double language

there's already a lot going on this week. surprisingly, it has to do--in part, at least--with things i don't really have much context for. "Not knowing many things about a thing"--this type of knowledge is also always a pardon begged in relation to knowledge. It makes me wonder if we should ever hope to resolve such a thing. this lack of context is surprising because i thought that these things were continuities of things i had already been working with. like Spinoza, for example. But what were last year questions of ideology and the individual put to Hegel, are this year questions of belief, theology and the relation to the political put to Spinoza. Looking back at my notes, I find much of it unintelligible. what did make sense to me was Balibar's explication of the "double truth" as a strategy for speaking the universal. well, it did not actually make SO much sense in terms of speaking the universal, except that i think it is similar to Badiou's notion that the separation of spheres for science, art, love, and politics would allow non-interference between them. Spinoza is also similar to Wittgenstein, who wrote two dissimilar theoretical pieces during his life. So Balibar brings this question of authorship into the circle of things that there is to say about how Spinoza might be able to speak the universal. He concludes that the Political-Theological Tractatus is, minimally, a certain disguise of the author's opinions.

One of the things i very much like about the idea that the Political-Theological Tractatus is disguised in some way, or cryptic, in others, is that Balibar eschews the somewhat normed idea that censorship functions to hide those "real" or "true" elements that otherwise would not allow the text to get past the censor. Instead, he proposes that the genre of the tractatus is such that basic philosophical ideas fall under the cover of imaginative representations immediately accessible to the common ideas. With this style, Balibar concludes, "truth is not accessible in the same way." Similar to the "double truth" of the Spinozan and Wittgensteinian doctrines, language itself becomes doubled, and the prolbem with language is once again how to transform ideas to representations and truths to opinions (held by many). So it is, language.

Picture: from The History of Egypt, "The Occupations of Ani in the Elysian Fields" followed by text "...in the Great Hall of the Double Truth, who have no falsehood in your bosoms, but who live on Truth in Aûnû, and feed your hearts upon it before the Lord God who dwelleth in his solar disc."

affective thought

When Spinoza makes the distinction between active force and passive force, he also weighs in indirectly about materiality. Deleuze sums in Expression and Philosophy: Spinoza, <<But on a deeper level Leibniz asks: should passive force be conceived as distinct from active force? Is its principle autonomous, does it have any possibility, is it in any way assertive? Answer: "Passive force has no autonomy, but is the mere limitation of active force.">> It is perhaps not immediately apparent how materiality, per se, enters into a discussion of the limited assertiveness of passive forces, but I would propose that both of these aspects--materialism and the duality of active and passive force--are components of a theory of work, for Spinoza, which might always be "working for a cause." And it is the question of the cause that Spinoza poses by asking whether or not passive force is autonomous. Even as he asserts the non-autonomous character of passive force (something which seems to be a logical consequence of the idea of adequate thoughts, and notions, of the adequacy of cause and effect), he nonetheless raises the question of why it is that the "autonomy" is the question. Of the passions (those things that we suffer, passively), there are those of joy and those of sadness. Because passions are only understood as the inhibition of action (and Spinoza acknowledges the differential in inhibitions based on the particular passion), they are not understood, or perhaps, they don't count until they become translated into activity (this translation, I have been thinking, is one way of thinking about affect). Maybe it makes sense that passive joy needs to be taken as active (as part of the conatus) in order for it to be "real action," but it makes less sense for sad passions, things for which there seems never to be an "adequate" cause. Sad passions seem to be a part of the Spinozan unconscious, things you know you should be able to turn to active but which perhaps instead dwell in a realm of affective thought (something I need to return to Freud's 1912ish papers for). But work, in the above quotation, is what makes this transference to activity possible, I think. And somehow, this seems to put off work, and put off the cause, as well.