Chapter 1, ‘Individuality, Causality, Substance: Reflections on Spinoza’s Ontology’...deals with the ‘enigma’ of ‘Spinozist ontology’ (3), by which Balibar means the account in Ethics, Parts I and II, of substance monism (and rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism and free will), the parallel nature of the attributes of Thought and Extension, which share the same order and connection yet cannot effect one another, and the nature of the finite modes, said by Spinoza to constitute in their entirety this single substance (referred to memorably later as ‘God or Nature’). For readers of Spinoza, many puzzling consequences follow: what is the status of freedom without free will? What does it mean to be an individual, if one is merely a finite mode whose existence is merely an effect of innumerable prior causes and forces that eddy one about like a leaf on the sea?

While the discussion is abstract and technical, Balibar raises his standard. ‘[T]he object of the Spinozist ontology is individuation, or the difference between activity and passivity as such’ (4). Unlike in Aristotle or Descartes, this individual is not a fixed simple nature, essence or substantial form, but one constantly modified by their bodily interactions with others (their ‘affections’). Yet that doesn’t mean that the individual can somehow dissolve into some mystical collective Whole or unity (e.g. ‘Nature’, conceived as something with a fixed order and telos). The transindividual is not a collective individual: it accounts for both the relational and interdependent nature of individuation as a continual process and the irreducibility of the individual to the whole. An ontology of relations is sketched here, becoming key to the transindividual later.

Chapter 2, ‘Individuality and Transindividuality in Spinoza’, offers a new translation of a text previously available in a small-circulation pamphlet in 1997. This is a wonderful essay and is where new readers of the transindividual should begin. It begins with the same problem: what is the essence of the human individual in Spinoza? In Ethics Part III, Proposition 9, Spinoza tells us it is their desire, being their ‘consciousness’ of their bodily conatus (or striving to persist in being which determines them to act). But what exactly is this consciousness or determination? Where lies this essence? Characteristically, Balibar uses a difficulty in interpretation to subtly advance a radical new thesis. The real challenge is in how Spinoza destabilises traditional ideas of the individual, premised on an exaggerated distinction of interior vs exterior, individualism vs organicism/holism, which is ultimately founded on mind-body dualism. Instead, Spinoza’s philosophy is ‘irreducible’ to the ‘standard dualisms of the history of ideas’, an irreducibility not accidental but ‘the basis of his theory of finite modes and their natural production’ (41). Whereas traditional philosophers have looked for a fixed, abstract essence of this individual, for Spinoza this individuality is founded on ‘relation and communication’ (43).

These formulations are abstract and concentrated on Spinoza interpretation, but subtly the transindividual appears. Individuality is fundamental to Spinoza: but the individual is herself a unity of parts, and is defined by her relations to other individuals. No one is entirely self-sufficient; what makes us autonomous also makes us interdependent. Thus we should speak of the transindividual then, which is to conceive of the being of the individual as in her relations through which she affects and is continually affected, modifying and being modified by her environment in a singular way. Such relations are neither simply ‘in’ each individual nor do they exist solely outside, classifying and defining them. Instead individuation is in a continual state of passage.

The remainder explores this through a close study of the Ethics. Note that the transindividual is a metaphysical (and not an affective or imaginative) concept: it proceeds from an understanding of causality to its determination of individuals, who not only act but become integrated with others (and are themselves composites of integrating parts). Thus the individual as an autonomous, singular thing is a continual process of what he calls recomposition and decomposition (it would be tempting to use the old phrase becoming here, but Balibar avoids it), relationally ‘oscillating’ between activity and passivity. Individuality is not a specifically human quality. Nor does individuality rest in our ‘higher’, rational natures: the final part of Balibar’s ambitious essay is to demonstrate how the human individual (and quasi-individual political and social groups) is constituted by an integration of both reason and the imagination, which together serve our flourishing.

Throughout, Balibar outlines questions rather than doctrines, yet there are some intriguing sleights of hand. Spinoza becomes a dialectician, closer to Hegel than Hobbes. Double processes, syntheses and polarities between opposites abound. While Simondon is the obvious reference, two other contexts matter. First, the intellectual presence of Matheron, whose 1969 Individu et communauté chez Spinoza [Individual and Community in Spinoza] authoritatively sets out an ontology based on a polarity between these two terms, into which the human individual can become integrated and even part of one collective individual with others, a ‘communism of minds’. Balibar’s aporia challenges that, identifying a third term between individual and collective that destabilises both. Readers will observe an underlying commitment to alterity and difference, sometimes in the hues of Deleuze, sometimes reminiscent of Arendt.

Mark G. E. Kelly