Bottici

We are not things, we are relations. Women’s bodies, like all bodies, are bodies in plural because they are processes, processes that are constituted by mechanisms of affects and associations that occur at the inter-, intra-, and the supra-individual level. To give just a brief example of what I mean here, think of how our bodies come into being through an inter-individual encounter, how they are shaped by supra-individual forces, such as their geographical location, and how they are made up of intra-individual bodies such as the air we breathe, the food we eat, or the hormones we swallow. There can be different roads to articulate an ontology of the transindividual. In Europe, the term has been at the centre of discussions arising from Étienne Balibar’s reading of Baruch Spinoza’s ontology as well as the result of a resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon.6

6Besides Étienne Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality (Delft: Eburon, 1997), explored below, more recent influential views include: Balibar and Vittorio Morfino, Il transindividuale: soggetti, relazioni, mutazioni (Milano: Mimesis, 2014); Balibar, ‘Philosophies of the Transindividual: Spinoza, Marx, Freud’, trans. by Mark G. E. Kelly, Australasian Philosophical Review, 2.1 (2018), pp. 5–25; Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Daniela Voss, ‘Disparate Politics: Balibar and Simondon’, Australasian Philosophical Review, 2.1 (2018), pp. 47–53 — who expands on Gilbert Simondon’s concept of transindividuality, by comparing it with Balibar’s view — and Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. by Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), the first monograph fully devoted to Simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual.These two strands of the debate on the transindividual have at times unfolded separately, and at times converged, as with Balibar’s philosophy, since it is from Simondon that Balibar derived the notion of transindividuality which he uses to interpret Spinoza’s Ethics.77Spinoza does not explicitly use the term transindividual or transindividuality, so for those who like to trace the origins of this ontology of the transindividual, one should follow Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality, which explicitly draws inspiration from Simondon, L’Individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989), which, in turn, coined the expression ‘transindividuality’. In this article, I mainly draw inspiration from Balibar’s insight that Spinoza’s concept of individuality is best understood as transindividuality (1997), and from Moira Gatens’s feminist readings of such an ontology, according to which the most monist of all ontologies — Spinoza’s — is also the most pluralist.88Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 56–57.

The starting point for Spinoza’s philosophy is that there is being rather than nothing.99Ethics i, Def. 1; CWS [The Collected Works of Spinoza, see abbreviations], i, p. 408. Indeed, he writes that not to exist is to lack power, and to be able to exist is to have power. Thus, if what necessarily exists are only finite beings, then finite beings are more powerful than an absolutely infinite being, which is absurd. Therefore, he concludes that either nothing exists or an absolutely infinite being exists. But we exist, either in ourselves or in something else, which necessarily exists. Therefore, an absolutely infinite being necessarily exists.1010Ethics i, 11 Dem.; CWS i, pp. 417–18. This is, in my view, the most beautiful lesson of Spinozism: if there are twenty people in a room, then an absolutely infinite being necessarily exists.1111The argument of the twenty persons is used in Ethics i, 8, Schol. 2, CWS i, p. 415, where Spinoza starts adding some a posteriori elements to the a priori proof for the existence of an infinite substance developed in Propositions 1 to 7 of Part i.

But this also implies that there is an infinite unique substance that expresses itself through an infinity of ‘attributes’, where the latter term stands for what the intellect perceives of the substance as constituting its essence.1212Ethics i, Def. 4; CWS i, p. 408. Among the infinity of such attributes, those that are accessible to humans (at least under current conditions) are thought and extension. A single thought is therefore just a mode of the attribute of thought, whereas a single body is a mode of the attribute of extension.

But, in order to avoid any possible misunderstanding, I should clarify that this does not mean that thought and extension, or ideas and things, are separate or even parallel to one another. Spinoza clearly states that ‘[t]he order and connection of ideas is the same [idem] as the order and connection of things’;1313Ethics ii, 7; CWS i, p. 451. thought and extension are the same (idem), not parallel to one another, and it is even less true that they are two different substances. It is important to emphasize this because whenever we speak about mind and body, or ideas and things, our long-inherited dualistic metaphysical framework tends to surreptitiously creep in. The first step in order to get to a truly pluralistic conception of the body is to get rid of this framework, and thus of the idea that a body is something different, parallel, or opposite to a mind. When we say ‘a body’ we do not mean something separate or even opposed to ‘a mind’ or ‘a soul’. ‘Body’ and ‘mind’ are just modes expressing two different attributes of the same substance.

This also leads us to the specific understanding of individuality as transindividuality which one can develop by drawing inspiration from Spinoza, particularly from the sort of compendium of his physics that he put forward in Part ii of the Ethics, where his eccentric materialism fully emerges.1414Ethics ii, 13–15; CWS i, pp. 457–63. If thought and extension are just two of the infinite attributes of the unique substance, then we cannot speak of a materialist ontology without immediately adding that it is not brute, inanimate, static matter that is at stake here. Spinoza’s materialism is an eccentric form of what we might call a ‘spiritual materialism’, precisely because extension and thought are just two of the infinite attributes of the same substance. 

Chiara Bottici