3. BARUCH SPINOZA AND THE POTENTIAL FOR A RADICAL POLITICAL THEOLOGY

IN THE LAST CHAPTER I DISCUSSED HOBBES AS AN EXEMPLARY founder of political sovereignty. In this chapter I shift to a different origin of modern political philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, and move from a discussion of the deconstruction of sovereignty and the weakness of God to a reconstruction of sovereignty, although this reconstruction of sovereignty along Spinozist lines does not reinstitute a traditional form of sovereignty or issue in a strong God or a strong form of political power and authority. In choosing Spinoza as an example and an inspiration for a postsecular theology, I am suggesting a reorientation of sovereignty, which has been already invoked as freedom, potentiality, and virtuality in the introduction. I am also consciously challenging the limits of the opposition of the secular and the religious, as discussed in chapter 1, and countering a more conventional theological discourse that simply declares that if our situation is postsecular, we can thereby dispense with any consideration of the secular.

I do not see my reading of Spinoza and sovereignty as oppositional to the Derridean deconstruction of sovereignty, Caputo’s insistence upon the weakness of God, or Keller’s idea of the theo-poetic becoming of God, but rather as complementary. The problem is the conceptual confusion of strong and weak as opposites. As any serious reading of Caputo, Keller, or Derrida makes clear, weakness or becoming is the not the opposite of power but lies beyond this simple opposition. Here I am attending to the immanent constitution of power and of theological and political thinking, which does not weakly or passively accept the terms, problems, questions, and conclusions offered up by the status quo of tradition or common sense. In the previous chapter I was concerned with the object of theological thought, God, as a concept that manifests and consolidates sovereignty; here I am interested in the process or constitution of theological thinking in an immanent way.

To think about sovereignty differently, I appeal to the conceptions of potentiality and virtuality already introduced earlier. For Deleuze, the virtual is not constrasted with the real but with the actual. For Negri, potentia as understood through Spinoza is a virtual or potential power that is contrasted with potestas or actual power. In his book on Henri Bergson, Bergsonism, Deleuze distinguishes the virtual from the possible, explaining that although “the virtual is not actual,” it “as such possesses a reality.”¹ The reality of the virtual supplies the movement of differentiation in a process of actualization. The virtual is not subordinated to the actual in a classic Aristotelian manner; rather, it exceeds the actual even as it gives rise to it. In Bergsonism, Deleuze contrasts the pairing “virtual-actual” with the opposition “possible-real,” claiming that both virtuality and actuality possess reality. Deleuze claims, following Bergson, that “we know that the virtual as virtual has a reality; this reality, extended to the whole universe, consists in all the coexisting degrees of expansion and contraction.”² All of the points that exist on every level of the universe “form the potential parts of a Whole that is itself virtual. They are the reality of this virtual.”³ The Whole is virtual and consists of everything in potentiality; these virtualities actualize in different and determinate ways. Deleuze states that “when the virtuality is actualized, is differentiated, is ‘developed,’ when it actualizes and develops its parts, it does so according to lines that are divergent, but each of which corresponds to a particular degree in the virtual totality.”⁴

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze maintains this duality of virtuality and actuality. He deploys a logic of virtuality to elaborate a repetition of difference, because repetition is not the realization of a prior possibility, which would be a repetition of identity, but in fact is based on difference, which makes it a virtual actualization, or an actualization of virtuality. Deleuze argues that the possible “refers to the form of identity in the concept,” whereas the virtual “designates a pure multiplicity in the Idea which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition.”⁵ Deleuze employs the term “virtual” instead of “possible” or “potential” because he wants to exclude both identity and negativity from this concept. Both virtual and actual are real; they are two sides of the same coin.

The important distinction between differentiation and differenciation also pertains to this difference between virtual and actual. To refer to the virtual operation of difference, Deleuze uses the French mathematical term différentier, which the English translator Paul Patton renders as “to differentiate.” The more common French word différencier, whose meaning is closer to the English word “differentiate,” is used to refer to the process of actualization. Différencier is translated in English as “to differenciate” to maintain consistency with the French usage of Deleuze. This is a very technical but also a very important difference, which applies to the crucial distinction between virtual and actual in Deleuze’s most important work. In the same part of text, Deleuze explains, “We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualization of that virtuality into species and distinguished parts differenciation.”⁶

Both virtual and actual possess equal reality; neither of these terms is essentially negative or lacking being. The virtual involves the posing of a problem and the terms in which it is presented. The actual concerns the answer, or the solution to a problem. “Whereas differentiation determines the virtual content of the Idea as problem,” Deleuze writes, “differenciation expresses the actualisation of this virtual and the constitution of solutions.”⁷ In Bergsonism, Deleuze claims that there is more freedom and power in the ability to pose a problem than in answering it. Even though the virtual is real and fully determinate, it nevertheless concerns freedom. Or rather, true freedom concerns thinking of and through virtuality. According to Deleuze, “true freedom lies in a power to decide, to constitute problems themselves.”⁸

Deleuze does not oppose virtual to actual in any fundamental sense; they are complementary. Negri, however, with his distinction between potentia and potestas draws out a similar distinction in terms of power, but for Negri this difference becomes more antagonistic. The difference between potestas and potentia is similar to Deleuze’s between actual and virtual, except that Negri sharpens the opposition between the two terms in his reading of Spinoza in The Savage Anomaly. Both words can be translated as power, but potestas refers to actual power, while potentia concerns a potential power or force. In relation to God, Spinoza claims that God’s potentia is identical with God’s essence, whereas potestas concerns existence. Negri explains that “potestas is given as the capacity (or conceivability) of producing things; potentia is presented as the force that actually produces them.”⁹

In The Savage Anomaly, Negri develops the link between the Ethics and Spinoza’s unfinished Political Treatise, claiming that “Spinoza’s true politics is his metaphysics.” Spinoza sketches out a philosophy of the future, in opposition to the project of modern science and politics, “which is a mapping or plan of absolute Power (potestas).”¹⁰ Spinoza consistently limits potestas with potentia, for the sake of a future, which is also freedom. In Spinoza’s thought, productive imagination constitutes reality and delivers humanity from its bondage to potestas. According to Negri, “freedom is the infinite. Every metaphysical channel toward freedom is dissolved, making room for the constitutive decision of freedom,” which is Spinoza’s main goal. The State constitutes itself by denying freedom, reducing it to provide for itself a transcendent basis. This is the mystification of politics as potestas. Negri’s reading of Spinoza, however, liberates “the social power (potentia) of the multitudo,” which functions as the subject of this freedom and potentia.¹¹

I am reading Spinoza through a postmodern lens here, using the interpretations of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri to help construct a contemporary postmodern interpretation of Spinoza that directly feeds into a radical political theology, for which Spinoza would serve as a saint, if not the Christ.¹² In some ways, however, Spinoza emerges as the first quintessentially modern philosopher, which is due to his consistent identification of God and Nature. Descartes is generally granted this title for his emphasis upon the human ego, or thinking self, but Descartes also retains a medieval and Aristotelian hierarchical dualism between thought and body that Spinoza attempts to overcome with his notion of substance. In his book, Spinoza and Other Heretics, Yirmiyahu Yovel illustrates the complex historical and cultural background of Spinoza’s family and its crossing of religious lines. Spinoza was born in Holland as a Jew, but his parents were Portuguese Marranos who fled the Portuguese version of the Spanish Inquisition when Spain and Portugal were united under the same king. Spinoza was educated in Jewish Amsterdam, but he was famously excommunicated in 1656 because he could not conform to the strictures of the Amsterdam Jewish community. Yovel explains that Spinoza’s thought is the product of a complex and secret religious background that has “a Jewish framework but [is] saturated with Catholic elements and interpretations.”¹³ Spinoza was influenced by his Catholic tutor, Van den Ende, but he resisted many efforts by friends and colleagues to convert to Christianity.

The main point here is that a religious faith held and practiced in secret—the Judaizing Marrano—became deformed in both forms of Christian and Jewish orthodoxy and later evolved into what we think of as secularity. The secular is the product of a complex religious space, an interaction between Jewish and Christian elements that is constructed initially in secret but later becomes unhidden, manifested as nonreligious in any formal sense. According to Yovel, the religious duality at the heart of the Judaizing Marranos ultimately created “a form of faith that is neither Christian nor Jewish,” and eventually “the confusion of Judaism and Christianity led in many cases to a loss of both.”¹⁴

I am following Yovel in suggesting that Spinoza represents a singular philosophy, due in large part to his religious identity, as well as his thoughts about religion. In some ways, Spinoza’s thought, as well as the Marranos’ experience, provides the consistency that supplies the dash in Judeo-Christian, if there is one. Spinoza anonymously wrote both the controversial Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which launched a massive critique of biblical truth, and the posthumously published Ethics, a dizzying geometrical treatise. Both helped to make him the “supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe,” as Jonathan Israel points out in his impressive study of the Radical Enlightenment.¹⁵ Spinoza’s thought is challenging and radical, for both contemporaries and later thinkers such as Deleuze and Negri.

I will briefly explain Spinoza’s proof of the existence of God at the beginning of the Ethics, with particular attention to the concepts of substance, attributes, and modes. I suggest that Spinoza does not prove God so much as define God into existence. At the same time, there is a tension in Spinoza’s definition between a unitary substance and a plurality or infinity of attributes. After explicating Spinoza’s understanding of God, I will turn to Deleuze’s and Negri’s respective interpretations of Spinoza to indicate their relevance for a contemporary reconceptualization of sovereignty that is important for radical theology.

Part 1 of the Ethics is entitled “Concerning God.” In six definitions, seven axioms, thirty-six propositions and assorted corollaries, scholia, and proofs, Spinoza defines and proves the existence and nature of God. The key terms are laid out in definitions 3, 4, and 5, where Spinoza defines substance, attribute, and mode. These terms culminate in definition 6, where he states, “By God I mean an absolutely infinite being; that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite existence.”¹⁶ According to Spinoza, there can exist only one infinite substance, and substance is primary being because it alone “is in itself and can be conceived through itself.” Substance is infinite and indivisible, and according to proposition 5, “in the universe there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.”¹⁷ Attributes are defined as “that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.” By definition 6, then, substance, which is ultimately God, consists of infinite attributes. The essence of substance may be perceived and known in potentially infinite ways, even though substance is essentially one in itself, that is, the unity of all of these attributes insofar as they pertain to a substance. Spinoza distinguishes between the higher unity or oneness of substance and the plurality or infinity of attributes to affirm that substance or God is one.

The infinity of the attributes of substance, which is aspect by which we can know the essence of substance, mirrors the infinite number of modes, as explained in proposition 22: “Whatever follows by some attribute of God in so far as the attribute is modified by a modification that exists necessarily and as infinite through that same attribute, must also exist necessarily and as infinite.”¹⁸ Modes are modifications or affectations of substance and follow the attributes of God in their expression. Modes are finite determinations of substance, but there are an infinite number of modes because there are an infinite number of attributes of substance. “Particular things are nothing but affections of the attributes of God; that is, modes wherein the attributes of God find expression in a definite and determinate way.”¹⁹ The two main modifications of substance are mind and body, or the Cartesian duality of thinking things and extended things, which Spinoza ultimately wants to overcome.²⁰ The attributes are crucial in that they mediate between the modes and substance itself, and they are also what allow intellectual knowledge of substance and comprehension of modes. Substance is defined in such a way that it must be infinite and indivisible, and hence one. God is defined as substance, and God as substance is known by the infinity of modes possessed by God. Although “each attribute of one substance must be conceived through itself,” its conception necessarily involves its relation to the one substance, which is God. Infinite attributes link the infinite modes or modifications of substance to the unity of substance in itself. Since substance necessarily exists, if in fact anything exists whatsoever, God necessarily exists insofar as God is defined as substance. Although Spinoza seems to present proofs of God’s existence, he actually defines God into existence, paradigmatically in proposition 11: “God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.”²¹

I have not so much presented the progression of Spinoza’s thought in part 1 of the Ethics, as tried to lay out how God is defined as substance in relation to attributes and modes. This discussion is highly complex, not least by the geometrical style Spinoza adopts in this book. The key, however, is the understanding of the nature of the attributes, because they allow us to pass from infinite substance to finite modes and vice versa. The status of the attributes constitutes the theological link between God and the nature, and it is through a profound reworking of the attributes that Deleuze and Negri interpret and apply Spinoza to contemporary thought.

For Deleuze substance becomes a plane of immanence and the attributes are conceived as expressions to assemble a philosophy of expression, a notion of philosophy as expression. Expression actualizes or elaborates the modes, which are affects, or becomings that take place along a plane of immanence that provides a bare minimum of unity of consistency. Later in his career, Deleuze abandons the category of expression as too intellectualistic, preferring to follow the movements of machines and of bodies in his work with Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, although expression may be seen as a prefiguring of his notion of the fold, as expressed in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Antonio Negri, by contrast, follows the development of the Ethics by eliminating the attributes and envisioning a direct confrontation between substance and modes. By dropping the attributes, Negri eliminates their mediating function, although the attributes return very subtly in Negri’s reading of potentia (or potential) constituting power, in contrast with potestas (or actual power). Ultimately, dislocating the attributes from any understanding of mediation that precludes transcendence raises the possibility of a radical theological thinking that is Spinozistic, because it is fully immanent as constituent power and also possesses political implications that will be addressed at the conclusion of this chapter.

Deleuze wrote two books dealing with Spinoza. The first, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, lays out a constructive understanding of philosophy as expression rather than as a description of reality by working through complex ideas of Spinoza and Leibniz.²² The second book, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, is a brief but intense engagement mostly with the Ethics. In the latter book Deleuze makes a claim that was implicit in the earlier one, and which is decisive for Deleuze’s own philosophy. Deleuze argues that the true significance of Spinoza is “no longer the affirmation of a single substance, but rather the laying out of a common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are situated.”²³ Deleuze claims that the modes of expression of substance are primary and that “a mode is a complex relation of speed and slowness, in the body but also in thought.” The fundamental idea is the composition of a mode that occurs along a plane of immanence. A plane of immanence is then contrasted with a theological plan in which “organization comes from above and refers to a transcendence.”²⁴ Here transcendence is imposed from outside, usually a dimension of height, which is what Deleuze precludes. Meaning, significance, and life are internal or immanent to the mode of composition.

We could trace Deleuze’s thought forward from this key insight, to witness the elaboration of a plane of immanence in What is Philosophy? coauthored with Félix Guattari, and in his final essay, “Immanence: A Life.” But I also want to relate Deleuze’s understanding of a plane of immanence, developed in relation to Spinoza’s philosophy, to Deleuze’s earlier book on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy. In this book, Deleuze uses Spinoza’s thought to criticize the notion of analogy in its theological use, a critique I want to reflect on briefly before shifting to Negri’s reading of Spinoza in The Savage Anomaly. In part 1 of the Ethics, as we have seen, Spinoza elaborates his three key terms: substance, modes, and attributes. He proposes that there is only one “absolutely infinite substance,” which is defined as God (propositions 13 and 14). Substance manifests itself in modes, or modifications of substance. There are technically an infinite number of possible modes, but the two main ones, following Descartes, are extension and thought. I have suggested above that the main conceptual difficulty of part 1 concerns the nature of the attributes, which function to mediate between substance and modes.

Now, the challenge is to understand the attributes of substance in distinction from the traditional properties of God. Deleuze argues that theology “oscillates between an eminent conception of negation” in which negative theology goes “beyond both affirmations and negations in a shadowy eminence” and “an analogical conception of affirmation.”²⁵ These two work together in a confusing way because they are based on a confusion of God with God’s “propria.” Propria, or attributes considered as properties of God based on relationships of analogy and dis-analogy, render the idea of God necessarily indeterminate. Deleuze’s solution is to understand attributes as expressions of substance in continuity with modes, rather than as mediating an analogy between substance and our experience of a mode. Here is where the notion of immanence comes in, because it resists the obscurity of revelation: “revelation concerns, in truth, only certain propria. It in no way sets out to make known to us the divine nature and its attributes.”²⁶ Attributes directly express the nature of substance in modes along a plane of immanence, which avoids the confusions of analogy and negative theology. Any time one posits two planes, a plane of transcendence and a plane of immanence, the problem becomes the mediation, in both ontological and epistemological terms, between the two planes. If God is simply located on a transcendent plane, then knowledge of God is impossible and religion is reduced to the problem of political obedience, as Spinoza concludes in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.²⁷

The separation of the two planes does not only concern knowledge but also political power because of the need for mediation. If one plane is insufficient and is mediated by a higher plane or a higher power, then power is dissipated, or drawn away from its direct, immediate application to another level or realm from which it can then operate to impose order, harmony, and obedience. This is what Deleuze means when he criticizes, following Nietzsche, the separation of force from what it can do, which is the essence of reactive force.²⁸ The active force is replaced by the reactive force, which is the essence of the State as representative and mediating power, as well as God as transcendent sovereign power. The question is whether or not God and the State are equivalent in their role of mediating direct, antagonistic conflict among forces, people, and ideas, as Deleuze’s and Negri’s readings of Spinoza direct us to think.

The attribute is the most problematic notion in Spinoza’s Ethics because of its mediating role between substance and mode. Deleuze tries to solve this problem with the notion of expression in order to read Spinoza’s attributes as direct expressions rather than as mysterious properties of substance. In his book on Spinoza, Antonio Negri goes further than Deleuze by dispensing with the attributes altogether. Negri reads the Ethics more contextually, toward the development of Spinoza’s unfinished Political Treatise, which is why Negri claims that Spinoza’s metaphysics is his political thought. Negri explains that as the Ethics proceeds, the attributes drop out, the result of an antagonistic clash between substance and modes. So long as attributes occupy a middle realm between substance and modes, a medium of mediation is preserved, a back and forth shuttle between two alienated realms.

Negri takes a lesson from his reading of Marx’s Grundrisse, which he develops in Marx Beyond Marx, and that lesson is one of antagonism. Negri emphasizes Marx’s understanding of tendency as a method, which is functionally similar to that of attribute, and stresses that this tendency is an antagonistic tendency. That is, in the Grundrisse the tendency of relations of production tend to exacerbate rather than ameliorate conflicts. At the same time, Hegelian dialectics and other forms of mediation tend to subsume or reduce conflict by locating it elsewhere. “The general concept of production,” Negri writes, “breaks the limits of its materialist and dialectical definition in order to exalt the subjectivity of its elements and their antagonistic relation.”²⁹ The political problem is that the State mediates the conflicts among subjects to strip them of their power to address the increasing inequality created by capitalist conditions.

In Negri’s analysis of Spinoza, after the early stage of the Ethics, the focus on the attributes drops away, leaving substance and mode to “crash against each other and shatter.”³⁰ Deleuze’s effort was to undo the hierarchy implied by the attributes by reading them as expressions, foldings of substances that occur in and as modes. But Negri attends to the tendency of the attributes to fade away and leave substance and mode as stark antagonists.

The question is: Why not retain mediation? Why must substance and modes fall into conflict with each other? Negri argues that it is for political reasons, and that the essence of Spinoza’s metaphysics is his politics, which culminates in his unfinished Political Treatise, as mentioned above. As opposed to the traditional modern bourgeois theory of the state, which is fundamentally based on mediation, Spinoza’s philosophy remains an anomaly because it is based solely on power: “Clearly, Spinozian philosophy is an anomaly in its century and is savage to the eyes of the dominant culture.”³¹ To explain the significance of power in Spinoza’s thought, Negri distinguishes between two understandings of power expressed in the Latin terms potentia and potestas. Potentia is potential power, whereas potestas is actualized power. Unlike traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy and theology, however, Negri reverses the value-relationship between these two terms and suggests that potentia is more profound and more significant than potestas. These two forms of power are never separated but are importantly distinguished. That is, Spinoza grounds potestas in potentia, while bourgeois thought from Hobbes through Rousseau to Hegel separates and mystifies potestas as power and obscures potentia, which produces “the bourgeois ideology of civil society.”³² Mediation is the space of separation that allows modern political thought to separate and mystify potestas, actual power, while hiding its rootedness in potentia.

Negri suggests that Spinoza liberates potentia from potestas, or potential power from actual power, which is both a political and a metaphysical operation. For most of modern thought, following the “line of thought Hobbes-Rousseau-Kant-Hegel,” potentia is always in the service of potestas, which takes the form of political and theological sovereignty. Potentia always requires mediation to take place as or accomplish the transition to sovereign potestas, and this project of sublime mediation culminates in Hegelian philosophy. This prevailing tendency of modern thought is the reason Negri works so hard to displace the conventional interpretation of the Spinozian attributes as mediating between substance and modes. Spinoza’s thought is an anomaly, however, because it counters this prevailing tendency.

In Negri’s reading of Spinoza, the attributes “go under,” to contribute to the power of potentia in contrast with potestas. The antagonism between substance and modes created by the virtual disappearance of the attributes brings about “a dimension of the world that is not hierarchical but, rather, flat, equal: versatile and equivalent.”³³ This is Deleuze’s plane of immanence, and it is also the “fundamental point” where “the idea of power … leaps to center stage with enormous force.”³⁴ Basically, the attributes no longer function to mediate between substance and mode in order to preserve hierarchical being, but they “have themselves been reabsorbed on a horizontal field of surfaces. They no longer represent agents of organization but are subordinated (and very nearly eliminated) in a linear horizon, in a space where only singularities emerge.”³⁵ Essentially, the absorption of the attributes contributes to the power of potentia, which is then manifested as potestas in the constitution of reality by the productive material imagination. This process is a political process, because the potentia of constituting reality is the potentia of the multitudo, or the multitude. According to Negri, Spinoza’s philosophy, as fulfilled in the Political Treatise, includes three important elements:

 

(1) a conception of the State that radically denies its transparency—that is, a demystification of politics; (2) a determination of Power (potestas) as a function subordinated to the social power (potentia) of the multitudo and, therefore, constitutionally organized; (3) a conception of constitution, in other words, of constitutional organization, which necessarily starts from the antagonism of subjects.³⁶

 

The notion of multitudo that Negri finds in Spinoza is directly related to the understanding of multitude that Negri develops in “Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo,” included as the second half of Time for Revolution, and that Negri and Michael Hardt express in Multitude: War and Democracy in The Age of Empire. At the same time, however, multitude is not explicitly related to power as potentia in either of these later works.

Negri’s understanding of the potentia of the multitudo in Spinoza leads directly to his sweeping political works, Empire and Multitude. I want to briefly consider the conclusion of Multitude to see how Negri and Hardt’s understanding of radical democracy fits into these theoretical notions of potentiality and virtuality. In Multitude, Negri and Hardt envision an understanding of democracy that would not be based on sovereignty. Sovereign power is potestas, and the dominant tradition of political philosophy claims that “there can be no politics without sovereignty.”³⁷ Negri and Hardt propose the term “multitude,” a translation of Spinoza’s multitudo, which would function as a virtual multiplicity, rather than exist as the actualized sovereignty of the people. War is the expression of sovereign power, but “the multitude cannot be reduced to a unity and does not submit to the rule of one.”³⁸ The power of the multitude is potentia, even though this term does not appear in Multitude; it is “the power to create social relationships in common.”³⁹ Hardt and Negri appeal to Lenin and James Madison to articulate “the democracy of the multitude as [a] theoretical possibility” that is grounded upon a material and political concept of love. Although most contemporary people think of love in emotional or spiritual terms, Hardt and Negri claim that “we need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions,” including Christianity and Judaism.⁴⁰ Religious love in a political and material (but not in an abstract metaphysical) sense is “the constituent power of the multitude.”⁴¹

Potentia is an immediately political term for Negri and, read along with Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, helps us to think a postsecularist Spinoza beyond the opposition between religious and secular. The constitution of reality is at once political, secular, religious, imaginary, theological, and real. A plane of immanence is not necessarily a denial of transcendence, but a way to express force and meaning directly without recourse to an abstract mediation that projects the source of power elsewhere in relation to its effects. Mediation is duplicitous; it appears to resolve antagonism but in fact displaces and diffuses it, appropriating and conserving power (potestas) and distributing violence (invisible effects of antagonisms) throughout the social order. Our media serves the potestas of the State and the Corporation in this regard. The current role of the corporate media is to absorb, bleed off, and redirect any serious challenge to the social order and saturate citizens with a disorienting and numbing cascade of spectacles. Any position is immediately reduced to “liberal” or “conservative” and then plugged into a preestablished network of other associations and identified with a party (you can choose the one on the Left or the one on the Right), both of which are funded by the same corporate money. Frustrated with their impotence, people give up, tune out, and become zombies of consumption.

The power of the constitutive bodily imagination in Spinoza, however, is its direct production of a new thought, which is theological as well as political in nature, and it is radical rather than reactive in relation to current and former modes of theological, political, and philosophical thinking. The notion of a plane of immanence keeps power from running away and transmuting itself into the power of potestas behind our backs as it were, whether this is done by rulers, CEOs, philosophers, or God.

In theological terms, God as pure actuality, or absolute potestas, governs the world by total mediation. It is the separation of potestas and potentia that instantiates and preserves traditional and modern sovereignty. Some of the most potent political critiques of modern capitalism are articulated in the name of traditional religious traditions, including British Radical Orthodoxy. The political solution of Radical Orthodoxy ultimately substitutes God for the State in its role as absolute Mediator, claiming that God actually does harmonize and mediate conflict before it can break out, whereas the modern state, and its concomitant philosophies and social theories, instead exacerbates conflict and creates violence. This is the argument of John Milbank in Theology and Social Theory, that modern political economy is “neopagan” because it is fundamentally conflictual and agonistic.⁴² Milbank acutely diagnoses and rejects the violence inherent in modern liberalism and contemporary capitalism, but his solution is to return to a premodern form of life that acknowledges the primary authority of the Church, not as an institution but as a source of harmony and community. This is a very idealized notion of medieval Christianity being petitioned as an alternative to the ravages of modern and postmodern capitalism.

I want to affirm the powerful social critique of liberal sovereignty on the part of Milbank and other representatives of Radical Orthodoxy, but at the same time I find the recommended solution of a renewed Christian orthodoxy to be utopian and incredible. Milbank dissociates the essence of Christianity from original violence, which itself is a difficult and contested move, since violence seems intrinsic to the very nature of Christianity. Christ is crucified on a cross, which is a supremely violent act, even if it is ultimately intended to overcome violence (in theory; of course the resurrection of Christ and the instantiation of Christianity do not overcome religious persecution and violence in practice). In contrast to his idealized version of Christianity, Milbank claims that modern secular society is originally and essentially violent, and he claims that any religious violence in the name of Christianity is a betrayal of Christianity. Of course, the State both creates and resolves conflictual violence, as does the capitalistic economy, where the market (as Adam Smith called it, the “Hand of God”) serves to mediate and reconcile competing ends. The State is established to reconcile or mediate conflict among citizens, although it also serves to instigate conflicts with other states. Milbank strips away the mediative aspects of the modern State and capitalist economy, leaving its naked violence exposed. At the same time, its mediation is what allows both the State and the economy to function.

The problem with the State, then, is that on the religious reading it either usurps God’s (or the Church’s) role of mediation of conflicts among entities, or, in Milbank’s more radical critique, it dispenses with this function altogether in its antagonism against Christianity. In his book on Christ and Culture, Graham Ward adopts a similar solution to Milbank, while focusing more on biblical and early Christianity than the modern secular world. Ward defines politics in terms of power relations that are necessarily asymmetrical and unequal. Ward argues that the revolutionary significance of Christ is not as “the leveler of hierarchies, the liberator of the subjugated.” Christ is not apolitical, however, because he is concerned with “power and its authorisation. The oneness concerns the submission of all social positions … to Christ, and the new orders of power (and its polity) that are engendered by this submission.”⁴³ While Ward elaborates suggestive ways to reimagine the significance of Christ for believers, his political stance is that the authority of Christ substitutes for the power and authority of the State while sublating any independent human culture.

Radical Orthodoxy substitutes an imperial Christian vision adopted from the Middle Ages for the suppression of Christianity and its relegation to the margins and private realm in the modern liberal and presumably secular state. Ward and Milbank are subtle, sharp, and important observers of contemporary theology, politics, and society, but they invoke a harmony that reinstates a more proper sovereign power rather than dismantle and reconfigure transcendent sovereignty itself, as Caputo, Keller, Derrida, Spinoza, Deleuze, and Negri offer resources to do. We cannot simply trump secular modernity with a reinvigorated Christianity.

On the secular level, the drawback of the State is that there is no higher, international authority to regulate or mediate the conflict among sovereign states, as they pursue their own heterogenous political and economic ends, and this concern leads to rationalistic and pragmatic reflection about the United Nations and international law, but the logic is similar to the theological situation. If only there were some higher power with the authority to adjudicate, to mediate and reconcile competing claims and conflicts, that would accord with what Derrida calls “the reason of the strongest” in a positive sense, the coincidence of “might” and “right.”⁴⁴ But if God as the coincidence or power and benevolence does not exist, if the state is in fact a rogue state, and if there exists no international power or authority to play God in the realm of international affairs, then what can we do about the problems of political and economic inequality, the savagery of naked capitalism, and the desire for social justice, not to mention the irruptions of ethnic, religious, and terrorist violence?

I don’t have the answers, but I do think that this interpretation of Spinoza assists us in thinking about political power in our contemporary world. It is a radical political act to retain potentia and refuse the subterfuge of transcendental mediation. If this is true, then the question is, is it possible to think a theology without transcendence, whether with or without God? If a purely immanent theological thinking is impossible, if theology is necessarily tied to transcendence, then there can be no truly radical political theology. In this case, we are left with the cleavage between a neoorthodox theology and its relationship to transcendence, however figured, and a radical political theory and action that must reject theology insofar as it is genuinely radical. But what if theology itself follows the trajectory of the attributes and folds into or under the modes of thought that constitute the productive imagination? What if the lesson of postsecularism is not that we must embrace religion but that modernity is not yet secular or religious enough, because these two phenomena are not exclusive? As Nietzsche explains in Twilight of the Idols, when we posit a separate realm of value and then question its existence we don’t just lose the transcendent world, we lose this world too because we have emptied it of value: “The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one, perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.⁴⁵ What if theology were to set for itself the task of restoring belief in this world rather than another?

In his book Cinema 2: The Time Image, Deleuze argues that the problem of the modern and contemporary world is a problem of belief. It was “a great turning-point of modern philosophy, from Pascal to Nietzsche, to replace the model of knowledge with belief.”⁴⁶ But the fact is that “we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us.”⁴⁷ The project of modern cinema, according to Deleuze, as well as implicitly for modern or postmodern philosophy, and I would suggest also for theology, a radical theology, is to restore our belief in the world, this world. Of course, cinematic technologies and effects also contribute to our sense of unreality, the experience of being in a bad movie, or maybe even a good one, but ultimately just a movie. Belief cannot be addressed to another world, a different world; this is a denial of faith and a betrayal of belief. According to Deleuze, “whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world. It is a whole transformation of belief.”⁴⁸

Following Deleuze and Negri and their respective readings of Spinoza, I suggest that we need a new Political-Theological critique as a prolegomenon for a new ethics, an anticapitalist ethics that could stitch together humanity and world, body and belief, faith and experience, democracy and power, beyond the opposition of religion and secularity. God is dead, has disappeared like the attributes, and has given way to the irreducible antagonisms between man and man, man and woman, and humanity and nature. Like the attributes, however, “God” also names the virtual potentia that makes it possible to restore belief. Restoring belief means transforming belief; it creates a new world, but it is not a utopia, because it is somewhere—right here and right now.

Spinoza’s thought raises numerous theological-political questions, including his significance for modern liberal democracy. Negri reads Spinoza in a radical manner, and I will return to Spinoza in chapter 5 to pose the question of radical democracy. At the same time, Negri’s reading of potentia offers a way to rethink the notion of sovereignty beyond the traditional understanding of actual power, or potestas, as I discussed in the introduction. Understanding potentia as a rethinking of sovereign attributes is not an overcoming of the deconstruction of sovereignty in the previous chapter, but an attempt to attend to the conditions of the forcefulness of conceptual and theological discourse in a supplementary or complementary way. Sovereignty, like God, does not exist. But precisely their (God’s and sovereignty’s) inexistence and the manner of their inexistence provides tools for the production of theological and political conceptions. According to the German jurist Carl Schmitt, political concepts cannot be fully disentangled from theological ones. In the next chapter, I will discuss Schmitt and his fellow German opponent of liberal modernity Leo Strauss to directly engage the problem of liberalism, which is both a political and a theological problem.