Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan

Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

by A. Kiarina Kordela

A. Kiarina Kordela is Associate Professor of German Studies at Macalester College.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, 21st Century

205 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Peter Mathews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the title, as it stands, contains Spinoza and Lacan, it should probably also contain Kant, Marx, and Saussure as well, who are all major figures in Kordela's argument. It wouldn't make for such a snappy title, obviously, but it would be a truer reflection of the book's contents.

The foundation for the modern notion of surplus, for Kordela, is Spinoza. That might seem surprising: isn't Spinoza, after all, a monist? If there is only one substance, how can there be a surplus to it? Kordela explains this apparent paradox by detailing, for instance, the place of fictions and imagination in human decision-making. Spinoza demonstrates that his Nature/God is infinite, and therefore has no ends or goals; nonetheless, at the same time, humanity cannot live, desire, or act in a world without such goals. As such, the human imagination produces a "surplus" in the form of an imagined goal or telos that, while being a complete fiction, nonetheless has real effects in the world in the way it allows humans to think and act with regard to reality.

This brilliant philosophical insight, Kordela shows, will become the first in a line of revolutionary ideas that rely on the notion of surplus. She shows how Kant's ethics, for instance, relies on the generation of surpluses (freedom, God) that he requires yet cannot fully rationalize. Marx shows how capital generates surplus through commodity fetishism. Saussure, in turn, translates economic value into a system of differential linguistic value. Lacan, finally, brings all these things together. What Spinoza has effectively done, shows Kordela, is to turn the entire world into a differential system of values, in which all things function as signifiers of value, but in this representation of value, they also hide the founding principle that makes such evaluation/representation possible.

This main thread of Kordela's book is unfolded in a complex and fascinating manner. Along the way, however, it is interwoven with a series of philosophical beefs she has with what she calls "Neo-Spinozism." As such, there are extended critiques of representatives of this tendency, most notably of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (whose strategy of pushing capitalism to its limit seems a bit too much like collaborating with it), as well as Alain Badiou (whose Platonism is sometimes at odds with Spinoza's monism). Surprisingly, there is no sustained critique of Gilles Deleuze in this respect, even though I would consider him to be the most famous of the Neo-Spinozist crowd.

Kordela's book is not an easy read, but if you can follow the main thread of its argument, it is ultimately very rewarding.

[AG]

Returning to Kordela’s first book two years after my initial encounter with it, I recognize that what I originally saw as the obscurity (and repetitiveness) of some of its claims aren’t the result of a tired rehearsal of some basic Lacanian/Zizekean tropes, but rather are the mark of an ambitious enterprise trying to produce a radical new synthesis from familiar materials. So, while I still find Surplus to sometimes be needlessly obscure and imprecise at the level of style (partially because its ambition exceeds it), I'm now in a better see the novelty of its contribution to Lacanian “para-ontology”. I want to try and spell out what see its contribution as consisting of -- something which I think the book itself often struggles at thematizing.

This thesis of this book is basically “Spinoza’s proto-structuralism as an alternative solution to Kant’s antinomies”; in this way, it mirrors in important ways Macherey’s “Hegel or Spinoza” in its claim that, contra Hegel, Spinoza gives us an alternative method of reading Marx’s mature dialectic. The claim is that, in Spinoza, we have an alternative to the imaginary rivalry at play in Hegel’s dialectic (as Lacan and Kojeve see it). Kordela's Spinoza sees that the field of language is transcendentally inscribes any opposition as the minimal difference which makes legible the opposition in the first place. Minimal difference — or Surplus — is that which is neither in-itself nor other, but the foundation of the distinction: whether that is the true and the false, or appearance and the real. In this regard, Kordela’s point resembles the Derridean privileging of the ambiguity of the trace.

She is able to draw this from Spinoza’s Ethics by arguing that the gap between ontology and ethics is *thematized* by him rather than collapsed. Briefly: in scholastic philosophy, the difference between efficient and final cause is collapsed in the last instance, i.e., in God. Descartes comes around and says that our reasons for knowing the causes of things cannot be grounded on the existence of God, but must be grounded on a principle given on the same level as our own reasons. This results in the famous “Cogito ergo sum”. Spinoza responds by saying that the Cogito is not a syllogism but a paradoxical statement similar to the liar’s paradox: “I am lying”. The cogito indicates not the difference between a thinking substance and extended substance but a single paradoxical substance: it states the contradictory unity of reasons and causes. We can put this in ethical terms: a reason is just as much a “reason why” as a “reason for doing”. And the same is true of a cause: it is both a “cause of” and a “just cause”. This means that there is an dialectic of ethics and ontology (which is closer to Plato than Kordela thinks). This is Kordela’s reading of Spinoza’s argument for a single substance with two attributes. (The fact that Spinoza says that thought and extension are the two we know of an infinity of attributes is sort of elided by her, but this is because Kordela is more interested in reading Spinoza symptomatically than doing an accurate exegesis.)

So, substance is split into the attributes of “thought” (what appears to be real) and “extension” (what’s really real). Later on, these are identified with exchange-value and use-value, respectively. Exchange-value, or the realm of symbolic-exchange, is the apres-coup field of “real abstraction”, and use-value is the realm of “practical activity”, what’s “really real”. It is only in the difference between these two — between the presence of the “really real” of use-value and the absence (or representation) of the real through exchange-value — that we can locate the concept of Surplus. That which appears to be “really real” is in fact a retroactive effect of abstraction, and that which appears to “appear” — that which we identify as a representation — is constitutive of the real itself. (You can see in this formulation an important deployment of Karatani’s concept of parallax).

But the Lacanian twist comes with the assertion that Surplus can only be understood as the transhistorical foundation of historical breaks. In Milner’s A Search for Clarity, Lacan’s “hyper-structuralism” is characterized as relying on “Koyre’s thesis” of the major break, in which we can understand the historical episteme on the basis of an invariant “Archimedean point” of structure. In other words, we can think the birth of the modern subject in Descartes only on the basis of its formalization (that which Spinoza recognizes in the cogito as liar paradox), and the possibility of formalization is no less than the universality of synchronic, differential structure. What is formalized is *the point of exception which makes possible the play of synchronic difference*. This point of exception, at the level of historical diachrony, is the arbitrary decision that “this means that”. But we can only impose, in historical time, that “this means that” absolutely, on the basis of a (universal, and therefore historically contingent) system of synchronic meaning.

As an example, it is possible to see in this a repetition of the relationship between use-value and exchange-value. If a commodity’s use-value is historically circumscribed — is the particular historical value that a commodity has, for example, gold — this is only on the basis of a synchronic (universal, and therefore contingent) system of exchange — gold’s installation as the general equivalent as filling the gap of a certain social function, one which might have previously been different in, say, a gift-economy. In this case, the imposition of a particular signifier of the Signifier (gold) erases the economic function which *that particular decision* played in the general economy, and thus appears to be “more real” than its abstract function. The establishment of a difference between appearance and reality is the very thing which allows money to function as a general (abstract) equivalent, but it is also the condition for the (supposedly non-ideological) recognition of money’s fictional character, as that which “stands in” for a thing with a genuine use-value (or the sense in which a concept “stands in” for a real practice). Kordela's point is not just that use-value is a retroactive effect of exchange-value -- something which I have argued elsewhere is almost explicitly stated by Marx in Capital Vol 1 -- but that a system of value is a substantial "causa sui" which is present in its effects, those effects being the continuous (synchronic) *differentiation* between exchange-value and use-value, a traumatic repetition of a (diachronic) *institution of difference*.

If the paradoxical signifier of exception (floating signifier, as it is commonly put) of pre-modernity is God, what produces the modern subject is the *formalization of this signifier*. This is what I take Kordela to mean when she says that, if the Surplus = God in pre-modernity, in modernity, *Surplus = Surplus*. Surplus then ultimately refers to the capacity for the modern subject to formalize self-reference. This is why she argues that Surplus is *both* a trans-historical ontology and the ontology of capitalism. It’s on the point of the various interpretations of formalization that I think Kordela sort of slips up. For example, Lacan takes up the possibility of formalizing the paradoxes of self-reference in his graph of sexual difference. Much of the later argument that Kordela engages in (which I am still working through, and probably exceed my current ability to untangle) relies on an interpretation of Lacan’s graph based on Copjec’s now famous mapping of it onto the Kantian antinomies. But this, in my opinion, requires her to develop a quasi-model-theoretic interpretation of Lacan’s formula which elides its inherent *dynamism*. That is, it misses the “dynamicization” of the mathematical antinomy — the expansive dynamic of succession at the limit — which is possible to take from it, and which would help in making sense of a dynamic or expansive logic of capital as surplus-value/surplus-jouissance from within this particular ontological register. And, to make things worse, this is *precisely* what Badiou draws from it, and I think that it’s at the root of (what is in my view) Kordela’s unfortunate misinterpretation of Badiou’s system. It’s unfortunate because I think that, with some work, Kordela’s structuralist reading of Marx itself adds some ontological scaffolding to a certain (maybe Karatanist?) project where the logic of capitalism is neither a totally contingent emergence (a la Meikins Wood or Brenner) nor a trans-historical inevitablity (a la Deleuze and Guattari) but *one* particular expression of a *trans-historical* structural matrix.