NATURE’S METABOLISM: ON EATING IN DERRIDA, AGAMBEN, AND SPINOZA by JULIE R. KLEIN Villanova University

ABSTRACT This article studies a series of provocative references to Spinoza by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. For both contemporary philosophers, the context is discussions of eating, a subject matter that turns out to involve such central issues as subjectivity, nature, ethics, and teleology. Each situates Spinoza in a counter-history of philosophy and suggests that Spinoza constitutes an important resource for contemporary re ections. Through an analysis of the three philosophers’ texts about eating, nutrition, and being metabolized, I argue that Spinoza’s nonteleological, nonhumanistic conception of nature remains a radical possibility, even in the face of contemporary attempts to think outside the canonical discourses of transcendental subjectivity, technological reason, and teleological ethics. Spinoza’s position is, in the end, more uncompromising than that of Derrida or Agamben.

Questions of the human and the animal and their relation are increasingly occupying contemporary Continental philosophy. These questions, which often begin from the end of the discourse of transcendental subjectivity, in turn open into the broader Ž eld of the philosophy of nature. In this essay I explore the invocation of Spinoza by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben in connection with inquiries into nature and the ethical community of the living beyond or after the subject. Derrida and Agamben concur in placing Spinoza in a noncanonical, or counter, history of philosophy. For Derrida, Spinoza’s philosophy lies outside the horizons of teleology and representation, and it proceeds without the characteristically modern structures of separation, mastery, and production. For Agamben, Spinoza’s philosophy is a discourse entirely without transcendence, either of the divine or the human, and a way of thinking without an ontological distinction between activity and passivity. Spinozism stands, then, as an invitation to think outside teleology, outside substance dualism and its accompanying representational epistemology, and beyond the opposition of freedom and necessity, Research in Phenomenology, 33 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2003

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that is, freedom as a disembodied freedom from, or transcendence beyond, a mute or reductively deterministic nature. As such, Spinoza’s thought puts in question the diVerences and boundaries between human and other beings. Taking up the tantalizing hints oVered by Derrida and Agamben, I consider Spinoza’s account of human beings and nature, then turn to the ethical and political implications of his account. Derrida and Agamben, respectively, converge with and diverge from Spinoza at important junctures, sometimes echoing, sometimes recoiling from his thought. To engage these complex relations, I begin from Derrida’s and Agamben’s references to Spinoza in the context of meditations on eating and nutrition. Spinoza, too, accorded eating a distinctive place in his philosophy, particularly with respect to issues of teleology and individuation. All three thinkers Ž nd in eating the intersection of themes in the philosophy of nature, ethics, and politics. Derrida has more than once underscored Spinoza’s extracanonical status and his importance.1 In the interview with Jean-Luc Nancy published as “‘Eating Well,’ or, The Calculation of the Subject,” Derrida introduces Spinoza as an unthought alternative to the classically modern motifs of representation, Ž nality, and instrumental rationality. Spinozism is not, we might say a propos of a text on eating, incorporated in the epoch of the subject or the history of metaphysics, and thus stands outside of, or as an other to, Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics. Stressing Heidegger’s avoidance of Spinoza, Derrida comments: the foreclosure of Spinoza seems to me to be signiŽ cant. Here is a great rationalism that does not rest on the principle of reason (inasmuch as in Leibniz this principle privileges both the Ž nal cause and representation). Spinoza’s substantialist rationalism is a radical critique of both Ž nalism and the (Cartesian) representative determination of the idea; it is not a metaphysics of the cogito or of absolute subjectivity. The import of this foreclosure is all the greater and more signiŽ cant in that the epoch of subjectivity determined by Heidegger is also the epoch of the rationality or the techno-scientiŽ c rationalism of modern metaphysics. (EW, 265)

Thinking at the end of metaphysics, Derrida argues that we do not yet know how to “cut up” the subject, that is, how to de-privilege it, to ingest, digest, and metabolize it for thinking (EW, 285). Eating thus thematizes questions of what is excluded from the subject, what sustains the subject, and what undoes the subject. From this perspective, the inquiry extends beyond issues of linguistic or cultural community and into the heterogeneous multiplicity of living beings. Derrida’s

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emphasis on the nonsubjective character of Spinozism highlights an important theme, but his depiction of Spinozism as a “substantialist rationalism” is inapt. Nature, for Spinoza, is an inŽ nite, nontotalizable, nonteleological  ux of singularities; in this respect, it is neither precisely “one,” nor is it intrinsically ordered to a single end. It is thus not appropriately deŽ ned as substantialist or rationalist in the seventeenth century or subsequent senses of these terms. If seventeenth century mechanism and its reduction of fæsiw to mute extension had to be countered by Romanticism, Spinoza stands outside this lineage, and provocatively so. Nevertheless, Derrida’s articulation of diVerence, multiplicity, and heterogeneity manifests a genuine kinship with Spinoza. As will become clear, however, Derrida’s position on teleology is ambivalent, and this ambivalence diVerentiates him from Spinoza. Agamben’s engagement with Spinoza points to a political and ethical as well as metaphysical inheritance. In “Absolute Immanence,”2 Agamben invokes Spinoza as a pivotal Ž gure in the genealogy of immanence as a way of thinking without dualisms, Ž nality, or transcendence. “Absolute Immanence” is primarily a re ection on Deleuze’s late essay “Immanence: une vie . . .,” which theorizes “life” as impersonal, indeŽ nite, and hence non- or pre-subjective perdurance, and on the later Foucault’s notion of life as errancy, that is, of life as nonteleological occurrence with no grounding in consciousness or truth.3 Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism emerges in Agamben’s reading as a Spinozan articulation of nonrepresentational, nonteleological contemplation, a thought without subjects and objects, aims and goals, method and results. Agamben juxtaposes Foucault’s critique of biopower to Deleuze’s evocations of the elemental, nonrational, and nonlinguistic beatitude of bodies. As distinct from Deleuzian “life,” Foucault’s “life” reopens the question of body as it is constituted as an object of power, and so proposes to clarify the political genealogy of the ontological erasure of body in favor of rationality. Thought together, Deleuze and Foucault broach a way of thinking life that “does not consist only in its confrontation with death” (AI, 238). “Absolute Immanence” manifests the same Benjaminian impulse that animates Homo Sacer.4 Mindful of Benjamin’s caution that the theologico-political history of the “sanctity of life” is both recent and obscure,5 Agamben locates the question of life and living in multiple and intersecting discourses. To the extent that “life” is intertwined with the history of power, whether as law or in nonjuridical forms, this intertwining demands a rethinking of the material beyond mere or mute corporeality. The concluding lines of “Absolute Immanence” emphasize just this shift:

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Life as contemplation without knowledge will have a precise correlate in thought that has freed itself of all cognition and intentionality. The˜ria and the contemplative life, which the philosophical tradition has identiŽ ed as its highest goal for centuries, will have to be dislocated onto a new plane of immanence. It is not certain that, in the process, political philosophy and epistemology will be able to maintain their present physiognomy and diVerence with respect to ontology. Today, blessed life lies on the same terrain as the biological body of the West. (AI, 239)

Where for Derrida the genealogy of rational animal is thought primarily in dialogue with the history of metaphysics and theology—this is presumably partly why Agamben views Derrida as a philosopher of transcendence (AI, 239)—Agamben begins to shift the discourse of bodies and corporeal perdurance or immersion toward a more richly political, and less narrowly ontological, sense of materiality. 6 As Spinoza remarks, “no one has yet determined what [a] Body can do.”7 Like Derrida, Agamben is led to questions of eating—nutrition, to be precise—in rethinking life and the living. In “Absolute Immanence,” Agamben develops a discourse of immanent life in terms of the Aristotelian threptike psych, and he argues that both Deleuze and Spinoza bring “life” back to the “lower faculty” of nutrition rather than the higher faculty of speech and reason. Alimentation becomes not merely the matrix, but the “enigmatic cipher of bare biological life as such” (AI, 230). Further, interpreting nutrition in terms of nourishment, fermentation, and coagulation, Agamben uses this linguistic Ž eld to formulate an account of immanent potentiality, a letting “a being reach the state toward which it strives.” According to Agamben, the coincidence of activity and passivity in fermentation, together with the absence of an external telos, exemplify immanence. To the extent that the pair active-passive dominates Agamben’s idea of immanence, his reading has a decidedly Schellingian feel. For Spinoza, in contrast, activity and passivity are deŽ ned primarily in terms of connection and involvement. In Agamben’s reading, moreover, the Hegelian motif of the coincidence of opposites in “indistinction” (AI, 234) or “indiscernability”8 displaces the more authentically Spinozistic sense of involvement, according to which fermentation would be conceived as an environmental, interactive occurrence. Derrida, too, takes up the question of boundaries and demarcation with regard to nutrition. His emphasis on multiplicity and complication more closely echoes Spinoza than does Agamben’s emphasis on “life as such” and indiscernability. Speaking of the boundary between the human and the animal, Derrida situates the inquiry within the semantics of treph˜, troph, and trophos, noting that “Whatever I say

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is designed, certainly, not to eVace the limit, but to multiply its Ž gures, to complicate, thicken, delinearize, fold, and divide the line precisely by making it increase and multiply. Moreover, the supposed Ž rst or literal sense of treph˜ is just that: transform by thickening, for example, in curdling milk.”9 What follows, then, is an exploration of the philosophy of eating in Derrida, Agamben, and Spinoza according to the principal themes of teleology, diVerence, and individuation. I begin with a brief account of the extracanonical status and content of Spinoza’s philosophy, then turn to a series of texts about eating, nutrition, and being metabolized. Hermeneutics and Heterodoxy Two hermeneutical problems present themselves at the outset of this inquiry. First, inasmuch as contemporary thinkers are oriented by the project of overcoming the post-Kantian, post-Hegelian language of transcendental subjectivity, our discourse has an uneasy, potentially anachronistic, relation to pre-Kantian and pre-modern thinkers. Even the Cartesian subject is not equivalent to its post-Kantian successors. More radically, as a thinking that eschews ontologically discrete, volitionally active subjects, Spinozism is not assimilable to any philosophy of the subject, even a seventeenth-century one, and so cannot be interpreted adequately within a horizon determined by subjectivity. Similarly, the German Idealists’ appropriation of Spinoza, which attempts to harmonize his philosophy with subjective freedom and teleology, inscribes him within a decidedly alien horizon. To the extent that such received readings orient our approach to Spinoza, his thought will remain obscure. But the problems are not limited to modern attempts to appropriate Spinoza. Spinoza’s rejection of volition and teleology separates him from the pre-modern Latin Aristotelians no less than the German Idealists. This is the origin of the second hermeneutical problem. In presenting Spinoza as a materialist and in terms of immanence, I interpret his philosophy in the context of Averroistic strains in medieval Jewish and Islamic Aristotelian philosophy. Targeted in the Condemnation of 1277 and subsequent controversies, Averroistic Aristotelianism was excluded from the Latin canon and curriculum. The texts were, however, read continuously (often in Hebrew) by Jewish thinkers, including Spinoza, for whom its most “heterodox” aspects were suggestive and fruitful. Where canonical Latin Aristotelianisms, such as that of

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Thomas Aquinas, aYrm divine transcendence, a single and unifying telos, and the presence and persistence of an individuated, immaterial, rational soul, Averroistic interpreters oVer a more naturalistic, materialistic, and nonhierarchical—i.e., immanent—version of Aristotelian philosophy. Further, the prevailing tenor in this Aristotelian tradition is nominalist, not realist, with regard to both language and ontology. 10 Such Aristotelianism informs Spinoza’s critique of Latin Scholasticism and Descartes, and it is the matrix for Spinoza’s original philosophical ideas. It shapes Spinoza’s formula “Deus, sive Natura,” his account of ethical and social life as structured by convention rather than natural law, his claim for the corporeal origin of all human knowing, and his idea of the eternity of the mind.11 A radical voice in this non-Latin Aristotelian tradition, Spinoza surpasses its limits. To incorporate Spinoza without assimilating him to dominant paradigms thus involves engaging the doubly marginalized and remote corpus of non-Christian Aristotelianism, the exclusion of which shapes the genealogy of the modern subject. To the extent that Spinoza’s philosophy is a real possibility for us only as a Ž gure in genealogies and counter-histories of philosophy, the question of philosophy’s postmodernity needs to be raised in tandem with its pre-modernity, with those ways of thinking that exceed the horizons of 1277 and related events. As Derrida emphasizes, Spinoza’s philosophy lies outside the prevailing spirit of the early modern canon. It is a philosophy that comes from elsewhere, an “other” to conventional understandings, and thus a way of thinking that is not consumed at the “end” of metaphysics. On Agamben’s account, Spinoza is the ancestor of immanence in contemporary Continental philosophy, the alternative to Kant and the post-Kantian problematics of subjectivity, freedom, and representation. One path to a non-Kantian mode of philosophizing is to retrieve Spinoza, to make him legible in our context by rethinking the diVerent histories of philosophy, and so to investigate what may be called a non-ontological ethics and politics, an ethics that is not a metaphysics of morals. Each part of the Ethics manifests the unorthodox, even heretical, and hence —for us—most fecund character of Spinoza’s philosophy.12 The central themes of the Ž rst three parts of the Ethics provide the setting for the present inquiry; I take up portions of the Ž fth part in the conclusion of this essay. From the outset, the Ethics presents nature as inŽ nite and inŽ nitely varying. The ideas of the will and teleology,

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in turn, are analyzed as Ž gments of the imagination. In the Ž rst part of the Ethics, Spinoza systematically desacralizes God, thus paving the way to the (in)famous expression “Deus, sive Natura” (E4Pref ). Successive arguments eliminate the plausibility of creation and eschatology, strip away divine volition in favor of the claim that freedom and necessity coincide as actuality, and expunge every form of transcendence in favor of immanence. For Spinoza, the terms substance, God, and Nature are synonymous names for inŽ nite, necessary existing. Spinoza understands inŽ nity in the literal sense of being un- or not limited, and this limitlessness means that there is nothing outside of substance that could cause, constrain, or aVect substance. The Appendix to Ethics 1 summarizes these results concisely. In typical fashion, Spinoza appropriates traditional theological language in order to deploy it to antitheological ends. Spinoza writes: I have explained God’s nature and properties: that he exists necessarily; that he is unique; that he is and acts from the necessity alone of his nature; that (and how) he is the free cause of all things; that all things are in God and so depend on him that without him they can neither be nor be conceived; and Ž nally, that all things have been predetermined by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute good pleasure, but from God’s absolute nature, or inŽ nite power. (E1app)

Spinoza depicts the idea of the will as an autonomous or self-causing power as a mistake stemming from the universal human experiences of ignorance, selŽ sh appetite, and consciousness. Rather than possessing an “absolute, or free, will,” the human mind is “determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to inŽ nity” (E2p48). To act, i.e., to aVect something (else), it is necessary to have been aVected (acted on). The divine will is simply a projection or magniŽ cation of human volition, an attribution of personality and abstract possibility that mystiŽ es nature’s actual necessity. Teleology, likewise, is simply an anthropomorphic, anthropocentric projection, the fantasy of power and the phantasmagorical justiŽ cation thereof. With characteristically pungent rhetoric, Spinoza terms the divine will the “sanctuary of ignorance.” Tempting as it is to call Spinozism a monism on the basis of texts like this one, the appellation is misleading. In addition to uncharitably entangling Spinoza in the well-known problems of the one and the many, such an approach obscures several salient aspects of his thinking. First, the unlimited character of substance entails that sub-

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stance is never present as a whole. With neither beginning nor end, substance lacks the boundaries that would delimit a discrete object. In this respect, substance cannot be self-identical, and substance is not describable as “one.” More radically still, Spinoza’s substance is nothing other than, or beyond, its modes. In Ethics 1, Spinoza reinterprets the causal dependence of “all things” on God in terms of nonhierarchical immanence. In contrast to medieval emanationist and creationist cosmologies, which entail hierarchical ordering, and seventeenth-century mechanistic models, which presume really distinct entities that can serve as discrete causes and eVects, Spinoza conceptualizes causation in terms of involvement. Involvement is essentially reciprocal implication: “The knowledge of an eVect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause” (E1a4). As a result, “God must be called the cause of all things in the same sense in which he is called the cause of himself,” and particular things are nothing but “modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way” (E1p25c). Spinoza thus juxtaposes the absolute inŽ nity of Nature with the expression or appearance of Nature as determinate or singular modes. God is nothing other, Spinoza argues, than the inŽ nite expression of modes; similarly, modes are nothing other than God or Substance. Expression is neither a  owing outward nor a projection elsewhere, for there is nothing but nature. Natura naturans, nature as absolutely unlimited, and natura naturata, nature in its modal determinations, are the same.13 Perhaps the best model for understanding this aspect of Spinoza’s thought is Aristotle’s account of the eternity of motion. 14 What Spinoza terms the “eZux” of substance and modes15 resembles the Aristotelian eternity of motion: what is eternal is the perpetual character of the motion or  ow, not the perdurance of any particular mode or conŽ guration of modes. Motion neither begins nor ends, but singular modes or things come to be and pass away in an eternal universe. The cyclical character of the motion captures the way in which coming to be and passing away neither come to be nor pass away. In Spinozistic terms, nature’s inŽ nite actuality is expressed in the unceasing or perpetual expression of its power in and as an inŽ nity of modes (E1p16). Similarly, just as Aristotle’s nonlinear concept of time is linked to a nonmechanistic understanding of causation, Spinoza’s aYnity with eternal motion is manifest in a rejection of mechanistic causation as well. Involvere, the central term in Spinoza’s causal language, has the root volvo, to roll or turn; it is a turning and rolling in, a joining and connecting related to terms such as implicare and explicare, folding in and

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folding out.16 This very rolling-in renders individuation nonontological; where interaction implies the conjunction of discrete or separate entities, involvement problematizes discreteness and separation. As developed in the Ethics, causal involvement is “order and connection” (E2p7), not merely succession or linear deductive implication. Understood as an “inŽ nite connection of causes” (E5p6), nature is an unlimited set of  uidly conŽ gured and conŽ guring events. Etienne Balibar has introduced the term “modulation” to express the involved character of Spinoza’s causal networks: “‘To cause’ is an operation by which something modiŽ es or modulates the way something else operates (or produces its eVects). Such an operation is of course modiŽ ed or modulated, ad inŽnitum.”17 The nonmechanistic movements of eZux and modulation replace stability in Spinoza’s philosophy, with the result that his “metaphysics” is a thinking of sameness, not self-identity. Spinoza’s term for this involved,  uidly interactive or communicative movement in which singulars are aVected and aVect is conatus, striving. No longer stable referents or deŽ ning forms, Spinozistic essences are formulas of activity and passivity, ideas of corporeal ratios (E3p6–7). Conative existence is always already modulated existence. A second recognizably Aristotelian element in Spinoza’s philosophy is the nondualistic character of his account of thought and extension. In the second part of the Ethics, Spinoza presents thought and extension as irreducibly diVerent attributes of Substance or God or Nature and only then proceeds to analyze the human mind and body as modes of substance. The discussion thus undermines any hierarchical account of God and the world, such as is used by Cartesian philosophers to explain mind-body union. Turning to cognition, Spinoza argues that the human mind is the idea of the actually existing body “and nothing else” (E2p13). The phrase “nothing else” denies a purely spiritual soul, the Augustinian-Cartesian separate rational faculty and will, precisely those faculties that would distance the human knower from the rest of nature.18 This claim is followed by a summary of his physics, and only thereafter does Spinoza proceed to analyze imagination, discursive reason, and intuitive understanding as diverse, indeed incommensurable, forms of cognitive life. Spinoza insists both that all knowing originates in sensible experience and that Mind and Body are two attributes or ways of conceiving the same thing (E2p7s, E3p2s). Spinoza writes: From these [propositions] we understand not only that the human Mind is united to the Body, but also what should be understood by the union of Mind and Body. But no one will be able to understand it adequately,

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or distinctly, unless he Ž rst knows adequately the nature of our Body. For the things we have shown so far are completely general and do not pertain more to man than to other Individuals, all of which, though in diVerent degrees, are nevertheless animate [quamvis diversis gradibus, animata tamen sunt]. (E2p13s)

The human being, Spinoza argues, is a “part of nature,” neither separate from it nor diVerent in kind and so not “a dominion within a dominion,” 19 and cognitive life is nothing ontologically other than bodily and aVective life.20 As a consequence, eating and thinking, while not reducible to one another, cannot be separated: The human body is composed of a great many parts of diVerent natures, which constantly require new and varied nourishment, so that the whole Body may be equally capable of all the things which can follow from its nature, and hence, so that the Mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things. (E4p45s)

The more the body is capable of undergoing, the more the mind can know. Reason is principally the activity of discerning agreements and disagreements in nature (E2p29s), cognizance of which enables an individual to do what is necessary to persevere in existence and thus to acquire knowledge. This is a matter of physical survival and intellectual eternity: “He who has a body capable of a great many things has a Mind whose greatest part is eternal” (E5p39). Finally, Spinoza’s seemingly paradoxical linkage of the “completely general” and the diVering of individuals is critically important. The Ethics aYrms the animation of all things and their inŽ nite diVerentiation or multiplicity, which by its very nature eludes the universalization implied in “all” (E2p13s). In addition to highlighting Spinoza’s rejection of any substantial separation of speaking, reasoning animals from other animals and living beings, this passage underlines the nominal status of universals in Spinoza’s thought. Universals, he argues, are entia rationis, beings of reason, not actual beings; concepts, similarly, are proles mentis, oVspring of the mind.21 While universals are derived by the mind on the basis of actual experience, nature occurs only as an inŽ nity of singulars. Although universals are abstract and homogeneous, nature is irreducibly heterogeneous and multiple. Crucially, while universals are useful—indeed necessary—in constructing a discourse, be it for a scientiŽ c or political purpose, recognizing the nominal status of universals disrupts reason’s characteristic pretenses of unity, adequacy, and systematicity. For Spinoza, not only is all language imaginative,

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but even reason does not adequate nature. Because Spinoza continuously emphasizes their nominal status, Spinozistic universals do not lend themselves to an eidetic or transcendental reduction that would formulate an essence “as such.” In E2p13s, moreover, animation—the striving of each individual to persevere in existing—extends more widely than what Agamben terms the “enigmatic cipher of bare biological life as such” (AI, 230), and its existence in and as inŽ nite gradations and variations undercuts an essentialist “as such.” In other words, while the striving to persevere in existing is the most universal principle or law, this striving is actual only in and as the singular occurrence of individuals. Spinoza writes that “Desire is the very nature or essence of every single individual. . . . Therefore the desire of each individual diVers from the desire of another to the extent that the nature or essence of the one diVers from the essence of the other” (E3p57). As Balibar emphasizes, to the extent that the desire for self-preservation is a universal law, it is a law of pluralization, not a law of univocity. For Spinoza, law, like all universals, is a way of amalgamating singularities into a constructed unity, and it does not disclose an inner unity or connection. In aYrming the inŽ nite multiplicity of animation, Spinoza withdraws the special status of the human being, yet not in the name of an univocal life or essence.22 The Ethics and Theologico-Politics of Eating To take up the questions of the human and the nonhuman with Derrida is to encounter questions of individuation, boundaries, and diVerences, and to complicate them. In “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” Derrida addresses these concerns under the rubric of eating. The subject under discussion is, of course, the subject, the human subject as it has been thought over and against nonhuman living beings, whose subsumption within a logic of sacriŽ ce and exclusion underwrites their use. The animal is emblematically a being who can be noncriminally put to death and thus killed but not murdered, but not the only such individual, the sole such “living ‘who.’”23 “Calculation” points to the objectiŽ cation of nonhuman beings—in all senses in which a being, even a seemingly human being, can be regarded as nonhuman—and their relegation to instrumental use. The French title of the interview “Il faut bien manger” has two senses: everyone has to eat, and one has to eat well. Eating thus exhibits both natural necessity— everyone has to eat—and human convention—one has to eat well. For

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Derrida, both senses involve the realization that one never eats (on) one’s own. Noting that the question of eating, that is, of ingestion, incorporation, and introjection, has been asked “carnivorously,” Derrida asks what it would mean to eat well in the sense of eating not merely as a subject or person, a human being or “Man.” This would be to think what it means to take the other, the animal or nonanimal, as a resource, to disclose the impossibility of grounding gestures of appropriation—the inscription of diVerence in every attempt at a ground, and the return of the excluded in the puriŽ ed discourse—and to consider the unlimited, and un-limitable, implications of that gesture. The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the non-living, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other deŽ nition of the good [du bien], how for goodness’ sake should one eat well [bien manger]? And what does this imply? What is eating? How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? And in what respect does the formulation of these questions give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the question, if you will, still carnivorous? The inŽ nitely metonymical question on the subject of “one must eat well” must be nourishing not only for me, for a “self ” which would thus eat badly; it must be shared, as you might put it, and not only in language. ‘One must eat well’ does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-givethe-other-to-eat. One never eats entirely on one’s own: this constitutes the rule underlying the statement, “One must eat well.” It is a rule oVering inŽ nite hospitality. And in all diVerence, ruptures, and wars (one might even say wars of religion), “eating well” is at stake. Today [1988] more than ever. One must eat well—here is a maxim whose modalities and contents need only be varied, ad inŽnitum. (EW, 282) 24

In the inevitability of eating, how is one to eat well, indeed, to eat the good? The Ž rst food for thought here is principally in the evocation of sharing: a “self,” a transcendental subject or ego, an isolated individual, eats badly, for “one never eats entirely on one’s own.” Thought in terms of natural necessity, eating involves both the eater and the eaten. One does not, that is, produce one’s own food. Nor, we might add, is anyone truly immune from being eaten. It is not simply that, after Freud and in view of the anthropology of religion, carnivorous dining readily admits of a symbolic interpretation relating to the incorporation of the father or the other. Fundamentally, we Ž nd ourselves in the ingestive-digestive Ž eld, in which our restriction of

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“Thou shalt not kill” to the human exhibits “the violent institution of the ‘who’ as a subject” and its sacriŽ cial structure (EW, 278, 283). As the example of war indicates, the logic of sacriŽ ce renders the question of living beings constantly and elementally at issue. In all of its implications, then, eating exhibits the intersection of natural necessity and human convention, or culture. This is perhaps the richest, and consequently most diYcult to digest, food for thought in “Eating Well.” Like language and culture, eating is natural, but not simply or straightforwardly a product of natural necessity. In this sense, while eating is necessary, there is not a single or intrinsic pattern of alimentation that obtains in all cases. Appetite appears in diVering modalities and conŽ gurations, and satisfaction takes many forms. As Derrida notes, the rule of never eating entirely (on) one’s own admits of inŽ nite variation. The rule of hospitality, i.e., of solicitude and nondestruction, also admits of inŽ nite variation. In other words, the same “eating well” is as much at issue in war as in hospitality, for they arise from the same natural imperatives. Eating encompasses both “learning and giving to eat” and “diVerences, ruptures, and wars.” What Derrida aptly terms a maxim of inŽ nite variation is in fact a law that encompasses or gathers contrary aVects and eVects. Rather than oVering a natural grounding for ethics, then, this acknowledgment of inŽ nite variation opens the question of the structure of decision and could invite a consideration of speciŽ c decisions in their historical, i.e., material, circumstances. To explain why appetite and alimentation take a speciŽ c form, it is necessary to investigate the concrete circumstances, understandings, and practices that structure decision and activity and that in turn are redoubled or intensiŽ ed in experience. This is a matter of analyzing those practices, ideologies, and demands—the social, political, economic, military, as well as the cultural imaginary circumstances— that sustain some ways of living and forbid or destroy others. Derrida gestures in “Eating Well” toward this kind of political inquiry, but he hesitates on the issue of inŽ nite variation, for to admit inŽ nite variation in nature is equivalent to abandoning a natural ground for ethics. It is in fact to replace a metaphysics of morals with a conventional, historically formed ethos, to replace an ontological account of the good with nominal concepts. Derrida’s hesitation at this juncture is most clearly visible in the way his discourse on eating takes shape in a re ective space deŽ ned by horror and gratitude. Much as Derrida’s idea of a rule admitting of inŽ nite variation broaches the possibility of thinking nature without teleology and intrinsic structure—

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natural law, in a word—the impetus for his remarks is the cruelty and violence displayed toward animals and human beings. These phenomena, evident in numerous aspects of human culture, demand a reordering of moral discourse. “For this surplus of responsibility that summons the deconstructive gesture and that the deconstructive gesture of which I am speaking calls forth, a waiting period is neither possible nor legitimate.” The aYrmation that motivates deconstruction is “unconditional, imperative, and immediate” (EW, 286). My point here is not that horror is an inappropriate response to war or to the realities of how we use animals. Rather, just at the point of conceptualizing nature as inŽ nite variation, Derrida’s discourse is marked by, or perhaps haunted by, a longing for moral harmony, progress, and even purity; the suggestion is less that destruction is part of nature than that it can and should be ameliorated. Everyone has to eat, but eating must become a matter of learning and gratitude rather than mere “taking in” and “grasping.” In “Eating Well,” the overriding themes become compassion, suVering with, and generosity. Concisely put, giving to eat and letting eat replace or ameliorate “mere” consumption: “as concerns the ‘Good’ [Bien] of every morality, the question will come back to determining the best, most respectful, most grateful and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self ” (EW, 281–82). While Derrida’s nuanced formulation of these goals in terms of the more and the less is important, the tone of his remarks, together with the history of suVering and giving as central terms of religious discourse, suggests a longing for teleology and order, i.e., for a natural and real separation of good and evil and a direct passage from natural law to moral law. Derrida’s sometime aYnities for Benjamin notwithstanding, this separation would facilitate transcending violence. While the “monotheistic sentence[s]” are “wearying” (EW, 286), their appeal remains. Over and against prevailing discourses of human rights or even ecology, deconstruction would interrupt the exemption or privilege of the human in the circulation of killing, but it would not amount to an unambiguous acknowledgment of destruction as natural. Displacing sacriŽ ce leaves the question of nature’s violence unthought. In sum, with the yes-and-no logic of disavowal, “Eating Well” simultaneously exhibits the impossibility of teleology, showing it to be an inadequate account of nature and an inadequate metaphysics of morals— insuYcient, that is, for the prevention of the very horror it decries— and the desire to refound teleology so as to ground ethics. Returning

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to the question of the human in “The Animal Which Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Derrida comes closer to acknowledging natural destruction as he complicates the relation of the living and the dying. Nevertheless, his explicit concern is the ontological problem of nature’s heterogeneity, not the a-moral character of nature: Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side . . . there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or, more precisely (since to say “the living” is already to say too much or not enough) a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among realms that are more and more diYcult to dissociate by means of the Ž gures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death.25

Although he articulates the problems of killing and eating in ways that accentuate the question of ethics as conventional and thereby implicitly raises the possibility of thinking ethics as related to, but distinct from ontology, and thus of displacing the priority of ontological considerations, Derrida seems to resist this implication. Read charitably, this hesitation marks the diYculty of beginning to conceive an ethics that is neither simply and reductively the expression of a natural law nor, on the contrary, “merely” conventional, in the sense of artiŽ cial. Less charitably, the hesitation discloses the diYculty of acknowledging that no ethics can avoid natural destruction and with it natural violence. This acknowledgment would foreclose every form of transcendence, and that is at the heart of the problem. In contrast, Spinoza openly argues for the moral indeterminacy— more bluntly, the moral indiVerence—of nature. Teleology and a metaphysics of morals according to which good and evil are really distinct are rejected at every juncture in his philosophy. The third part of the Ethics demonstrates, for example, that love and hatred arise from the same source, and Spinoza deŽ nes good and evil as conventional categories. With regard to social and political life, Spinoza denies the natural law tradition’s claim that human beings are social by nature, arguing instead that social practices are determinate expressions of the natural desire for self-preservation. This desire is the nature of each existing thing (E3p7). With respect to politics, Spinoza shows that the natural desire for self-preservation can manifest itself via the institutions of civil society or as the chaos and violence of civil war. Just as entering into the social contract expresses the natural desire for selfpreservation, so too breaking the contract, indeed destroying it, can

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express that same natural desire. According to Spinoza, careful consideration shows that promises or covenants, including the original contract, have an entirely natural status, such that there is no passage (à la Hobbes or Rousseau) from nature to culture. As the Ž rst part of the Ethics argues, whatever occurs, is an expression of the power of nature, for there is nothing other than nature. It is thus not by appeal to nature that we will adjudicate anything. At the same time, there is no “pure” artiŽ ce or “mere” convention. There are only expressions of concrete, determinate forces and powers. Ethical, social, and political conventions originate in the arrangement and exchanges of natural beings. These phenomena are to be understood, not despised (E3pref ). Tenacity and nobility are the Spinozan virtues of facing things as they actually are, not as we wish they might be; hope and despair result from the opposite posture. The Theologico-Political Treatise is particularly blunt on this point, taking pains to describe the universal law of consumption and metabolism. Nature is an order of power and consumption, and political arrangements are expressions of the exigencies of self-preservation commensurate with an individual’s power: By the right and established order of Nature I mean simply the rules governing the nature of every individual thing, according to which we conceive it as naturally determined to exist and to act in a deŽ nite way. For example, Ž sh are determined by nature to swim, and the big ones to eat the smaller ones. Thus it is by sovereign natural right ( jus naturale) that Ž sh inhabit water, and the big ones eat the smaller ones. For it is certain that Nature, taken in the absolute sense, has the sovereign right to do all that she can do; that is, Nature’s right ( jus naturae) is coextensive with her power ( potentia). For Nature’s power is the very power of God ( potentia dei), who has sovereign right over all things. But since the universal power of Nature as a whole is nothing but the power of all individual things taken together, it follows that each individual thing has the sovereign right to do all that it can do; i.e., the right of the individual is co-extensive with its determinate power.26

Fish behavior and ecology, for Spinoza, are no diVerent from any other kind; the individuals under consideration pertain to all of nature, not merely human individuals. Natural right, jus, in the sense of justitia, justice, and the ordo natura are thus not a moral or political structure or principle that would limit or resist violence, but rather are precisely an individual’s actual or determinate capacity for consumption and combination. For Spinoza, the a-moral character of nature as an economy

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of unlimited production and consumption undergirds—and sometimes undermines—all positive laws (leges) and social practices and conventions (mores). Self-preservation, as natural, both makes possible and exceeds positive law and convention. What happens in this ecology? When the big Ž sh eat the little Ž sh, the former combine with the latter, causing them to concur, literally, “to run together,” and thus to be considered as one singular thing. Just as I am what I eat, then, I am also what is eaten. What, then, distinguishes the eater and eaten, who are one in the eating? Everyone is ingesting and digesting, and being ingested and digested. Actively eating from one perspective, any individual is also being consumed in or by another individual from another perspective. Spinoza’s Letter 32 adds the image of parasites to the Ž sh ecology sketched in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise. Discussion of our limited apprehension of nature and the basis for our belief that the parts of nature cohere (as distinct from knowledge of exactly how they cohere), Spinoza describes the perspective of “a tiny worm living in the blood.” The worm “would be living in the blood as we live in our part of the universe,” taking the blood as a whole, not a part, and so mistaking its own environment for the whole of nature. The technical limitations of seventeenth century microbiology aside, we worms cannot but conclude that we are being eaten as we eat. To be is less to be a subject than to be in and of an ecology in which diVerent interests and powers are enacted. To be powerful is to be able to consume another individual without thereby altering one’s own ratio. EVective eating is thus the ingestion of individuals that agree with one’s own nature, adding to one’s power to persist. The Law of Appetite and Desire With Spinoza, then, we cannot inquire into the manifold issues raised by eating issues merely carnivorously, but must do so omnivorously, for Nature is an omnivore. Nature produces everything and consumes everything. While the Ž sh ecology and the worm in the blood are especially striking images, they are not the only examples of Spinoza’s interest in biology. In Spinozistic terms, to be good is, minimally speaking, to be good to encounter or combine with, and in that sense, good to eat. All things strive to persevere in their existing, and they do this as they encounter, interact with, and exchange with other things. Good and evil are thus in the Ž rst instance a form of metaphorical talk—

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typically, authoritative talk, as in the image of the moral law handed down by prophets and gods—for the very concrete issue of perseverance. Discussing the well-known vegetarian act of evil in Eden, Spinoza writes that “the command to Adam consisted solely in this, that God revealed to Adam that eating of that tree brought about death, in the same way that he also reveals to us through our natural understanding that poison is deadly.”27 The biblical story is a parable of natural causation: God the lawgiver is a persuasive image of nature’s series of causes and eVects. Poison is “bad” because it decomposes my nature and so con icts with my natural desire for self-preservation. For another diner, the same apple might have been a Ž ne meal. For Adam, any number of other fruits might have been perfectly conducive to continued existence. For Spinoza, a moral language unmoored from the experience of actually existing things is no ethics at all: as Derrida says, one must eat, and it tastes good to eat. Asking whether we should eat is unreal precisely because it is unnatural: Everything has to eat. The question is how to eat in ways that sustain rather than destroy one’s ratio of motion and rest, and the answers vary according to the variety of existing things. This is the case in several ways and, in a manner of speaking, at several levels—though, as we shall see, Spinoza complicates all discourses of levels and boundaries. First, each individual judges the good according to her own temperament and constitution, according to her own needs and tastes. “There are as many diVerences of brains as of palates,” reads an old proverb that Spinoza quotes approvingly (E1app). Similarly, “although human bodies agree in many things, they still diVer in very many” (E1app). Moral ends are thus my ends, relative to me: I judge something to be good because it is what I am seeking for myself (E3p9s). Spinoza characterizes appetite as “nothing else but man’s essence, from the nature of which there necessarily follow those things that tend to his preservation.” Desire (cupiditas) is the term for Appetite, i.e., the striving to persevere as it is related to the mind and body together, “accompanied by consciousness thereof ” (E3p9s). As the arguments of the third part of the Ethics, particularly regarding the themes of imaginative-aVective vacillation ( uctuatio animi) and imitation (imitatio aVectuum), are worked out, this initial and universal or unqualiŽ ed deŽ nition of desire is reformulated in terms of the singular individual: “Desire is the very nature or essence of every single individual. . . . Therefore the desire of each individual diVers from the desire of another

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to the extent that the nature or essence of the one diVers from the essence of the other” (E3p57). In the Preface to Ethics 4, Spinoza makes this point with typical wit: As far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare one thing to another. For one and same thing can, at the same time, be good, bad, and also indiVerent. For example, Music is good for one who is Melancholy, bad for one who is mourning, and neither good nor bad to one who is deaf. (E4pref )

The diVerences of palates and natures insist on a law of consumption whose fulŽ llment will be far from univocal: the good is plural because nature is multiple and irreducible. Like all universals, including universal laws, “good” and “evil” are abstractions formed out of the singularities of a knower’s sensible experience. Any universal notion originates in, and hence re ects, an individual knower’s idiosyncratic accumulation and association of impressions and interactions. Universals are, in this regard, originally imaginative structures. As compared to concrete experience, universals are abstracted from the speciŽ cities of time, manner, and place, and this abstract character lends itself to the illusions of univocity—as if there were a single standard of the good—and reiŽ cation—as if the good were something intrinsic in things, like a rational essence or law. But we must, Spinoza cautions, take care not to confuse words and things (E1App).28 In addition to the diVerences among or across human beings, there is the diVerence between human beings and animals. In Ethics 4, Spinoza derides vegetarianism precisely as an avoidance, even an eVacement, of diVerence: The law against killing animals is based more on empty superstition and unmanly compassion than sound reason. The rational principle of seeking our own advantage teaches us the necessity of joining with men, but not with the lower animals, or with things whose nature is diVerent from human nature. We have the same right against them that they have against us. Indeed, because the right of each one is deŽ ned by his virtue, or power, men have a far greater right against the lower animals than they have against men. Not that I deny that the lower animals have sensations. But I do deny that we are therefore not permitted to consider our own advantage, use them at our pleasure, and treat them as is most convenient for us. For they do not agree in nature with us, and their aVects are diVerent in nature from human aVects. (E4p37s1)

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Spinoza’s insistence on diVerence stands in stark contrast to Agamben’s univocal sense of “life” and to the latter’s insistence that thinking in terms of immanence eVaces distinctions. Agamben writes that the Ž eld of immanence “functions as a principle of virtual indetermination, in which the vegetative and animal, the inside and the outside and even the organic and the inorganic, in passing through one another, cannot be told apart” (AI, 233). To argue that genealogists of the term “life” who investigate under the aspect of immanence will Ž nd “little sense in distinguishing between organic life and animal life or even between biological life and contemplative life and between bare life and the life of the mind” (AI, 239) does helpfully undercut the dualistic foundations of the rational, humanistic subject. In resisting dualism in the name of an univocal “life,” however, Agamben substitutes one reductive ontological position for another. Yet to think in terms of indeterminacy and to recognize the conventional or constructed character of metaphysical divisions and categories need not commit us to the elimination of diVerence. The central issue here is Agamben’s demand for univocity, which, like Deleuze, he mistakenly attributes to Spinoza on the ground that Spinoza rejects the discourse of divine eminence.29 Spinoza does clearly reject eminence and analogical metaphysics. Holding that the human being is a “part of nature” and not “a kingdom within a kingdom,” however, Spinoza can also argue that nature manifests herself in a diversity of individuals. Spinoza’s remarks in E4p37s1 clearly echo a Maimonidean text readily available to him. Maimonides, himself a noted physician as well as philosopher, explains that nutrition is an equivocal term. The equivocation occurs because language occludes the diVerences in beings: Man’s nutritive part, for example, is not the same as the nutritive part belonging to a donkey or a horse. For a man is nourished by the nutritive part of the human soul, a donkey is nourished by the nutritive part of the donkey’s soul, and a palm tree is nourished by the nutritive part of its soul. Now all of these individuals are said to be “nourished” solely due to the equivocal character of the word, not because the meaning itself is one. . . . Every single species having a soul possesses a unique soul, diVerent from the soul of another species.30

In view of the natural diVerence of humans and animals, terms like “sensation,” “aVect,” and “nutrition” are equivocal: one word applies to diverse realities. Thus it is necessary to focus on the natural exigencies

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of survival rather than on the appearance of commonality; while the word can give the appearance of univocity, nature is irreducibly multiple and diverse, and so renders language radically equivocal. Of course, animals have the same right against us as we have against them, and it is not diYcult to imagine situations where human power would not prevail against an animal adversary. The advantage of human community, which is grounded in commonalities discerned via experience and interaction, is precisely to defend against such powers by, for example, expressions of rational strategy designed to counteract animal force or instinct. The diVerent natures of human and animal actors manifest themselves in characteristic abilities and behaviors. Accordingly, the Spinozistic rational eater knows the animal not qua animal or living, but qua food—as tasty, nutritious, desirable, etc. The Spinozistic lion, likewise, apprehends the human knower not as rational but as food. Spinoza argues that use—consumption—is inevitable and must be faced. To fail to do so is superstition and sentimentality. Finally, just as individuals diVer from one another, individuals diVer from or within themselves. Spinoza denies that even the singular individual is self-identical or atomistic. In the Ž rst place, “it is clear that the various aVects can be compounded with one another in so many ways, and that so may variations can arise form this composition that they cannot be deŽ ned by any number” (E3p59s). In the second place, aVects, such as love, bring about transformation: For example, when we imagine something that usually pleases us by its taste, we desire to enjoy it—i.e., to consume it. But while we thus enjoy it, the stomach is Ž lled, and the Body constituted diVerently. So if (while the Body is now diVerently disposed) the presence of the food or drink encourages the image of it, and consequently also the striving, or Desire to consume it, then that new constitution will be opposed to this Desire, or striving. Hence, presence of the food or drink we used to want will be hateful. (E3p59s)

As Balibar observes, desire is a principle “not of uniŽ cation, but of determination or of diVerentiation.” 31 If there is a law of desire, it is a law of diversiŽ cation, both among individuals and within them. As Spinoza remarks, “Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly have said that he was the same man” (E4p39s). Death is an especially dramatic reconŽ guration, but the individual is capable of numerous transformations, such as the transition from the speechlessness of infancy to the  uent reason of adulthood.

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Such variations, Spinoza argues, occur throughout nature, for all “individuals” are internally complex and heterogeneous. Rather than constituting a whole or unit that manifests or emanates from a single inner essence or identity, an individual is best described as a concurrence or intersection of individuals. By singular things I understand things that are Ž nite and have a determinate existence. And if a number of Individuals so concur in one action that together they are all the cause of one eVect, I consider them all, to that extent, as one singular thing. (E2d7)

As in the Theologico-Political Treatise, “individual” is used indiVerently here and refers to a heterogeneous, multiplicitous nature. In the extended discussion of individuation contained in the physics of Ethics 2, Spinoza denies the atomist hypothesis of bare or ontologically discrete basic entities. Even singular things, for Spinoza, must be considered as  uid complexes of relations and interactions. Spinoza’s model is involved communication and modulation; existing is deŽ ned as being aVected and acting, undergoing and communicating motion. Absent atoms, “individual” is a term of diVerentiation or demarcation relative to a speciŽ c vantage point, not an index of absolute position in a Ž xed hierarchy. Spinozistic individuals, while describable in terms of partwhole relations, may overlap, in the sense that “parts” may be shared by many individuals, depending on the vantage point from which they are viewed. While it may be useful to articulate some modes as an individual, this articulation is achieved by dirempting causal connections. At any level, the conatus that deŽ nes an individual or a singular thing is a ratio of forces and so deŽ nes the individual at issue in connection to and involvement with others. Individuation is the construction of separation. As was evident in the example of eating, compatible individuals concur, enhancing their persistence; disagreements reconŽ gure some individuals and preserve others. Things come to be and pass away through the shifting conŽ gurations of communicative modes. For any individual, greater constitutive complexity or heterogeneity enables that individual to interact more extensively with the diversity of other individuals without disrupting its own ratios. The complex heterogeneity of the human body, for example, enables it to be aVected by more bodies and to aVect more bodies (E2post1,3,6) and consequently to persevere in existing. The same is true for any part of the human body or for any combination of human bodies such as a body politic.

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Rather than being conceived as a One, Nature too is conceived by Spinoza as a composite individual, one whose complexity is without any limit: And if we proceed in this way to inŽ nity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one Individual. Whose parts, i.e., all bodies, vary in inŽ nite ways, without any change of the whole Individual. (E2lem7s)

It is of course no easy matter to proceed to inŽ nity, but Spinoza’s point is clear: Nature’s perseverance in existing admits of unlimited variation and does not pass out of existence. Since the nature of the universe “is absolutely inŽ nite, its parts are controlled by the nature of [its] inŽ nite power in inŽ nite ways, and are compelled to undergo inŽ nite variations.” 32 These inŽ nite variations, namely, the singular expressions, conŽ gurations, and reconŽ gurations of modes, are Nature, which is without duration or limit. Nature is, for Spinoza, inŽ nitely— unceasingly, endlessly—metabolic, for it is nothing other than the modes.33 Immanent Beatitude Agamben deŽ nes beatitude as immanent movement. Immanent movement occurs when the agent and patient are identical or indistinguishable and when movement occurs without reference to an external telos. Following Deleuze’s indications, Agamben turns to Spinoza’s analysis of the grammar of the Ladino verb pasearse, “to walk-oneself,” and the idea of “being at rest in oneself ” (acquiescentia in se ipso) as presented in the Ethics (e.g., E3p51) to orient the discussion. Recalling Spinoza’s deŽ nition of conatus as an immanent striving, Agamben formulates immanent movement in terms of desire and being. He writes that “In conatus, desire and Being . . . coincide without residue” (AI, 236; italics in original). This is the case because self-preservation is a “striving that remains obstinately within itself ” (AI, 236) and because conatus is nothing other than, or separate from, the being of the entity. Put diVerently, in beatitude, essence—conatus or desire—and existence coincide. To be is to strive to persevere. Agamben’s paradigm for this movement that remains in itself is Aristotelian nutrition, “the potency capable of preserving whoever possesses it as such.”34 He writes: “All nourishment, all letting be is blessed and rejoices in itself ” (AI, 237). In deŽ ning immanent beatitude as letting be, Agamben is surely correct to emphasize the absence of teleology and related structures

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of intentionality, and he clearly evokes the naturalistic character of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like Derrida, however, Agamben shies away from the elements of force and consumption in self-preservation. He envisions nutrition neither as an acquisition of parts or relations—the incorporation of another individual—nor as  uid, environmental communication in which one individual is transformed by the addition of others, even digested by others. These more ecological ways of understanding nutrition nevertheless seem more authentically Spinozistic. Further, in view of Spinoza’s treatment of individuation, it seems appropriate to resist inscribing the discourse of modally-involved singularities within the horizon of selfhood. Agamben clearly recognizes that the immanence envisioned by Deleuze and Foucault undermines traditional ideas of the self, but he seems to have been misled by the language of selfhood in Spinoza, and by the language of activity and passivity, which he uses with overtones of mechanistic separation and reduction to identity. As a result, Agamben’s own discussion of immanence moves in the direction of letting-be as a kind of emptying out of intentionality. Immersion, as he discusses it, seems more like an ecstasis than an increase in involvement. In Ethics 2, Spinoza redeŽ nes activity and passivity in terms of connection and disconnection, agreement and disagreement. To be active is to understand, and to understand is to make causal connections that agree with our nature (E2p28). Conatus thus comes to be identiŽ ed with conatus intelligendi (E4p18) in two senses. First, reason is concerned with discerning agreements and disagreements and thus is well suited to identifying connections that preserve an individual’s distinctive ratio or nature. Second, Ethics 5 identiŽ es the eternity of the mind with the third, intuitive kind of knowing. Thus the Ethics explicates preservation and beatitude in terms of involvement. Two textual details in Ethics 5 underscore the centrality of the idea of involvement and the attenuation of selfhood. The Ž rst is a grammatical shift evident in Spinoza’s use of the term love (amor). The Ž rst twenty propositions of Ethics 5 are an exposition of “all that the Mind, considered only in itself, can do against the aVects [adversùs aVectûs]” (E5p20s). The Mind’s power in this process involves separating the idea of aVects from thoughts of external causes and joining them to true ideas; this transforms inadequate into adequate, disconnected into integrated, ideas. Since it is impossible entirely to dispel the aura of fortuitous and external causality in aVective life, Spinoza further recommends that we conceive “a principle of living, or sure maxims of

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life” (E5p10s). Recollecting the principles and maxims aVects the imagination and shapes our experience of the world by nobility, tenacity, and joy. Through this habituation, individuals become more able to connect the images of things to the idea of God (E5p14) and thus to understand, rather than merely undergo, aVects. Sadness, in particular, ceases to be a passion when we understand it (E3p59). This path leads to an appreciation of God as the cause of all things, even sadness (Ep18s), and to a love toward God (amor erga deum) (E5p16). In the course of these twenty propositions, the initial gap between reason and the aVects is bridged as images are understood—that is, reappropriated through understanding, rather than merely undergone—but an element of separation or externality remains insofar as it is repetition of an authoritative maxim that preserves the relation between reason and aVect. Similarly, although God comes to be understood as the cause of all things, the love produced is love toward God as an object. The cause, in other words, remains in some way distinct from the eVects. The remainder of Ethics 5 describes the love of God experienced by the wise person, i.e., the intuitive or third order knower.35 The life of reasoned nobility and tenacity is a necessary, but not suYcient, condition for intuitive knowing. The intuitive knower experiences amor dei intellectualis (E5p32), love of God and God’s love, not the amor erga deum of reason’s action against the aVects (E5p16). Just as Spinozistic intuitive knowing is immediate, the love is immediate: there is no mediation or separation of the knower and the known in the knowing, nor of the lover and the loved in the loving. The model is Aristotelian nñhsiw, in which the knower and the known are one in the event of knowing. 36 In Ethics 5, Spinoza writes that “insofar as God loves himself, he loves men, and consequently . . . God’s love of men and the Mind’s intellectual love of God are one and the same” (E5p36c). Metaphysically speaking, of course, everything that is, is in God, and this “being-in” is immanent, such that God is the cause of all things in the same way that he is the cause of himself (E1p25c). Looked at in terms of knowing, this means that the human mind is part of the divine mind (E2p11). The intuitive knower experiences this immanent belonging and so actively undergoes the proportion of motion and rest that characterizes his or her modal existence. Spinoza writes that we are active only insofar as we understand (E3p3) and that the more we undergo, the more we know (E2p13s). This understanding is an understanding of nature’s involvements and patterns, and it is therefore per-

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fectly compatible with the dissolution of the body; accepting one’s own metabolism as natural, indeed, taking joy in this connection to nature, is at the heart of intuitive understanding. From E5p27 to the end of the Ethics, Spinoza describes a process of increasing intuitive knowing and increasing amor dei intellectualis, and his references to selfhood correspondingly decrease. Spinoza’s formulations are all proportional: insofar as, to the extent that, as much as the intellectual union of the Mind with God or Nature occurs, the imaginative boundaries of selfhood dissolve. The more the Mind knows, the less it is a self, the more it is part of Nature.37 When, then, Spinoza discusses the acquiescentia animi achieved by the wise man in the concluding paragraphs of the Ethics (E5p42s), he drops the re exive pronoun se found in the Ethics 3 discussion and so de-emphasizes selfhood. As described in E5p42s, the wise man’s rest involves being aware “of himself, and of God and of things” (E5p42s). Insofar as this awareness pertains to self, God, and things, it undermines distinction or priority among them. The shift from acquiescentia in se ipso to acquiescentia animi is a shift from human individuation to involvement in Nature. Conclusion For those who would think “after the subject,” Derrida and Agamben point the way to Spinoza as a rich and challenging interlocutor. For Derrida, Spinoza’s radical refusal of teleology is a point of proximity and diVerence. Much as Derrida’s discussions of inŽ nite variation and the complication, imbrication and multiplication of boundaries echo Spinoza’s non-atomistic, inŽ nitely varying nature, Derrida’s return to ontology as the ground for ethics constitutes an ambivalent remnant of teleology. With regard to Agamben, questions of univocity and involvement mark a similar moment of proximity and diVerence. The texts on eating display Derrida’s hesitation concerning the meaning of treating ethics as conventional rather than ontological. To aYrm teleology would stabilize nature’s inŽ nite variation in a determinate pattern and thus underwrite a passage from nature to ethics, grounding the latter in the very structure of the former. Indeed, Derrida’s explicit concern in “Eating Well” and the “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” is to undermine the ethos of technological rationality, with its spiritualization of the human and denial of a wider community of the living. Within the horizon of the modern subject and its metaphysics of morals, to regard ethics as conventional would

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risk treating ethics as artiŽ cial, i.e., unrelated to nature. This, of course, would be to reproduce the very separation of human beings from nature that sanctions the domination and destruction of nonhuman others. Yet, absent a real division between nature and culture, it does not seem necessary to take convention as equivalent to un- or extranatural. For Spinoza, the conventional status of ethics underlines it as a discourse of human  ourishing. De-mystiŽ ed and de-mythologized, ethical language arises from the universal desire for self-preservation, a desire that exists only as the concrete actuality of this or that human individual or community. As human beings are “part of nature” (E4pref ), the languages of ethics are of nature, but no ethical convention or aggregate of conventions can be said to directly exhibit or adequate nature. Ethical universals, like all universals, originate in experience and have a nominal status, but this does not make them unnatural or ineYcacious; insofar as ideas shape our experience, ethical conventions have considerable power. In view of the inŽ nite variation and metabolism of nature, human  ourishing is a matter of our aVective and cognitive disposition. Resentment is no less natural than joy, ignorance no less natural than understanding, war no less natural than peace. While Derrida’s hesitation underscores the loss of normativity and transcendence in the face of natural variation, a Spinozistic reply must begin from the claim that norms, practices, and claims re ect the strivings of actual human beings to persevere in existing. Such a reply points us toward a materialist inquiry into ethics and politics. For Agamben, Spinoza’s signiŽ cance is precisely as a nonteleological philosopher, a thinker of immanence and materiality. Spinoza’s nominalist ontology of singulars, however, problematizes the life “as such” in Agamben’s formulation of immanence. Like Derrida, Agamben is manifestly concerned with the ethical and political consequences of the transcendental subject and its metaphysics of morals. Indeed, Agamben’s real subject is the boundaries of the community of the living and the realities of exclusion from it. His evocation of “pure vegetative life” is a response to crises of inclusion and exclusion and the failure of the discourse of subjectivity to constitute a community of diVerence. This is an attempt to think outside, and beyond, the logos. Paradoxically, however, “life as such” seems to function in Agamben’s discourse as a common origin for diVerence, such that diVerence emerges from commonality, not vice versa. Agamben frees nutritivity from intentionality and subjectivity, and his “bare life” “severed from all cerebral activity and subjects” (AI, 232) blurs the boundaries of the

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“vegetative and the animal, the inside and the outside and even the organic and the inorganic” (AI, 233). The question here is whether this “life as such,” which “can never be attributed to a subject” and is “a matrix of inŽ nite de-subjectiŽ cation” (AI, 231–32), can function as a principle of multiplicity and heterogeneity rather than as a common substratum, if not precisely a ground. One might reply on behalf of Agamben that “life as such,” as a name for “the radical impossibility of establishing hierarchies and separations” (AI, 233), could not be a ground. The locus of diYculties is the “pure” and the “as such”: is this a linguistic appearance, an exhibition of the tendency of reason and language to universalize, reify, and totalize, or a reduction to indiVerence as ontologically prior, an origin of some kind? If “life as such” is a name for radical indeterminacy and irreducible multiplicity, for singularity as opposed to particularization, in what sense does it make sense to speak of it “as such” and in terms of purity? Concretely, what is “indeterminacy as such”? Further, why does abandoning the idea of intrinsic ontological principles, hierarchies, and separations— real order and real distinctions—entail indiVerence rather than multiplicity? Agamben’s account renders diVerence an epistemological, rather than an ontological, issue. In the end, his formulations are puzzlingly oceanic and perhaps of a piece with the sense of letting-go as ecstasis. Spinozistic diVerence, in contrast, cannot be reduced to unity; beatitude is not an oceanic joining with the whole of nature or life but rather an involvement—a Ž nite participation—in an inŽ nite, i.e., nontotalizable, nature. The reason to insist on these matters is to underscore the question of the relationship between ethics, politics, and ontology. If inquiries into nature acknowledge inŽ nite variation and radical heterogeneity, ethics and politics will of necessity be of nature, and community will be possible only as a community of singularities. Thought in terms of inŽ nity and irreducible heterogeneity, nature generates the problematics of diVerence and community but does not resolve them. They remain, we might say with the three philosophers considered here, food for thought. 38 NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well, Or The Calculation of the Subject,” trans. P. Connor and A. Ronell, in Points . . .: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. E. Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 255–87. Hereafter cited as EW. Originally published as “‘Il faut bien manger’ ou le calcul du sujet. Entretien (avec J.-L. Nancy),” Cahiers

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

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Confrontation 20 (1989): 91–114. See also Derrida’s remarks in the transcript of a discussion about seventeenth-century philosophy that appears at the end of Robert Bernasconi, “Descartes in the History of Being: Another Bad Novel?” Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987): 75–102, in which Derrida observes that Spinoza stands outside the “long chain of great philosophers which Heidegger describes historiologically—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Hegel,” all of whom “sketch a novel about the history of philosophy”; Derrida insists that, unlike the majority of philosophers (Nietzsche among them), “Spinoza does not tell a story about the history of philosophy, does not insist on putting things in a teleological perspective” (95–96). Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 220–39. Originally published in Aut aut 276 (1996): 39–57. Hereafter cited as AI. Deleuze’s “Immanence: Une Vie . . .” Philosophie 47 (1995): 3–7; translated by Nick Millett under the title “Immanence: A Life . . .” Theory, Culture and Society 14, no. 2 (1997): 3–7. The Foucault essay discussed by Agamben is “Life: Experience and Science,” which appeared originally in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (March 1985) and was reprinted in Dits et Ecrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 4:763. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Presence and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); originally published as Homo Sacer (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1995). “It might be well worth while to track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Perhaps, indeed probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost in cosmological impenetrability. . . . this idea of man’s sacredness gives grounds for re ection that what is here pronounced sacred was according to ancient mythical thought the marked bearer of guilt: life itself [blosses Leben]” (Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reections, ed. and trans. E. Jephcott [New York: Schocken 1978], 299). In Homo Sacer, Agamben also makes the connection to Hannah Arendt’s re ections on the weakness of the discourse of human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). In a 1997 lecture, recently translated as “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (Critical Inquiry 28 [Winter 2002]: 369–418), Derrida comments, a propos of the same passage in Benjamin that the concept of “life in its pure state” “can be nothing more than a pseudo-concept.” In this passage, Derrida is also responding to Heidegger’s example of the animal as “Nur-lebenden,” i.e., nothing more than living (391). The French text of this lecture appears in L’Animal autobiographique. Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999), 251–301. It is nevertheless quite striking that Agamben’s genealogy of immanence runs from Spinoza directly to Nietzsche, bypassing not only Hegel, but Marx (AI, 239). Ethics, Part 3, proposition 2, scholium. Latin texts are from Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: C. Winters, 1925). Translations are taken from The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), vol. 1, which I have occasionally modiŽ ed. I abbreviate the Ethics as E and cite it by part, then deŽ nition (def ), axiom (a), proposition (p), scholium (s), preface (pref ), postulate ( post), lemma (lem), and appendix (app). I quote from Samuel Shirley’s translations of the Theological-Political Treatise (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998) and Spinoza’s The Letters (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), to which I refer by number. See Homo Sacer for a sustained elaboration of this idea. Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” 397. By “realism,” I mean the ontological thesis that aYrms the extra-mental existence of universals and the epistemological thesis that words and thoughts access such

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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universals directly. By “nominalism,” I mean the ontological thesis that only singular things exist, and the epistemological thesis that language and reason do not adequately name or express existing things. For nominalists, universal terms like “being” are abstractions derived from the thinker’s experience of singulars, and such abstractions exist only in thinking, not in the world. Spinoza’s version is quite radical, for he holds not only that language is conventional but that existing things are not self-identical, stable “one’s.” Because to exist is to be in  ux, there is no stable or discrete individual “thing” to which language might refer, however inadequately. Reason, as abstract, is also distinct from the concrete  ux of singularities. Idit Dobbs-Weinstein has demonstrated that Spinoza’s account of the third kind of knowing (scientia intuitiva) is essentially the Averroian-Gersonidean agent intellect explicitly presented as the intrinsic, immanent order of nature. See Dobbs-Weinstein, “Gersonides’ Radically Modern Understanding of the Agent Intellect,” in Meeting of the Minds, ed. Stephen F. Brown, Rencontres de Philosophie Médiévale 7 (Tournhout: Brepols, 1998), 191–213. Spinoza’s “eternity of the mind” is a non-individual, intellectual eternity. For background on the controversies, see Stephen Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (New York: Cambridge 1999). The Ethics was published only posthumously, and it was the Theologico-Political Treatise—with its critical treatment of biblical narrative, pointed remarks on prevailing religious orthodoxies and political aspirations, and striking reformulation of contractarian politics—that occasioned uproar during Spinoza’s lifetime. I have argued this point at length in “‘By Eternity I Understand’: Eternity According to Spinoza,” Iyyun, The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 51 ( July 2002): 295–324. For an extremely subtle discussion of Hegel’s (mis)interpretation of these issues in Spinoza, see Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: Maspero, 1979). The other clear similarity is to Nietzsche’s eternal return. The complexities of the Nietzsche-Spinoza relation, however, demand separate investigation. Spinoza to L. Meyer, 20 April 1663, The Letters, no. 12. See, e.g., E2p18s. Etienne Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality, Mededelingen 71 vanwege het Spinozahuis (Delft: Eburon, 1997), 14. Kant’s Third Antinomy is thus impossible in Spinozistic terms. These phrases occur in Letter 32 (Spinoza to Henry Oldenburg, 20 November 1665) and in the Political Treatise, Book 1, chap. 2. Both Derrida and Agamben tend to depict the body as a passive site of suVering rather than as locus of power. The capacity to suVer, the power not to be, and similar structures of undergoing are conceived in terms of bodily aVection, as if the body were merely a site of inscription. For Spinoza, in contrast, both minds and bodies can be active and passive. See especially E2p40s1. Two essential studies of the issue are David Savan, “Spinoza on Language,” in Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marjorie Grene (New York: Anchor, 1973), 60–72, and Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, “Maimonidean Aspects in Spinoza’s Thought,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 17, nos. 1–2 (1994): 153–74. Appreciating Spinoza’s nominalism, which extends to mathematics, is crucial for interpreting texts like the following: “I shall treat the nature and powers of the AVects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies” (E3 pref ). Lines, planes, and bodies are the entia rationis of mathematical reason, whose relation to nature—the earth—is nonrealist. Spinoza’s distance from Cartesian geometry cannot be overstated.

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22. This sense of universality as reducing and obscuring the inŽ nity of nature’s expression in singularities will be crucial in what follows. The principal danger in universal discourse is that words can displace things, acquiring, as it were, an independent life and eclipsing actual experience. 23. EW, 278, 283. Agamben’s analysis of the homo sacer as one who may be killed but not sacriŽ ced interrogates a similar structure. 24. See also Derrida’s stinging critique of Levinas: “The ‘Thou shalt not kill’—with all its consequences, which are limitless—has never been understood within the Judeo-Christian tradition, nor apparently by Levinas, as a ‘Thou shalt not put to death the living in general’. . . . The other, such as this can be thought according to the imperative of ethical transcendence, is indeed the other man: man as other, other as man” (EW, 279). 25. Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow),” 399. 26. Chap. 16, Theologico-Political Treatise, 179. 27. Spinoza to William de Blyenbergh, 5 January 1665, The Letters, no. 19. 28. For Spinoza linguistic communication is a form of imaginative knowing in which words take the place of actual experience. Thus ideology and speech are as forceful as any “physical” force. 29. See, e.g., Deleuze’s Spinoza. Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990); originally published as Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1968). 30. Moses Maimonides, The Eight Chapters, chap. 1, in The Ethical Writings of Maimonides, ed. R. L. Weiss and C. Butterworth (New York: Dover, 1975), 61–62. 31. Etienne Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality, 4. Balibar has also shown how, in Spinoza’s philosophy, individuation emerges from, and is therefore an eVect of, not a precondition for, interaction. See “What Is ‘Man’ in SeventeenthCentury Philosophy? Subject, Individual, Citizen,” in The Individual in Political Theory and Practice, ed. Janet Coleman (Oxford: European Science Foundation/Oxford University Press, 1996), 215–41. The connection to Hegelian ideas of social subjectivity is clear. 32. Spinoza to Oldenburg, The Letters, no. 32. 33. Strictly speaking, Spinoza argues in Letter 50, nature’s singularity is not numerable. Spinoza denies that Nature is properly called “one” on the ground that “one” is predicated in relation to likeness and “two.” Nature, however, is not a member of a series or relation. Additionally, calling nature “one” would also (a) imply stabilizing nature as an object, which is precluded by the absence of all limitation in Nature, and (b) embroil Spinoza in the aporias of the one and the many. 34. De Anima 416b12–20, quoted by Agamben at AI, 236. 35. I cannot develop the point here, but it is important to note that Ethics 5 presents a dialectic of imagination and reason; they constitute diVerent modalities of experience but are not ontologically distinct. Thus it is always a question of shifts in the modalities and orientation of experience, that is, in ethos and disposition, not transitions from one faculty or domain to another. 36. Metaphysics 11.7.1072b25 V. and De Anima 3.4.430a1–5; cf. E2p7s, where Spinoza notes that “certain Jews” spoke of the unity of God and the intelligibles. Spinoza’s acquiescentia should be interpreted as actuality in the Aristotelian sense and not in terms of the mechanistic categories of motion and rest. 37. Famous interpretations notwithstanding, there is no “intuition of the whole” in Spinoza’s philosophy. From a metaphysical standpoint, nature is not, properly speaking, a one or a whole; to have neither beginning nor end is to lack the boundaries of a discrete object. Further, where nature is absolutely inŽ nite, any attribute of nature, such as thinking, is inŽ nite only in its kind (e.g., as thought and not as extension or any other attribute of nature) (E1p31; Spinoza to Simon

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De Vries, February 1663, The Letters, no. 9). From an epistemological standpoint, intuitions of ratios are acquired seriatim by the Ž nite human intellect, with the result that the proportion of intuitive knowing increases “as much as possible” relative to imaginative and ratiocinative knowing. 38. I would like to express my appreciation to Claudia Baracchi, JeVrey Bernstein, and Idit Dobbs-Weinstein for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. In addition, I am grateful to the participants in seminar courses on Spinoza at Villanova University and the New School.