warren montag

Imitating the Affects of Beasts:

Interest and Inhumanity in Spinoza

I
n Naissance de la biopolitique, the text of his course at the
Collège de France in the academic year 1978–1979, Michel Foucault argues
that two distinct forms of governed subjectivity emerged in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries: first, the legal subject (le sujet de droit), the
individual conceived as possessor of rights and foundation of legitimate
sovereignty; and second, the subject of interest (le sujet d’intérêt), a subject
of calculation and choice. In opposition to the legal subject, the subject of
interest did not determine the legitimacy of states but rather their practi-
cal ability to exist: the state that fails to take into account the basic fact
that all individuals pursue their own interests will, irrespective of its
legal status, soon cease to govern at all. In fact, according to the mode
of governmentality that emerged in the eighteenth century, individuals,
Foucault maintains, were said to be governable only to the extent that
they were understood as subjects of interest. Interest alone, understood
as a calculation of gain and loss, would render their conduct, not only in
what we understand today to be economic matters but even in their most
intimate and private choices, both intelligible and predictable.

Volume 20, Numbers 2 and 3  doi 10.1215/10407391-2009-004

© 2009 by Brown University and  d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
d i f f e r e n c e s 55

Foucault has thus drawn a line of demarcation within the cat-

egory of the subject insofar as it became the object of critical analysis in
post–World War II French philosophy: not only is there no single subject
into which the legal subject and the subject of interest might be amalgam-
ated, but Foucault cautions us against assuming any sort of homology
(whether formal or historical) between them. If legal and moral philoso-
phies took the subject of right as their point of departure in their defini-
tion of legitimate authority from the beginning of the seventeenth century
(Suarez and Grotius to Hobbes and Locke), the subject of interest, at least
until the middle of the eighteenth century, remained the province of a
shadowy raison d’état, which announced, as much in opposition to early
liberal and republican philosophies as to the legacy of medieval Christian
political thought, that it would regard human beings not as they ought to
be but as they were.
But what were they? A. O. Hirschman has shown that the lust for
power and possessions once denounced as sin came to be understood as an
unalterable property of human nature and thus part of a design: if individu-
als were governed by interest, this interest, which as Bernard Mandeville
suggested appeared at a certain level to be a vice (and which might take
the forms of selfishness, greed, or lack of charity), regarded at a superior
level, that is, from the perspective of its results on the scale of society as
a whole, could be understood as the instrument of a general good, or at
least prosperity that would itself furnish many of the conditions of such a
good. There emerged from this line of investigation a vision, from which
we haven’t entirely freed ourselves, of a utopia far more compelling and
durable than any dream of communism: that of a society whose perpetual
advance in material and cultural terms is guaranteed by autonomous
individuals pursuing their interest free of interference (by states or by
shadowy combinations of envious and irrational workers or consumers,
the former often acting at the behest of the latter) whose actions combine
to produce a rationality beyond the comprehension or design of human
beings. We were and are assured that such a society cannot fail to offer a
stability heretofore unimaginable: irreversible prosperity without crisis
or dearth that would in turn provide the base for a politics without need
of revolution or repression.
However tempting it may be at this point to link the themes of
government by consent and the economics of free choice, Foucault injects
a note of caution: while the legal subject and the subject of interest are
associated historically, they remain in important ways distinct. In fact,
56 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

citing the example of Hume, he will postulate as a characteristic of political

thought from the middle of the eighteenth century on a tendency to grant
a permanent excess of interest over right, as if the former animates and
gives content to the otherwise empty forms of the latter. While interest can
invalidate law and right, law cannot dissipate interest, even if the force
of law can hold it in abeyance. The contract (private or public and social)
is no longer binding in irresistible fact if it fails to serve the interests of
one of the parties. Foucault observes that while much attention in the last
decades had been devoted to the genesis of the legal subject, far too little
thought has been given to the specificity of the subject of interest and its
historical emergence, and it has thus remained the unthought-of political
speculation, liberal and Marxist alike.
Foucault’s admittedly schematic treatment of the two forms
of subjectivity and their relation to what he calls governmentality raises
a number of questions, of which one in particular is important for the
discussion that follows. It may well be the case that Foucault too quickly
reduces the subject of interest to “the model of homo economicus,” that is,
the theory of human conduct that one finds, for example, in Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations, the not very distant predecessor of the utility maximer
whose choices furnish grounds for so much contemporary social science.
Interest more broadly conceived (beyond not only mere economic interest
but even “self-interest”) was the object of a great deal of speculation and
debate a good century before the appearance of Smith’s masterpiece. In
fact, the deduction of right from interest and the assertion of the perma-
nent excess of the latter over the former is arguably to be found in Hobbes’s
Leviathan. At the same time, Spinoza’s relation to these discussions and
debates has remained in question. He appears in Hirschman’s The Passions
and the Interests as a partisan of interest against Christian moralizers, only
to disappear altogether from Pierre Force’s extremely comprehensive and
interesting work, Self-Interest before Adam Smith. The disappearance, or
rather invisibility, of Spinoza, who manages to haunt these discussions all
the more when he has no apparent place in them, is absolutely typical and
indeed necessary: in a certain sense he represents what must be placed out
of bounds for the discussion to take place as it has. Enough has been said
about Spinoza in the last thirty years, not only by well-known French and
Italian scholars but also by historians such as Jonathan Israel, for it to be
clear that Spinoza was an opponent of every theology of transcendence, as
well as the moralism that is the necessary correlative of such theologies. I
want to ask, however, whether it is not possible in addition to understand
d i f f e r e n c e s 57

his work as a whole in relation to what Foucault called the two forms of
modern subjectivity, the subject of law or right and the subject of interest.
Some of the most important contributions in recent Spinoza scholarship
have demonstrated Spinoza’s critique of the idea of the subject of right, his
insistence that right in any meaningful sense is coextensive with power
and that a contract is nothing more than an expression of a relation of force
(which is quite distinct, needless to say, from deducing right from interest).
Accordingly, I want to argue that just as we can read parts of the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (ttp) and the entire Tractatus Politicus (tp) as cri-
tiques of the legal subject (and of the entire apparatus of right, contract,
and consent), it is possible to see the Ethics as containing one of the most
rigorous critiques of the concept of the subject of interest ever written.
To approach this critique, however, we must first acknowledge
and explain not only the appeal of Spinoza to the partisans of interest (who
are themselves, albeit unwittingly, partisans of the concept of the subject
of interest), but also his incontestable influence on figures as varied as
Mandeville and Ludwig von Mises. Both drew inspiration from Spinoza’s
epigrammatic utterance at the conclusion of the preface to Ethica 3: “I will
therefore discuss the nature and force of the affects, as well as the power
of the mind over them according to the same method I just employed in
relation to God and the mind, and I will consider human appetites and
actions as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies.” The move
from moralistic denunciation of the affects or passions to the project of
comprehending them as necessary parts of nature opened the possibil-
ity of judging them by their effects rather than according to theological
prejudices. This, together with the idea that God is the immanent cause of
all things, allowed a kind of sanctification of the effort to preserve one’s
own being. That which preserves one’s being is good and that which harms
or threatens to harm it is bad; we are thus led by nature and our nature
to choose the good over the bad, to choose that which is useful over that
which is harmful.
Certain philosophers of the period turned to the stoic tradi-
tion to assert that the effort to conserve one’s being was the prompting
of Providence within, our desire seeking the end proper to the design of
nature as a whole. The Greek term όρμή (“instinct” or “inclination”) cap-
tured the sense in which individuals were impelled to serve natural ends,
an impulsion that they experienced as desire. Thus the sexual impulse
that individuals sought to gratify served the natural end of the propaga-
tion of the species. Such notions were easily adapted to society by later
58 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

thinkers. The effects of what were once denounced as selfish passions,

understood at the level of society, produced a system that would relieve
the sufferings of the poor far more effectively than the self-sacrifice and
denial involved in acts of charity (which, insofar as they involve renuncia-
tion and a kind of diminution of the individual in question, might be seen
as a refusal of Providence). In this way, necessity and morality could be
happily made to coincide and the subject of interest made to rest on the
natural foundation of self-preservation. This became for Hobbes the basis
for a society without conflict (if, that is, he could persuade individuals
genuinely to fear physical death and surrender their hopes of the world
to come) and for later thinkers such as Mandeville and Smith the ground
for a theory of social progress and prosperity (themselves the only real
guarantee of social order): individuals, understood as subjects of inter-
est, will choose life over death and prosperity over poverty. Finally, while
Foucault was undoubtedly correct to argue that the subject of interest
in the course of the eighteenth century comes to exceed the subject of
right, it is nevertheless true that the legal subject provided the form that
the subject of interest tended to take in philosophical speculation: the
essentially solitary individual who preserves himself without regard or
responsibility for others.
What was Spinoza’s relation to these currents of thought? In
common with the Stoics, as understood by Cicero, and with Hobbes, he uses
the term conatus, derived from the verb conor that, as Pierre Macherey
has observed, “has the double meaning of an attempt and an engagement”
(80). For Cicero, every animal seeks to be its own preserver and is endowed
with self-love in order that it will desire not only its own persistence but
that of its kind (De finibus bk. 4, sec. 7–8). The conatus is thus the point
at which the individual’s self-love coincides with the ends established by
Providence. The conatus becomes the striving toward an end, and the
entirety of human culture can be understood as the means peculiar to
humanity for the attainment of that natural end. Hobbes translates conatus
as “endeavor, the internal beginning of voluntary motion as in walking,
speaking, striking and other visible actions.” This endeavor, in turn, is
governed by a law of nature, which Hobbes describes in moral and legal
terms even though it functions like the laws that determine the motion of
bodies: “[A] man is forbidden to do that, which is destructive of his life, or
taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which
he thinketh it may be best preserved” (189). Indeed, Hobbes’s entire theory
of the stable commonwealth is predicated on the idea that individuals will
(and not simply should) act to preserve their own lives and may therefore
d i f f e r e n c e s 59

be counted on to perform their covenants and obey the laws of the com-
monwealth as long as there is “a visible power to keep them all in awe”: the
Leviathan. The theoreticians of self-preservation as natural principle who
followed Hobbes (particularly Mandeville and Smith) tended to fault him
for failing to penetrate beyond the appearance of discord to the underlying
harmony it concealed; self-seeking individuals not only unwittingly real-
ized the goals of nature, they just as unwittingly served to create a social
harmony whose design remained invisible to them. While they believed
they acted only to secure their own prosperity with indifference, if not
active enmity, to others whose pleas for material aid or even mere pity
were received with scorn, they in fact contributed to the general welfare
to a far greater extent than any voluntary act of assistance. Thus interest
was not merely the real motive for human action; it was just as importantly
laudable, worthy of the approbation that prejudice denied it.
The term conatus as it functions in the Ethics (esp. pt. 3, prop.
4–8) has as little in common with these ideas as Spinoza’s “God, or Nature”
does with the God of Christianity. First, conatus is not peculiar to human
or even animate existence; it is neither instinct nor voluntary or animal
motion. It is not inscribed in a providential design, nor does it describe the
way that every individual in animate nature acts, with the end of its own
preservation in view, an end that in turn serves the end of the preservation
of the species of which it is a member, which itself preserves the delicate
balance of species as a whole in nature. Spinoza’s conatus is disengaged
from any teleology; it is simply the tendency for any singular thing (res
singularis) at all, animate or inanimate, a stone or a human being, to
persist as it is. The conatus of each singular thing “is nothing other than
its actual essence” (Ethica 3, prop. 7), a phrase that rules out any final-
ism (immanent or transcendent); the thing is not striving to realize its
essence or potential. The essence of a thing coincides entirely with its
actual existence and has no meaning outside of that existence (“by reality
and perfection I mean the same thing”). To complicate matters further, a
singular thing, far from exhibiting an irreducible simplicity, is “several
individuals [plura individua] concurring [concurrant] in one action, such
that they are all simultaneously the cause of the same effect” (Ethica 2,
def. 7). This definition is extremely important in a number of respects for
any understanding of the conatus. How can a “thing” that is nothing more
than a number of other things united long enough to produce an effect be
endowed with something like an “instinct” or impulse of self-preservation?
Further, if Spinoza’s definition, as rendered in English, would appear to
confer upon the thing a kind of precariousness, the Latin verb Spinoza
60 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

has chosen here to denote the “unification” of several individuals into

one underscores its precariousness even more. Concurro is derived from
the verb curro, to run. Concurro is a running together, but in two distinct
senses: it can signify both a rapid assembling together and also a running
to meet in combat. It is, in other words, the most unpredictable, fragile,
and temporary unification that would merit the name. Further, it is worth
remarking that although Spinoza’s discussion of singular things at this
point and later in Ethica 2 is derived from Lucretius, his account of the
tendential unity of the bodies of which any thing is composed is even
more cautious than any found in De Rerum Natura. Lucretius employs a
verb that Spinoza freely appropriates in the Ethics, convenio, which means
both to come together and to agree, capturing the simultaneity of body
and mind upon which Spinoza repeatedly insists. The allusion to Lucre-
tius is important here: singular things are formed through an encounter
between bodies capable of simultaneous agreement and assemblage. Once
composed through such an encounter, the thing will persist indefinitely
and can be destroyed only by an external cause. The conatus is then noth-
ing more than the tendency for such a composite assemblage to persist.
Neither the human nor even the animate thus stands apart from or in any
way transcends physical nature; we are subject to its determinations as is
any other existing thing. These determinations, insofar as they increase
or diminish the power of the body to act and the mind to think, Spinoza
calls affects. It is in relation to the affects alone that the conatus can be
understood. We live our actual essence as appetite, and to the extent that
we are conscious of this appetite, we desire.
Here we must confront a possible objection: is it not the case
that Spinoza has simply recast the subject of interest, depriving interest of
its subjective character, it is true, but nevertheless granting each thing the
tendency to persist in its being, a tendency that, in the case of human indi-
viduals, will lead them to choose that which aids them in their persistence
and to avoid that which threatens it? Has not Spinoza posited an internal
finality according to which each thing tends insofar as it is able to seek
the end of its own preservation, as both the Stoics and Hobbes held? If such
a reading is tenable, then Spinoza has provided a foundation for a theory
of human action, understood as a choice among alternatives, perfectly
compatible with the theoreticians of interest. Even if the subject of inter-
est derivable from Spinoza’s conatus is in no way reducible to the model
of homo economicus, the human individual as understood in the Ethics is
constantly faced with the ethical alternatives of the utile and the malum.
d i f f e r e n c e s 61

However, as Macherey has remarked, Spinoza develops the

notion of the conatus at the beginning of Ethica 3 in a provisional and
artificial state of isolation. The conatus in the Ethics is simultaneously a
principle of singularization (or individualization) and a principle of trans­
individualization. Constant interactions with bodies and forces external
to it are the condition of the very existence of any thing and are as such
unavoidable, but such encounters carry risks as well as benefits. All that
follows the account of the conatus in propositions 4–8 of the third part of
the Ethics serves to demonstrate that the distinction between the conatus
as internal cause and as the infinity of external causes cannot hold. In
fact, in any important sense, there are no internal causes, only external
causes compatible with our being that precede our being the cause of an
effect, which will in turn become an effect ad infinitum (and in this way
increase an individual’s power and virtue), or, in contrast, external causes
incompatible with us, which weaken or decompose the concurrence of the
bodies of which we are comprised (diminishing our power). There can
be no withdrawal from nature, including that part of nature that is the
human world: “[W]e can never bring it about that we do not need what
is external for the conservation of our being and live without commerce
with the things that are external to us” (Ethica 4, prop. 18, schol.). We
should not be misled by Spinoza’s use of the term things (rebus): among
the things we need, as he makes clear in the remainder of the sentence,
are other human beings.

If, for example, we examine our mind, it is certain that it would

be more imperfect if the mind were alone and had nothing other
than itself to comprehend. There are thus many things outside
of us that are useful to us, and which we therefore desire. And
among them we cannot conceive of anything better than those
that agree [conveniunt] with our nature. If, for example, two
individuals having the same nature are joined together [jun-
guntur], they compose an individual twice as powerful as each
one taken separately. For man, therefore, there is nothing more
useful than man.

But if the human world tendentiously increases the power of

each individual, “disposing the body to be able to be affected in a greater
number of ways by external bodies” in ways that “render it able to affect
other bodies” in its turn, it often, perhaps more often, subjects the indi-
vidual to affects that weaken the body and mind. I have noted elsewhere
62 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

Spinoza’s fascination with automatons and somnambulists: those entirely

subjected to determinations external to them and forced to serve tyran-
nies inimical to their own well-being, all the while desiring nothing but
what the tyrant commands. To the list of the figures of human servitude,
however, we must add an even more disturbing character: he who dreams
with his eyes open and, in the grip of conflicting affects, observes himself
with horror as he “sees the better and pursues the worse” (Ethica 3, prop. 2,
schol.). This phrase, or some version of it, occurs three times in the Ethics:

But to tell the truth, if from experience they did not know that
they not infrequently do something that they later regret, and
that often, when they are in the grip of opposing affects, they
see the better and pursue the worse [meliora videre, et deteriora
sequi] nothing would prevent them from believing that they act
freely in all things. (pt. 3, prop. 2, schol.)

The powerlessness [impotentiam] of human beings to restrain

and limit the affects, I call servitude; in effect a man subject
[obnoxius] to the affects is not under his own authority, but
that of fortune [sui juris non est, sed fortunae], whose power
is such that he is often constrained, although he sees the better,
nevertheless to pursue the worse [quanquam meliora sibi videat,
deteroria tamen sequi]. (pt. 4, preface)

In this way, I believe that I have shown why men are moved more
by opinion than by true reason and why the true knowledge of
good and bad excites the soul and gives way to every kind of
libidinal desire; from which comes the phrase of the Poet: I see
the better, approve it, and pursue the worse [ Video meliora,
proboque, deteriora sequo]. (pt. 4, prop. 17, schol.)

There are many observations to be made about these three passages. In

the first, the fact that we in certain cases know clearly what the utile is
but pursue (as I have translated sequor) what is harmful to us, what will
diminish our power, allows us to see what is usually invisible to us: that
our will is merely an effect of causes external to it and not the cause of
our actions. And this is not only the case in actions that are harmful to
us: an individual thinks that he is the cause of the painting that he makes
only because he is conscious of the desire to make a painting and unaware
of the causes of his desire, the determinations that move both body and
mind simultaneously. In the second passage, which follows the first fairly
d i f f e r e n c e s 63

closely, the phrase takes on a more specific ethical and political function:
it reveals that the nature of “servitude” is to act or be acted upon in ways
that weaken us, including fighting a war in the interest of the tyrant who
oppresses us. But it also suggests that human beings are always affected
in contrary ways by antagonistic affects, some impelling us to greater
power, others to weakness and even decomposition (and it is in Ethica 4
that Spinoza will consider the forms by which we destroy ourselves slowly
and imperceptibly, as well as the case of desiring and bringing about our
own death at the behest of causes external to and incompatible with our
nature, that of suicide).
In the third passage, Spinoza attributes the phrase he has
already used twice without any indication that it was a citation to, simply,
the Poet. In fact, it is a verbatim citation of Medea’s words in book 7 of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses as she struggles to “shake off” (excute) the passion
she has inexplicably conceived for the foreigner and enemy, Jason (line
17). The statement differs from the two preceding versions not only by the
fact that it is in the first person rather than the third but also because it
contains an additional element that sets the mind in partial conflict with
the actions of the body. The speaker not only sees the better but “approves”
or “judges” (proboque) it to be so. He not only perceives but knows through
the mental act of judgment that it indeed is the better, and yet he pursues
the worse. It is here that Spinoza tips his hand: to assume that individu-
als follow their interest not only as conceived abstractly according to
some philosophical system but even as they themselves define it is simply
another form of “conceiving men not as they are” but as the philosophers
want and need them to be.
The subject of interest, in all its diversity, from Hobbes to Smith,
rests on a fantasy of how people should be rather than how they are, even
if its norms diverge from those of Christianity. Spinoza, in fact, rules out
even the concept of a deceived subject of interest: the problem here is not
that people pursue illusory rather than real interests or those of others
rather than their own without knowing it. Spinoza’s example leads to a far
more disturbing conclusion: while we sleepwalk through the motions of
obedience to that which weakens and destroys us, a part of us is awake to
see and understand our utter subjection to what we know is the worse. It
is not that we are ignorant but that our knowledge, our use of reason, is
powerless in the face of the determinations that compel us, against what we
know to be the case, to follow the worse. Immediately after the citation from
“the Poet,” Spinoza adds another citation as a kind of gloss: “It is this that
64 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

Ecclesiastes seems to have had in mind when he said: Whoever increases

knowledge, increases pain” (dolorum; in the Hebrew text of Ecclesiastes,
‫)קהּלת‬, with which Spinoza was familiar (the verb is to feel pain, to suffer:
‫)ויוסיף דעת יוסיף מבאוכ‬. To see the better, to know it and understand it, and
simultaneously to see oneself follow the worse and, even more pathetically,
be forced by our very reason to acknowledge that a part of us desires to fol-
low the worse, would be enough to make anyone but Spinoza turn away in
despair. But knowing that which determines us and the extent of its power
increases our own capacity to modify it: there is no surer road to servitude
than the belief that we alone determine our actions by the exercise of the
will. In part 4 of the Ethics, “Of Human Servitude,” the notion of the indi-
vidual as subject of interest is shown to be a cruel hoax or, better, a kind of
denial that masks the ways in which we are “constrained” to choose that
which harms us and weakens the powers of body and mind (and it is worth
remarking in passing that nothing suggests that the pursuit of the greatest
possible wealth would in any way augment the powers of mind and body or
that the very model of homo economicus would not constitute for Spinoza a
form of seeing the better and doing the worse, that is, of slowly destroying
oneself in the service of causes outside of us).
We may now understand that our conatus impels us into inter-
actions with a great number of other things in the interest of our very
survival, let alone the increase of the power of mind and body, but that
such encounters are full of risk as well as opportunity; we may be made
more powerful by the joyous affects of mutual love and desire or weakened
and destroyed by the sad affects of hatred and self-hatred. Of all the things
that affect us, none have greater force than things themselves affected by
affects. “When we imagine that something we love is destroyed, we feel
sadness; if we imagine it conserved, we feel pleasure” (Ethica 3, prop.
19). But beyond mere destruction or conservation, there exists, in certain
things at least, the possibility of joy at that which increases power and
thus tends to a thing’s conservation and, in contrast, sadness at that which
weakens a thing and renders it liable to destruction. If we imagine a thing
itself capable of being affected by affects of joy and sadness that we further
judge similar to ourselves, we will be affected by the same affects (Ethica
3, prop. 27). Spinoza will call this propensity “the imitation of the affects”
(Ethica 3, prop. 27, schol.).
The concept of affective imitation, although absolutely central
to Spinoza’s social and political thought, received very little attention
until relatively recently and remains to an important degree unexplored.
d i f f e r e n c e s 65

It raises a number of questions and problems, all of which are relevant to

understanding the resistances to the category of the subject of interest by
philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Against the idea
of individuals affected by their own passions alone, calculating an interest
peculiar to them, Spinoza and a number of his contemporaries developed
an entire vocabulary of transindividual affective existence in which
affects neither originate nor are contained in discrete individuals but are
“communicated,” or “transmitted,” from one to another outside of both
knowledge and control. Such communication might be viewed, as it often
was, negatively, as a “contagion” by which various harmful follies spread
across great numbers of people, but it was also understood as a means of
influencing weak minds in the interests of public good. The 1670s wit-
nessed, probably in reaction to the translation of Hobbes’s work into vari-
ous European languages by the beginning of the decade, the introduction
into philosophical and political discourse of a number of such concepts,
notably in the work of La Rochefoucauld and Malebranche, in addition to
Spinoza himself. The extent of Spinoza’s convergence or divergence from
these and other like-minded thinkers remains to be determined.
I want to focus on an aspect of Spinoza’s discussion of the imita-
tion of the affects that has so far received little attention. We imitate the
affect we imagine affects a thing similar to us (res nobis similis). This might
appear to be merely an extravagant way of denoting our fellow human
beings that all the other thinkers of transindividual affectivity assume
without discussion, without making any concessions to a theoretical
humanism that would place the human outside of nature (human beings
are finally things among other things, etc.). I propose, then, to examine a
passage in which the propensity to “see the better and do the worse” is tied
directly to the imitation of the affects: the scholium to Ethica 4, proposi-
tion 68, Spinoza’s final word on the parable of the first man. If man were
born free—that is, free of the sad affects that diminish his power to act and
think and to persist in his being—he would form no ideas of good and evil.
But he lives in a world of servitude, subject to the affects of things similar
to himself that he imitates without wanting to or knowing that he does.

It is this as well as other things that we have already demon-

strated that Moses seems to have meant in his history of the
first man. We can conceive in this history no other power of God
than that by which he created man, that is, a power by which
he sought only the utility of man and it is in this sense that it is
66 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

narrated that God forbade free man from eating of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil and that as soon as he ate from
it, he would fear death rather than desire to live. Then, man
having found woman, who completely agreed with his nature,
he knew that there could be nothing in nature more useful to
him than she; but that, believing that the beasts were similar to
him [ bruta sibi similia esse credidit], he soon began to imitate
their affects [see Ethica 3, prop. 27] and allowed his freedom
to escape, which was later recovered by the Patriarchs led by
the Spirit of Christ, that is, by the idea of God, on which alone
depends the fact that man is free and desires for other men the
good he desires for himself.

Deleuze has very accurately described Spinoza’s “fascination”

with the problem of evil, a fascination that overpowered his caution and
led him to express himself quite imprudently to the Calvinist Willem
von Blyenburgh. In three letters written between December 1664 and
February 1665, Spinoza returned to the parable of the first man, a par-
able that he discusses, in addition to his exchange with Blyenburgh, in
each of his major works: the Short Treatise, the ttp, the Ethics, and the
tp, each time with a slightly different emphasis, as if he sought to use the
passage from Genesis for a number of purposes. Of all these discussions,
the passage from the Ethics is by far the most wide ranging, as well as
the most elliptical, and poses numerous difficulties. Spinoza’s discussion
begins by acknowledging the obscurity of the “history of the first man”
in its concrete textual existence. He claims to be able to do no more than
determine what Moses “appears to have meant” in this history, a claim
that assumes Moses’s authorship when it was none other than Spinoza
himself who had argued in the already published and far more accessible
ttp that “it is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Pentateuch was
not written by Moses, but by someone who lived many generations after
Moses” (bk. 8). Rather than examine the scriptural passage to which he
refers, however, he invokes in a remarkably condensed way a number of
distinct themes already developed in Ethica 3–4. Adam was free in that
he not only could but did endeavor to persist in his being and to increase
the power of the body to act and the mind to think. As a particular expres-
sion of God’s power, he sought only the utile and thought of nothing but
life and living: in this sense, Adam is the portrait of the homo liber or
free man, the possibility of which occupies the concluding propositions
d i f f e r e n c e s 67

of Ethica 4. In Spinoza’s earlier texts, the prohibition that God addresses

to Adam was neither legal nor moral, but causal: “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”
(Letter 19, Works 810). In the Ethics, the account of the nature and content
of the “prohibition” changes in subtle but not insignificant ways: “[A]t the
moment he ate, he would fear death rather than desire life.” While the
Hebrew of Genesis is unambiguous—“as soon as you eat it, you shall die
[‫—”]מת‬Spinoza emphasizes the affective consequences of eating the fruit
of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Desire, which Spinoza has
defined as consciousness of one’s own conatus, will be replaced by fear,
the present by the future, and being by nothingness. The individual who
lives according to reason is affected by “joy and desire,” while the one who
acts out of fear is governed by external causes more powerful than he,
which are antagonistic to his nature. The free man is one who seeks the
good, “that is, to act, to live, to conserve his being by seeking that which
is properly useful to him: he thinks of nothing less than death, but his
wisdom is a meditation on life” (67).
Here Spinoza departs from the theme of the forbidden fruit, as
does the narrative of Genesis, whose order he follows quite closely. The
following, and concluding, sentence of the scholium strangely complicates
the temporality of Spinoza’s account of the first man:

Then, man having found woman, who completely agreed with

his nature, he knew that there could be nothing in nature more
useful to him than she; but that, believing that the beasts were
similar to him [ bruta sibi similia esse credidit], he soon began
to imitate their affects [see Ethica 3, prop. 27] and allowed his
freedom to escape, which was later recovered by the Patriarchs
led by the Spirit of Christ, that is, by the idea of God, on which
alone depends the fact that man is free and desires for other men
the good he desires for himself.

The sentence begins with the word then, as if Spinoza intends to continue
the narrative of the eating of the fruit. Instead, however, he inserts a
parenthetical clause whose significance would appear to be at odds with
the account of the fall into servitude that occupies the remainder of the
sentence. It is, in fact, an account of Adam’s conatus, of his endeavoring
to persist in his own being and increasing his power to do so through his
fortuitous encounter with Eve (we should note that Spinoza says Adam
68 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

“found” or even “came upon” Eve—the verb is invenio—thereby suppress-

ing the account of God’s creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib). In fact, Spinoza
here offers a kind of allegorical reading of this passage from Genesis,
according to which the image of Eve’s origin in Adam signifies the fact
that his encounter with her was an encounter with another singular thing
that “absolutely” (prorsus) agreed with (the verb is conveno) his nature.
It appears that the narrative of Adam and his wife (Spinoza does not
name her in this account), condensed into a parenthetical phrase, is the
paradigm of the proposition cited earlier: “If for example two individuals
having the same nature are joined together, they compose an individual
twice as powerful” (Ethica 4, prop. 18, schol.). This sentence, in fact, fol-
lows the Hebrew of Genesis 2.24 very closely: “A man leaves his father and
mother and becomes joined to (‫—דבק‬the exact Hebrew equivalent of the
Latin, juncto) his wife and they become one body (‫—בשר‬often translated
as “flesh”). “Nothing could be more useful to him” than the woman he
encountered, nothing could increase the power of his mind to think and
his body to act to a greater extent than the act of joining with her. At this
point in the sentence, however, what may very well be an allegory of the
act of increasing one’s virtue and power (that is, to follow Spinoza’s theme,
the condition of being a free man) through a composition of bodies and
forces—two individuals forming a new individual—is interrupted, cut
short by an account not of the eating of the fruit, which is entirely omitted
here, but of the causes that determined the first man to see the better and
pursue the worse, relinquish his freedom and seek his own destruction.
The sentence resumes, “But because he believed that the beasts
were similar to him [bruta sibi similia esse credidit], he soon began to imi-
tate their affects and allowed his liberty to escape [amitto, to let go or to
send away].” This phrase is extraordinary in a number of respects, above
all insofar as it invokes the earlier discussion of the imitation of the affects.
In the earlier passage to which Spinoza refers, Ethica 3, proposition 27,
we are said to imitate the affects that we imagine affect “a thing similar
to us” (res nobis similis). Similitude here appears as an objective fact: the
similarity of the thing to us seems to be the condition of our imitating
(usually unwittingly and involuntarily) the affects we imagine it to have.
Further, we should recall that for Spinoza imagination is not a synonym for
illusion: the imagination is nothing more or less than the production of an
image in or to the mind of a thing once present but now absent. The imita-
tion of the affects is precisely the image of the pleasure, pain, or desire of
the other that tends to produce in us the same affect. In the parable of the
d i f f e r e n c e s 69

first man from part 4, however, the fact of similitude is problematized and,
with it, any permanent demarcation between the human and the animal;
the border between the similar and the dissimilar is now condemned to
constant fluctuation. The phrase “a thing similar to us” ceases necessarily
to designate humanity or even humanity together with beasts (and Spinoza
does not use the term animalia, but bruta) in a metahuman universalism,
but may just as well function to narrow the class of things we “believe”
to be similar to us and whose affects we are therefore prone to imitate to
a mere portion of what we formerly understood as humanity. In fact, in
Ethica 3, proposition 46, Spinoza appears to acknowledge a tendency in
affective existence to exclude from the category of those we experience as
similar to us those of “a different class, or nation” (classis, sive nationis).
In the case of Adam, however, Spinoza seems to imply that the expansion
of the limit of the similar to beasts is not only what brought about Adam’s
imitation of their affects but more importantly what caused him to abandon
his freedom, that is, to cease to endeavor to persist in his own being and
to be overpowered by external causes destructive of his very nature. His
belief that he is similar to the beasts is thus not so much false in the sense
that it does not accurately reflect the true state of affairs as it is destructive
of his being, of his power and pleasure.
The specificity of the bestial in this sentence, then, appears to
concern the power not so much of the animal as the inhuman, so defined
by the effects of decomposition and death that it produces in man. Spinoza’s
account of Genesis (from which Eve has all but disappeared) suggests
that Adam imitated the desire of the serpent in an act of emulatio (the
imitation of another’s desire) that subjected Adam to determinations more
powerful than he and inimical to his being. In the scholium of proposi-
tion 27 in Ethica 3, Spinoza argues that there can be no doubt that beasts
feel and that they have affects. The affects of animals, however, differ as
much from those of men as their nature differs from human nature: the
libidinal desire of a horse is as different from that of a man as an insect’s
is from that of a fish. As might be expected, however, the Ethics subjects
every notion of “class” or “species” to a destabilization that is never sim-
ply a reduction of a secondary whole to its primary parts in the spirit of a
methodological individualism. A species must henceforth be considered
a singular thing in exactly the sense we noted earlier: it is nothing more
or less than a concurrence of singular things at a given time. As such, it
exists in a perpetual recomposition that may render it greater or lesser,
more or less powerful. But between it and the “individuals” that compose
70 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

it, there exists an infinity of intermediate compositions or singularities,

such as the two individuals who unite to form one body and mind twice
as powerful as each one taken singly.
Human individuals are singular things like any other—“Peter
must, as is necessary conform to the idea of Peter and not to the idea of
Man” (Short Treatise, ch. 6, in Complete Works)—and Spinoza is led to a
conclusion identical to that of his contemporary, the English poet Roch-
ester: “Man differs more from man, than man from beast.” Spinoza notes,
at the end of the scholium to proposition 37 in Ethica 3, that in the matter
of affects, the happiness of a philosopher does not differ much less from
that of a drunkard than does that of an animal from that of a man. But this
appears to pose a serious problem: what, then, can the term bruta signify in
the parable of the first man as it is recapitulated in Ethica 4, where Adam is
said to have lost his freedom by imitating the affects of the beasts to which
he believed himself similar, if Spinoza rejects a categorical distinction
between the human and the animal? Perhaps it signifies nothing more or
less than the eruption of the tendency to self-destruction at the behest of
what is more powerful than we are within us, a tendency determined by
an imitation of the affects to act in ways that weaken, sadden, and finally
bring about our own demise in the service of another thing that does not
and cannot agree with our nature—namely, the inhuman.
The freedom that the first man lost, the freedom to persist in
his own being by increasing his power, cannot be for Spinoza, as we have
established, a freedom that sets one individual against another. The man
who is free according to the definition above will, as Spinoza says in the
conclusion to the scholium to proposition 67, part 4, “desire the good for
all men which he desires for himself.” And the effect of so doing, Spinoza
explains in proposition 37, part 4, to which he refers the reader at the
conclusion of the scholium to proposition 67 in Ethica 4, is that “a good to
which a man aspires for himself and which he loves, he will love with a
more constant love if he sees that others love it.”
It is in this context, that of the transindividualization of the
conatus, the necessity that impels us to share simultaneously the good
and the desire for the good in order to persist and remain constant in our
endeavor to increase our power, that Spinoza introduces the concept of
the inhuman. The very principle that necessitates our joining with others
to compose a new, greater body demands that they share the good that we
enjoy. If this is not the case, their deprivation, pain, and sadness can only
d i f f e r e n c e s 71

weaken us, and we, of necessity, seek to “deliver them from their misfor-
tune,” driven not by reason but by the sad and passive affect Spinoza calls
pity. Pity, he tells us, often moves an individual to relieve the distress of
the other in ways he will later regret (Ethica 4, prop. 50, schol.). But what
of those who endeavor neither by reason nor by passion to increase the
power and pleasure of others as they do their own? Those who, as it were,
heed the voice of the serpent, the most cunning of all animals, to turn
away from others, insensible to their affects, sad and joyful, passive as
well as active, and, thinking to embrace a good that they alone can enjoy,
bring about their own destruction? “He who is moved neither by reason
nor pity to help others is rightly called inhuman. For he no longer appears
to resemble a man.”
From Spinoza’s point of view, the production of the subject
of interest as it occurred in the course of the eighteenth century can be
nothing less than the inhumanization of politics. Inhumanization in this
sense would not be a deviation from an essential and given humanity,
for the boundaries of the human must constantly expand for its power
to increase, according to Spinoza. Rather, the inhuman can only ever
be defined conjuncturally as that which at a given moment undoes the
human composition, subjecting it to an antagonistic external cause whose
reverberations are felt within—that is, the eruption of the external inter-
nally—disrupting the concurrence of its parts so that it is no longer what
it once was. The demand that individuals separate their interests from all
others and ignore their affects is already in itself an imitation of death and
of that which demands death in the service of something other than life.
To take Spinoza seriously is to acknowledge that the separation of inter-
ests and desires, of bodies and forces, does not exist merely at the level
of philosophical concepts; it must simultaneously operate in the physical,
corporeal dimension as well. It is only in the act of resisting this separation
in body as well as mind that virtue and perfection as Spinoza understood
them exist; it is in such resistance alone that life can, for the moment or
for eternity, be preserved against death.

wa rren montag is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College

in Los Angeles. His books include Louis Althusser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Bodies,
Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (Verso, 1999).
72 Imitating the Affects of Beasts

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