitly recognizes that values are the product of human thought and action and not transcendent sanctions. How does such an understanding apply to Bloom’s omission? If one consults the OED, celibacy is defined as nothing more than the “state of living unmarried.” Kahan, as noted in the last chapter, argues that celibacy can be a sexual identity in its own right, and since its meanings can be “as variable and myriad as those of sex” and exist “simultaneously and concurrently,” there is no reason to exclude celibacy as a possibility within the institution of marriage, especially since each meaning “carries different valences for different historical actors.” Those meanings include a performative choice or formal vow, as well as “a resistance to compulsory sexuality” and “a period in between sexual activity.”92 Technically, if Jean Valjean is a celibate in the strict sense, as I argued in the last chapter, Bloom would have to be something different. Yet Kahan has little to say about the relation between celibacy and love, though I don’t think one can exclude the possibility that love could potentially express itself through acts of celibacy. Bloom is apparently not asexual or homosexual (which doesn’t exclude the fact that he may have homoerotic desires and feelings), and while he may be heterosexual to all appearances, his relation to Molly seems to involve the performative choice to abstain from the kind of sexual contact that Molly would understand as an expression of love, though she herself may be ambivalent about what she desires. Concerning modernism, Kahan writes that “Celibacy is both railed against by modernists seeking sexual expression and taken up as a revolutionary sexual expression on its own terms.”93 For Joyce, it is perhaps neither one nor the other except as tendencies. One could argue that celibacy is Bloom’s way of distancing Molly, whose physical being and sexual demand perhaps threaten his sense of autonomy, despite the fact that he clearly has sexual desires. But that would be to ignore the process of what Kahan calls “reiterative desire,” which can be related to Butler’s concept of performative identity. As Kahan formulates it, “the celibate desire is the reiteration of celibacy itself.” However, he has a tendency to idealize this reiterative process when he claims that it “revises psychoanalytic models, since it frames desire outside of

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lack.”94 That conclusion would depend on how one defines the concept of lack, which could be understood as the necessary incompleteness of the reiterative process itself. As Butler noted about the subject of sexual identity, it “is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmic idealization of itself—and failing.”95 To the extent that there is such a thing as “reiterative identity,” which Kahan distinguishes from normative sexual identity, it is both “the desire and the practice” that must be repeated because it can never sustain itself as a pure identity, which would require it to become a norm in its own right.96 But since every sexual identity fails, according to Butler, what determines the radical nature of any identity is the strategy of its failure—or incompleteness. Kahan criticizes what he calls the “expressive hypothesis” that can apply even to queer theories of sexuality that inadvertently postulate the necessity of a sexual identity that, though in opposition to the hegemonic norm of heterosexuality, aims to achieve some normative status. Because, in his view, “celibacy fails to fit into modern frameworks of determined and determinate sexuality,” it has been used as “a placeholder that does not have a particular content or a particular character the way that other sexualities do.”97 Similarly, in the conclusion to his book, Kahan theorizes that asexual identities challenge the concept of a sexual drive that “comes with the demand that everyone must express sexuality.”98 It isn’t self-evident, however, that getting rid of the concept of a compulsory “sexual” drive automatically negates the concept of the drive itself. The drive would be something like Spinoza’s conatus, which is the striving by which “each thing endeavors to persist in its own being” as the expression of its essence (E3.7: 283). Spinoza associates this striving with potentia, which would include, of course, the powers of thought and action. Essence, in this context and elsewhere in this book, is not related to essentialism as that term has come to be understood in contemporary cultural criticism. As already indicated, it is closer to the notion of a generic set, a subtractive process more than a self-contained object. Kahan’s reiterative identity could be understood as the effect of its own effects, but to grasp identity in this way is to posit the essence of a singular being as its immanent cause. Bloom’s quasi-celibacy, if you will, cannot be understood outside of his relation to Molly, and therefore it is not strictly an identity while it is also not a placeholder for his true sexual identity, which presumably would be normative heterosexuality. Kahan seems to contradict himself when he criticizes the expressive hypothesis for presupposing the necessity of sexual identity and yet insists that celibacy must be understood as a formal sexual identity or category.

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In the chapter in which he struggles to distinguish asexuality from celibacy, he claims to have “mapped an overlap between celibacy and asexuality on the axis of desire,” insisting that both asexuals and celibates make a choice, though asexuals choose not to identify with sexuality, which is itself the expression of a desire.99 In any case, I would define Bloom’s quasi-celibacy in a slightly different way by insisting that the term in this case is only useful as the signifier of the unbinding of an identity. Bloom is celibate to the extent that he resists or even refuses to have sexual intercourse with his wife Molly, even though it is rather obvious that she might welcome such an act and might even risk the possibility of having another child.

Amorous thought A few critics recently have made the effort to produce a new reading of Bloom and Molly’s relationship by inflecting Ulysses with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.100 It is interesting to note that Levinas associates Spinoza with “the ancient privilege of unity” according to which “Separation and interiority were held to be incomprehensible and irrational.”101 I hope that the readings of Spinoza and the related philosophy of Badiou that I have referenced in this study have made clear the inadequacy of such a characterization of their or any other thought derived from an ontology of immanence. In particular, Janine Utell formulates a reading of Joyce that participates in the contemporary celebration of alterity and difference in a way that, from my perspective, misrepresents the ontological significance of his work. Though she wisely recognizes Joyce’s understanding that, strictly as a social institution, “Marriage is a violation, and adultery is an inevitable outcome as individual desires are defined within limited categories,” she nonetheless insists on taking Joyce’s references to stars and eternity rather too literally.102 Comparing the couple in Ulysses with the couple in Finnegans Wake, she writes, “Molly and Bloom are part of something larger than themselves, part of a celestial motion. They create a universe of two, a universe that will be rendered cosmic in the later novel.”103 I could almost agree with this idea—since everybody is part of something larger—until I see where Utell goes with it in the reading of Finnegans Wake. ALP and HCE “become, in the formulation of Levinas, othered to each other in a most radical, almost divine sense.” Their marriage moves “beyond the erotic into the agapaic, beyond the human into the divine.” While “knowable in the mundanity of their remarriage,” their relation remains “unknowable

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in the transcendence of their transformation.”104 I must confess that for all the beauty of the final pages of the Wake, I find it difficult to see reconciliation or transcendence in these lines from its penultimate page: “I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me.”105 In her last act, ALP loves and loathes and possibly loots at the same time. Her loneliness has made her loony, crazy. Perhaps, like Christ, she sacrifices herself for the faults of her family, humanity. Her passing out and slipping away could be falling asleep, or the bitter ending of death itself as permanent sleep. The human family will never see nor know nor miss her. Maybe her unknowableness is the infinite distance of the wholly other, or maybe she just didn’t count in the patriarchal world, what Badiou might call her inexistence. If this is the potential reconciliation awaiting Bloom and Molly, then one can understand why Utell insists on a negative reading of the ending of Ulysses. For her, it turns out that the only ethical hero in that work is the reader: “The final act of the novel is to withhold the other from the lover, to create an infinite distance between Molly and Bloom as we are given access to her inner life—and Bloom is not.”106 Her conclusion about the distance between the two and her view that Bloom “will never fully know his wife” is surely true, but this perspective has been idealized in a way that misses the essence of any relationship—something that may be infinite or eternal without being celestial or transcendent. When Joyce said that the “Penelope” episode is “the indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity” or that Stephen and Bloom in “Ithaca” become “heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze,” he was not positing any form of transcendence in the metaphysical sense. He characterizes the “last word” that goes to his Penelope as “human, all too human,” as something that is anything but transcendent.107 On the contrary, just as I argued in the last chapter that Jean Valjean is the image of a savage God, Job on top of a dunghill, Bloom and Molly are the faces of an immanent God in Ulysses, though I use the word “face” and the word “God” here in a way that defies the mystification of the face and alterity that may exist in Levinas’s philosophy, at least in certain interpretations of it. If I have lingered on the minute particulars of Bloom and Molly’s physical relationship, I have done so in order to demystify sexual being by foregrounding Brown’s “everyday, observable sexual experience” that simply doesn’t conform to any strict sexual identity or moral codification. Though I may agree with Utell’s general idea about the revolt of love in Ulysses, her reading is simultaneously too negative and too affirmative.

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If one posits the Lacanian principle that there is no sexual relation, no necessary complementarity of sexual beings, one can argue that the relation between Bloom and Molly is disjunctive, that there is a kind of distance between them—but to make that distance absolute and metaphysically transcendent also entails accepting the principle of a totality that Levinas’s thought meant to call into question. Such an absolute distance presupposes an autonomous self that constitutes a kind of whole that can never transcend or overcome itself because it is necessarily complete in itself, while it faces the other from which it seeks a truth. As Levinas writes, “Truth is sought in the other, but by him who lacks nothing. The distance is untraversable, and at the same time traversed.”108 Elsewhere Levinas refers to the subject as “the other … in the same, inasmuch as the same is for the other.”109 The subject turns out to be autonomous and self-contained, both for and in the other. As far as I can tell, there is no concept of self-annihilation in Levinas’s thought, and he explains very clearly what he understands by the term “transcendence” when he says it “signifies precisely the fact that one cannot think God and being together.”110 This division is, of course, antithetical to Spinoza’s claim that “God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things,” which means that God and being cannot be separated (E1.18: 229). Furthermore, as I argued in Chapter 1, the use of the word “God” in Spinoza produces a kind of fiction, since we inevitably attribute to it a personhood and even, as history testifies, a gender, which makes absolutely no sense in an ontology of immanence. Precisely because for Spinoza there is no outside of being, there is also nothing that can be counted as one or a whole. For a whole to be possible, there must be at least two, and a third term that would count them—a transcendent God, immanent being, and something that would contain both, like Plato’s khôra. As I argued in the first chapter, Spinoza’s philosophy implies that being is inconsistent or incomplete, an infinite process of becoming without boundary or limit. Furthermore, against Spinoza’s notion that human beings do not constitute a kingdom within a kingdom, Levinas insists that “To be human means to live as if one were not a being among beings. As if, through human spirituality, the categories of being inverted into an ‘otherwise than being.’”111 This thinking, in my judgment, is utterly foreign to the thought of Joyce in Ulysses, since he makes it perfectly clear that the sexual practices and desires of Leopold and Molly Bloom, including all the contradictions in their sexual desires and in their understanding of each other’s sexual being, express nothing above or beyond nature itself. The “Yes” with which Ulysses concludes is not an affirmation of the reconciliation of Leopold and Molly Bloom in a

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happy-ever-after scenario but the affirmation of being itself as an infinite process that produces intuitive understanding through acts of love, even though those acts have no metaphysical guarantee that they will produce happiness or any immediate good in the social sense of these terms. Throughout her study, Utell repeatedly uses the verb “recognize” or the noun “recognition” as the term for the process that makes ethical love possible. In a passage that perhaps condenses her thought-process, she writes, “Recognition of the other is crucial for an ethical love; otherwise, we are merely mirroring ourselves to ourselves.”112 Such a recognition contradicts the very principle of such an absolute difference. One of the axioms of Spinoza’s philosophy, cited already, states that one cannot understand or even posit the relation between two things if they have nothing in common. It would follow that recognition in any meaningful sense would be impossible without common ground or substance. Badiou, who regards Levinas’s ethics as a “category of pious discourse” and his “altogether-other” as “the ethical name for God”—and clearly a transcendent God—finally suggests that the construction of the other at an absolute distance subverts itself and the differences it posits through the recognition that must necessarily be a recognition of identity, of the same: “this celebrated ‘other’ is acceptable only if he is a good other—which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us.”113 In effect, this suggests that idealizing or mystifying the other as the wholly other at an absolute distance is ironically a way of “mirroring ourselves to ourselves.” For this reason, it is not surprising that most organized religions posit a God who is nothing more than a mirror projection of normative social identity, complete with human emotions and values. Bloom recognizes this himself in the “Lotus-Eaters” episode when he enters “All-Hallows” or St. Andrew’s Catholic church and formulates his own idea of what Marx called “the opium of the people.”114 Contemplating Dubliners receiving communion, he thinks, “Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop … Yes, bread of angels it’s called. There’s a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel … Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim” (U5.359–64). The object of Bloom’s critique conforms rather strictly to Levinas’s notion of the other in the same (kingdom of God within) and the same for the other (we identify with each other as the same by projecting our own image as the image of God who gazes back at us through the face of the other who is the same). For Bloom and Molly, this would suggest that each projects their own identity onto the other and each is disappointed by the failure of that projection to sustain a unity, or what Lacan might call a mirror image. Furthermore, if the reader

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thinks he or she has direct access to the mind of Molly Bloom, then the reader has been deluded by their own projections of identity, rather in the manner of the non-duped who err in thinking that they are not duped. Bloom and Molly are fictional characters who express the thought of James Joyce, and one could argue that this thought is both interior and exterior—or transindividual. In two extremely difficult essays and a set of interviews, Badiou elaborates a rather different understanding of the other in the amorous relation, starting from the premise that love is not “an experience of the Other” but “of the world.”115 Love is a truth process. Or, in Fernando Pessoa’s words that Badiou quotes more than once, “Love is a thought.”116 Still, I would argue that there is a way of understanding love as an experience of the other, though not of the wholly other, which could be rewritten to say the other as a whole, the infinite as a totality, which ironically transcends or separates itself from being, hence becoming a bad infinity in the Hegelian sense. Badiou does argue that love is an experience of a sort but that this experience “does not constitute any knowledge (savoir) of love.” It is “an experience of thought” that “does not think itself.” This formulation is curious and rather difficult to grasp, but I will postulate its meaning in this way: love as an experience is the expression of a thought, not the thought of a thought. In other words, the lover is not interested in theories of love that can be articulated but in something that from the perspective of language may be unnamable, even unknowable in the conventional sense. For Badiou, the term “experience” in this context denotes “presentation as such,” which, as already noted, means that something belongs to a situation, even though it may not appear as an object to the everyday understanding of a world.117 In its simplest formulation, love means “you can experience the world from the perspective of difference.” Badiou identifies this perspective with sexuation, which involves two disjunctive positions that he names “woman” and “man,” though he insists that this choice is “strictly nominalist” without empirical, biological, or social meaning.118 I would question whether it is possible to use these terms in such a neutral way, which can lead to the sort of empiricist generalization that contemporary cultural theory would associate with a reductive form of essentialism—for example in this statement from Levinas: the feminine is “the absolutely contrary contrary” and “a flight before light. Hiding is the way of existing of the feminine, and this fact of hiding is precisely modesty.” Indeed, Levinas understands this process as a kind of transcendence for which he can see “no other possibility than to call it mystery.”119 Though admittedly these phrases make more sense in their context, they don’t carry us far beyond the standard ideological constructions of gender.

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This situation only becomes more incoherent when Levinas suggests that the “archaic” implications of these constructions would be eliminated “if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and in the feminine were the attribute of every human being.”120 Certainly, Joyce’s womanly man, Leopold Bloom, would seem to validate such a perspective, not to mention Molly’s desire to be a man for once and try sexual intercourse “with that thing they have” (U15.1799, 18.1381–82). These superficial attributes, however, merely reapply to Bloom and Molly what are already categorical and ideological gender characteristics that may blind the reader to a more profound ontological division, not simply between a man and a woman, but between any two subjects who enter into a disjunctive amorous relation. Badiou’s perspective may be related to Levinas’s, but he avoids the tendency toward false essentialization by insisting that the disjunction is between positions rather than identities. Badiou’s language on this point is difficult but not indecipherable. The two positions—however you name them, though historically the terms “woman” and “man” have functioned as critical signifiers of sexual division—are only “established retroactively” through the amorous truth process. These two positions are “absolutely disjunct,” which doesn’t mean that experience is divided up, but rather “The sexuated positions are disjointed with regards to experience in general.”121 Since experience means presentation, then the disjunction between the two positions lies in their relation to being as the inconsistent multiple. One could argue that the Two in an amorous situation are the result of two separate operations or counts, and the disjunction between them localizes the inconsistent multiple that retroactively conditions their presentation. As I’ve already suggested, Spinoza’s concept of essence as the object of intuitive understanding or love could be interpreted as the end of a process that subtracts all the categories that govern perception or appearance so that one is left with the empty set that locates the point of inconsistency in the presentation of being, or the void. As Gillespie explains, this void is not identical with the inconsistent multiple but is “the unpresented of presentation,” its “localized effect.”122 In the phenomenal world, the void appears only as that which does not appear or has virtually a zero degree of existence, localized by the empty set. Essence itself is a formal impasse that cannot be separated from the subtractive process that induces its appearance as the inexistent, which is the absence that Badiou associates with the Lacanian principle that “sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship.”123 However, Badiou

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insists that the disjunction that conditions love “is not observable and cannot itself be made the object of an experience or of a direct knowledge (savoir).”124 There is no presentation of the unpresentable within presentation, because the point of inconsistency within the multiple is the point of non-being within the presentation of being. In other words, love itself is not the objective or cognitive perception of the absence of relation but the power of thought that enables one to move beyond the non-relation to the understanding of its truth, the scene of Two without a third position that would govern and define it, such as the wholly other or God. Though Spinoza never formulates it this way, one could argue that his distinction between the second and third kinds of knowledge correlates with Badiou’s distinction between knowledge (savoir) and truth. Intuitive knowledge or knowledge of essence is a truth procedure. It is a procedure or process because truth or essence is infinite and therefore cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge according to the common logic, by which I mean the logic of instrumental reason. Badiou notes, almost as a second thought, that the disjunction on which the scene of Two is founded—unless one resorts “to some imaginary point about feminine mystery,” as Levinas does—is not pure: “there is at least one non-null term that enters in its place in rapport with the two sexed positions.” The only way I can make sense out of the apparent contradiction between the absolute disjunction of the absent sexual relation and this exception—what you could call the point of inconsistency within the disjunction—is to fall back on a Spinozian reading of this process. In effect, there is an apparently absolute disjunction between any particular human being, constituted by a body and the idea of that body, and any other human being, since the knowledge they would have of each other as singularities must be mediated by perceptions or images, which are necessarily inadequate if the understanding of them is limited to the particular mind of a particular body. This disjunction is absolute insofar as the relation between these singularities cannot be overcome without the intervention of thought, but that thought involves what Blake would have called self-annihilation through the construction of another singularity that is neither self nor other but transindividual. As Badiou postulates, the two positions of the non-relation “share a multitude of predicatives allowing for detailing almost to infinity their common membership in Humanity.”125 These predicates could be considered common notions in Spinoza’s sense, or, in Badiou’s terms, veridical statements that provide “the support for generic procedures, or truthprocedures.” However, the truth itself, which again I would associate with

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Spinoza’s intuitive understanding of essence, “is indifferent to all predicative partition of its support.”126 Another way of expressing this indifference would be to say that the truth is subtracted from every predicate or category, and the intuitive understanding of truth lies in the process of this subtraction—one is tempted to say deconstruction. The truth or essence of a singular thing is this process, the non-null term that relates to the two positions as “a local hole, or a relational support, in their non-rapport.”127 The hole locates the infinity of a truth that traverses the terms of a non-relation yet remains “unformulated, or indeterminate, in such a way that only the void enters in rapport with it.”128 The truth of the non-relation would be a generic set, something that only relates to the void, the point of inconsistency or non-being within being. Non-being in this context should not be taken as some point of mystifying transcendence of being, but as the formal impasse immanent to it. There is nothing outside of being, but being itself is inconsistent. The event, in Badiou’s sense, discloses this inconsistency and forces the momentary appearance of the inexistent, the nonnull term in a non-relation. Ironically, the inconsistency or incompleteness of infinite being means that it is productive, a process of innovation. Let me try to put these obviously abstract propositions into slightly more concrete terms with respect to Joyce’s novel. Leopold and Molly Bloom are the names of two positions in a disjunctive relation. The entire novel locates these two positions through the deconstruction of the apparent identities, through the failure of the signifiers that constitute these characters in a fiction to cohere into a final unity. Such a coherence is always an illusion, but Ulysses forces the appearance of this illusion as illusion through its excess of style, an excess that virtually destroys any classical understanding of style as the expression or signature of the authorial subject and its constitution of objects. The reader can identify these positions as “man” and “woman,” or “male” and “female,” and perhaps that is inevitable since our readings take place in a particular context or world. However, the novel destabilizes these categories and expresses Joyce’s own understanding of the unbinding force of the non-relation between these positions that ironically can become the condition of ontological innovation. The event that constitutes the truth process in the novel is not Molly’s adultery but Bloom’s decision not to intervene and Molly’s decision to forgive him for this omission. In effect, the truth of their non-relation is expressed through these acts of what Blake would call mutual forgiveness. Bloom’s quasi-celibacy and Molly’s ultimately non-committal adultery express the truth of their incommensurable desires. Joyce scholars can quibble endlessly about why Bloom has avoided

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complete sexual intercourse with Molly for over ten years, and whether this act has hurt her or expressed an understanding of her that may exceed our grasp as readers. Anyone who has read the book can hardly doubt that Bloom’s actions are an attempt to understand the particular being of Molly, their difference, which finds its counterpoint in her ruminations on Bloom in the soliloquy. Finally, the mutual forgiveness that both characters appear to practice in their final moments in the text, an act not without its risks, articulates an eternal love that exceeds the apparent failures of their physical relationship, eternal in the precise sense that it is a generic set that cannot be measured or categorized. Love is the force that unbinds a subject from a categorical identity, whether it be sex, gender, nationality, or any other social predication. Bloom locates himself as the subject of a truth process in “Cyclops” when he speaks the words that come as close as he can to the articulation of a truth: “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life … Love … I mean the opposite of hatred” (U12:1481–85). The love Bloom references here is not romantic or fusional, but rather represents the thought process that induces his understanding of the impossibility that any two can ever add up to one, or that any third position can ever fill the gap or void between the two. Force, hatred, and history produce divisions in humanity through the process of binding. The British, driven by hatred and justified by history, constitute themselves as a force—counted as one—against the Irish other, and of course to some extent Irish nationalism simply mirrors this process in reverse. The division between men and women can function in the same way, through insult and hatred, and the assumption of an ontological division that translates into so many naturalized predicates. Molly’s forgiveness of Bloom is more than just giving him another chance or remembering how she likes the way he made love or that he may have “understood or felt what a woman is” (U18.1578–79). If he ever understands what a woman is, it is only the singular woman whose desire he knows he cannot own any more than she can own his desire. The truth of this amorous relation is not the binding of two into one but the disjunctive unbinding that forces the understanding that the essence of the other, of anyone, always remains unnamable and can only be approached through something like what Adorno called determinate negation, which is another way of naming the subtractive process that conditions the amorous production of a truth in the scene of Two. Molly probably comes closest to expressing her forgiveness of Bloom when she comments critically on the men of Dublin—particularly those who attended

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Paddy Dignam’s funeral, many of whom look down on her husband, keeping their distance even as they entice him with the thought of inclusion in their social identity, a binding that Bloom seems consciously to regret missing at times but unconsciously resists virtually every time. In the end Molly defends her husband’s detachment from that binding process, what you could call a patriarchal social identity: well theyre not going to get my Husband again into their clutches if I can help it making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and family goodfornothings (U18.1270–79)

The ambivalence of these words, the pure vacillation they express, do not simply locate Bloom in the category of the good husband despite his “idiotics.” They circulate around the hole in the non-relation between Bloom and Molly precisely in the way they do not resolve the contradictions between Molly’s loyalty to Bloom and her adultery, her sense of alienation by Bloom’s quasi-celibacy and her acceptance of his—to her—sexual perversity.

Truth is a woman Mutual forgiveness, or love, is understanding, but I would add here that understanding is not strictly cognitive in the context of a truth process. Some readers may think that by quoting certain banal phrases attributed to Bloom and Molly in Joyce’s novel, I have only posited a vague generality, indeed nothing more than a cliché. To be frank, the words of these characters are banal, but one has to remember and situate the words in the context of Joyce’s revolutionary work. For example, to use a different work that influenced Joyce, in the death scene of Madame Bovary, after Charles discovers that Emma has poisoned herself, Flaubert inserts a one sentence paragraph: “Et il la regardait avec des yeux d’une tendresse comme elle n’en avait jamais vu.” My translation would be: “And he looked at her with eyes of a tenderness that she had never seen before.” Lydia Davis has translated the key phrase in the passage as “with a love in his eyes,” which is consistent with the possible meanings and connotations of “tendresse.”129 Now this sentence is ultimately rather banal in itself, particularly when it is located in the death-bed scene of a nineteenth-century novel. What

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makes it significant and gives it force is the context of the rest of the novel. At first, it may seem ambivalent. Has Charles never shown any tenderness, any love, to Emma? Upon reflection, such an assertion would make little sense, since it can hardly be doubted that Charles, for all of his ineptitude and petit-bourgeois idiocy, has always loved his wife to the extent that he knew how. So the reader is left with the realization that Emma sees something for the first time that has always been there, that the love she was looking for—though not in the romantic way she imagined after the books she had read—was right in front of her, but she did not have the power to see it, and the tragic irony is that she only gains that power at the moment of her death. This singular sentence—hardly as beautiful and complex as many of the sentences that Flaubert wrote—nonetheless crystallizes the entire novel and discloses, without naming, the “non-null term” that interrupts the non-relation between Charles and Emma Bovary. We can, of course, give it a name as long as we recognize that the truth of the name doesn’t lie in the construction of a simple referent, an object of knowledge, but in the failure of the name to govern its object. We can call it love, or tenderness, or understanding, or intuitive knowledge. At this particular moment in Madame Bovary, this brief sentence dismisses or subtracts all the categories that have governed our perception of these characters throughout the novel, yet nothing strictly coherent takes the place of these subtracted categories. Something “unformulated, or indeterminate” enters or occupies the void between the two characters and could be said to constitute an event within the event of the novel, a truth process that the novel postulates by the very incompleteness of its expression. With Ulysses, Joyce in many ways produced the antithesis of Madame Bovary. Charles Bovary becomes Leopold Bloom whose “idiotics” at least bear some comparison with the former’s idiocy. Yet, while Bloom is made the subject of fun, parody, and satire, there is no condescension in Joyce’s representation of his character, and as I’ve already noted, Joyce constructed Bloom as a projection of aspects of his own being. It’s as if Joyce read Flaubert and saw the larger point that Flaubert himself tended to ignore but that nonetheless unconsciously breaks through in certain passages of the novel. To allude to the possibly apocryphal comment of Flaubert, Joyce may have understood that not only is Madame Bovary based on something in Flaubert but the same is true of Charles Bovary.130 Bloom, Molly, Stephen Dedalus—and no doubt many of the other characters in the novel—express aspects of Joyce, but not simply Joyce the person or self, but the transindividual Joyce constituted by the adventure of his thought and its

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participation in the general intellect. It probably goes without saying that Molly is loosely based on Joyce’s perception and understanding of Nora Barnacle Joyce, but it is also critical to understand that Molly expresses something in Joyce more than Joyce, more than Nora, and more than their particular relationship. You might say that the whole of Ulysses is the attempt to circumscribe and thereby disclose the hole, the non-null term, in Joyce’s relation not only to Nora but to everyone he ever loved, possibly including those he regarded as his enemies. Though I am not comfortable with Badiou’s way of deploying the terms of gender, male and female, as sexuated positions, there is something he manages to express through his appropriation of the Lacanian model of the sexual division, something that has bearing on both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. When he argues that “‘man’ is mute and violent, while ‘woman’ gossips and complains,” he seems to deploy what could only be considered the most blatant sort of gender stereotype.131 And yet no one who has studied Joyce’s two final works could possibly not see how appropriate this phrase is as a description of their significant content. At the same time, Joyce’s investigation of the sexual relation in these novels hardly leaves these sexual categories uninterrogated and stable. Badiou hypothesizes what he calls the Humanity function, which he insists does not coincide with the phallic function as hypothesized by Lacan.132 In the latter’s sexuation formulas, which appear in a table at the beginning of Chapter 7 of the Encore seminar, Lacan postulated a masculine universal that was conditioned on an exception, what I would call the fantasy of the One. Every man is subject to the phallic function, which also means castration, with the exception of the One, what Lacan calls the father function.133 The masculine universal presupposes at least one whole being, something that escapes or transcends the incompleteness of being. Ultimately, from the perspective of this study, this would be the transcendent God that separates itself from being while functioning as the guarantee of wholeness, totality. The other side of the sexual divide is the side of women in the plural, since the universal woman doesn’t exist for Lacan, except “at the level at which woman is truth. And that is why one can only half-speak of her.”134 In another passage, Lacan clarifies this statement by explaining that “the whole truth is what cannot be told. It is what can only be told on the condition that one doesn’t push it to the edge, that one only half-tells (mi-dire) it.”135 By implication, Lacan seems to concede the existence of another universal, a different sort of universal that does not depend on the fantasy of the One, the exception. On the side of truth, or women, there is no exception to castration or incompleteness, there is no sexual relation, and yet the ironic result of this

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apparent universality of the phallic function is that the phallic function loses its universality and becomes mere fantasy. The fantasy of the One that supports the masculine sense of something lost, something that must be restored, becomes meaningless on the side of women. Those without the fantasy of the One experience incompleteness and the absence of a sexual relation not as a lack but as the immanent structure of being. Nothing is lacking to the truth that is infinite, which means not subject to a count that would add up to One. Let me put it another way. The universal associated with Western imperialism is founded on the fantasy of the One—for example, that there is such a thing as a unified Western culture that finds its legitimacy in a transcendent order of value that guarantees its superiority to other cultures, which, in order to fulfill or complete themselves and the evolutionary process in which they are embedded, must become like the West, an extension of it. Similarly, as Luce Irigaray argued long ago, in the patriarchal ideology that posits a necessary sexual relation, the sex that sees itself as one, as dominant, as complete, imagines the other sex as its complement, an extension of its own being. The other sex is required to complete the one sex, which means that the other sex is not for itself but for its other—“a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies.”136 For Badiou, the Humanity function subverts the false universality of the phallic function, the fantasy of the One, by giving ground to the truth procedures. In effect, it is the non-null term that disrupts or constitutes a break in the non-relation between any two thinking beings. For all practical purposes, the Humanity function is precisely what inexists according to the everyday logic of a world. As Badiou notes, “There is only one Humanity,” which seems to contradict the whole point of his argument, but he simply means that the truth process derives from the location of a zero degree of appearance, the inexistent. Everything that inexists has the same value of zero in the world of appearance. The truth of every situation inexists within that situation, unless a procedure forces the existence of the inexistent, which means that it produces veridical propositions or strong fictions of a completed truth that can transform the understanding of a world. The truth itself, as infinite process, remains immeasurable or inexistent. Furthermore, and this may be the critical point, “The existence of love makes it appear retroactively that, in the disjunction, the female position is oddly the bearer of love’s relation to humanity as I conceive it: humanity … is science, art, politics, and love.”137 The female position here, while historically associated with the experience of women, cannot be reduced to some sort of feminine essence. Rather, the position of truth, of the infinite incomplete, founded on a kind of

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intuitive knowledge, in the Spinozian sense, operates through the inexistent, including the non-relation between the sexes, and, since it knots together the four types of truth procedure, it is the position that guarantees the universality of truth as a generic set. Here I will have to improvise a little. Both Leopold and Molly Bloom occupy the female position at different points in Joyce’s text. Unlike most of the male characters in the novel, Bloom repeatedly withdraws from the fantasy of the One, though he is sometimes tempted by it. He is repeatedly excluded or identified as not one of them by the male community of the novel, which also forces the truth that he is not-one and ironically the bearer of the universal, the non-null term in the disjunctive social relations that the binding of nationalist or masculinist identity disavows. Perhaps his greatest temptation comes in the “Sirens” episode when his sense of loss, not so much his fear of losing Molly as his fear of losing the identity he associates with the masculine position in their disjunctive relation, tempts him to fuse or identify with the other men, a binding that forecloses the unbinding of the truth process. The episode also dramatizes the temptation of false art and false politics, which means that the men in the Ormond bar use music as an art form not to explore or circumscribe the hole in their social relations that would condition the kind of transindividual understanding that could produce a political truth with a universal address. The false art—not the art work itself but the relation to art—does not individualize or singularize but rather generalizes and fuses; it produces a serial identity in the Sartrean sense. The false politics of national resentment demonizes the political other and betrays the fundamental principle of a political truth procedure—to provide a limited and precise definition of the political enemy. Bloom manages to resist both temptations through his appeal to “Musemathematics,” a vague reference to a scientific truth procedure that, despite his faulty and limited knowledge, nonetheless enables him to sustain a critical relation to his immediate experience of art and politics (U11.834). In “Cyclops,” the Citizen crudely calls into question Bloom’s masculine identity (“Do you call that a man?”), and though Bloom’s implied critique of Irish nationalism may seem naïve in its call for “moderation and botheration and their colonies and their civilisation”—not his words but their representation by the unreliable narrator, the true Cyclops of the episode— he finally responds to the Citizen’s half-truths, which mix nationalism and anti-Semitism, with the construction of a generic nation and a generic Jew, as already noted (U12.1194–95, 1654).

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Finally, Bloom becomes a transindividual subject—or a signifier of Joyce’s transindividual subjectivity—through the deconstruction of styles that leads to the hallucinatory writing of “Circe,” in which Bella Cohen’s Fan may provide the purest expression of this generic set: “Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now me?” (U15.2768–69). As Joyce must have learned through his political and amorous experience, it isn’t that the other becomes the same but that the essence of any particular being, the non-null term that inexists in the relations of appearance, lies beyond the serial identity of everyday existence. Our “true selves,” as we imagine them, are copies of others, reflected back and forth in a kind of serial regression. The essence of any particular being, a true individuality, can only be grasped through the eyes of the mind, the power of thought. It is transindividual because it requires the movement of thought through the subtractive process that nonetheless engages the general intellect and finally discloses something in language more than language, not above or below but an excess immanent to language. This is what Lacan might have called the discourse of the Other, or the unconscious, though it is not strictly the property of a particular self with a particular history. Language always says more than it knows, and that excess would be the truth process that passes through any given situation or world.

Process interminable Finn Fordham has argued that the concept of process in contemporary thought has been given “too absolute a value,” due to a “simplistic dualism and binaristic evaluation.” This displaces “static form” and makes “change absolute,” which ironically gives process “too static an essence that paradoxically prevents becoming from becoming.” In the end, he would argue, “process is a function of its potential transformation into a completed form, and on into product and thence consumption (where it becomes part of a new process of production with another reader/consumer.)”138 To my mind, the only reductive dualist or binary thinking in these assertions comes from Fordham, and it is a perspective that supports the premise of his favored methodology, genetic criticism, which, at least in the standard academic practice, locates the truth of a text in the relation between a reconstruction of its becoming or history of composition and the final product. But Fordham himself seems to recognize that the product is only a moment within an immeasurable process, and the relation between process

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and product could be understood as dialectical, which makes them contraries in Blake’s sense. Spinoza did not make significant use of the concept of process, but in Chapter 1 I argued that Spinoza’s God or immanent being cannot, strictly speaking, be one, because there is no other, no outside of being, no second term—or a third term that would incorporate or count the two. Negri, as I also noted there, argues that being is productive—and therefore a process—because the fullness, the completion, it moves toward necessarily gives ground, through the movement of desire, to more production. The appearance of completion—or, in the case of art, the work—derives from process and conditions more process, more thought, even if only in the form of critical interpretation. For Badiou, truth is structurally infinite, and though the truth process requires veridical statements and hypothetical fictions of its completion in order to sustain its infinity and produce new singularities, it cannot be contained by or reduced to any particular effect or product without a betrayal of the truth itself. In giving the last word to Molly, Joyce positions himself on the female side of the sexual equation, the side that conditions the interrelation of all possible truth procedures. Molly’s words circulate around the hole in her being, the point of its inconsistency, and the non-null term in her relation to others. I said earlier that Molly’s soliloquy could be read as the nameless name of Leopold Bloom, just as the rest of the novel—not only Bloom’s monologues but all the references to Molly, all the names attributed to her—circumscribe her being in order to disclose the thing they miss, the unnamable essence or truth. One could think of it, in Spinozian terms, as her power in the sense of potentia. In creating Molly Bloom through the mediation of words that gave expression to his own thought, Joyce produced a radical representation of the ontological principle of democracy. Drawing on Joyce’s description of Molly as the earth in both “prehuman” and “posthuman” forms, I argued in Paperspace that she was the “preposthuman” or preposterous woman, whether we think of her as the natural woman, as the embodiment of woman’s nature, or as nature itself. I also came up with what in retrospect seems like the overly facile formula that Molly is where the truth lies.139 Now Joyce certainly associated Molly with the earth when at the end of “Ithaca” he described her in bed “in the attitude of GeaTellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed” (U17.2313–14). Yet we must also keep in mind that this description is an attitude, an appearance, and not necessarily the truth about Molly. Whether consciously or unconsciously, in Ulysses Joyce supports the Spinozian idea that nature is nothing more than the expression of the immanence of being, and there is no nature within nature, no second nature,

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such as culture. What we call culture is just as natural, just as in conformity with the laws that govern being, as a flower or anything else. When Negri concludes that “There is no longer nature, in Spinoza, but only second nature; the world is not nature but production,” he could just as easily say that there is no longer second nature.140 The terms become reversible. At the end of her soliloquy, Molly’s memory transforms her into a flower, and as Derek Attridge has written in yet another challenge to Molly’s image as earth mother, “Flowers traverse the division between nature and culture, not by flowing across it but by demonstrating that permeability is a constitutive feature of it.”141 Every mode of being has power that expresses nothing more than its essence, its immanent cause, the effect of its effects, like the essence of a flower that produces a scent that has its own constitutive or creative function in human culture. Molly’s essence, her perfume if you will, is diffused throughout Ulysses. It is the effect of her power as felt or experienced by almost every character who has come into contact with her. For Joyce, Molly, like the earth, is a kind of foundation. In fact, her relation to Bloom and the other characters in the novel resembles what in set theory would be called the axiom of foundation: “given a set x, there is always an element y of x, such that y has no elements in common with x.” This would be the empty set, but empty only in the sense that it “has no members that can be discerned from within that set.”142 If one takes all the characters of Ulysses as a set—which one could arbitrarily name Ireland but which would consist of all the identities bound to and derived from British imperialism, Irish nationalism, Catholicism, patriarchy, and Judaism, not to mention categories of sexuality, gender, and race—Molly signifies the empty set, not because she is untouched by these categorical divisions but because her final word, her style so to speak, with its circular structure that begins and ends with the word “Yes,” discloses the place where all categories break down. Throughout the novel, despite the glimpses of her from time to time, Molly has been the missing piece of the puzzle without which none of it makes sense. Her word, which is Joyce’s word, circulates without any real center, since she is Catholic without being Catholic, Irish without being Irish, Jewish without being Jewish, a mother without being maternal, a wife without being faithful, a daughter without a father or a mother, a lover (in the case of Boylan) without love, and an artist without the pretense of aesthetic superiority. By comparison with Molly, the novel presents Bloom as an atheist and hence not-Catholic, as a Jew though not in the theological sense, as Irish at least as much as the next man, as a father who mourns the loss

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of a son and the absence of a daughter, as a lover at least in his memories, as a husband despite his wandering and infidelities, and as a son who continually regrets the death of his father. Of course, these are images of Bloom that are contradicted by the truth that Molly expresses through her circulatory discourse, not only her truth but his truth. Her soliloquy discloses the non-null term that constitutes the truth of her disjunctive relation to Bloom and in principle to every Dubliner, male or female, taken one by one. Molly’s truth cannot be discerned within the framework of the hegemonic culture of Ireland under the rule of the British Empire and the Catholic patriarchy. Her truth lies because every attempt to express it also betrays it. If it can be discerned by Bloom, it constitutes something unnamable in his world, something that only appears as the failure of his more sentimental longings for a union with his wife, for the couple who would somehow transform the disjunctive two into the public one, a conventional marriage. Bloom flirts with the idea of a conventional relationship with Molly through fantasy and sentimental recollection, but he expresses his understanding and love of her through his quasi-celibacy. Molly expresses hers through adultery. These acts are not betrayals of truth, though they also do not guarantee that the marriage as a social product will survive. Molly’s Yes is the cover of a powerful negative, a force that punctures the fantasies of conventional existence, including some of her own fantasies. This force is expressed not by any single proposition in her soliloquy but by the force of its process, its style. The fantasy of the One that haunts the masculine, the feminine, patriarchy, empire, nationalism, art as an institution, religion, and so forth, is negated by the not-one, not-whole, not-closed, not-countable expression of her being, which is generic. It really doesn’t matter if Joyce got the woman right, or was able to express the true nature of women—say, by transposing his understanding of his wife Nora onto Molly. The truth of Molly’s voice will flow directly into Finnegans Wake, into the voice of ALP that ends the work and then flows right back into its first page, from which point the very idea of a univocal feminine or masculine essence will be exploded point by point. Every essence is concrete, singular, generic. Molly is universal because she is so singular, and because the singularity of her language, the language Joyce gives her, forces the appearance of something that her language does not express as a matter of simple reference. What appears is the excess that the incompleteness of her discourse, its inconclusive circularity, nonetheless signifies. The truth she expresses as a character in a novel belongs to every existent, every being, in its singularity. Without passing through the

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empty set, the non-null term that forces the unbinding of false universals, there is no true universal, no understanding, no love, and no possibility of freedom in human relationships. Joyce chose to end Ulysses with a powerful image of a thought process coming from a subject who lacks any significant institutional or social authority, certainly not the authority one would associate with a man often described as the greatest writer of the twentieth century. Of course, Molly’s words are Joyce’s words, and that alone produces a kind of authorization. Yet Joyce chose to express the final word of the novel by constructing the thought and language of someone who remains inexistent to the hierarchies of institutionalized and authorized knowledge and understanding. Stephen gets a hearing, however half-hearted it may be, from the archons of Irish culture in the National Library. Even Bloom manages to impress his voice on others, especially in “Cyclops,” and occasionally receives recognitions from different characters, even the view that he is “a cultured allroundman,” with “a touch of the artist” (U10.580–81). Molly exists for the characters of Ulysses in many forms, but mostly she is an object of desire to the men of Dublin. For Bloom, she certainly is that, but she is also something more. Bloom fantasizes about his own intellectual superiority to Molly, but he also recognizes something in her that is more than he is. In “Ithaca,” after he and Stephen exit the house into the garden, they see a “visible luminous sign” that attracts both their gazes, the paraffin night lamp in the Blooms’ bedroom. Bloom feels the need to “elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person,” with “indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued affection and admiration: with description: with impediment: with suggestion” (U17.1171, 1177–81). At this point, Molly could be asleep or awake, since later she refers to her sleep being spoiled and lowers the lamp so that she can get up early, though her sleep could have been spoiled when Bloom entered the room (U18.1542–43, 1547–48). One could interpret the reference to her mystery as yet another mystification and idealization of the woman, but it seems to me, based on everything we read in this novel, that the truth is more pragmatic. Bloom’s language is direct and indirect, his emotions subdued, and his speech blocked, so that he can only suggest what Molly is to him. One could say the same thing about Joyce’s writing of Molly. The words “luminous visible sign” have been taken as an allusion to Beatrice in Dante’s Purgatorio, the light that sent Virgil to guide Dante through hell.143 But Molly is no transcendent being, and if she is unnamable and unsayable, even for Bloom, it isn’t that he cannot see her with the eyes of his mind. Just as Bloom’s speech stumbles against an impediment in

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trying to express the being of his wife, Molly’s discourse circles around Bloom’s being that she can never directly name, even if she knows “every turn in him” and that she can “always get round him” (U18.1530, 1579–80). The love of these two characters is the non-null term between them, the essence of the other that neither can express except as the unnamable thing that locates the truth about both of them. Thanks to the force of Joyce’s styles, every reader gets a glimpse of this truth, the thing that Joyce’s words cannot express except as what is missed. Against all the scholars who think they have mastered his text—and we academics never tire of reauthorizing ourselves as masters—Joyce expresses his own truth, his love and understanding of the world, not primarily through his avatar, Stephen Dedalus, but through the common language and thought of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Through his construction of these characters and the language of their thought, he demonstrates that truth is not the property of an elite and privileged discourse but can come from anywhere, in any language. Though Leopold and Molly each have their own power, potential, or potentia— though all the characters of Ulysses, even the lackeys of the British Empire, have the power of thought that could discover their truth, a common ground, in the empty set, a foundation of power, that Molly Bloom signifies with her last word— though James Joyce clearly has a gift, a power of language that expresses not only his thought but a thought that derives from transindividual understanding—the difference between any of these human types and Joyce himself or any of the minds who shape and inform his writing is negligible in comparison with the force of the multitude, the generic thought of humanity that is never complete. Ulysses is perhaps the most powerful expression of the democratic nature of being ever produced. It is not primarily a call for democracy, or a critique of its absence. It is the assertion of the truth that democracy is the condition of every form of power and the force that can negate or overrule every institution of power. Its deconstruction of style forces the determinate negation of the hierarchies of hegemonic culture, including literature itself. Joyce’s thought is a form of love, an affirmation of intuitive understanding, but as Badiou notes, love is “a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two.”144 Love is a thought, and it starts from the premise that there is no access to truth without the experience of the other, without a subjective process that is transindividual. Love produces new being through the process of understanding what Blake would call the minute particulars of the world. Among those particulars is the body of the Two, the physical correlate of the thought that we

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could name democracy, or, to use Badiou’s alternate name for love, “minimal communism.”145 Democracy requires the scene of Two as its basic unit, and furthermore, to the extent that love itself seeks a truth about difference that is universally addressed, then the politics of love requires understanding and forgiving not only the loved one but the political enemy. Forgiveness in politics is not retreat from action, but producing a definition of the enemy that can bring about change without murdering truth. At the heart of Ulysses is the ethic of mutual forgiveness that disrupts the order of national, class, and sexual boundaries. Perhaps in rethinking the modernist paradigm, it is time to reconsider the ontological ruptures that continue to haunt literary and cultural productions to this day.

Conclusion

Stupidity consists in wanting to conclude. —Flaubert1 The present work no doubt has become what it describes, a political monster. If this were a study of Spinoza’s influence on literature, at least from romanticism to modernism, then I would need to account for the impact of his thought on any number of writers, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, both Shelleys, Lord Byron, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy—not to mention the continental Europeans, particularly Goethe, Heine, and Flaubert—also not to mention the other modernists. Since this is not primarily a study of influences, I will limit myself to a few observations. The passage of a thought, which incorporates into itself at least the appearance of a thought’s death and resurrection, is a movement and exchange between subjects of a truth process, not between persons. Still, there is no reason why an author cannot be influenced by another author and yet facilitate the passage of a thought and, of those mentioned above, P. B. Shelley and Flaubert certainly deserve a more sustained critique than I can provide here.2 Nonetheless, I will defend my choice of Blake over Shelley, and perhaps the more controversial choice of Hugo over Flaubert, as critical transfer points in the passage of what Derrida has called the “Spinozist idea,” which could be summarized by Flaubert’s comment in the 1868 letter to his niece: “I find materialism and spiritualism both equally impertinent.”3 The “Spinozist idea” derives from a strict understanding of his parallelism. If mind is no longer the transcendent substance of soul or spirit, then it simply becomes another word for thought. If thought and material being—including the materiality of language—are two different expressions of the same thing, then material being cannot determine thought and thought cannot determine

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material being. Both are equally impertinent as ideologies, even though I believe that “materialism” remains a suitable word for the ontology of immanence if the term is understood as operating outside the logic of dualism. Thought is not pure transcendent spirituality, and matter is not a secondary representation in the Platonic sense. Yet thought exceeds any particular material form or expression precisely to the extent that there are truths in Badiou’s sense. Thought as a truth process always corresponds with expressions in language and human action, but no particular formulation in language or specific human act exhausts the thought process itself, which is necessarily infinite. Blake’s elaboration of the Spinozian idea in his long poems, particularly his understanding of his own participation in the transindividual thought that he associates with the name Milton, is more direct than Shelley’s and his concept of democracy as an ontological condition more radical. Shelley may have been committed to social equality, but in his “Essay on Christianity,” he wrote that “the regulations of precedent and prescription” should not be abolished until the “universal benevolence” of the empowered makes them unnecessary.4 Perhaps because Blake had less formal education and experienced society’s misrecognition of his own creative power more dramatically than Shelley did, he is not only, without knowing it, more faithful to Spinoza’s concept of the multitude, but actually expands that concept through his criticism of Milton’s patriarchal vision that creates gender and other social hierarchies and fails to recognize the singularity or holiness of each minute particular. Flaubert laid the foundation for modernist fiction through his implicit discovery of the subtractive force that can be achieved through the accumulation and configuration of details. As Pierre Bourdieu has noted, this has led to the critical perception of disunity in his novels “by virtue of the absence of a clear hierarchy of details and incidents.”5 Though Sartre, as Jacques Rancière summarizes, saw Flaubert’s style as “an aristocratic assault against the democratic nature of prose language,” critics in his own time saw his purity of style and indifference to “high and low subject matters” as expressions of democracy.6 As Bourdieu seems to imply, the aesthetic gaze of Flaubert’s art is a gaze without categories, so that even in addressing the bourgeois universe, he only affirms “its irreducibility.”7 Though Hugo may be far less the impersonal artist that Flaubert was, he also confused high and low both as the object and the means of representation. Fordham has recently traced the influence of Hugo on Joyce and has seen a significant relation between their styles, if only in the form of Joycean parody.8 Les Misérables, which is a work like no other in Hugo’s canon, accomplished something that anticipated

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Joyce, the irreducibility not only of the social classes but also of the singular beings who constitute the multitude through their unbinding from the authority of class. In expressing this thought, he also disclosed as its necessary correlate the democracy of styles. Flaubert claimed that style is a way of seeing things (hence anticipating the visual ontologies of the twentieth century), but Joyce showed, after Hugo, that style could be transformed into a force that subtracts itself, leaving us with what Shelley might have named the imageless truth.9 The modernists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and even D. H. Lawrence assert the force of democratic imagination and the savage ontology that conditions it even against the grain of their own aristocratic fantasies of intellectual hierarchy. After all, even Joyce, more as a person than as the subject of a truth process, needed some form of social recognition and frequently imagined himself as an unrecognized genius at war with the rabble incapable of understanding his art. Even Spinoza, as I noted in Chapter 1, distrusted the people when they ceased to be the cooperating individuals of the multitude and coalesced into the deluded unity of a mob. Proust may seem to have written, on a scale even greater than Joyce’s in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the ultimate expression of egocentric narcissism; but if we can apply to In Search of Lost Time almost the reverse of the logic that Wayne Booth applied to Portrait long ago, the irony of Proust’s massive text, in which it is almost impossible to distinguish the author from the narrator, displaces any naïve understanding of the consciousness at the center of the novel.10 Booth spoke of ironic distance in Portrait, but Proust sometimes annihilates distance and at other times ironically insists on a distance that is nothing less than the author’s lie, as when he claims that, with the exception of Françoise’s millionaire cousins, every incident and all the characters in the novel are completely fictitious.11 One might want to agree with Maurice Blanchot that “Proust has become inaccessible,” or, as Colleen Lamos has effectively argued, he presupposes “the impossibility of penetrative knowledge” and the general “unknowability of the other.”12 Still, in light of the arguments I have made in this study, there is another way of looking at it. Aside from Marcel, no other character takes up as much space in Search as Albertine, though for the most part we see her only through the screen of Marcel’s jealousy and what I would call his epistemological madness. Most critics, with reasonable justification, take Marcel’s repeated word for it that he never ultimately knew the truth about Albertine, that he failed, as he says himself, to make “a greater effort to know Albertine in herself.”13 I would argue that, on the contrary, Marcel, through the subtractive force of his own obsession,

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confronts the truth about Albertine but betrays that truth in the sense that he cannot surrender to it. Was Albertine a homosexual who pursued other young girls? Did she actually love Marcel? Was she a pathological liar? The specific answers to these questions, however one arrives at them through whatever means of interpretation, which Proust invites us to do and thus captures us in the web of Marcel’s interpretive madness, do not convey the truth or the essence of Albertine. The process of Marcel’s investigations and rationalizations do convey that essence through its subtractive force, which produces what Deleuze once called a “superior viewpoint,” though he did not mean that Marcel’s personal viewpoint is superior but rather that a viewpoint emerges from his obsessions that “transcends the individual no less than the essence transcends the mood, the state of the soul.”14 This transcendence, of course, is transcendence within immanence, or simply the determinate negation of the categories that govern Marcel’s and, to some degree, our perception. In effect, under Marcel’s gaze and through the power of his thought, Albertine becomes a generic set, the empty set, a being without categories or for whom all categories have failed, which is why to Marcel she becomes “many Albertines in one person,” existing on “so many planes”—“a many-headed goddess.”15 Her sexuality, from this perspective, is singular or incommensurable, and for that reason, beyond good and evil. Lamos insightfully concludes that homosexuality is “coextensive with a discursive crisis in modern literature” for the following reason: “As a negation of the natural order, same-sex desire is a concealed nothingness, a deprivation or privative mode of existence.”16 The discursive crisis means that modern literature never stops saying in one way what it cannot say in another. However, the unsayable or inexistent of Marcel’s world contains the ontological power to transform that world if its truth is forced. Tragically or pathetically, depending on the viewpoint that constitutes the subject who reads Proust, Marcel fails to seize and commit himself to this truth and all the consequences that might follow from it. In his repeated references to Albertine’s sexuality—along with the sexualities of Mlle Vinteuil, M. de Charlus, Robert de Saint-Loup, Charles Morel, and others—as a vice or a perversion, he betrays the truth of that singularity by imposing moral categories that violate his own understanding of at least Albertine and Charlus. Still, the author may redeem that truth through his intricate irony, which could be said to express the unconscious of the character. Redemption in this context does not mean resolution but disclosure. In Proust’s novel, Marcel the character never gets the last word because the author who resides within him repeatedly forces the appearance of a contradiction that

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expresses truth. At the simplest narrative level, who can take seriously Marcel’s repeated claims that, after the death of Albertine, he has stopped loving her when his mind, his thought, can never stop coming back to her as she comes to embody the return of the repressed in the final two volumes of the novel? At the same time, his homophobic obsession with her takes on a different value after the apparent authorial intrusions into his thought. For example, in a remarkable passage, Marcel recognizes, from his experience of the vicissitudes of every kind of love, the extent to which “matter is indifferent and anything can be put into it by thought.” This truth (verité) applies particularly to the phenomenon of inversion, “so badly understood and so pointlessly blamed.”17 There are numerous passages in Proust that suggest his participation in the Spinozian idea, the radical parallelism of thought and matter, but in this passage such a thought leads to a radical understanding of his own fiction: “The writer must not be offended that the invert gives to his heroines a masculine face.”18 Though the narrator/author continues by relating this insight to a theory of the reader who reads him- or herself into the literary work, one cannot ignore the implications of this statement for Proust’s own novel.19 Earlier he had already noted that Albertine’s “vice” contributed to “the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unqualified comradeship as with a man.”20 At points such as this one, the distinction between author and narrator collapses, as the author virtually articulates his own sexual being, Proust’s well-known homosexuality, through the contradictions in the narrator’s perspective. Elsewhere, the author has the narrator contradict hundreds of pages of moral obsession when he asserts his ethical indifference to sexual preferences and finds it “only too natural and human” that individuals seek their pleasure where they can find it.21 This is a Spinozian perspective. Proust’s concept of impression as a “criterion of truth” corresponds with Spinoza’s concept of intuitive understanding, which is knowledge beyond categories, something that can only be expressed through a language that subtracts itself insofar as it necessarily misses the thing it aims to capture.22 Albertine is the very embodiment of this thing in Marcel’s world. She is the political monster that resides in Proust’s own being, because, like her, he does not belong “to ordinary humankind, but to an alien race which moves among it, hides itself among it and never merges with it.”23 The monster is not simply homosexuality, but the inexistent being that Proust’s novel forces into appearance precisely through the expression of Marcel’s contradictions. It is the place beyond—through the displacement of—all social classes and categories. Albertine signifies Marcel’s class contradiction, the tension between

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his passionate commitment to class consciousness with his near-worship of aristocracy and his awareness of the illusion of any class essence. As he finally concludes, “I had seen enough of fashionable society to know that it is there that one finds real illiteracy and not, let us say, among electricians.”24 Albertine, by contrast with Marcel’s intellectual and sexual pretensions, expresses the incommensurable essence of thought and desire, another expression of Spinoza’s concept of equality. The possibility of Spinoza’s direct influence on Woolf through multiple channels, including the philosophical work of her father, has been critically established, though there is no way to determine the precise degree of her knowledge.25 She mentions Spinoza’s name in several of her writings, including Jacob’s Room,26 but while there are echoes of Spinozian ideas in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and other novels, The Waves may be the purest expression of Spinozian thought in modernist literature. The purest expression is not necessarily the most forceful one, however. In this novel, Woolf was inspired by the volumes of Proust she had read, possibly only the first four volumes by the time she wrote The Waves, while she regarded Ulysses as “illiterate, underbred,” “the book of a self taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistical, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.”27 If Woolf did not complete the last three volumes of Proust’s novel before The Waves, she would have missed some of the darker, possibly nauseating dimensions of Marcel’s personality and Proust’s most brutal irony. Still, in The Waves, she explores the force of transindividual subjectivity that would have been implicit throughout Search, though Proust formulates the perspective most explicitly in the last volume when, for example, Marcel notes that “the raw material of my experience, which would also be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann.” Proust relates this experience to the fact that Swann inspired him to go to Balbec where he met Albertine, but the experience is deeper than that since the “Swann in Love” sequence from the first volume anticipates and to some extent shapes Marcel’s experience of and relation to Albertine in the later volumes.28 In The Waves, almost from the beginning of this poetic novel, Bernard is the voice of the transindividual subject as he notes that the six primary characters “melt into each other with phrases.”29 The characters undergo a process of differentiation through social integration into what Louis sees as “the chained beast,” Jinny “a great society of bodies,” and Rhoda “the emerging monster.”30 Neville tries to flee any relation to others by positing a superior intellectual order that preserves his integrity

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and the secret of his homosexuality, while Susan submerges herself in raw physical nature that ironically finds its social reflection in private property. I have already written elsewhere about the contradiction in Woolf ’s novel between a nostalgia for imperialist order that centers on the voiceless character of Percival and the critique of the imperialist system, which would include the class system that these six characters express through their identification with Percival.31 With the latter’s death, the center is vacated, so that the characters themselves become part of a generic set without a strictly governing category or binding identity. Toward the end of the novel, as Bernard speaks for all the others from whom he cannot distinguish himself, he recognizes their failure to become “the complete human being,”32 but this incompleteness is precisely what transforms this collection of characters from the image of a binding class formation into the inexistent potential being of the multitude. In the final analysis, Bernard, who can no longer even determine his own gender,33 becomes the voice of the multitude, which is also the voice of nature as manifested throughout the novel in the poetic interludes. Through these interludes and the novel they enframe, Woolf has created a Godless world, “the world seen without a self,” as Bernard phrases it, which is simply a world without any point of transcendence.34 The nature in the interludes is the immanent cause of the characters who, by the end of the novel, can no longer claim themselves to be distinct from nature, or, in Spinozian terms, to be anything but a combination of the motion and rest, the speed and slowness, of the waves, both symbolic and real, that constitute the formation of individual bodies. Whatever the differences between these characters according to the intellectual hierarchies that Neville (and Woolf herself, in some instances) may want to sustain, at the end there emerges an equality that applies not only to, say, Rhoda and Neville, but to all those others outside the novel who have been constituted and excluded by the British imperial system. There is no order in nature—given the transindividual force of thought—that can justify the exclusion of the others constituted by the British Empire—or of anyone. Without Percival as the collective fantasy of a binding identity that includes some and excludes others, Bernard finally gives way to his “impossible desires to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding.”35 Such an embrace involves Spinoza’s intuitive understanding of the essence of each particular being, which the novel teaches us to recognize through its strange mixture of the general or abstract and the concrete. To recognize the truth about any one human being in their singularity is to recognize the truth of transindividual

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singularity itself, the empty set or formal impasse of being without categories through which newness enters the world. Lawrence is another author for whom Woolf had limited tolerance but who was, more than Joyce, the “self taught working man,” at least with respect to origins. Though he may have attended a teaching university, he was further away from Oxbridge than either Woolf or Joyce in terms of what Bourdieu would call his social trajectory and inherited cultural capital.36 Elsewhere, I have written about Lawrence’s concept of democracy, which has to be disentangled from his sometimes proto-fascist ideas about social leadership.37 In Women in Love, Rupert Birkin defines power in Spinozian, rather than Nietzschean, terms as simply the ability to do things, or potentia.38 For Lawrence, in his essay “Democracy,” people are not equal in terms of specific abilities, but in terms of their singularity: “Where each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made. One man is neither equal nor unequal to another man.”39 In Women in Love, the production of the incommensurable is the necessary effect of love, which, as a form of understanding, produces a balance of power through the recognition of the singularity or essence of the particular beings. Hence Birkin expresses his view of the relationship to Ursula as the image of “two single beings, constellated like two stars.”40 Transindividual thought could be understood as the constellation of different ideas and subjective tendencies in a truth process. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence produced a figure who could be called l’homme moyen corporel if not sexuel—in fact, he produced two figures, a man and a woman, as Joyce also did with Bloom and Molly. Connie Chatterley, given her aristocratic identity and the limited privileges that go with it for a woman of her time, may seem to be an odd example of the common human being, but to the extent that she discovers herself, through physical love, as a form of naked existence—or, more properly to her world, naked inexistence—she becomes the expression of something common and universal. Lawrence clearly struggled with the creation of Oliver Mellors and his precursor Oliver Parkin. In the first version of the novel, Parkin is presented as a God-man and a communist, and there is a strong suggestion that Connie might be inclined to follow him in that political direction.41 In the second version, the vision of his body convinces Connie that there is “God on earth; or gods,” though she also insists that “He did not own his own body.”42 Here, and in many other locations in these novels, Lawrence strongly implies that the amorous relation, as a generic set, has the power to destroy the categories that govern our perception of the human body,

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including the subjective category of self-ownership. At one point in the second Lady Chatterley, in Lawrence’s free indirect discourse, Connie thinks that Parkin’s body “was not even physical. It was like the hyacinths, a thing of bloom, the love-body.”43 This version of the Spinozian idea reaches a culmination near the end of the final version of the novel when Mellors concludes that Pan is “the only god for the masses, forever.”44 In other words, Mellors, like Bloom, has the identity of the goat, the identity of non-identity or generic being. Though Lawrence’s vision in Lady Chatterley is marred by phallocentrism as well as the anti-Semitism and racism of his nation and class, he rarely presents these opinions as simple facts but as perspectives that dialectically interact even to the point of subverting each other. Early in the final version of the novel, Connie, after having sex with Mellors, privately laughs at the concept of divine love while she looks at “the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis,” which makes her think that in creating the male God had “a sinister sense of humor.”45 What matters in Lady Chatterley is the way the passionate love relation, even in this heterosexual mode, has a subtractive force, so that point by point the social identity of the two lovers is gradually stripped away until something emerges that could be called their generic being, which remains inexistent and unthinkable either to the class of Clifford Chatterley or to the class of the coal miners. Initially, Mellors appears to Connie as a being who subverts the categories of her class perspective, someone both common and uncommon.46 By the end of the novel, even the gender categories have become unstable as Mellors’s vulnerability and the risk he takes in connecting himself with Connie’s wealth becomes apparent. At one point, he comments that other people “used to say I had too much of the woman in me.”47 Mellors refuses this category, but the reference resonates with the argument of Deleuze and Félix Guattari that even seemingly virile and phallocratic writers like Lawrence and Henry Miller “become-women” in their novels.48 To the extent that woman becomes the name of the inexistent, the not-one that exposes the fictionality of the One, then it is not surprising that male characters like Valjean, Bloom, Marcel, Bernard, and Mellors enter such a self-deconstructing category through an art that forces the existence of the inexistent. In this age of disability studies, readers are uncomfortable with Clifford’s symbolic paralysis, as Connie thinks of it in the first version of the novel, though this condition actually incorporates Clifford into the category of the universal, the not-one of the generic set that absorbs all the characters in the novel.49 For Lawrence, naked bodies and naked sex are symbolic forces that produce a thought that remains inseparable from

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the democratic desire for social equality—or social indifference to differences. Lawrence’s excess of language, as Erica Jong and others have thought of it, suggests the truth of what it fails to express, the “immense incomplete” that love addresses beyond the sexual relation that does not exist. Modernism, which has been defined in many different and sometimes contradictory ways, is perhaps best understood as the point of culmination in the ontological revolution that begins with Spinoza, at least as its most articulate and influential expression. It is surely no accident that the broader concept of modernity as a social and cultural “drift” that coincides with and responds to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond more or less finds its parallel in an ontological drift, no matter how deeply buried it may have been in the cultural unconscious of the different periods. The radical idea of democracy, to which this ontology gives ground, has died and been resurrected repeatedly during this span of time through local revolutions and global movements that have been punctuated by betrayals, reactions, and negations. Many simulacrums have been constructed along the way, sometimes obscuring the names of truth processes, so that conquest and mass murder have been committed not only in the name of religion but also in the name of democracy and communism. Yet through these reversals, the substance of the democratic truth process continues to produce political subjects, artistic subjects, and even, I would argue, amorous subjects, who resurrect the principle itself as the expression of their own power of collaboration and cooperation. Political subjects are always with us even in those social figures with whom we may be disappointed because they fail to achieve on their own what many of us project onto them as the goal of the process. As Flaubert recognized, stupidity is wanting to conclude, wanting an immediate end to a process that has no end. It also means imagining that any particular individual can sustain a truth process and the effects it produces in any particular world or historical situation without the support and active involvement of the multitude. Perhaps the greatest betrayal of democracy lies in the fantasy of representation when it becomes the premise of disengagement and the transfer of responsibility to someone else. An individual can be the focal point of a political movement, but the power of the movement always resides in the multitude and the ongoing negotiation and interaction between different subjective tendencies. Artistic subjects, as I intend to argue in subsequent volumes, continue to express democratic truths not only consciously and programmatically, but also unconsciously through their participation in the aesthetic revolutions of the

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twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Henry Miller wanted “to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off,” and in the same paragraph he concluded that “We have no need for genius—genius is dead.”50 Most of us would still use the word “genius” for certain kinds of aesthetic events, but no one can seriously fail to recognize that the bomb went off and destroyed the aesthetic hierarchies that had dominated our understanding of art for centuries. Joyce’s deconstruction of styles and of language itself in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake found its contemporary resonance in the birth of cinema and the visual and aural cultures that directly and indirectly were its consequence. Writers as different as Nathaniel West, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, and David Mitchell have responded to the intellectual force of visual ontology, either by introjecting visual techniques and styles into their works or by anticipating cinematic or other visual translations of their works. Though these are significant figures, they are not isolated events. By visual ontology, I refer to the ontological consequences of the movement, initiated by photography and cinema, that displaces the hegemony of the written word and foregrounds the truth that autonomous thought can be expressed through visual images in various combinations with other aural and verbal expressions. This hegemony of the visual and the emergence of mass culture as the vehicle of its expression detaches language from its association with transcendent meaning and values and forces the knowledge that thought is immanent to the visual and the visual is immanent to the thought process. In the movies, even our representations of God require visual construction and special effects so that transcendence itself turns out to be implicated in the realm of extension, of concrete images—a kind of special effect of thought that never escapes the immanence of being. Beyond the present study, the next phase of my project will focus on parallel readings of two significant figures in the transition from modernism to postmodernism, from the despiritualization of the written word to the intellectual autonomy of the visual image. These figures are Samuel Beckett and Alfred Hitchcock. Beckett was familiar with Spinoza, as well as with many other Enlightenment philosophers, while it is unlikely that Hitchcock would have had direct knowledge of Spinoza’s thought.51 Beckett went in the opposite direction from Joyce and became the supreme minimalist in literature, but though he produced something approaching “pure” literature, he was deeply influenced by the silent cinema of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. In the 1960s, he made a short film with Keaton.52 Hitchcock attempted to produce a “pure” cinema, but Deleuze argued that Hitchcock also invented

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what Deleuze variously calls the mental image, the relation image, or simply the thinking image.53 For Beckett, language becomes self-referential and its meaning immanent to its process. For Hitchcock, the image becomes the autonomous signifier that is not strictly bound to the object of representation but rather enters into relation with other images in order to convey a concrete thought. With Beckett in mind, Adorno noted “the tendency of modern art to make its own categories thematic through self-reflection.”54 This is as true of Hitchcock as it is of Beckett, and the work of both artists expands on the Spinozian idea that would make the reductive ideologies of materialism or spiritualism equally unsustainable. The last phase of this project will be an investigation of visual culture and its implicit ontology in both visual and non-visual medias. Starting in the 1930s with movies like King Kong, the birth of superhero graphic fictions, the consolidation of film and popular literary genres, and the stance of so-called “autonomous” literature toward these new aesthetic forms, I will explore the aesthetic, cultural, and political consequences of the ontology of immanence as an expanding force in our cultural practices—one that encounters disavowal in our conscious political rhetoric that leads to increasing social and political polarization while mass culture itself, contrary to what Adorno assumed, becomes the scene of experimentation in alternative systems of thought and ontological understanding. The crisis of democracy, which may be as much the birth of the demand for real democracy as the scene of the failure of an earlier conception of representative democracy, erupts in the 1930s and never entirely disappears after that, except in the sense that it goes underground through its diffusion into film, television, music, and other popular medias, as well as into literary and popular fictions. Passing through events in popular culture like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta and the Batman series of both Frank Miller and Grant Morrison, through the movies that influenced or were influenced by these works, through postmodern novels that incorporate popular culture into seemingly “autonomous” forms such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day, and concluding in the present with a novel like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the distinctly different film version of Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer—this history represents the struggle of the political monster to be born as the consciousness of a common culture that rejects every kind of social, political, and aesthetic hierarchy. Since love is a thought, then every act of thinking must share something with the process of love. Negri writes, interpreting Spinoza, that love is “the

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father of all passions and is in turn knowledge.” Indeed, “love is reason,” and “reflection … is always amorous.”55 He further adds that “love is the ontological power that constructs being.”56 In this work and those to come, the driving force of what struggles to be thought is love. This word, as I understand it, does not refer only to the affective relation to others, but to the force of thought that constitutes itself through interaction with others, with their thought. Without others, there is no thought or truth because thought is necessarily shared and is never strictly private property. What is called thought either expresses a truth, which cannot be owned, or it is simply the repetition of the opinions, common sense, and public discourses that govern a particular situation in a world. Ironically, a thought that can be owned constitutes nothing new and merely reflects the categorical identities of people and things. Intellectual property is the appropriation of something common and its conversion into an abstraction or a commodity. The thought that expresses truth constitutes a new form of subjectivity that has an almost self-annihilating effect on every individual who participates in the process because the self is a social mask without essence. The love that constitutes thought does not erase difference but negotiates with difference to produce an understanding of the essence of the particular that unbinds individuals from categorical identities. Thought is shared because it is universally addressed without erasing the essence or singularity of any particular being. On the contrary, thought that expresses truth configures singularities into a new constellation that constitutes the being of a new and unforeseen singularity, something particular and universal. Each essence or singularity is a monad of power. This configuration of essences or powers that cannot be measured has a name—but a name without categorical force because it cannot govern its minute particulars from a position of transcendence. This name is democracy, and the essence of democracy is love.

Notes Chapter 1 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 50–51. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 332. See his Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 139. Alain Badiou, “On the Truth-Process: An Open Lecture,” The European Graduate School, Aug. 2002, Web, Oct. 3, 2010. Badiou, Being and Event, 525. Badiou, Ethics, 72–87. Badiou, “On the Truth-Process.” Ibid. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 73–74. Badiou, Ethics, 72. Badiou, “On the Truth-Process.” Ibid. See Patrick McGee, Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 157. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 183. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Lisa Randall and Michael Turner, “Amidst Rocky Peaks, Physicists Ponder The Universe,” interview by Ira Flatow, Science Friday, Natl. Public Radio, Aug. 10, 2012, Web, Aug. 23, 2012. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xix. Ibid., 60. Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan M. Ruddick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 57, 203.

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19 Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 24. 20 Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 149, 157. 21 Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 203. 22 Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s “Ethics”: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–24. 23 On this distinction, see “Translator’s Foreword: The Anatomy of Power,” in Negri, Savage Anomaly, xi–xvi. 24 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117–21. 25 Negri, Savage Anomaly, 110. 26 Ibid., 197. 27 Warren Montag, Body, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 75, 78. 28 Hobbes, Leviathan, 117–18, 121–29. 29 Ibid., 114. On the fictionality of the state in Hobbes’s thought, see Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999): 1–29; and David Runciman, “What Kind of Person Is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8.2 (2000): 268–78. 30 Montag, Body, Masses, Power, 52–53; Hobbes, Leviathan, 111–15. 31 Negri, Savage Anomaly, 110. 32 Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 46; Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 305–6. 33 Antonio Negri, Subversive Spinoza: (Un)contemporary Variations, ed. Timothy S. Murphy, trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Michael Hardt, Ted Stolze, and Charles T. Wolfe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 43. 34 Badiou, “On the Truth-Process”; Logics of Worlds, 453. 35 For a detailed explanation of the term “common notions,” see Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 54–58. 36 Ibid., 58. 37 Ibid., 56. 38 Spinoza, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and Metaphysical Thoughts, 152. 39 Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 176. 40 Étienne Balibar, “Spinoza: from Individuality to Transindividuality” (a lecture delivered in Rijnsburg on May 15, 1993), CIEPFC, Centre International d’Étude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine, July 22, 2011, Web, Sept. 20, 2012. 41 Deleuze, Spinoza, 48.

Notes 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65

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Balibar, “Spinoza.” Montag, Body, Masses, Power, 42. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 106. Montag, Body, Masses, Power, 78. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 106. Montag, Body, Masses, Power, 79–82. See Pierre-François Moreau, Spinoza: l’expérience et l’éternité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 383, 537–38. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin with New Left Review, 1993), 706. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 364. For a different elaboration of this concept, see Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). On the meaning of ingenium, see Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 29, 37. Ibid., 83. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 149–50. Ibid., 188. Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 88. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 110, 113. Ibid., 68, 219. Ibid., 201. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976), 57. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 142, 259. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 155. Kordela calls this secular causality—or, after Saussure, differential causality— because it “is itself the effect of its own effects and does not exist but in its own effects.” See A. Kiarina Kordela, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2007), 1, 31. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 129. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 225. Cited by Alexander Garcia Düttmann, “A Matter of Life and Death,” in Spinoza Now, ed. Dimitris Vardoulakis (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 355. Montag, Body, Masses, Power, 81.

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67 Alexandre Matheron, “Spinoza and Sexuality,” trans. Simon Duffy and Paul Patteon, in Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza, ed. Moira Gatens (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 94, 103, 104–5. 68 Ibid., 104. 69 Negri, Time for Revolution, 177. 70 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 279. 71 Ibid., 286–87. 72 Negri, Time for Revolution, 176. 73 Ibid., 169. 74 Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” ll.1–4: 490. 75 Negri, Time for Revolution, 184. 76 Ibid., 177. 77 Badiou, Being and Event, 112–20. See his Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2006), 73–87. 78 Badiou, Theoretical Writings, 28. 79 Spinoza, Principles, 186–87. 80 Spinoza, “Letter 50, To the most worthy and judicious Jarig Jelles,” dated June 1674: 892. 81 Sam Gillespie, “Placing the Void: Badiou on Spinoza,” Angelaki 6.3 (2001): 65. 82 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 330–32. 83 Badiou, Ethics, 84–85. 84 Hobbes, Leviathan, 54–55. 85 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 35. 86 Negri, Savage Anomaly, 225. 87 Nadler, Spinoza, 116–54, 346. 88 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 196–200. 89 For Spinoza’s theory of historical interpretation as it is applied to Biblical scriptures, see TPT 7, 456–71; TPT2, 97–117. 90 Kordela, $urplus, 6. 91 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale; Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 45. 92 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, book 7 of The Seminar, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 12.

Notes 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105 106 107

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Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 29–30. Kordela, $urplus, 76. Negri, Time for Revolution, 185. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 191. Alain Badiou, “Badiou on Negri and the Uniqueness of the Event,” interview, Kasama, posted by Rosa Harris, June 18, 2008, Web, Oct. 11, 2012. Negri, Time for Revolution, 185–86. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 380. Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York and London: Norton, 2012), 78; Gar Alperovit and Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back (New York: New Press, 2009), 97. Negri, Time for Revolution, 175. Badiou, Being and Event, 406. Ibid., 209–11; Ethics, lvi–lvii. Badiou, Being and Event, 203. Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 612–13. Negri, Time for Revolution, 243; “The Political Monster,” In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, by Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 199. Negri, “Political Monster,” 205.

Chapter 2 1 2

3 4

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2 vols., ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), vol. 1, 157–60. Wayne I. Boucher, Spinoza in English: A Bibliography from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes, 2002), 4–8, 35; Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 604–5. G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 229–30. G. E. Bentley, Jr., ed., Blake Records, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 422.

244 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

Notes Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003); Marjorie Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” Studies in Romanticism 46.4 (2007): 367–408. Coleridge may have read Spinoza as early as 1797 and was “sunk in Spinoza” in September 1799. In 1812, Henry Crabb Robinson lent Coleridge his copy of Spinoza’s works in Latin, which he partially annotated. See Ronald C. Wendling, Coleridge’s Progress to Christianity: Experience and Authority in Religious Faith (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995), 114; and Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, 3 vols., ed. Thomas Sadler (London: Macmillan,1869), vol. 1, 399–401. Hume, Human Nature, vol. 1, 157. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 539. Bentley, Blake Records, 283. Ibid., 340. Blake, “A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures” and “[First Prospectus]: Blake’s Chaucer. The Canterbury Pilgrims,” 529–51, 567–68. Bentley, Blake Records, 312–13, 336–38, 393–95. Ibid., 437. See also 296, 310, 320, 420, 480, 485, 693, 695. Ibid., 548. Ibid., 310. Antonio Negri, “The Political Monster,” In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, by Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 193. Ibid., 195. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn, trans. Susan Dunn and Lester Crocker (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 64–65. Ibid., 178. Susan Dunn, “Introduction: Rousseau’s Political Triptych,” in Rousseau, Social Contract, 6. Ibid., 10. Rousseau, Social Contract, 172. John H. Jones, Blake on Language, Power, and Self-Annihilation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For a sketch of Badiou’s concept of the transcendental, so my Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 209), 163–65.

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25 Laura Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 13. The classical studies of Blake’s relation to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism are George Mills Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), and Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 26 Quinney, William Blake, 22. 27 Ibid., 98–99. 28 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145. 29 Quinney, William Blake, 56. 30 E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 91 and passim; Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Robert Rix, William Blake and the Culture of Radical Christianity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 31 Thompson, Witness, 71; Raine, Blake and Tradition, vol. 1: 4; Jakob Böhme, “The Second Apologie to Balthazar Tylcken,” in The Remainder of the Books written by Jacob Behme, ed. and trans. John Sparrow (London: M. S[immons] for Giles Calvert, 1662), 27, Internet Archive, Web, Nov. 28, 2012. 32 Böhme, Second Apologie, 27. 33 Kevin Fischer, Converse in the Spirit: William Blake, Jacob Boehme, and the Creative Spirit (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 85. 34 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 3rd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 179–80; Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany : SUNY Press, 1991), 148–49. 35 Jakob Böhme, “The Mysterium Magnum,” in The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher, vol. 3, ed. William Law (London: M. Richardson, 1764), 11, Internet Archive, Web, Nov. 28, 2012. 36 Quoted, John W. Cooper, Panentheism—The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 58–59. 37 Raine, Blake and Tradition, vol. 1: 369. 38 Martin K. Nurmi, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1957; New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1972), 23; Thompson, Witness, 45–46. 39 Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 236–37. 40 Dominic J. O’Meara, “The Hierarchical Ordering of Reality in Plotinus,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66–81; Plotinus, Enneads, 7 vols., trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–1988), vol. 5, 63. If Blake read the quoted passage from Plotinus, it would have been in Thomas Taylor’s translation (first published in 1816), which reads: “Intellect, however, is all these,

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41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

Notes and yet it is not. It is, indeed, because they are from it; and again, it is not, because abiding in itself, it gave them to exist.” See Selected Works of Plotinus, trans. Thomas Taylor, ed. George R. S. Mead (London: George Bell and Sons, 1895), 255. Blake may have attended Taylor’s lectures on Plato at the home of his friend John Flaxman the sculptor in 1783 and may have had other contacts with Taylor in the 1780s. See Bentley, Stranger, 82; Blake Records, 500. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 17–18; Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 16–19. Blake, “There Is No Natural Religion,” 2. Blake, “All Religions Are One,” 1. See M32.19: 132; J5.20, 58–59: 147–48; 70.19–21: 224. Blake, “[The Laocoön],” 273. I accept the date of this engraving as 1826–1827. For two positions on the date, see G. E. Bentley, Jr., and Martin K. Nurmi, A Blake Bibliography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964), 34; Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, eds., Milton, a Poem, and the Final Illuminated Works: The Ghost of Abel, On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil, Laocoön, with introductions and notes (Princeton: William Blake Trust Princeton University Press, 1993), 229, 242–43. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 15. Ibid., 18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (1953; Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 31e–32e. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 326n. Deleuze, Expressionism, 311. Ibid., 313. For Spinoza’s view, see E2.18S: 258; C 465–66. George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, vol. 1, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948), 61, 78, 89. Blake, “[A Vision of the Last Judgment],” 565. Ibid. Quinney, William Blake, 57. See also Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s “Vala” or “The Four Zoas” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 51. Donald D. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 22–27. Ault’s view of Newton’s Neoplatonism and his possible interest in Jakob Böhme is relevant to this context. See 9–13. Blake, “Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by R. Watson,” 614. Hazard Adams, Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 75.

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59 Blake, “[The Letters],” 702. 60 Negri, Savage Anomaly, 97. 61 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, revised ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 55–56. 62 Blake, “Annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man,” 600. Passages deleted by Blake have been removed. 63 Ault, Visionary Physics, 63–64, 73. 64 Blake, “Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris,” 664. 65 Blake, “Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” 647–48. 66 Mark Bracher, Being Form’d: Thinking through Blake’s “Milton” (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1985), 5. 67 Negri, Savage Anomaly, 140. 68 Jones, Blake on Language, 164–65. 69 David V. Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992), 226. 70 Bloom, “Commentary,” 915. 71 Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1983), 7. 72 Julia M. Wright, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 111–12. 73 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 95, 101, 152. 74 Ibid., 156. 75 John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), bk. 4, ll. 338–39, 523. 76 Jones, Blake on Language, 18, 79. 77 Alain Badiou, “On the Truth-Process: An Open Lecture,” The European Graduate School, Aug. 2002, Web, Oct. 3, 2010. 78 Ibid., 12–13; see John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 405, 408. 79 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 286–94. 80 Ibid., 283. 81 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 41. 82 Bentley, Blake Records, 421–22. 83 Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XXI: Les non-dupes errant, session of Dec. 11, 1973, 37–38, prepared by Nicole Sels, École Lacanienne de Psychanalyse, Web, April 4, 2013. 84 S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, revised ed. (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1988), 321. 85 Ibid., 368.

248 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94

95

96 97 98 99 100 101

102

103 104 105 106 107

Notes Quinney, William Blake, 170–71. Blake, “The Human Abstract,” Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ll. 1–2: 27. Damon, Blake Dictionary, 403; Martin K. Nurmi, William Blake (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1976), 166. Essick and Viscomi, Introduction, Milton, 22. They list all the other published interpretations of the plate, which vary significantly. Robert N. Essick, “Erin, Ireland, and the Emanation in Blake’s Jerusalem,” in Blake, Nation, and Empire, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 201–13, 209–10. Christopher Z. Hobson, The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of Revolution (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 17–18. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 176–79. Frank A. Vaughn, Again to the Life of Eternity: William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poems of Thomas Gray (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1996), 90. R. Watson, An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of letters, Addressed to Thomas Paine … Part the Second (Cork: A. Edwards, 1796), 5, Google Books, Aug. 21, 2006, Web, Jan. 29, 2013. Blake, “Annotations to Watson,” 613. Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 65. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 95. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, second ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 252–52, 259. Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling (London: Reeves and Turner, 1886), 393, 458–59; Peter Lamb and James C. Docherty, Historical Dictionary of Socialism (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006), 264. Northrop Frye, “Notes for a Commentary on Milton,” in Northrup Frye on Milton and Blake, Collected Works of Northrup Frye, vol. 16, ed. Angela Esterhammer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 261. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 78. Bracher, Being Form’d, 53–55. Blake, “A Vision,” 562. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 113, 127. Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17.

Notes 108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128 129

130 131

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John Beer, Blake’s Humanism (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 111. Frye, “Notes,” 246. See Erdman’s note on M32.15 in “Textual Notes,” 808. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Style and Iconography in the Illustrations of Blake’s Milton,” Blake Studies 6 (Fall, 1973): 47–72; Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 140. Essick and Viscomi, Introduction, Milton, 23. Ibid. Stephen C. Behrendt, The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustration of “Milton” (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 23–24. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality, 141. Ibid. Sartre, Critique, 264. Claire Colebrook, Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), xxxii. Ibid., 45. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 160, 342. Ibid., 587 Alexandre Matheron, “Spinoza and Sexuality,” trans. Simon Duffy and Paul Patteon, in Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza, ed. Moira Gatens (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 91, 94. Colebrook, Blake, 94. Wayne Glausser, Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 135. Jacob Bronowski, William Blake and the Age of Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 118, 123. Negri, Savage Anomaly, xix. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 54–62. Blake, “Annotations to Reynolds,” 649. Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 171; Susan Matthews, Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 107–8. Jules Van Lieshout, Within and Without Eternity: The Dynamics of Interaction in William Blake’s Myth and Poetry (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 110N. Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 169.

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

Pierre Macherey, “Spinoza lu par Victor Hugo,” in Spinoza au XIXe siècle: actes des journées d’études, ed. André Tosel, Pierre-François Moreau, and Jean Salem (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007), 258; Émile Saisset, ed., Oeuvres de Spinoza, vol. 1 (Paris: Charpentier, 1842). I have converted Saisset’s page designations in Roman numerals to Arabic numerals in these notes. Macherey, “Spinoza lu,” 260. Saisset, Oeuvres de Spinoza, 96, 109–11. Macherey, “Spinoza lu,” 265–67. Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, 53. Victor Hugo, Post-scriptum de ma vie (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1901), 264–65. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the German Text of Logischphilosophische Abhandlung, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 148. Ibid., 149. Macherey, “Spinoza lu,” 263. Ibid., 266. Spinoza, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and Metaphysical Thoughts, 199; see Short Treatise, 59–60. Blake, “[A Vision of the Last Judgment],” 565–66. Macherey, “Spinoza lu,” 262. Saisset, Oeuvres de Spinoza, 32–33. Edward Behr, The Complete Book of “Les Misérables” (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1989), 191; Margaret Vermette, The Musical World of Boublil and Schönberg: The Creators of “Les Misérables”, “Miss Saigon”, “Martin Guerre” and The Pirate Queen (New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2006), 122. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 148. Blake, “The Human Abstract” and “London,” l. 8, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 26–27. See Spinoza, “Letter 12, To the noble and learned Henry Oldenburg,” dated July 1663: 794. Jean Delabroy, “Cœcum: Préalables à la philosophie de l’histoire dans Les Misérables,” Lire “Les Misérables,” ed. Anne Ubersfeld et Guy Rosa (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1985), 115. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes de J.-J. Rousseau, vol. 2 (Paris: Houssiaux, 1852), 564.

Notes 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36

37

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Delabroy, “Cœcum,” 112. Ibid., 100, 103. Ibid., 102. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 237. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1978), 263. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hulot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 54–55, translation altered; Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 87. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 54. Ibid., 45. Allan Bloom, “Introduction,” Emile or On Education, ed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 4. Delabroy, “Cœcum,” 114. Kathryn M. Grossman, Figuring Transcendence in “Les Misérables” Hugo’s Romantic Sublime (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 124–25, 179. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 119. According to Pierre Bourdieu, the habitus involves socially determined “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” that “generate and organize practices and representations” and can produce outcomes without the conscious understanding or intention of a subject. See The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 110–11. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Part First: Fantine, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1887), 171. This version was originally published in 1862. See Olin H. Moore, “Some Translations of Les Misérables,” Modern Language Notes 74.3 (1959): 240–46. See Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Complete in One Volume, trans. Charles E. Wilbour (New York: Carleton, 1863), vol. 1: Fantine, 117; Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Complete in One Volume, trans. Isobel Florence Hapgood (New York and Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1887), vol. 1: Fantine, 190; Wraxall, trans., Fantine, 301. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 85. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 86–92, 109. Badiou, Ethics, 84–85.

252

Notes

41 Badiou, Saint Paul, 98. 42 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 86. 43 Ibid., 25. 44 Ibid., 86. 45 Ibid., 88. 46 Ibid., 86. 47 Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism & Sexual Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–6. 48 Ibid., 6. 49 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, book 20 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton, 1999), 12. 50 Graham Robb, Victor Hugo (New York and London: Norton, 1999), 265. 51 Ibid., 266. 52 Victor Hugo, Napoleon the Little, 2nd ed. (London: Vizetelly and Company, 1852), 138. 53 Robb, Victor Hugo, 269. 54 Ibid., 275. 55 Victor Hugo, Choses Vues: Souvenirs, Journaux, Cahiers, 1830–1885, ed. Hubert Juin (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2002), 567. See Robb, Victor Hugo, 270. 56 Guy Rosa, “Notice,” Les Misérables, édition critique et génétique, ed. Guy Rosa, Groupe Hugo, Université Paris 7, Web, May 22, 2014. 57 Karl Marx, The Class Struggle in France, 1848–1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 54. 58 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 47. 59 Ibid., 71. 60 Matthew Josephson, Victor Hugo: A Realistic Biography of the Great Romantic (1942; New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2005), 328–29; Hugo, Napoleon, 139. 61 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Part Fifth: Jean Valjean, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1893), 107; Hapgood, trans., Jean Valjean, 65; Wilbour, trans., Jean Valjean, 44. 62 Saisset, Oeuvres de Spinoza, 269. 63 Robb, Victor Hugo, 275. 64 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et De Broise, 1857), 7. 65 Robb, Victor Hugo, 278. See also Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 106–8.

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66 Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, with Nicholas Truong, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 52, 57. 67 Ibid., 71–72. 68 Ibid., 59–60. 69 Ibid., 29. 70 Robb, Victor Hugo, 462, 464. 71 Ibid., 465. 72 Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling (London: Reeves and Turner, 1886), 95, 227. 73 Robb, Victor Hugo, 467, 475, 487, 497, 500, 512–13; Lissagaray, 405–6, 462. 74 Antonio Negri, “The Political Monster,” In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, by Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 198–99. 75 Ibid., 205. 76 Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), 6, 91–92. 77 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 56. 78 Ibid., 59–60. 79 Les Misérables, Raymond Bernard, dir. (Pathé Natan, 1934); Richard Boleslawski, dir. (20th Century Pictures, 1935); Jean-Paul Le Chanois, dir. (Deutsche Film, PAC, Serena, Société Nouvelle Pathé Cinéma, 1958); Glenn Jordan, dir. (Incorporated Television Company, Norman Rosemont Productions, 1978); Bille August, dir. (Mandalay Entertainment, TriStar Pictures, 1998); Josée Dayan, dir. (GMT Productions, TF1, Taurus Film, Mediaset, DD Productions, Sat.1, 2000); Tom Hooper, dir. (Universal Pictures, 2012). 80 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 159.

Chapter 4 1

2 3 4

Patrick McGee, Joyce beyond Marx: History and Desire in “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 113; see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, and Nabokov (New York: Continuum, 2011), 47. Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan M. Ruddick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 156. Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature, 54.

254 5

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23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30

Notes James Joyce, Exiles: A Play in Three Acts, with the author’s notes, introd. Padraic Colum (New York: Viking, 1961), 114; George Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, 2 vols., trans. William Archer (London: William Heinemann, 1898), vol. 2, 124n. James Joyce, The Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 133–34. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 10–11. Ibid., 8. Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 47. Ibid. Ibid., 54–55. Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature, 55. Ibid. Ibid., 57. Ibid. Spinoza, Emendation of Intellect, 5. Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature, 58. Ibid., 59. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 200–1. Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), 31. Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature, 18. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 156, 299, 359, 362; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1984). Joyce, Exiles, 114. Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature, 64–65. Alexandre Matheron, “Spinoza and Sexuality,” trans. Simon Duffy and Paul Patteon, in Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza, ed. Moira Gatens (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 88. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 93. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, book 20 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton, 1999), 7. Ibid., 73. In the same passage, Lacan further comments that “You will notice that I said ‘supplementary.’ If I had said ‘complementary’ what a mess we’d be in! We would fall

Notes

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

255

back into the whole.” In the sexual relation, for both Lacan and Spinoza, 1 + 1 never equals 1, but the 2 of the sexual relation that does not constitute a fusion, a whole. Ibid., 45. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 76, 110. Quoted, Élizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 253. See also Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton, 2006), 516. Matheron, “Spinoza and Sexuality,” 90. Ibid., 101–2. Ibid., 103–4. Ibid., 104. For example, see Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at “Finnegans Wake” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18, 34. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 39. Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature, 69. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 6. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953), 49. Elizabeth S. Anker, “Where Was Moses When the Candle Went Out? Infinity, Prophecy, and Ethics in Spinoza and ‘Ithaca’,” James Joyce Quarterly 44.4 (2007), 662. Ibid., 671. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978), 202. Spinoza, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and Metaphysical Thoughts, Appendix, 205; C 337; O 1, 271. Spinoza, “Letter 12A To Lodewijk Meyer, from B.d.S,” dated July 26, 1663: 792. Spinoza, Principles, Appendix, 200; Letter 12a, 792. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 70, 74–77. Jonathan Israel, “Introduction,” TPT2 xviii. Anker, “Where Was Moses?” 670. Don Gifford, with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, second ed. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1988), 579. Blake, “Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by R. Watson,” 617. Spinoza, Emendation of Intellect, 190; O2: 35. Christopher Norris, Badiou’s “Being and Event”: A Reader’s Guide (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 97. See also 223, 262, 273, 277.

256

Notes

56 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 396. 57 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 545. 58 Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 46, 71. 59 Badiou, Theoretical Writings, 107. 60 Badiou, Being and Event, 24–25. 61 Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, 3 vols. (New York: Garland, 1984), vol. 2, 1168–69. 62 Patrick McGee, Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 131. 63 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hulot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 348. 64 Ellmann, Joyce, ills., XXXVII. 65 Badiou, Theoretical Writings, 107. 66 Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), chs. 9–11. 67 Ibid., 148. 68 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 89–90. 69 Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 124, 165. 70 Ibid., 150. 71 Quoted, ibid., 144. 72 Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 135. 73 Quoted, ibid., 123. 74 Nadler, A Book, 169. 75 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland, trans. Geremy Forman (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 183–84. 76 Moses Mendelssohn, “Remarks Concerning Michaelis’ Response to Dohm (1783),” The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinhare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 48. 77 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfelt, 1991), 204, 244; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 224, 232; McGee, Joyce Beyond Marx, 267–82. 78 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 74–75. 79 Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the “Grundrisse”, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano, ed. Jim Fleming (Brooklyn and London: Autonomedia/Pluto, 1991), 153. 80 Ellmann, James Joyce, 361.

Notes 81 82

83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

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Ezra Pound, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York: New Directions, 1970), 194. Gifford and Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated, 480; Herodotus, The Histories, ed. Carolyn Dewald, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 114. Herodotus, 153; Edwin L. Brown, “The Lycidas of Theocritus’ Idyll 7,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 85 (1981): 65–66. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 75. For detailed analysis of the historiography on this point, see Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. Yael Lotan (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 129–49. Alain Badiou, Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 162–63. Sand, Invention of Israel, 11. Jean Kimball, Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 109. Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56–57; Joyce, Exiles, 124. Joyce, Exiles, 124. Brown, James Joyce, 63. Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism & Sexual Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 2. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 69, 152. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Dianna Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 21. Kahan, Celibacies, 69. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 152. In addition to Utell, referenced below, see Marian Eide, Ethical Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 102. Janine Utell, James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 127. Ibid., 129.

258 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130

Notes Ibid., 139. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 627. Utell, James Joyce, 130. James Joyce, Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 278. On the meaning of “heavenly bodies,” see McGee, Joyce beyond Marx, 111–30. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 62. Emmanual Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 146. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 77. Ibid., 100. Utell, James Joyce, 122. Badiou, Ethics, 22–24. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), 244. Alain Badiou, “What Is Love?” in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 265. Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, with Nicholas Truong, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 87; “What Is Love?” 270. Badiou, “What Is Love?” 266. Badiou, Praise of Love, 17; “What Is Love?” 266. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 85–88. Levinas, Ethics, 68. Badiou, “What Is Love?” 267. Sam Gillespie, “Placing the Void: Badiou on Spinoza,” Angelaki 6.3 (2001): 65. Badiou, Praise of Love, 18–19. Badiou, “What Is Love?” 267. Alain Badiou, “The Scene of Two,” trans. Barbara P. Fulks, Lacanian Ink 21 (2003): 47–48. Badiou, “What Is Love?” 268–69. Badiou, “Scene of Two,” 48. Ibid., 49. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 391; Lydia Davis translation (New York: Viking, 2010), 281. Flaubert’s actual comment was presumably, “Mme Bovary, c’est moi!—d’après moi.” See René Descharmes, Flaubert: sa vie, son caractère et ses idées avant 1857 (1909; reprint Geneva: Slatkine, 1969), 104n.

Notes 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140

141 142 143 144 145

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Badiou, “What Is Love?” 276. Ibid., 281. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 78–79. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 92. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Badiou, “What Is Love?” 278. Finn Fordham, “Spinning with Penelope,” Joyce, “Penelope” and the Body, European Joyce Studies 17 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 93–94. McGee, Paperspace, 176, 181; Joyce, Selected Letters, 289. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 225. Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 114. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 88. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume 2: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ll. 43–54: 20–21. Badiou, Praise of Love, 29. Ibid., 90.

Conclusion 1 2

3 4

Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 5 vols., ed. J. Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–2007), vol. 1, 680. Concerning Shelley, two works from the 1980s suggest the possibility of such an analysis: Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Concerning Flaubert, see Jacques Derrida, “An Idea of Flaubert: ‘Plato’s Letter,’” trans. Peter Starr, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Derrida, “An Idea,” 315; Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. 3, 738. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Essay on Christianity,” Shelley’s Prose in the Bodleian Manuscripts, ed. A. H. Koszul (London: Henry Frowde, 1910), 49.

260 5

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9

10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Notes Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 112. See Bernard Weinberg, French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830–1870 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 164, 172. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010),154–55. Bourdieu, Rules, 106. Finn Fordham, “Hugo There!?,” James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel, ed. Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 70–71. Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. 2, 31. As Demogorgon proclaims in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, “the deep truth is imageless.” See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Norton, 2002), 2.4.116: 250. Wayne Booth, “The Problem of Distance in A Portrait of the Artist,” James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook, ed. Mark Wollaeger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 59–72. First published in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright, 6 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 2003), vol. 6, 225. As one Proust biographer notes, “all Proust’s major characters are composites of those he knew, including himself, as well as products of his own creation.” See William C. Carter, Proust in Love (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 35. Maurice Blanchot, The Siren’s Song: Selected Essays, ed. Gabriel Josipovici, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 70; Colleen Lamos, Deviant Textuality: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 185, 191. Proust, Search, vol. 5, 669. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 72. Proust, Search, vol. 3, 499; vol. 5, 87, 520. Lamos, Deviant Textuality, 194. Marcel Proust, Á la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, Pleiade edition, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–1989), vol. 4, 489. Ibid. Proust, Search, vol. 6, 321–22. Ibid., vol. 5, 826. Ibid., vol. 5, 933–34.

Notes 22 23 24 25

26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

261

Ibid., vol. 6, 275–76. Ibid., vol. 5, 710. Ibid., vol. 6, 280. Derek Ryan, “Entangled in Nature: Deleuze’s Modernism, Woolf ’s Philosophy, and Spinoza’s Ethology,” in Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, ed. Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 163. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, ed. Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 48. Emily Delgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 99–100; Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 4 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), vol. 2, 189; vol. 4, 216. Proust, Search, vol. 6, 328. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 16. Ibid., 58, 63, 65. Patrick McGee, Telling the Other: The Question of Value in Modern and Postcolonial Writing (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 116–20; “The Politics of Modernist Form; or, Who Rules The Waves?” Modern Fiction Studies 38.3 (1992): 631–50. Woolf, Waves, 277. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 287. Ibid., 114. Bourdieu, Rules, 258–61. Patrick McGee, Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 101–7, 114–15. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (London: Penguin, 1995), 150. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 80. Lawrence, Women, 201. D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 62, 206–8. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 446. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 300. Ibid., 172.

262

Notes

46 Ibid., 68. 47 Ibid., 276. 48 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 276. 49 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley Novels, 70. 50 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 26–27. 51 Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 132–33. 52 Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: Da Capo, 1999), 58, 406, 530–36; James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 71, 105, 125, 465–66. 53 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 200–15. 54 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hulot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 340. 55 Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 177. 56 Ibid., 210.

Index Adams, Hazard 58 Adorno, Theodor W. 127, 130, 132, 172, 189, 211, 236 (see also determinate negation, second reflection) affective imitation 17–19, 23, 29, 49 affects 28–9, 83, 94, 113–14, 116, 127, 129, 136–7, 141, 161, 174–5 Althusser, Louis 12, 26, 70 anti-Semitism 3, 192, 195, 216, 233 Attridge, Derek 219 Ault, Donald D. 57–8, 60 bad infinity 115, 138, 207 Badiou, Alain 1–8, 12, 15–17, 19, 21, 26–7, 31–2, 34–6, 39–42, 49–51, 53–4, 58, 65–6, 77, 80, 82, 91–3, 95, 97, 99, 114, 124–5, 127, 130, 135–6, 151–4, 157–61, 167–8, 170–2, 178, 180–1, 186–8, 190–1, 194–6, 204, 206–10, 214–16, 218, 222–3, 226 (see also empty set, event, generic, inconsistent multiple, inexistent, love, ontology, sexuality, subject, subtractive process, thought, transcendental index, truth) Bakhtin, Mikhail 62, 64 Balibar, Étienne 17–18, 23–5, 109 (see also transindividual) Baudelaire, Charles 151 Beckett, Samuel 181, 187, 235–6 Behrendt, Stephen 90 Benjamin, Walter 127 Berkeley, George 45, 54–6, 60 Blake, William 20, 30, 33–4, 45–106, 116– 18, 121–2, 132, 141, 185, 187, 192, 210, 218, 225–6 (see also human form divine, minute particulars, self-annihilation) The Four Zoas 69, 77–8, 83, 94 Jerusalem 24, 45, 47–8, 50, 54–6, 58–9, 67–71, 75, 79, 81, 83, 94–7, 99–100, 102–6, 135

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 6, 27, 29, 52–4, 56, 59, 62, 64–6, 76 Milton 47, 50, 54, 56, 59–66, 68–76, 78–102, 105, 133–7, 145, 153, 155, 159, 226 Blanchot, Maurice 227 blessedness 112–14, 120, 135, 184 Bloom, Allan 128 Bloom, Harold 62 Böhme, Jakob 51–3 Booth, Wayne 227 Bourdieu, Pierre 226, 232 (see also habitus) Bracher, Mark 61–2, 79 Bronowski, Jacob 96 Brown, Richard 199, 204 Butler, Judith 163, 201–2 Cohen, Paul 187 Colebrook, Claire 93, 95 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 32, 45, 47, 225 common notions 16, 18, 20, 24, 26–7, 31–3, 36, 49, 54–5, 92, 167–8, 172, 175–6, 179–80, 182, 209 communism 42, 124, 194, 223, 234 Cronenberg, David The Fly (1986) 4–5 Curley, Edwin 17, 166, 170, 174, 181 Damon, S. Foster 68, 73 Dante 221 Davis, Lydia 212 Delabroy, Jean 125–6, 128, 133 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 28, 30–1, 53, 55, 93, 171, 228, 233, 235–6 democracy 5, 13–15, 35–6, 40, 48–50, 77–8, 102, 123–4, 148–50, 154, 194, 218, 222–3, 226–7, 232–4, 236–7 (see also imagination) Derrida, Jacques 38, 187, 195, 225 Descartes, René 7, 16, 22, 34–5, 58–9, 169, 183

264

Index

determinate negation 132, 211, 222, 228 disutopia 25, 27, 41, 152 dualism 7–8, 40, 53–4, 104, 142, 165, 217, 226 Dunn, Susan 49–50 Dutch crisis (1672) 15, 35–6 Ellmann, Richard 172, 194 empty set 93, 125, 188, 191, 208, 219, 221–2, 228, 232 Erdman, David V. 62 essence (see also knowledge, generic, immanent cause, thought) desire and appetite 169 system of relations 168 transindividual 88, 166, 217 unnamable 3–6, 32, 68, 71, 80, 173, 176, 185, 187–9, 196, 207, 211, 218, 220–2 virtue or power 18, 237 Essick, Robert N. 73, 88 event (see also monstrosity, subject, truth) amorous 3, 196 and being 178–9 kairòs 39–40, 42 singularity 27 in Ulysses 196, 210 Fanon, Frantz 193–4 (see also national consciousness) Flaubert, Gustave 225–7, 234 Madame Bovary 212–13 Fordham, Finn 217, 226 free will 11, 37, 109, 111–12 French Revolution 5, 76–9, 84, 125, 130, 158 Freud, Sigmund 11 Frye, Northrop 54–5, 67, 79 Gabler, Hans Walter 189 Gebhardt, Carl 166 general intellect 22, 29–30, 41, 43–4, 59–60, 109, 114, 166–9, 171, 176, 178, 180, 183–5, 214, 217 generic being 33, 194–5 essence 17, 32, 220 procedure 2, 42, 209

set, multiple 91, 95, 101, 104, 141, 147, 176, 180, 188, 191, 193, 195, 202, 210–11, 216–17, 228, 231–3 truth 2, 17, 32–3, 35, 55, 136, 141, 170, 176, 186, 192, 220 Gifford, Don 185 Gillespie, Sam 34, 208 Gnosticism 51–3, 57, 67, 108 Gödel, Kurt 187 Goetschel, Willi 192–3 Gramsci, Antonio 37, 55, 186 Grossman, Kathryn 130, 132 Guattari, Félix 233 habitus 132 Hamlet 32–3 Hardt, Michael 22, 163 Hegel, G. W. F. 40 (see also bad infinity) Herodotus 194–5 Hill, Christopher 63 Hilton, Nelson 64 Hitchcock, Alfred 235–6 Hobbes, Thomas 14, 25, 35, 48–9, 94 Hobson, Christopher Z. 76–7, 88, 90–1, 98 Hugo, Victor 107–62, 187, 225–7 (see also French Revolution, June Insurrection, Paris Commune, savage God) Les Misérables 79, 107, 111–12, 115, 119–26, 128–62 Napoleon the Little 146, 148, 151 “Philosophical Preface” 107, 110–13, 114–18, 122–5, 138, 140, 160–1 Post-scriptum de ma vie 112–13 Religions et religion 107–10, 112 human form divine 30, 56, 67, 71, 75, 86, 88, 109, 117, 122, 160, 178 Hume, David 45–6 Hunt, Robert 46 imagination (see also reason, thought, truth) constitutive 14, 23–4, 27, 29, 30–1, 33–4, 36–7, 39, 41–2, 57–9, 75, 78, 96–7 democratic 227 positive and negative uses of 19–20, 71 transindividual structure 17–18

Index immanent causality 8–13, 16, 18, 21, 24, 27, 31–2, 34, 38, 44, 54, 60, 62, 66–7, 69, 103, 109, 111, 115–18, 120, 122–3, 127, 134–5, 139, 142, 144, 163–4, 168, 170–2, 202, 205, 219, 231 inconsistent multiple 34, 178, 188, 208 inexistent 26, 48, 59, 85, 91, 93–4, 97, 125, 136, 156, 171–2, 187–90, 196, 204, 208, 210, 215–17, 221, 228–9, 231–3 Irigaray, Luce 215 Israel, Jonathan I. 8, 20, 45–6 Jameson, Fredric 126 Jew 3, 5, 36, 66, 137 generic 192–5 Jones, John H. 50, 62, 64–5, 97 Jong, Erica 234 Joyce, James 29, 137, 165, 187, 222, 226–7, 232 Exiles 165, 173, 199, Finnegans Wake 163, 172, 203–4, 214, 220, 235 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 227 Ulysses 163–5, 170–3, 178–82, 184–5, 187–208, 210–14, 216–23, 230, 235 June Insurrection (1848) 145–8, 150–1, 156, 159 Kahan, Benjamin 137, 143, 201–3 Kant, Immanuel 51, 57–8 Kimball, Jean 197 knowledge adequate and inadequate 10–13, 15, 27–9, 32, 56, 60, 67, 78, 113, 135, 152, 169, 172, 181 art as 127, 172 first kind, perception 11–12, 13, 16, 18, 22–3, 32, 38, 55, 57, 60, 99, 113, 118, 126–8, 172, 186 mind’s essence 21 second kind 16, 99, 113, 118, 172, 209 (see also common notions) third kind, intuition 21, 23, 29, 32–3, 35, 51, 54–5, 79, 99, 104, 112, 120, 135, 172, 184, 208–9, 231 Kordela, A. Kiarina 37–9

265

Lacan, Jacques 11, 18, 38–9, 43, 67, 143, 175–6, 179, 184, 187, 189, 191, 205–6, 208, 214–15, 217 Lamartine, Alphonse de 145 Lamb, Charles 47 Lamos, Colleen 227–8 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 192–3 Lawrence, D. H. 181, 227, 232 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 232–4 Women in Love 232 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 65 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 192 Levinas, Emmanuel 203–9 Levinson, Majorie 45 Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier 155 Locke, John 45, 65, 71, 80, 99 love (see also event, thought, truth) and equality 158 generic set 211, 232 as knowledge 143, 237 minimal communism 223 politics of 151–3, 223 and reason 237 unbinding 210–11, 237 as understanding 152, 154, 175–6, 178, 206, 208, 212, 222–3, 232 Luther, Martin 64 Macherey, Pierre 10, 12, 107–8, 110, 116, 119, 164 Makdisi, Saree 45, 102–3 Marx, Karl 8, 22, 41, 43, 49, 105, 148, 192–3, 195, 206 Matheron, Alexandre 29–30, 42–3, 94, 124, 144, 174–8 Mee, Jon 52 Mendelssohn, Moses 192–3, 195 Miller, Henry 233, 235 Milton, John Paradise Lost 61, 63, 79, 81, 90, 94 Paradise Regained 64 minute particulars 53, 58, 60–1, 66, 68–9, 71–2, 82, 85, 90–1, 95, 97, 103–5, 204, 222, 237 (see also singularity) Mitchell, W. J. T. 88 modernism 162, 164, 181, 201, 223, 225–7, 230, 234–5

266 monstrosity 35, 43–4, 46, 102, 107, 132–4, 144–5, 159, 195 political monster 47–8, 156–7, 225, 229, 236 Montag, Warren 14, 18, 20–1, 28 Moreau, Pierre-François 21 multitude 14–15, 20–1, 23, 25, 29–30, 35– 7, 40, 44, 48, 50, 53, 59, 63–4, 67, 69, 71–2, 78–9, 81, 86–7, 93–4, 98, 100–5, 117, 123–4, 131–2, 136–7, 139–40, 147, 150, 157–8, 161, 163, 169, 171, 178–80, 184, 194, 222, 226–7, 231, 234 Nadler, Steven 187, 193 national consciousness 193–5 National Socialism (Nazism) 3, 5, 195 Negri, Antonio 7–9, 13–15, 17, 19–20, 22–8, 30–7, 39–44, 47–9, 53–4, 59, 62, 96–7, 124, 137, 152, 156–7, 163, 173, 194, 218–19, 236–7 (see also disutopia, event, general intellect, imagination, monstrosity, multitude, ontology) Neoplatonism 35, 51–3 Newton, Sir Isaac 45, 50, 57–8, 71–2, 80, 99, 103 Nietzsche, Friedrich 31, 37–8, 47, 83, 99, 125, 182, 232 Norris, Christopher 186 Nurmi, Martin K. 73 ontology constitutive 36 (see also vacillation) eugenic 48 of immanence 34, 40, 44, 48, 111, 203, 205, 226, 236 mathematical 186 savage 7–8, 48, 64, 106, 108, 227 subtractive 167, 178 of transcendence 83, 90 unconscious 119, 123, 142, 154, 162 visual 235 Paris Commune (1871) 78, 155 permanent revolution 15, 25 Plato 40, 54, 64, 67, 95, 114, 205, 226

Index potentia 13–15, 20–1, 25–6, 40, 48, 53, 59, 67, 69, 81, 98, 109–10, 112, 114–15, 123, 131–2, 136, 140–1, 149–50, 163, 202, 218, 222, 232 potestas 13, 15, 25, 48, 63, 69, 94, 98, 110, 131, 137, 150, 163 Pound, Ezra 194–5 Proust, Marcel 181 In Search of Lost Time 227–30 Quinney, Laura 51–3, 57–8 Raine, Kathleen 51–3 Rancière, Jacques 226 Randall, Lisa 8 reason adequate knowledge 28 in art 127 common notions 16, 18, 20, 92 dialectical 126–7 and energy 27, 53 and imagination 20, 23, 31, 49, 55 instrumental 126–8, 209 negative 69, 75 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 60, 99 Rix, Robert 52 Robb, Graham 145–6, 155 Robespierre, Maximilien 77–8 Robinson, Henry Crabb 45, 47, 67 Rosa, Guy 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 49–50, 125–6, 128 Said, Edward 193 Saisset, Émile 107, 109, 111, 120, 141, 149 Sand, Schlomo 193, 195 Sartre, Jean-Paul 84, 92, 216, 226 savage God 111–12, 122–4, 138–40, 154, 160, 204 second reflection 189 Seidman, Robert J. 185 self-annihilation 11, 19, 33, 43, 50, 64–5, 70, 82, 90–1, 96–8, 105, 109, 143, 169, 175–6, 184–5, 209, 237 sexuality 12, 29, 82, 84–5, 90–4, 102–3, 196–7, 199, 203–5, 207–9, 214–16, 218–19, 233–4

Index celibacy 137, 142–5, 197–8, 201–3, 210, 212, 220 homosexuality 88, 90–1, 94, 201, 228–9, 231 Spinoza’s view 29, 94, 144, 173–8, 201 Shelley, P. B. 225–7 Shirley, Samuel 17, 20, 170, 174, 181 Silverthorne, Michael 20 singularity 9–10, 16, 18, 25–8, 30–1, 33, 50, 53–4, 58–62, 68–9, 72, 79, 81–2, 85, 91–2, 94–5, 97–9, 101–4, 122, 124, 135, 139, 142–3, 154, 176, 193–4, 209, 218, 220, 226, 228, 231–2, 237 (see also minute particulars) Socrates 108, 112–15 soul 10, 51, 53–5, 61, 72, 88, 109, 112, 121–2, 124–5, 127–8, 130–4, 138, 141–2, 154, 159, 165, 169–72, 194, 225, 228 Southey, Robert 47 Spinoza, Baruch 8–43, 45–63, 65, 67, 70, 78–9, 83, 87, 93–4, 96, 98–9, 104, 106–18, 120–3, 126–9, 131, 134–44, 149–50, 152, 154, 156, 164–87, 190, 192–6, 199, 201–3, 205–6, 208–10, 216, 218–19, 225–7, 229–37 (see also affective imitation, affects, blessedness, common notions, Dutch crisis, democracy, essence, free will, imagination, immmanent causality, knowledge, love, multitude, ontology, potentia, potestas, reason, sexuality, singularity, thought, truth, vacillation, vulgus) Stevens, Wallace 41 Stiglitz, Joseph 41 style 64, 119, 181, 187–8, 191, 210, 217, 219–20, 222, 226–7, 235 subject evental 39, 41–2, 157–8, 168 faithful 36, 42, 114, 136, 157–8 multitude as 15, 63 out-of-place 26 reactive and obscure 97, 99, 157–8

267

transindividual 17, 19, 105, 109, 217, 222, 230 of truth 2, 60, 81–2, 97, 114, 135, 158, 181, 211, 227 subtractive process 26, 31, 190, 196, 202, 208, 210–11, 217, 228 Swedenborg, Emanuel 51 Thompson, E. P. 51–2 thought autonomous 10, 13, 180, 235 axiomatic 116, 167–8 as essence 61, 166, 172 generic 222 imagination as 57, 60, 71, 79, 96, 106, 185 jouissance of 184, 190 and language 38–9, 171, 186, 225–6, 235 love as 136, 139, 152, 207, 209, 211, 222, 236–7 mind 8–10, 13, 16, 21–2, 28, 38, 139, 169, 217, 225 power of 9, 11, 19–21, 24, 26, 28–30, 33, 36, 40–1, 53, 60, 65, 68, 70, 83–4, 91, 96, 98–9, 101, 104, 109, 113, 118, 123–4, 127–9, 135–6, 139, 157, 166–7, 179–80, 209, 217, 222 subtractive 12, 26 visual 235 transcendental index 50–1, 59, 95, 171–2 transindividual 17–19, 28, 35, 50, 54–6, 60, 62–3, 67, 79, 82, 87–8, 91–2, 95, 100–1, 103–5, 109, 113, 122, 124, 134, 153, 156, 166–9, 175–6, 179–80, 182–4, 207, 209, 213, 216–17, 222, 226, 230–2 (see also essence, imagination, subject) truth (see also generic) amorous 3–5, 22, 139, 207–12 and event 3, 94, 127, 168, 210, 213 falsification of 2–3, 66 as imagination 3–4, 6, 19, 50–1, 59, 66, 187 procedure 5, 42, 72, 94, 130, 139, 153, 157–8, 181, 209, 215–16, 218

268 process 2–3, 5–6, 8, 12, 15, 17, 19, 27–8, 30, 33, 35–8, 41–3, 46, 48, 51, 65–9, 76–7, 80–2, 87, 96–8, 100, 103, 109, 114, 127, 131–2, 134–7, 139, 141, 143, 145, 153, 156, 158, 168, 176, 184, 189, 195, 207–8, 210–13, 215–18, 225–7, 232, 234 self-referential 17, 28, 59, 65, 167 Uhlmann, Anthony 164–5, 168–73, 179, 187 Utell, Janine 203–4, 206 vacillation 23–4, 68, 144–5, 148, 151, 156–7, 173, 199–200, 212

Index Viscomi, Joseph 73, 88 vulgus (common people, masses, mob, public) 14, 20, 27, 110, 114, 194 Wahnich, Sophie 77, 79 Watson, Richard 77 Williams, Nicholas 85 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 55, 116, 121–2, 195 Woolf, Virginia 181, 187, 227, 232 Jacob’s Room 230 Mrs. Dalloway 230 To the Lighthouse 164, 230 The Waves 230–2 Wordsworth, William 45, 47, 225 Wright, Julia 64