I take that Carrol has extracted these pithy
statements from a book, so I will not blame Brennan.
>From this extract we get no idea what Brennan's
criticism of Spinoza might be. It appears that the
author knows nothing of Spinoza or else he would not
speak of "Spinoza's God" in such transcendental terms.
If he did know anything about Spinoza, he could have
maybe attacked Spinoza as a "pantheist" and, in turn,
accuse Deleuze of being a pantheist, which would have,
at least, been a more understandable criticism.
Anyway, it's a cheap shot. Deleuze is inspired by Spinoza's writing and draws what he needs from it, just as he is inspired by Nietzche. He is not dogmatically aligned with Spinoza and to suggest that being influenced by a writer necessarily means that we are in 100 percent agreement is just stupid. This dogmatic relationship might be the one that exists between certain leninists and lenin, but they should not project their religious fervor on others.
He does use the terms nomad, nomadism and tribes. However, one should read Deleuze in order to understand how he uses these terms, rather than assume, as Brennan would like you to, that Deleuze envisons some kind of Medievalist utopia. How ridiculous to even suggest such a thing!
Thomas
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > Carrol Cox wrote:
> >
> > >The following paragraphs from Brennan identify
> some of the features of
> > >_Empire_ that make it, in my estimation, utterly
> useless as political
> > >analysis.
> >
> > You don't like the book, Carrol? I'm surprised to
> hear this!
> >
> > Doug
>
> Why are you so much more interested in personalities
> than in ideas or
> politics?
>
> Carrol
>
> More from Brennan:
>
> Also at issue is the question of whether the
> theoretical legacies of '68
> were really an adventure or exploration of new
> possibilities or only a
> conservative redoubt where thinkers huddled with
> eyes fixed on the
> past.55 One of the most striking aspects of Deleuze
> and Guattari's
> powerful evocations is the extent to which their
> strange and wonderful
> prose is studded with archaisms, allusions to
> medieval metallurgy, the
> fratres of primeval tribes, the autonomous craftsmen
> dotted along the
> pristine hills, the Spinozist God hovering over the
> world's molecules
> like a benign shepherd, the glorious nomadism of the
> Crusades. Is this
> antiquarianism merely a coincident element in the
> toolbox, or does it
> signify a special relationship to the past itself?
> In times as dark as
> these, such lines of flight are, perhaps,
> increasingly attractive, but
> they appear less comforting in a pact with thinkers
> such as Arendt,
> whose ideas are inseparable from cold war America,
> or Schmitt whose
> legal theories consciously emboldened Nazism. One is
> reminded of Slavoj
> Zizek's recent cogent comments on the Arendt
> revival: "This elevation of
> Arendt is perhaps the clearest sign of the
> theoretical defeat of the
> Left -- of how the Left has accepted the basic
> co-ordinates of liberal
> democracy (`democracy' versus `totalitarianism,'
> etc.), and is now
> trying to redefine its (op)position within this
> space."56 It might be
> said that, as a matter of intellectual convergence,
> a Deleuzian leftism
> is less a neo-Marxist revamping than an
> old-fashioned anticommunism. The
> genius of capitalism, one might well conjecture, is
> that it can create
> such allies in this costume. Anticapitalist in
> impulse, but
> theoretically inoculated against the war of maneuver
> in all its forms,
> the new Italians project themselves into a
> futurology that largely
> reinvents and reinvigorates capitalism's dominant
> clichés.
>
> 56. Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
> Five Interventions
> in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London, 2001), p. 3.
>
===== "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
"Money eats quality and shits out quantity" -William Burroughs
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