The affective and political life of thought: from imagination to reason chez Spinoza

Michael Kim

Introduction
In the opening paragraphs of both political treatises and the Treatise on the Emendation
of the Intellect (hereafter TdIE1), as well as the entire appendix to Ethics I, Spinoza persistently
criticizes the life of imaginationas a life subject to the vacillation of hope and fear without
sure judgment (TTP 1), where we are happy when things are going well and resentful
when fortune turns her back (E1 app), where one is content to live after ones own opinions
over against others and, thus, prone to strife and conflict (TP 1.5). In all of these works,
Spinoza identifies such an imaginative life with the life of fantasies and prejudices that are
not only harmful to individual but also to communal flourishing.
After summarizing the result of Ethics Ii.e., as having demonstrated the nature and
existence of GodSpinoza immediately says that I have taken care, whenever the occasion
arose, to remove prejudices that could prevent my demonstrations from being perceived (E1 app, emphasis
added). The problem of habit and prejudice surfaces in two parallel contexts throughout the
above works. The first section of this paper discusses the first of these contexts: on the one
hand, prejudice is an epistemological problem. In the Ethics (particularly op. cit.) and the TdIE,
Spinoza observes that certain habits of thinking (especially the notions of teleology and
individual autonomy) can make us unable to think trulywhether this is a question of
method (see below) or the dogmatic persistence of received opinionsuch that we can

References to the Ethics and TdIE are from Curleys translation; references to the TTP are from Israels
translation; references to the PT are from Elwes translation; and references to the letters are from Shirleys
translation, all as listed in the bibliography.

become unable to recognize true ideas, and can even invert the order of nature and thus turn
our conatus against itself by creating and enforcing the very conditions of our unhappiness.
On the other hand, prejudice is identified not only as an ethical but also as a political
problem. In Letter 21 to van Blyenbergh, Spinoza laments that his correspondent is so
entrenched in his beliefs that I see that no proof, however firmly established according to
the rules of logic, has any validity with you unless it agrees with the explanation which you,
or other theologians of your acquaintance, assign to Holy Scripture.2 Similarly, in the TTP,
Spinoza says that his attempt in that work is to
remove our prevailing theological prejudices. But my attempt, I am afraid, may be too late.
For the situation has now almost reached the point that men will not allow themselves to be
corrected on these questions but rather obstinately defend whatever position they have taken
up, in the name of religion. There seems to be no room left for reason except perhaps
among a very few persons so completely have these prejudices taken over mens minds. I
will however make the attempt and not give up on the task, since there is no reason for
complete despair. (TTP 8.2; cf. 7.1 and TdIE 14).

What, then, is to be done? How can the intellect be mended so it can be best directed
toward the true knowledge of things, as Spinoza says in the title of the TdIE?3 Following
the epistemological and ethical treatment of part one, part two of this paper will consider
how this emendation is a political task (including, for example, what we are to do with
those who seem incapable of emendation4) and will suggest that there is an important role
for the imagination in politics through an appropriately conceived political art.

The Letters in Shirley 822.

So too in this work, Spinoza recognizes that the emendation of the intellect is also a practical and political
question: so I wondered whether perhaps it would be possible to reach my new goalor at least the certainty
of attaining itwithout changing the conduct and plan of life which I shared with other men. Often I tried this, but in vain
(TdIE 3, emphases added).
4 As Montag notes, however, the political question is slightly more complicated insofar as we cannot simply
assume a fixed opposition between the camp of the enlightened versus the camp of superstition, or the camp
of reason versus the camp of unreason. If it remains possible to speak of camps, it is necessary to observe that
the same man may at one moment belong to the camp of reason and at another to the camp of superstitution
(Montag 28-9) and that the natural tendency of human beings is toward superstition (which seems to be
consonant with Spinozas own account of superstition as resulting from the fact that we are born
simultaneously ignorant and conscious of our desiresa dangerous combination!).
2
3

Part One
At first glance, the object of such emendation of the intellect seems to be the
imaginative life, which must be superseded by the natural light of reason. Spinoza will
often explicitly say things like:
we have distinguished between a true idea and other perceptions, and shown that the
fictitious, the false, and the other ideas have their origin in the imagination, i.e., in certain
sensations that are fortuitous, and (as it were) disconnected; since they do not arise from the
very power of the mind, but from external causes, as the body receives various motions.
The aim, then, is to have clear and distinct ideas, i.e., such as have been made from the
pure mind, and not from fortuitous motions of the body. (TdIE 84, 91)

Yet passages such as this do not permit us simply to oppose the operation of the intellect to
the imagination and, at the least, invite us to wonder in what such a pure mind might
consist.5 In Ethics II, for example, Spinoza opposes the Cartesian view according to which
the mind is considered a different substance than the body. The union of the mind and
the body is explained by the fact that the object of the idea constituting the human Mind is
[nothing other than] the Body (E2p13). The human being, therefore, consists of [both] a
Mind and a Body (E2p13c)we are both our minds as well as our bodies, considered
under two different attributes.
There is, then, no pure mind without a body or, in other words, no thinking
without a body. In E2p17s, Spinoza says that the affections of the human Body, whose
ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things And when
the Mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines. But, he continues in the
next paragraph to warn the reader that the imaginations of the Mind, considered in themselves
contain no error, or [in other words] the Mind does not err from the fact that it imagines,
but only insofar as it is considered to lack an idea that excludes the existence of those things
that it imagines to be present to it (emphasis added). The operation of a so-called pure

This suggestion is also made by de Dijns commentary on the TdIE (de Dijn 127).

mindby which ideas are produced not as the result of external bodies interacting with our
own bodies (e.g., in the form of representations of the former) but rather through the minds
own internal determinations (see, e.g., E2p29s)begins when, on the basis of imaginative
perceptions, we are able to form common notions (as Spinoza describes starting at around
E2p37) and thus have not only fortuitous knowledge of individual things but rather
adequate ideas of the properties of things [or] adequate [ideas] of the formal essence of
certain attributes of God (E2p40s2). For example, through my fortuitous experience of
bodies, I notice that extension is common to all bodies and, thus, am able to form a notion
of extension that applies to any individual body I can experience; this notion is, moreover,
adequate, for nothing about the variability of the bodies I experience (e.g., their different
sizes and shapes) affects my idea of extension since it applies commonly to all of them.
Spinoza sets up this transition from imaginative knowing to the common notions
and the second kind of knowledge by noting that falsity consists in the privation of
knowledge which inadequate, or mutilated and confused, ideas involve (E2p35). In one of
his examples provided in the scholium to this proposition, Spinoza offers the familiar case of
error when we see the sun and imagine that it is 200 feet from us while, in actuality, it is in
fact much farther.6 Two points are important here. (1) On the one hand, it is not the
imagination in itself that is in error, for the perception I have of the sun is, in itself, not a
wrong or deceived perception: for we imagine the sun so near not because we do not
know its true distance, but because an affection of our body involves the essence of the sun
insofar as our body is affected by the sun (E2p35s; cf. the next proposition, which states
that inadequate and confused ideas follow with the same necessity as adequate, or clear and
Not insignificantly, the other example of a privation of knowledge leading to the formation of inadequate
ideas that Spinoza provides is the illusion of human freedom owing to the ignorance of the ways in which we
are determinedwhich was the target of his criticism both earlier in the Ethics and which has apparent political
consequences.

distinct ideas and also E4p1 where the same point is repeated). Or, to use another clichd
example, the perception that a pencil inserted into a cup of water is bent is not, in itself, a
false perceptionI err and believe only when I do not investigate further into the
situation and declare that the pencil is bent because it appears to be bent (in other words, the
pencil is not truly bent, but it truly appears so): I grant that no one is deceived insofar
as he perceives, i.e., I grant that the imaginations of the Mind, considered in themselves,
involve no error (E2p49s)
(2) On the other hand, Spinoza is clear that falsity or error occurs in the privation of
knowledge. In other words, imaginative knowing is incomplete and the turn to the common
notions and the second kind of knowing does not surpass imagination [so much as] fulfill
the positivity of what is contained in imagination.7 It is for this reason Spinoza distinguishes
between a good and a bad use of the imagination. Imagination contributes to the minds
progress toward more adequate knowledge insofar as it provides the positive content from
which the common notions are formedand this is the sense of the imagination we get
from the propositions following the Physical Digression in Ethics II.8
Yet when we do not recognize the incompleteness of imaginative knowing, we are
led into error and false ideas. Spinoza often (though not always) makes a terminological
distinction to designate this bad use of the imagination from the prior (proper) use by
distinguishing between the verbs fingere (translated by Curley as to feign) and imaginari
(translated by Curley as to imagine). For example, in the aforementioned scholium to
E2p35, when Spinoza is discussing the tendency of the ignorant to believe in their freedom
from the order of nature, he ridicules those who feign seats and dwelling places of the soul

Sepper 328. Cf. Gilead in Yovel (1994).

Cf. E2p33 where Spinoza argues that there is nothing positive in ideas on account of which they are called
false and E2p35 where he continues to say that falsity cannot consist in an absolute privation.

7
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[qui animae sedes et habitacula fingunt] as the source of free will. In the next example,
however, in speaking of seeing the sun as being 200 feet away, he says that we imagine
[imaginamur] it so.9
This distinction is also evident in the TdIE. After his criticism of the Cartesians and
their method, as Spinoza is preparing to propose his own method, he says that the reason
why Nature is rarely investigated in the proper order, is, first, that men have prejudices
(TdIE 45) and that the first task of method is to distinguish and separate true ideas from
all other perceptions (TdIE 50). No one can deny a true idea once she has it (cf. TdIE
44), and we can only feign with respect to the possible and not the necessary:
if there is a God, or something omniscient, he can feign nothing at all. For as far as We are
concerned, after I know that I exist, I cannot feign either that I exist or that I do not exist;
nor, after I know the nature of God, can I feign either that he exists or that he does not
exist. the same must be understood of the Chimera, whose nature implies that it would be
contradictory for it to exist. (TdIE 54)

It follows, then, that the less the mind understands the greater its power of feigning is;
and the more things it understands, the more that power is diminished. the less men
know Nature, the more easily they can feign many things (TdIE 58). The purpose of
emendation, then, is not only to diminish our tendency merely to feign but also our tendency
(or habit) to assent to those things about which we feign (TdIE 59ff) without adequate
knowledge of those things.
It is clearly this sort of imaginative knowing that Spinoza insists requires emendation.
We might ask, however, what is so bad about having inadequate or false ideas? This is not a
question to which Spinoza devotes much attention in the TdIE but, rather, is given fuller

Cf. TdIE 62: we ought not to fear in any way that we are feigning something, if only we perceive the thing clearly
and distinctly (emphasis added). It is not, in other words, problematic for me to perceive the sun as being a
couple hundred feet away even though I also know that it is, in actuality, much farther than that.

treatment in the Ethics, particularly in Ethics III and IV.10 In the beginning propositions of
Ethics III, Spinoza argues that insofar as the mind strives to persevere in its being and does
so both insofar as it has either adequate or inadequate ideas (E3p9), its ability to persevere in
its being is increased the more it has adequate ideas since the mind is more active the more
it has adequate ideas (E3p1c; cf. E3p3), i.e., the more the mind determines itself and is not
determined by things outside of it (while acknowledging, of course, that the mind can never
solely be self-determiningthis proviso will return below).
Spinoza quickly reminds us, however, that the Mind is necessarily conscious of itself
through the ideas of the Bodys affections (E3p9) (recalling that the mind is the idea of the body by
E2p13 and Spinozas comment in E3p11s that the present existence of our Mind depends
only on this, that the Mind involves the actual existence of the Body [cf. E2p23]). In E4p8
and E3.gen.def, Spinoza argues that the idea of an affect is united to the affect (of which it is
an idea) in the same way that the mind is united to the body: the mind affirms of its body (or
some part of it) a greater or lesser power of acting, which is experienced as joy or sadness.11
Reason, then, remedies the passions by replacing inadequate ideas of the bodys transitions
to greater or lesser states of activity by more adequate ones,12 but these ideas are still
affective: reasons direct engagement with the passions, replacing adequate for inadequate
ideas, means that reason is itself in the realm of emotion.13

As Yovel notes, knowledge is subsidiary to an ethical goal in Spinoza. Its goal is liberation through
enlightenment having true explanatory schemes will be sufficient to eject former superstitious ideas and
produce the liberating ethical effects Spinoza is seeking, if only to a limited extent, without actually fleshing the
idea out in detail (Yovel 110 in Yovel [1994]). These liberating effects, of course, are not to be found in the
treatment of the correction of error in Ethics II but, rather, found in Ethics III-V (cf. Sepper 328-9).
11 Spinoza does, of course, distinguish between the joy experienced by the minds perception of an increase in
the bodys power of acting and the intellectual joy experienced by the minds perception of an increase in its
own ability to act (particularly by the third kind of knowledge in E5p27ff). But in either case the point remains
the samei.e., that ideas are in themselves affective and that joy is not a quality added to an idea from outside
of it.
12 Lloyd 86.
13 Ibid. 95.
10

On the one hand, the idea of an affection of the body is that which is supplied by the
imagination, for it is imagination that provides the knower information about the world
from her particular location in it (see, e.g., E2p25). Granted this is a confused and inadequate
knowledge, but this is not the only function of the imaginationi.e., passively to represent
the state of the body (viz., the degree of its power of acting) as it is determined by things
outside of it. The mind also has the power to summon image-ideas and to grasp what the
arrays and sequences [that are presented to it] have in common. This begins a process that
can rise to the level of understanding all things as caused by God.14 More than motivating
the passage from imaginative knowing to forming the common notions (and hence toward
more adequate forms of knowing, ultimately culminating in the third kind of knowledge),
however, Spinoza also argues that there is an activity of the imagination such that the Mind,
as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the Bodys power of
acting (E3p12) or, conversely, that it tries to exclude those things that decrease the bodys
power of acting (E3p13). The following propositions in Ethics III and, subsequently Ethics
IV, proceed to describe the ways in which the affects can be moderated such that the mind
can be freed from the vacillation that occurs when it is determined solely from the outside on
the one hand, and the illusion that occurs when the mind believes it is purely self-determining
and can feign whatever it wishes to be the case without regard for the actual connection of
things (the perception or knowledge of which cannot be given by the imagination alone).
The emendation of the intellect, then, concerns not only the correction of habits of
thinking that prevent imaginative knowing (where we must all begin) from moving beyond
inadequate, confused ideas based on my particular experience of the world toward ideas
conceived as necessary and universal in the second kind of knowing, but also a
14

Sepper 329.

reconfiguration and reorientation of the affects and not their occlusion. The imagination
continues to play a role in the emended intellect, but one that is more than less active:
thought has become conative and affective. And it is this, rather than the mere presence of
truth, that allows reason to have power over the passions. It is only through being itself
affective that reason can engage with the passions. These dynamic variations in the
minds power of acting allow Spinoza to treat reason as having power to transform human
life precisely through its affectivity.15

While below we will return to the question of how our lives can be transformed
through affectivity, one final point requires clarification from the perspective of the
emendation of the intellecti.e., the difference between active and passive affects. This
distinction is often unclear (for example, in the different definitions of the affects given in
E3d3 and E3.gen.def), especially insofar as the distinction is not simply that of acting and
being acted upon if for no other reason than that Spinoza does not allow us to conceive of
an active subject (as agent) independently of the ways in which it is acted on (as patient) by
its environment and the causal relations in which it is implicated.16 Rather, the important
distinction consists in the degree to which we are able to be the adequate cause of the
affections (see E3d2) by which our power of acting is increased or diminished.
By E3d3, by affect I understand affections of the Body by which the Bodys power
of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of
these affections. Therefore, if we can be the adequate cause of any of these affections, I
understand by the Affect an action; otherwise a passion. In other words, the passions (for
example, joy and sadness as they are initially defined in E3p11) determine us externally to a
greater or lesser power of acting. The problem with the passions for Spinoza is that we are

Lloyd 99, 98. Lloyd notes, however, that such a reconfiguration of the affectswhich Spinoza calls
freedomis not a separation from the determination of nature or from determination as such (see, e.g.,
E4app.32): our ideas can never be wholly adequate all the time.
16 Cf. Schrijvers 65. Schrijvers works out this problem in more detail in this regard: in actual existence, the
adequate actions have always been a function of favorable external influences, even though the latter are
neither the cause normore preciselythe grounds for the former (76).
15

not the adequate cause of these affections (noting, however, that we cannot always be the
adequate cause of our affectionssee note fifteen above). Thus in E4p59 Spinoza says that
to every action to which we are determined from an affect which is a passion, we can be
determined by reason, without that affect or, in other words, that we act by reason.
Yet, as we have seen, we need not act solely by reason. As Spinoza continues in the
demonstration of E4p59,
Joy is bad [only] insofar as it prevents man from being capable of acting (by 4p41 and 4p43),
and so to that extent also, we cannot be determined to any action which we could not do if
we were guided by reason. Insofar as Joy is good, it agrees with reason and is not a
passion except insofar as the mans power of acting is not increased to the point where he conceives
himself and his actions adequately. [translators interpolation; emphasis added]

Two questions present themselves at this point, which will carry us forward into the next
stage of this investigation: (1) what does it mean for one to conceive oneself and ones
actions adequately? and (2) is there the possibility of a transition from a lesser to a greater
power of acting where the stimulation of the imagination leads to a higher performance of
an adequate thought through a purely immanent principlethe innate power of thinking?17
In approaching the first question, it is helpful again to recall E4app.32 and E4a1:
Spinoza denies that freedom consists in the mastery of a subjective freedom over against
nature but, rather, in the understanding that the individual is a part of nature and, therefore,
is never purely self-determining; on the other hand, neither is the individual completely
determined from the outside. Rather, our very power of acting consists precisely in our
connections to other things and the task of the second kind of knowledge is to understand
these connections. Whereas the first kind of knowing presents knowledge of the world
relative to my own position in itand, consequently, can lead me to feign that my position
is in some way privileged over others or, in other words, to privilege the part of nature
viewed from my position in it over the interconnection of nature as a wholewe perceive
17

Shrijvers 77; emphasis added.

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things more adequately (as we move into the second kind of knowing) when we understand
connections and universals.
As far as the affects are concerned, then, while we are always affected by things
outside of us, and so are never the complete or completely adequate cause of our affections,
we are more or less so to the degree that we understand and accept that we are a part of the
whole of nature, whose order we follow. If we understand this clearly and distinctly, that part
of us which is defined by understanding will be entirely satisfied with this, and will strive
to persevere in that satisfaction (E4app.32). But, as we saw above, this striving, while
motivated by reason, is nevertheless affective and can be assisted by the proper use of an
active imagination.
While, then, there is an ethical role for the imagination and its involvement in human
knowledge, and while we will return below to consider how such a (proper) use of
imagination differs from the unprincipled imagination that feigns whatever it wishes
(question (2) above), we are now in a position to broach the second aspect of the problem
outlined at the beginning of this essay: i.e., not only how the imagination and the prejudices
formed by imaginative knowing is an epistemological (and ethical) problem but also a
political one.

Part Two
2.1 The task of politics
Up to this point, we have seen that not only does Spinoza distinguish between a
good and a bad form of imagination, but also that the persistence of (good) imagination
in reason means that ideas are affective (which is registered in the imagination). In particular,
as the mind is able to achieve a greater power of acting the more it understands nature, this

11

increase in power is accompanied by the affect of joy. This is the positive aspect of (active)
imagination that will be important below.
The bad form of imagination, however, is also relevant to the question of politics
insofar as it is precisely due to the inadequacy of imaginative knowledge not supplemented
by reason that results in the prejudices and fantasies that lead to conflict and strife. Balibar
observes that
it is not enough to remark that the theory of the passions in the Ethics rests on the
development of their ambivalence, from the initial division of the conatus to the analysis of
the fluctuatio animi. Again we must ask ourselves what the object of this analysis is. This
object is not the individual but individuality or, better, the form of individuality: how it is
constituted, how it tries to preserve its own form, how it is composed with others according
to relations of agreement and disagreement of activity or passivity.18

For example, Spinoza says in E1app and E2p35s that it is ignorance of the causes by which
we are determined that give rise to the illusion that we are free (in the sense of being outside
the order of nature) and, consequently, set one freedom against another. This ignorance is,
however, the natural condition of mankind due to the
incongruity of the subjective nexus of ideas in my mind with the relevant segment in the
order and connection of ideas [i.e., I initially experience the world imaginatively, which is to
say, by being determined from the outside such that I perceive things as (a) individual or
discrete and existing in (b) time]. Thus error is a mismatch between the order and
connection of ideas in my mind and in the infinite intellect.19

When, therefore, I fail to grasp the particularity of my position in the world and fail to
understand how my nature does and does not agree with other individuals and things, I can
in fact hinder my own power of being and acting (cf. TdIE 7), causing either my own
destruction (or at least suffering) and possibly the destruction of others with whom I fall into
a bellum omnes contra omnes. Thus in the TTP, as Balibar points out, the guiding thread
of the argument [in that work] leads to a definition of a regime by which antagonistic

18
19

Balibar (1994) 26.

Yovel 95 in Yovel (1994).

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passions may be neutralized20particularly the religious passions or any passions

associated with opinions that conflict and thus transform the possibility of mutual love and
cooperation into hate and war. In these cases, the problem of the passions is the conflict of
affections endemic to the life of imagination that is mired in inadequate, fragmentary,
particular knowledgeand thus subject to the passions by external determinationbecause
it does not grasp the order of nature universally or as a whole.
With this critique or genealogy of individuality (constituted as an ideology through
the (bad form of the) imaginative life), Balibar points us to the structuration of affect as not
only an epistemological and ethical endeavor but also a political one. To see why this is so,
however, first we must turn to the general task of politics.

Politics for Spinoza is not the attempt to combine individuals inherently separated by
nature into civil association, nor to separate the individual from the State, nor to separate
the State (i.e., the political) from nature. Just as desire is a part of the general economy of
nature, so too consciousness of desire is not exempt from nature. The individual is an
expression of nature, immediately one in many and also one as many insofar as it is
composed of parts, consists of and is defined by relations with other things, etc (see, for
example, the postulates at the end of the so-called physical digression in Ethics II).
It hardly needs to be repeated that for Spinoza the individual is neither substance nor subject
(neither ousia nor hupokeimenon): the individual is a relation between an outside and an inside
paradoxically constituted by this very relation. This relation constitutes the essence of the
individual, which is now nothing other than its existence-power.21

But, of course, all things in nature are themselves expressions of their own power (i.e.,
articulations of their conative striving). The difference, as noted before, is that humans are
conscious of this striving in such a way that the relations between humans goes under the
20
21

Balibar (1994) 7.
Morfino 118. Cf. Deleuze (1990) 90-5.

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name of politics.22 In other words, although Spinoza goes to great lengths in the first two
books of the Ethics to demonstrate that the individual is not a dominion within a
dominion (E3pref)i.e., that the individual is a part of naturethis fact does not per se give
us an account of politics. The claim that we are political by nature depends both on the
conception of nature provided by Ethics I and II and the additional theory of conative and
affective relations provided in Ethics III. It is only on the basis of both these elements that
politics appears in Ethics IV (see, e.g., E4app7, 9).
Mention of the State first appears in the scholia to E4p37 (although political society
has been alluded to earlier in Ethics IV in, e.g., E4p18s). This proposition comes at the end
of a train of propositions (E4p29-37) the deal with commonality and generally of relations
between singular things: whether and how things can agree in nature and, in particular, when
humans agree (i.e., when they live according to reason by E4p35) or conflict with each other
(i.e., when they are torn by passions by E4p32-34). The political task, as it is presented in
E4p37, is to mitigate conflict and foster agreement: the good which everyone who seeks
virtue wants for himself, he also desires for other men 23 (emphasis added). And as Spinoza
argues in the final proposition to Book IV, the more humans agree and live according to a
common decision, the more free they are.24 At first glance, it seems we are facing a
Rousseauian problem of the coincidence of the individual and general wills. But what does

The strategy of using the conatus as the basis for Spinozas political theory is well-known (viz., TP 3:18);
Giancotti in Yovel (1999) reminds us thatas will become important belowthat the notion of the conatus and
its relation with others (that may increase or diminish an individuals conatus) relies on the theory of the affects.
23 The ellipsis here excludes the last clause, which reads: and this Desire is greater as his [the one who seeks
virtue] knowledge of God is greater. I bracket this aspect of Spinozas claim, since it is not fully treated until
Ethics V.
24 Freedom here does mean a certain independence from extrinsic determinations in a sensei.e., freedom
from the passive affectsbut it does not mean the affirmation of something like autonomous subjectivity.
22

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the free individual will in the State, according to Spinoza? What is the task of politics
according to which the State becomes the instrument of such a general will?25
The rational genesis of the State26 follows directly from E4p35, which states that
only insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, must they always agree in
nature; and, in the demonstration: insofar as men are torn by affects which are passions,
they can be different in nature (by E4p33), and contrary to one another (by E4p34). On the
one hand, this is precisely what Hobbes also noticed, i.e., that it is inadequate knowledge that
leads to vacillation of the mind or the passions that lead to diffidence and war; on the other
hand (also as Hobbes noticed), it is precisely when humans live according to nature, that
is, under the guidance of reason, that they are most able to live together.
It is often overlooked that Hobbes says at two points in the Leviathan that there is a
nobleness of character according to which men do not tread on their neighbors or break
their covenants for pride of not having the need to do so (i.e., I.xiv.31 and I.xv.10); he
laments, however, that the Sovereign is needed due to the dearth of such nobility. This
nobility of character is what Spinoza invokes as being honorable in E4p39s1 and that this
is one way to conceive of the foundations of the State, as he says in E4p37s2:
if men lived according to the guidance of reason, everyone would possess this right of his [to
consider what is good or evil and pursue what one judges to be good] (by E4p35c1) without
any injury to anyone else. But because they are subject to the affects (by E4p4c), which far
surpass mans power, or [sive] virtue (by 4p6), they are often drawn in different directions
(by E4p33) and are contrary to one another (by 4p34), while they require one anothers aid
(by E4p35s). [cf. TP I.5]

Thus it is necessary to give up natural right and to make one another confident that they
will do nothing which could harm others (ibid).27
This idea that the power of the individual is increased by its identification with a larger body is analyzed
according to what Balibar calls transindividuality in Balibar (1997).
26 Here and in what follows concerning the dual genesis of the State, I draw inspiration from Balibars Spinoza
and Politics.
27 While an adjudication between Hobbes and Spinoza is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that,
despite what has been said here, Spinoza also says that the difference between Hobbes and myself [is] that
25

15

This task is accomplished by the State, or the institution of Law (what Hobbes calls
the Sovereign), which appropriates to itself the right everyone has of avenging himself, and
of judging concerning good and evil. In this way Society has the power to prescribe a
common rule of life, to make laws, and to maintain themnot by reason, which cannot restrain
the affects (by E4p17s), but by its threats (E4p37s2; emphasis added) for, as Spinoza had
reminded us in the passage just preceding this text, only a stronger affect can restrain
another affect. The State is both rational and affective, operating under both aspects.
What is the State, according to this schema? For Hobbes, the individuals who
contract to form the State combine to form a larger political body (the Leviathan); in one
sense this is true for Spinoza, but in another, the State has a special relation to the bodies
that compose it. When food enters into composition with my body, there is a sense in which
that food becomes a part of a larger body (i.e., mine); this does not, however, seem
analogous to the individual with respect to the State; neither is the State simply the
aggregation of courts, legislatures, and other political institutions, if for no other reason that
there are structures of State power that are not reducible to these institutions (e.g., what
Althusser calls ideological state apparatuses). Neither is the State merely the aggregation of
all the individual (political) actions performed by its members (if for no other reason that
even the non-action of any particular individual does not thereby reduce the State). In short,
the State is not merely the set of all political institutions.28 Rather, the State is what might be
called, in a special sense, the transcendental structuration of bodies. Transcendental here
does not refer to a Kantian a priori but, rather, expresses the nature of the State as being
I always preserve the natural right in its entirety (Letter 50 to Jelles). There is, in short, no distinction
between nature (viz., the conative striving to exist) and the political (viz., the State and the contract).
It is also worth noting, as Oakeshott points out, that for Hobbes the dearth of nobility as the basis for
association among humans is a dearth of the proper passion.
28 To translate Hobbes terms into Spinozist language, one could say that the Sovereign for Spinoza is a legal
and not a political concept (see below).

16

neither an element in the set of all political institutions nor merely being itself the set of
these. The State is that which must necessarily be referred to by any element in the set of
political elements as the principle of its organization and relation to any other member of
that set. I use the term structuration instead of structure to emphasize the fact that the
State is not a static structure but one that does the work, over time, of structuring: the State is
the structuration according to which nature is productive and expressive. Just as the
principles of movement, composition, and decomposition of bodies is described physically
according to certain laws of motion, so too, in the domain of human action, these principles
are structured by the Law: Society, maintained by laws and the power it has of preserving
itself, is called a State (E4p37s2).
The State, therefore, is not the end of politics, but the constitution of the State is the
(perpetual) task of politics. It is a task because it is itself caught in a certain tension that has
already been expressed in its dual genesis. On the one hand, the political body is simply a
special case of the composition of bodies described in Ethics II and III. What the dual
genesis of the State expresses is not simply a quasi-Stoic rationalistic mastery over affectivity,
but a rationalism of affectivitythe understanding of affectivity and its mobilization for
more rather than less productive action.
Hence the affective genesis of the state parallels the rational genesis:
our fellow man is constituted by a process of imaginary identification, which Spinoza
calls the imitation of the affects (affectum imitatio) (E3p27) [cf. E3p29-35]. This process is at
work both in mutual recognition between individuals and in the formation of the
multitude as an unstable aggregation of individual passions. It follows that men, insofar as
they have the same nature, are not alike! But they can become so. What provokes this
process of identification is an external cause, which is the image of the other as object of the
affects.29

There are two interrelated dualities here. On the one hand, just as, rationally understood,
man is a God to man (E4p35s) and that to man there is nothing more useful than
29

Balibar (1998) 87.

17

man (4p18s), it is also true that other human beings are useful to me by virtue of the fact
that I imagine them as being so (e.g., as being like me with respect to my temperaments,
my projects, colleagues in my endeavors; as being, as the clich goes, my brothers and
sisters; etc). Such affective imitation and identificationby which two different singularities
can combine to form a single (political, social, instrumental, etc) bodyis not opposed to a
rational understanding of the same utility and similarity of nature but, rather, is often
epiphenomenal with it (as well as being more common given the difficulty of such rational
understandingsee E4p37s2, op. cit).
The (dual) genesis of the State does not express a founding moment but, rather,
expresses a continuous immanent production. The State is not merely instituted out of a
prior state of nature and, once established, sets individuals free to operate privately within
the structure it dictates (through laws, police, etc).30 Individuals and State are always mutually
co-implicated. This means, on the one hand, that the structuration of the State is always
affirmed by the actions of individuals (for example, I vote and obey laws), but also that, to
maintain the distinction between the individual and the State, there is also, immanent to the
State itself, a moment of distance from the State (what Critchley has recently called
interstitial distance). In other words, constitutive of politics is an immanent critique of
politics.

It is true that Spinoza does speak in the language of such a prior state of nature in contrast to civil society
towards the end of E4p37s2. It is clear that this passage has been influenced by Spinozas reading of Hobbes,
and sounds almost as a paraphrase of Hobbes, even in the penultimate sentence that reads: from this it is clear
that just and unjust, sin and merit, are extrinsic notions, not attributes that explain the nature of the Mind. Yet
the scholium ends abruptly with the sentence but enough of this. Prior to this passage in the scholia to
E4p37, when Spinoza is speaking in his own language, such a separation between the State and nature does not
seem so relevant or even tenable. la Negri, one could suggest that this particular passage is a remnant of a
shift in Spinozas political thinking from the Theological-Political Treatise to the Ethics wherein a political
physics occupies the central focus of the argument. Social contract theory, which was proposed earlier [in the
TTP] no longer has any place within the definition of progressive antagonism. The physics is substituted
for any voluntaristic hypothesis. If society inheres in being, it is constituted by being in being (Negri (1991)
194).

30

18

This duality in politics is expressed by Negris distinction between power in the sense
of State domination and coercion (potestas, potere) on the one hand and power in the
general sense of the capacity for acting (potentia, potenza) on the other: society constructs
within itself the functions of command that are inseparable from the development of
productive force. [Spinoza thus] poses potentia against potestas.31 Spinoza himself in the TTP
makes this distinction: no one will ever be able to transfer his power [potentia] and
(consequently) his right to another person in such a way that he causes to be a human being;
and there will never be a sovereign power [potestas] that can dispose of everything just as it
pleases (TTP 17.1; cf. 16). The fundamental paradox of politics is that potestas is at once
a moment of potentia32 while at the same time potentia resists the very absolutism of
potestas that is constitutive and necessary for its function. Both aspects of power are
expressive of the nature according to which human beings (consciously) strive to persevere
in their being not only as the beings that they at any particular time arethrough the State
(potestas)but also what they can become by their interaction with other beings (potentia).
The task of politics is to negotiate both aspects of this duality of power.

2.2 The task of political art

We are now in a position to answer the question raised above: namely, is there,
immanent to imaginative knowledge itself, a motivation to recognize the inadequacy of its

Negri (1991) 140.

See, e.g., E3p54: the Mind strives to imagine only those things that posit its power [potentia] of acting. The
individual freely participates in the genesis of the State, since the structuration of the State (according to its
potestas), transcendental to the individual, is also the condition for the full development of the individuals
potentia.

31
32

19

knowledge and thus to move to a better kind of understanding (i.e., reason)?33 And,
moreover, how can this be not only an ethical but also a political task?
There are several initial parallels to Spinozas hierarchy of imagination and reason to
the way in which Plato had divided the soul in the Republic, assigning desire (thymos) its
proper place under the rule of wisdom (sophia). The analogy between Plato and Spinoza on
this point is relevant for art as well. The censorship of art in Republic II and III is performed
on account of arts mimetic nature and its capacity to move the thymotic part of the soul;
while some art is banned from the kallipolis, however, that which is retained is so precisely
on account of its mimetic capacity and its ability to incite the good emotions (e.g., 389b-c).34
Similarly, as Morrison points out, while art is certainly related to the imagination and, when
we imagine, we are for the most part passive and acted upon by that which we imagine (we
are absorbed into the world of the novel or the play, for example), in E4p45c2s, Spinoza
says it is part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself with moderation with
pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music,
sports, the theater, and other things of this kind so that, with the body thus nourished and
capable of more things, the Mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things
[by E2p13s].35 Just as, then, the question for Plato is: can there be a good form of mimesis,
so too one might ask of Spinoza whether there can be a form of art that does not simply
pacify the mind into fanciful flights of the imagination, which would be precisely the

Recalling, however, that although Ethics III tends to speak of the imaginative life as leading to vacillation of
the mind and to passivity and sadness, and that Ethics IV tends to speak of the rational understanding of
affectivity, it is also true that there is a dual genesis of the State and that imagination is not abandoned for reason.
34 Although it is true that mimesis itself is critiqued later in Book X, it is an open question whether or not there
can actually be a good mimesis for Plato (as I have argued affirmatively elsewhere).
35 Cf. Morrison 362.
33

20

definition of ideology.36 What would it mean for art to ennoble the body so the mind itself
can be likewise ennobled?
It is easy to identify the ideological function of art with arts content (which was, for
example, the primary locus of Platos criticisms of art)hence, for example, Stalins
socialist realism turns art into propaganda (and thus the inculcation of prejudice without
the possibility of a critique of the state) insofar as art is forbidden to represent anything but
the strength and solidarity of the proletariat; or, conversely, ACT-UP in the 1980s used
forms of popular media and art to bring to public consciousness the AIDS crisis being
persistently kept invisible by the Reagan administration.37 As Plato had said, however, the
problem is not simply that art represents reality but that the representation is (mis)taken for
being reality. Similarly, if it is arts content that is constitutive of its ideological function, then
whether for good or for ill, art seems merely to be imaginative on the one hand and, on the
other, a content-constitutive aesthetic seems to be purely factical without the capacity to
make any normative claims.
Yet the situation does not seem quite as simple as that. Consider, for example,
difference between Manets The Execution of the Emperor Maximillian (1867) from
Goyas The Third of May (1814). Both, ostensibly, have the same referential content, yet
the political difference resides precisely in the difference in their form and technique.38 Both
paintings are affective and both paintings are political, yet the difference in their affective

Or to put the question yet another way, is there the possibility of what Adorno would call an altered figure
of mimesis according to which art wakens the very possibility of (critical) thought? The similarities with
Adorno will become more evident below.
37 An excellent account of this can be found in Crimp and Rolston (1990); other related uses of political art are
described in Felshin (1995).
38 For one interpretation of this difference, see Nochlin (1971), from which I draw freely.
36

21

and political modalities rests in their forms or, more precisely, in the dialectics between the
form and content of these two paintings.39
For Goya, the execution functions as a sign of a universal moralitywhat is
indicated is the brutality of which human beings are capable, particularly insofar as politics
perpetuates the very brutality it is ostensibly supposed to proscribe. The gradation of light
from the gray background into the clear, bright foreground (especially in the emperors white
shirt, the blood of the corpses, and the barrels of the executioners guns) and various other
formal features lift us from the first-order referential content of the painting (the execution
of the rebels) into the second-order myth40 of a particular political and moral commentary
that transcends the particularity of this event.
The dialectic of form and content is different for Manet, however. Manet the socalled Realist provides us with a snapshot of a definite moment in time and not a
general moral commentary on the inhumanity of mankind. The inhumanity is of this event,
this time, this placea specific politics and not a general morality. As other Realists would
say, the function of art is not by the contemplation of eternal truths but the representation
of this city, this worker, this child that shows us the hidden significance of what is right in
front of our eyes.41 In Manets painting, however, whatever moral and political ideas that can
be drawn from do not occur as a result of Manets own (personal) commentary on the
particular event depicted, nor as a second-order myth operative in the structure of the
painting itself; the politics of Manets painting occur as a result of the viewers reflection
(which itself follows the affective (aesthetic) encounter with the painting).

In other words, it is a mistake to identify arts content with affect and imagination and arts form with reason
and discursivity.
40 Here I draw on Barthes distinction between first- and second-order signs in Barthes (1972).
41 Unfortunately this is not the place to discuss the critical-democratic nature of Realism (as I have attempted
elsewhere).
39

22

In short, the political nature of art lies in the way in which the relation or dialectic
between form and content itself is a mimesis of the duality of the rationality and affectivity
that characterizes human understanding (as described above). In these two examples, it is
not irrelevant that the referential content of the two paintings is a political event, but
political artparticularly insofar as it is a critical and not merely an ideological artcan
neither merely be so on account of its content, nor merely be formally constitutive.
One consequence of this conception of aesthetics is that beauty, as a subjective
quality added to some physical object (the artwork), for example, is no longer constitutive
of the artwork; neither is the point of art simply to be beautiful and thus pleasurable to the
body and the imagination (which is how Spinoza tends explicitly to speak of artsee the
passages cited in Morrison, op. cit). The task of art becomes something much different: to
mobilize the imagination not to rest in its content but to move beyond itself.
But the imagination in itself cannot so refer beyond its own content, since it consists
in the affections of the human Body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us
(E2p17s; emphasis added). Of course, I can, once I have retained several images in memory,
perform variations on those images, but ultimately the imagination remains dependent on
the action of external bodies. The mimesis of art, then, insofar as it presents an object to the
imagination, if it is to mobilize the imagination in a way useful for the understanding instead
of presenting us with the illusion of understanding, must bear as much on the form of art as
much as it does its content. In other words, the effect of art on the imagination is not only
the effect of arts (ideological) content but also of its form, i.e., in general terms, how that
content is presented (qua content), which constitutes the very affectivity of art; and it is
precisely what Spinoza had feared in Ethics III about the vacillations of the mind in
imaginative life that might even provide art with the capacity to move knowing from the

23

imagination beyond itself. This suggestion will be illustrated through a case study of
Rzewskis piano work The People United Will Never Be Defeated: 36 variations on El
Pueblo Unido Jams Ser Vencido!

2.3 The People United

The theme of Rzewskis work is a song composed by Sergio Ortega42 around July
1973 and soon recorded (and often performed) by Quilapaynone of the most wellknown products of the Nueva cancin chilena movement of the 1960s, which began
partially as a response to commercial popular music (to some extent imported from
American pop music) and increasingly as a response to the instability and polarization of
politics during the Allende government (1970-3).43 According to legend, Ortega heard a
street singer outside the Palais de la Moneda chanting El Pueblo Unido Jams Ser
Vencido!, which became the refrain for the song of that title that he would write just
months before the people were defeated when the alliance of various socialist parties that
comprised Unidad Popular that resulted in the failed Allende presidency disintegrated and
led to seventeen years of Pinochets dictatorship (1973-1990).
Ortegas song, nevertheless, became popular not only in Chile but in various places
throughout the world as an expression of utopian socialism. The lyrics to the verses express
their utopianism proudly: de pie, cantar / que vamos a triunfar. / Avanzan ya / banderas de
unidad,44 the song begins. Performances of the song often involve audiences chanting the
refrain (el pueblo unido jams sera vencido) if not singing along the whole time. The

Two other songs, however, are quoted and become material for variation, beginning in the third set of
variations: Eisler-Brechts Solidarity Song and Bandiera Rossa (originally written by Carlo Tuzzi)both
other popular socialist anthems.
43 A good history is Collier and Sater (2004) as well as Fandez (1988).
44 Arise, sing / we are going to win. / Flags of unity / are now advancing (translated by Mitch Abidor).
42

24

refrain, however, is sung more or less as it is chanted insofar as the melody mimics the
scansion of the written and spoken words.45 There is nothing that prevents the song from
becoming, instead of an anthem for the mobilization of socialist action, a nostalgic,
imaginative escape from such action (much in the same way a heartbroken lover can switch
on the radio and sing along with Carrie Underwood).
Just as Ortegas song was an attempt at the representation of politics in art, so too
Rzewski attempts a representation of that (political) representation and its historye.g., the
fall of the Allende government and the worldwide fate of other socialist movements in the
years since. This particular work is no different than many others of this period and earlier
works by Rzewski. As early as his senior thesis at Harvard (1958), he would refer to tonality
as a manifestation of the bourgeois order.46 It was at Harvard that Rzewski would explore
nondevelopmental forms, ally himself with the avant-garde (himself becoming a prominent
performer of avant-garde music in Europe and an important interpret of Cage, Wolff, and
Stockhausen), and wed his art to the task of politics. As he would write in 1968 in a sort of
manifesto entitled Commandments to Myself: Dont construct time: interpret the
moment / / Dont play possibilities: do the necessary / / Make music with whatever
means are available.47 The compositions of this period cannot resist comparison to Cage
who himself would blur the distinction between music and noise, performance and the
everyday, art and nature. Rzewskis 1969 work Les Moutons de Panurge consisted of a 65note melody that was to be played by a group of performers according to the formula {note
1, notes 1-2, notes 1-3, notes 1-65, notes 2-65, note 65}. Yet within this seemingly

Not irrelevantly, the melody is a Romantic melody that, as many have noted, bears significant structural
similarities to the famous final caprice (Op. 1) of Paganini that was the subject of several other great Romantic
works.
46 Quoted in Pollack (1992) 379.
47 Quoted in ibid. 377.
45

25

logical order, performers were expected spontaneously to improvise, to lose track of where
they were, and otherwise to move from unity to disorder.
The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975) continues to explore this
boundary between unity and disorder.48 The thirty-six variations are grouped into six sets of
six variations, with each set being defined by an overall principle of variation; there is also a
looser association between the corresponding variations of each set (i.e., the first variation of
each set, the second variation of each set, etc, with the most important of these associations
being that the sixth variation of each set (i.e., variations 6, 12, 18, 24, 29, and 36) is itself
composed of six parts: each of these parts summarizes or reviews the previous five
variations and then introduces its own material and/or transitional material. The last set of
variations (31-36) itself consists of this structure. Variation 31, in four-bar units, draws
together elements of the first variation of each of the preceding sets (i.e., variations 1, 7, 13,
19, and 25); variation 32 does the same for the second variation of each set, etc. This
sequence culminates in the final variation (36), which is a summary of the preceding five
variations, which are themselves a summary of the preceding five sets of variations.
Theme

1
7
13
19
25
31

2
8
14
20
26
32

3
9
15
21
27
33

4
10
16
22
28
34

5
11
17
23
29
35

6
12
18
24
30
36

Theme'

Figure 1
Thus, elements of each variation are now compressed into a fraction of a bar49 and what
would appear to have been merely a summary and collection of the preceding elements
actually results, through this repetition, in a conclusion that is not conclusive but full of
48
49

The folllowing analysis is adapted and expanded from Wolffs.

Wolff, quoted in Pollack (1992) 384.

26

tensions, conflicts, ambiguities, and references that are cross-cutting, recursive, and
redundant such that a repetition (summary, review) and an original becomes
indistinguishable.50 In short, variation thirty-six is in important ways overdetermined.
The individual variations themselves, however, are full of these same tensions and
ambiguities, despite what appears to be a rigorous and tyrannical logic. The piece exhibits
none of the cold academicism (Tchaikovskys words) of Brahms, who is generally
considered to be one of the great masters of form. At first glance, the piece appears to be
classical. The presence of Bach is everywhere, including a quotation of the first prelude of
the first part of the Well-Tempered Clavier in the second half of variation 28 and the general
techniques of contrapunctal and chromatic sequencing that occurs throughout the work.51
Architecturally, the variations work their way around the circle of fifths in the outer two sets
of variations (while remaining anchored in the original key of Dm in the middle two sets).
Yet in addition to the complication of original and repetition outlined above,
individual moments within the piece, which result from the logic of its form, stand at the
edge of that logic precisely on account of that logic. For example, variation 5 begins by an
abrupt rhythmic and tonal break from the previous passage in variation 4, marked especially
by the articulation of the first chord, which is indicated in the score as a swift, sudden
grabbing motion in which not all of the written notes are necessarily played and some other
Thus Pollack calls the eventual culmination of this (perhaps infinitely) com-plicated structure one of the
most Dostoievskian moments in American music [i.e.,] the composer seemed poised at the edge of madness
(Pollack (1992) 384).
Unfortunately, the figure above does not completely capture the complex relations given by the
structure described above, if for no other reason that it does not embody the peculiar recursivity of variation
36it refers not only to variation thirty-one, which refers to variation one, but also to variation six, which also
refers to variation one; variation one itself refers to the original theme. Also see below.
51 Although I have invoked Bach here, earlier I claimed the work appears classical. Although it is actually
neither, what makes the work more classical than Baroque is the fact that the development of theme motives
does not become prevalent until Beethoven (for a good, although extremely dated, history of variation, see
Nelson); it would not be until the free variation of the twentieth century that radical alterations in the harmonic
and structural elements would be exploited in variation (which is why the piece is also not classical, since in
classical variationBrahms includedmelodic and structural variation are inversely proportional).
50

27

notes may be accidentally struck; a little like picking berries, or fruit. In addition, the pedal
marking indicates that what is to be caught are not the notes of the chord itself but the
harmonics of the chord (i.e., the vibration of the strings near the ones struck by the
hammers). The statement here is not only at the edge of audibility but also one of tonal
ambiguity (so too, in a different way, in variation 10s clusters and glissandi in contrast, e.g.,
to the semitone voice leading into the fifths of variation 19).
Neither does Rzewski allow us to forget the boundary between music and sound or,
more generally, the materiality of art. In variation 11 (as well as in the appropriate places later
when this material is reviewed) the performer is instructed to slam the keyboard lid at one
point and also to emit a short vocal cry as well as to whistle (at certain pitches) such that the
very body of the performer becomes indistinguishable from the music and the interior of the
performer (normally construed as his/her mind) is externalized not only in the pressing of
the keys but also in the movement of his/her breath into a sound that itself states the theme
being played.52
It is also worth noting that the piece in its entirety runs for about an hourit is not
easily consumable and requires considerable at-tension. In words that echo the famous
closing line of Spinozas Ethics, Rzewski says the extended length of the composition may
be an allusion to the idea that the unification of people is a long story and that nothing
worth winning is acquired without effort.53

Though this sounds like an innocuous element, notice that romantics such as Hamelin display considerable
hesitation to follow these directions in the score. When asked before one performance whether he would
indeed whistle during the piece, Hamelin smiled demurely, almost embarrassedly, and said maybe. Rzewski
himself has been called a neo-romantic, although in at least one sense, his Cagean influences belie that
particular appellation. Rzewski calls attention to the very materiality and embodiment of artsomething that
continues to be resisted by the various forms of romanticism or what Marcuse calls affirmative art. During
these variations we are never to forget that the performance is a event occurring here, now, not simply through
the magical spirit of the artist but the body of the per-form-er that presents art as materiali.e., as futural
possibility.
53 Sleeve notes to the composers own recording of his piano works from 1975-1999 on Nonesuch.
52

28

After the last variation (and an optional cadenza), the piece restates the original
theme (not, although, verbatim as in the beginning). Yet what has happened between the
original statement of the theme and its restatement? Have we ever really left the theme (see
note forty-six and below)? The attentive listener, even without a technical understanding of
the variations undergone, is able to recognize the theme in each of its variations; yet the
theme does not function as an original in any straightforward sense, for each variation
explores the possibilities and ambiguities at the boundaries of the original statement even as
the variations progress according to a determinate logic. It is the logic that leads the listener
to experience conflict and tension, always confronting possibilitieswhat if? or where?
In other words, the structure of the piece is not experienced in its rigorous
determinismthe determinism of the structure opens an indetermination. The listener of
the variations is presented with a series of questions as the variations are recapitulated not
only once in the sixth variation of each set, but also in the sixth set of variations that is a
quadruple repetitiona repetition of the theme (as varied) is repeated in the sixth variation
of the initial five sets, which is repeated as an element in the sixth set of variations, which is
repeated again in the sixth variation of the sixth set (i.e., variation thirty-six).
Theme

31

36
Figure 2

Theme'

Each time, then, the listener is forced to ask what is happening? is it a recurrence of the
same? what has happened? is it happening? But here we do not have merely the nesting of
quotations (quotations of quotations)as in genetics, reproductions are never exact replicas.

29

Something new happens with every repetition such that a trace of the past remains, but it is
that relation to the past that constitutes a new present as both unique in itself but also (quasi)determined by the past which it no longer is. The variation form thus is not merely a
structure of repetitions, but the immanent reconfiguration of relations that indicate the
possibility of relations yet unarticulated that are opened within the zones of indetermination
not only in certain moments but also within the very structure of the work itself. It is by
pulling us into these zones of indetermination (Deleuzes term) that the work is political
in the sense of bringing us into this very sensibility that is the essence of politics.
It is commonly observed that the emotional narrative of the piece represents the
history of the revolutionary spirit of the original songfrustration, anger, hope, etc. Yet the
repetition of the theme at the end of the piece is not like what is usually the monotonous
redundancy of the refrain and even of the verses in Ortegas song that allow the listener
hypnotically to be enraptured by its emotional expression (e.g., in typical performances of
the song). If the repetition of the theme in Rzewskis piece is a restatement, it is not the
restatement of something like a triumphant vision, but rather a restatement of possibilitynot
simply an fantastical hope for an indefinite future or of something just different than the
given, but by the structuration of affectivity in such a way that has made politics possible
instead of a mere (imaginary, ideological) representation of a political vision or of political
action.54

In asking what is to be done? in a Spinozist critique of ideology, Sharp suggests

that a Spinozist does not aim to leave imagination behind, as if that were possible, but to
As in the current clich that tells us to never forget, the series of repetitions and recapitulations in
Rzewskis variations never allow the listener to forget what has come before. Never to forget, for example, that
the people were defeated and the task of politics must be to recover this defeatthe perennial burden of
Marxism.

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take it up in a new way, to know and apprehend the same things differently, as one becomes
able to act more effectively in the world.55 Of course, one is able to act more effectively the
more adequately one understands it. Arts solution to the problem of ideology, whether in
terms of form or content, is the dialectic of form and content (as described above) that does
not allow the imagination to remain determined by the artwork into a particular (passive)
affect but, rather, motivates the passage from a passive imagination to an active
imagination informed by a reflective reason.
The positive role of the imagination, then, in the (re-)structuration of the affects that
defines the task of politics (as described above as the continuous production of the State
precisely by the immanent operation of its critique) also addresses the problem mentioned at
the start of this essayi.e., how are we do deal with those who seem not to be amenable to
the emendation of the intellect and who cling to their prejudices? Aside from solutions akin
to liberal toleration (as commonly read in the TTP), Spinoza suggests a much more radical
answer:
a Spinozist analysis of ideal vitality forces one to consider what might be involved in the task
of developing a counter-force to dissolve and break up an oppressive network of ideas. One
must aim not only to demystify them through understanding their structural character [viz.,
rationally], but also to bring to life alternatives to displace them, force them out of existence,
or weaken them.56

If the power of prejudice rests in its affective power, then the disruption of prejudice
similarly requires (as a necessary if not sufficient condition) a reconfiguration of the affects.
Insofar as ethics, then, demands adequate knowledge, so correlatively politics
demands critical art. If what is imagined, precisely because the imagination relies on what is
external to itself, is represented according to the form of the presented object, Rzewskis
variations challenge the very possibility of representation by denying the imagination the
Sharp 749. Sharp does not make the aesthetic suggestion I am making here, but they do not seem to be
incompatible with the tenor of her essay.
56 Ibid. 752. Cf. E4p7 where Spinoza says that only an (stronger) affect can destroy an affect.
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ability simply to identify with a determinate content.57 We cannot remain in the sufficiency of
the image, for the image itself exhibits fundamental ambiguity and tension (not forgetting
that the presentation of the content is extremely rigorous). The imagination is forbidden
from closing into itselfthe artwork does not permit us to be absorbed into it insofar as it is
consistently calling into question its own presence (e.g., what is being presented to us at any
particular momentan original, copy, or repetition, etc). We are thus denied any actual
identification (e.g., with the people united)which would merely serve the operations of
prejudice and ideologybut directed towards possibility (viz., the possibility of a people
united). The People United does not allow us to imagine that something (viz., politics)
has happened; rather, the artwork charges us to go onto make politics happen and to
participate in the perpetual task of politics.
The people united have been defeated but, Rzewski says (in a way Ortega could not),
the people united will never be defeated. The political task is the construction of a people
(multitude, etc), conscious of itself as a people (according to the old Marxist formula,
along with the attendant notions of State critique). Yet such consciousness does not
precludeand even requiresthe imaginative act of identification by which individuals
imagine themselves as actively constitutive and constituting elements of a political body.
Such is the task of political art.
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