Appendix: The Question of Alienation: Frédéric Lordon, Marx and Spinoza

Summary

The question of how a return to Marx and Spinoza can make it possible to construct a concept of alienation that would still be relevant for us today is the central question both of this book and also of a major work by Frédéric Lordon, Capitalisme, désir et Servitude: Marx and Spinoza, which appeared in 2010 (translated in 2014 as Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire). If there is a terrain common to Lordon's Spinoza and Marx and our own Marx with Spinoza, it can only be a Spinozist one, and therefore in accord with the idea that alienation must be thought in relation to a regime of activity or acting more than to a certain form of being: that alienation is experienced first in terms of what we do (or what we cannot do), as primarily a restriction on what we can or are able to do, and subsequently as a restriction on what we are or can be.

With its title and subtitle, Lordon's book is placed in relation to a philosophical tradition that has its roots in France, going back at least to Althusser, and that consists in reading Marx and Spinoza together: a tradition which posits that it is Spinoza (not Hegel) who makes it possible to understand Marx, and that it is Marx (more than Descartes) who makes it possible to understand Spinoza. The first approach effectively makes possible a reading of Spinoza by Marx, focused on the traces that remain in the text of Marx, mostly the young Marx, of his reading of Spinoza, notably in his anthropological (human beings as Teil der Natur or pars naturae) and ontological conceptions (nature as productive totality, human history as a continuation of natural history). The second approach (using Marx to read Spinoza) appears more adventurous and risky, but it can justify itself in terms of multiple points of intersection. For example, with Spinoza and Marx, it is a matter of two philosophers who, in the context of the entire western tradition, are rare in terms of their specific claim to be partisans of democracy.