Spinoza for Our Time

Pushing the Boundaries of Amnesia and Myopia: A Critical Review of the Literature on Identity in Management and Organization Studies

“…However, we do intersperse our analysis with contemporary examples of past and present literature partly to endorse the breach of arbitrary historical boundaries that are indispensable to writing a history of the present (Foucault ). In addition, our approach accepts Spinoza's invitation to all ‘in the social, to really be there ’ (Negri , p. 95, our emphasis), where this implies a fully embodied and engaged presence, not a detached and narrow, cognitively controlled observation from a ‘safe distance’. This has the methodological implication that we be passionately and bodily engaged with our research subject(s) whether texts or other bodies.…”

“…This challenge embraces a posthumanist feminist ethics that is concerned to care for and engage with the lived experience of the other, however different (Diprose , ; Pullen and Rhodes ; Ziarek ). One of our central arguments has been that the preoccupation with identity renders this ethics of engagement with difference problematic, since identity is often threatened by ‘the mere presence of the other’ (Ziarek , p. 74), but this could be otherwise, and partly for this reason, it is necessary to ground ‘the ethical (and the ethico‐political in particular) in bodies, in the materiality of desire’ (Negri , p. 17).…”

Judgment beyond Jurisdiction: Spinoza’s “Freedom to philosophize” and the Politics of Immunity

“…Adamant that "the political thought of Spinoza is to be found in his ontology," Negri holds that "in Spinoza the political is … a potency exceeding all measure … an accumulation not of substantial (individual) segments but of modal (singular) potencies." 66 However, as critics note, Negri's insistence on the ontological and absolute character of this surplus potency tends to absolve it from any essential relation to the governmental forms of capture, control, and regulation that are said to be its (illusory?) products.…”

Power ≠ Power: Against the Mix-Up of Nietzsche and Spinoza

“…Without developing capacities of anticipation and hope, emancipatory social movements can neither emerge nor maintain themselves. 5 Negri captures this dimension when he speaks of a “teleology of praxis” from below, oriented toward the construction of the common (2013: 8, 78–79).…”

“…The different usage in regard to potestas can in turn be explained by an ambiguity of social and political reality itself: the question of whether or to what extent a state power is actually backed by the potentia of the many depends on the concrete conjuncture and cannot be decided beforehand. Moreover, Negri later distanced himself from the assumption of an “absolute antagonism” and argued that potentia and potestas are characterized not by an “ontological dualism” but rather by both an interaction and a dissociation, so that potentia can work both within and against potestas (2013: 13, 25).…”