Imperium: Structures and Affects of Political Bodies

by Frédéric Lordon

What should we do with the ideals of internationalism, the withering away of state and horizontality? Probably start by thinking seriously about them. That is to say, about their conditions of possibility (or impossibility), rather than sticking to the wishful thinking which believes that for them to happen it is enough to want them. Humanity exists neither as a dust cloud of separate individuals nor as a unified world political community. It exists fragmented into distinct finite wholes, the forms of which have varied considerably throughout history - the nation-state being only one among many, and certainly not the last. What are the forces that produce this fragmentation, engender such groupings and prevent them from being perfectly horizontal, but also lead them to disappear, merge, or change form? It is questions such as these that this book explores, drawing on Spinoza's political philosophy and especially his two central concepts of multitudo and imperium.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy

289 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 25, 2022

About the author

Frédéric Lordon est un économiste français né le 15 janvier 1962. Il est directeur de recherche au CNRS et chercheur au Centre de sociologie européenne (CSE).

Reviews

[Zéro Janvier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Voici encore un livre très intéressant de Frédéric Lordon, même si je dois avouer que j'ai parfois dû m'accrocher pour suivre sa pensée quand il mobilise des concepts philosophiques de Spinoza, d'autant qu'il adopte par moments un style un peu abscons.

C'est brillant et intellectuellement très stimulant, j'ai d'ailleurs surligné des paragraphes entiers sur ma liseuse, mais j'ai parfois ressenti ce sentiment de culpabilité du pseudo-intellectuel qui réfléchit sur de grandes concepts et propose de belles idées pour repousser le moment de devoir s'atteler personnellement à les mettre en pratique, laissant la sale besogne à d'autres.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book Lordon writes about Spinoza, whom I'm not very familiar with, welded to a structuralist politics to form Lordon's own version of critical realism. Spinoza had a very distinct position, and vocabulary to describe it. According to Lordon Spinoza saw humans as having a dual nature: on one side we are unavoidably driven by desire or "passion," and on the other we are completely a social animal and reliant on one another for survival. Where things get interesting is how these two parts work together—in a group we are able to work together because our individual passions tend to harmonize into a sort of shared desire, which Spinoza calls affect.

Now there is a lot of ground to cover between a group affect and a multitude, which I'll leave to the author to explain, except to say that multiple groups sharing affects can combine into such a multitude, and when we reach a multitude we attain imperium: "It is not that ‘state' or ‘sovereignty' are incorrect translations, but" … also described as "common affect," "the power the multitude has to affect itself," or "the source of all authority in the social world." It seems a far too loaded term to me (even though Lordon states he wants us to ignore its connotations), but that's another topic.

At any rate, where this book really takes off is the implications of Spinoza's metaphysics. And really, there is so much to think about here it's a worthwhile exercise. Spinoza was skeptical of us humans achieving what you could call pure reason, while simultaneously wanting nothing else than for us to strive for it.

As admirable as Spinoza's wishes were and however agreeable I find many of his arguments, I had a lot of trouble swallowing them wholesale, at least as Lordon laid them out. The problem with the arguments Lordon presents is the problem with all metaphysical arguments, which is your have to take each link in the logical chain as a given, even if you are skeptical—as in, how can I verify this for myself? So to arrive at a conclusion such as:

One may, if one wishes, define the universal as the complete emancipation from any specific category – an appeal to the generic humanity of individuals above and beyond any distinctive properties. But this would mean conceiving of it as a release from the servitude to the passions, since that is the regime under which all these distinctive properties are born. As soon as the problem is reformulated in those terms, one can immediately appreciate how unlikely such a resolution is, however desirable it might be.

we necessarily have to accept the logic preceding this statement as true, no matter how much one remains skeptical, unless you want to drop it and put down the book. Lordon himself even points out why this is a problematic way of going about things; why metaphysical truth remains pretty much uncertain:

However, reason is hypothetical, or more precisely the degree to which we can attain it is hypothetical. And overestimating that degree carries with it serious political dangers. What degree of reason can we attribute to the behaviour of individuals? A limited degree, is Spinoza's categorical answer, though, like everything else, it is modifiable.

So shouldn't this apply to his own arguments? Because if we can only "hypothetically" attain reason, how can I make sure any metaphysics, including this one, aren't an illusion? It remains a puzzle.

However one might agree with Lordon:

The importance of taking people 'as they are' cannot be overemphasised, since this is the starting point from which everything else follows. The crux here is that people are by and large strangers to reason, whose full realisation is not yet a reality of our world: 'those who believe that ordinary people or those who are busily engaged in public business can be persuaded to live solely at reason's behest are dreaming of the poets' golden age or of a fairy tale'. Emancipationist thinkers would do well to take this on board if they want to avoid spinning 'fairy tales', but they rarely seem inclined that way...

he doesn't seem very practiced at the gentle art of critical self-reflection. Another stark example is his criticism of Alain Badiou:

His belief that it is not the role of philosophy to conceptualise the structure of the world and its laws echoes the stance of Rancière, whose disdain for sociology, and for Bourdieu in particular, is the correlate of a philosophy of performative assertion in which presuppositions are favoured over verification. It is a stance that has a certain intrinsic force, but its avowed aversion to the empirical leaves it in a strange relationship to the real world: it has a synthesising power and insists on the possibility of influencing the course of the world, but risks being vacuous in its ignorance of the actual preconditions for influencing it.

Presuppositions over verification? Aversion to the empirical? I am not the positivistic type, but even such as me can see:

The conatus does not admit of a distinction between self-interest and thought, or indeed between self-interest and altruism. As a generic self- interest and therefore still intransitive, it is the source through affections, adequate or otherwise, of every specific self-interested goal whose pursuit we call human activity. In other words, every action is a specific expression of the generic self-interest of the conatus, even if it is perceived as the most altruistic or generous of deeds. Every action and every way of acting is a physical channelling, often modulated by external causes, of the fundamental impetus of the conatus from which they all derive: The conatus with which each thing endeavours to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.

the conatus is not something I can put under a microscope. Where is this 'empiricism' Lordon is talking about?

In the end, I know I've criticized this work severely—there is plenty to disagree with here. But I want to emphasize there is also a lot of things I think are insightful, and Lordon has advanced important questions regarding politics and the state.

[Soraninn]

Naze

[Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril · Rating 2 out of 5]

Illisible