Braidotti,Spinoza and disability studies after the human

Abstract

Disability studies has begun to employ Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism, as a means to challenge the exclusionary model of man, dominant both in the academy and in everyday life. Braidotti argues that we must embrace a new form of subjectivity to effectively address the academic, environmental and species challenges characterizing the posthuman condition. This critical posthuman subject is inspired, in part, by Baruch de Spinoza, read as a monistic philosopher of difference. In this article, I compare Braidotti’s posthuman philosophy with Spinoza’s Ethics, read through a Deleuzian lens. The two projects are extremely different. My arguments are twofold: first, that Braidotti’s subjective reading overlooks Spinoza’s anti-subjective rationalism; and, second, that we must be cautious about Braidotti’s demands that we jettison all vestiges of man from philosophy, exploring disability or anything else. I make my case using the example of phenomenology. I end by asking what an expanded understanding of Spinoza’s philosophy means for disability studies, for posthumanism and for other forms of radical philosophy in the future.

Keywords

Rosi Braidotti disability posthumanism Baruch de Spinoza subjectivity

Introduction

Disability studies are taking a posthuman turn. A leading figure here is Rosi Braidotti, who asks us to exorcize the legacy of humanism in disability studies and the humanities, if not the entire academy (Roets and Braidotti, 2012; Braidotti, 2013; Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick Cole, 2014; Vandekinderen and Roets, 2016). This article is supportive of the overall aims of that project, questioning the boundaries and politics of ‘exclusive humanism’, and reframing individual and collective capacities therein.¹ A key figure for Braidotti’s posthumanism, as for many other contemporary continental thinkers, is Baruch de Spinoza (1632–77). Braidotti argues that Spinoza’s legacy provides the basis for a new posthuman ethics and a post-anthropocentric formulation of subjectivity. This reading, however, relies far more heavily on the secondary literature, particularly Deleuze and Guattari, than on Spinoza himself. This article is a work of comparative philosophy, in which I read Braidotti’s The Posthuman, and compare it with the Spinoza found in Deleuze’s minor thesis, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990). Differences abound. I look to disability studies’ recent posthuman turn to make these differences manifest. Two points are crucial, contrasting Braidotti’s nomadic subjectivity with Spinoza’s affective anti-subjectivity, and exploring the traditions disability studies must discard, if we wholly reject Braidotti’s humanistic foe. Phenomenology is a case in point. Here, I make a case for collaboration between phenomenologists and Spinozists, not their division. I conclude by asking how philosophical disability studies might read Spinoza, Braidotti and the posthuman literature in the future – if at all.

Deleuze’s expressive Spinoza

The Spinoza closest to Braidotti is undoubtedly Deleuze’s. The key concept here is expression, unifying two key Spinozan terms, ‘explicate’ and ‘implicate’. Each term reflects how univocal substance participates in its modalities. Spinoza’s God is expressive. That is, God, or Nature, is at once implicated through the Attributes, in infinite and finite modes, and the essence of God or Nature is at once explicated through them. He is expressed as he expresses. This will become clear as we make our way through Spinoza’s masterwork, divided into 5 parts. To each, Deleuze gives us a corresponding ‘expressive concept’ (1990: 337).

The first 8 propositions of ‘On God’ (EI) present Spinoza’s ‘Speculative Affirmation’ (Deleuze, 1990: 337).² Deleuze argues that the crucial arguments of EI do not relate in the first instance to a monistic understanding of God. Book I develops a rationalist causality of which the univocity of substance, radical immanence and the famous equation of God with Nature are necessary consequences. This argument can be substantiated sequentially: only by EIP11 does Spinoza make his ontological argument, how ‘God, or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists’, via the certainty of the preceding 10 propositions. The proof of God’s existence, as He is at once implicated in and explicated through the Attributes, infinite and finite modes (human minds and bodies among them), is secondary to the rational order of things, through which we come to know Substance, and ourselves. The certainty of the order is established before the ordered. God’s immanent causality, how He participates in expression, is the basis of speculative affirmation. It is crucial to Spinoza’s epistemology and ontology, the order of the world, and to human salvation.

Deleuze reads part two, ‘On the Origin and Nature of the Mind’, as a philosophy of ideas rather than of consciousness. Deleuze’s corresponding expressive concept makes this clear, when he describes ‘Ideas as Expressive’ (1990: 338). As God expresses himself in the finite modes, we are given ideas of other things, bodies or ideas: ‘we neither perceive nor feel any singular things…except bodies and modes of thinking’ (EIIAxiom5). Here we read Spinoza’s famous parallelism, whereby ‘the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (EIIP7). Just as ideas explicate and implicate God as a thinking thing, our minds and bodies, as finite modes, express substance under the attribute of Extension. They are, together, the human, expressed through two attributes. We are affected by bodies and ideas as they manifest in the finite modes, under their respective attributes. Here Deleuze’s position is categorical: while ideas and extended things are ordered in a parallel fashion, they are not ordered together. They are affected only by those entities expressed under the same attribute.

In ‘Spinoza against Descartes’ (1990: 155–67) Deleuze contrasts the expressive view of truth with its Cartesian predecessor. Descartes held that one could truly know a cause through its effect, by way of divine certainty. God, ordaining clear and distinct perception, underpins truth. Spinoza repeatedly critiques Descartes for moving too quickly in his ontological argument. He argues that clear and distinct ideas are thoroughly inadequate so long as they are inexpressive. Recall that Spinoza establishes expression before God’s expression (knowing the two are, in fact, identical). God’s ‘infinite perfection’, the anchor of Cartesian truth, is a mere proprium, attributing a human descriptor to the divine order. It says nothing of the order of expression and causes through which effects are produced, God’s immanent cause included. The order of causes is the order of expression, the basis of truth as adequation. ‘Any adequate, that is to say expressive idea, gives us knowledge of what it expresses, that is, adequate knowledge of God’s essence itself’ (ibid.: 280). Or, ‘an adequate idea is just an idea that expresses its cause’ (ibid.: 133; emphases added by Deleuze). An idea might meet the Cartesian measure, but remain inadequate, removed from the order of expression. Clear and distinct, then, but not yet true.

The passions, introduced in part three, are founded in inexpressive ideas. They are ideas of bodies and ideas of ideas that affect our body and mind, the true cause of which we are ignorant. Here we are introduced to Spinoza’s famous conatus, how each being ‘strives to persevere in its own being…nothing but the actual essence of the thing’ (EIIIP6, P7). The passions are reducible to joy, increasing our power of acting, or to sadness, reducing it. In Deleuze’s reading, the conatus is not external to those affects that increase or decrease our power of acting. Rather, it is that power: the affects determine our conatus. ‘The variations of conatus as it is determined by this or that affection are the dynamic variations of our power of action’ (1990: 231). With a change in our power of acting, we pass from lesser or greater perfection (or vice versa), or from inadequate passive affection, to active joys, or vice versa (EIIIP59, Definitions I, II). Swayed by base passions, we conflict with one another; passive sadness inhibits practical joy, found in the common good.

How, then, in a world wrought with passions, do we come to form expressive ideas, and practical joy? Through the common notions, to Deleuze, one of the ‘chief discoveries of the Ethics’:

Common notions are ideas that are formally explained by our power of thinking and that, materially, express the idea of God as their efficient cause…Among the ideas we have, the only ones capable of expressing God’s essence, or of involving knowledge of this essence, are thus ideas that are in us as they are in God: in short, common notions. (1990: 279)

Common notions, then, represent more than the commonality between humans and other finite modes (though they surely do this). They are a first step to bringing our mind in line with ideas as they are in God. Deleuze argues that the common notions form the expressive link between inadequate ideas – those rooted in the inadequate impressions following bodily or mental affections – and adequate ones, by showing the common form of expression itself. The reasonable life is one that follows, logically and ethically, the order of expressions. Common notions increase our power of acting, connecting the joys and sadness of the passions with the expressive order of Nature.

Deleuze links part four of the Ethics to Spinoza’s political writings, as a philosophy beyond Good and Evil. As transcendent moral criteria, Good and Evil are mere superstitions. Hence Deleuze’s expressive concept: ‘Good and Bad’ (1990: 340). Both are manifest in the conatus, whereby what increases our power of acting is good, what decreases it is bad. Spinoza’s ethical vision of the world takes the body as its model. Read ethically, his oft-cited (and oft-misunderstood) remark in part three, that ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’ (EIIIP1, Schol.), takes on newfound significance. In the first instance, we do not know what a body can do because our mind, as a finite mode, cannot know in advance the infinite modes of agreement that constitute our powers of acting. These are in God. Humans are forever subject to, and at the bottom of, this immutable order of expression.

Taking the body as model allows Spinoza to reformulate the Hobbesian theory of natural rights. Spinoza, as Deleuze reads him, at once accepts and modifies this position. The state of nature is indeed a state of passion. Our ignorance of bodily affections prevents our power of acting from flourishing. But we cannot escape this Natural state. Man is never a ‘dominion within a dominion’ (EIII Preface). The state of nature is to be mediated – not transcended – such that active joys are viable.

There could be only one way of making the state of nature viable: by striving to organize its encounters. Whatever body I meet, I seek what is useful. But there is a great difference between seeking what is useful through chance (that is, striving to destroy bodies incompatible with our own) and seeking to organize what is useful (striving to encounter bodies agreeing in nature with us, in relations in which they agree). (Deleuze, 1990: 261; original emphases)

To form associations whereby we ensure bodily agreements is not, in itself, ethical. Nor is worship in the hope of reward. A commonwealth does not do away with Natural rights – we remain in their dominion – but rather ‘raises them to a power without which such rights would be unreal and abstract’ (1990: 264). The city is no more reasonable or ethical than Nature, for it is part of that order. Rather, it provides us the space to then find practical affirmation, affording the capacity to bring our minds and bodies in line with the order of expression.

In the fifth part of the Ethics, Spinoza shows how the powers of the intellect can overcome the passions, and bring our minds into line with God. Deleuze reads its themes as ‘Practical Joy and Speculative Affirmation’ (1990: 341). The first 4 books of the Ethics, Deleuze argues, have so far explored bodies, in their extrinsic determinations, and the common notions – employing the first and second kinds of knowledge, respectively. As much as they may increase our power of acting, joyful passions are still passions, weaker than the third kind of knowledge. This is blessedness or beatitude, ‘the possession not only of an active joy as it is in God, but of an active love by which God loves himself’.³ The distinction between love, as we experience it, and God’s active love is crucial. God is not and cannot be subject to passive affections, joyful or otherwise. He is always active, acting on himself, expressed as naturing Nature and natured Nature. These are God’s powers, not our own.

As long as we dwell in duration, as any other finite mode, we are subject to passive affections. We can, to the best of our imperfect ability, overcome the passions to which we are subject by rationally ordering them, through the power of the intellect, attuned to ideas as they are in God. This means to view things ‘under the aspect of eternity’, sub specie aeternitatis. Here we find Spinoza’s expressive formulation of immortality. Deleuze argues that he avoids that term ‘because it seems to involve the most tiresome confusions’ spanning from the Platonic to Cartesian traditions (1990: 313). In death, we do not pass from an embodied soul to an immortal one, leaving our divisible bodies behind. This would lie in glaring contrast to Spinoza’s parallelism. Rather:

Death is a subtraction, a cutting back. We lose all the extensive parts that belonged to us in a certain relation; our soul loses all the faculties it possessed insofar as it expressed the existence of a body itself endowed with extensive parts. But for all that these parts and faculties belonged to our essence they constituted nothing of it: our essence considered simply as such loses none of its perfection when we lose the elements of extension of which our existence was composed…When, furthermore, our body has ceased to exist, when our soul has lost all those parts that related to the body’s existence, we are no longer in a state where we can feel passive affections…Our essence adequately expresses God’s essence, and the affections of our essence adequately express our essence. We become completely expressive[.] (Deleuze, 1990: 315)

Death, then, is not simply a state of transcending the moral body. Nothing in Spinozism – Deleuze’s or otherwise – is transcendent. Rather, in death we become the expressive essence through which all things are produced. We do not leave the body and retain a soul, but move from duration to infinity. We no longer gain hints of the divine through the common notions, but express blessedness itself sub specie aeternitatis. Deleuze’s Spinoza begins and ends in expression.

The Posthuman

Braidotti’s book is an anthropology of life after the anthropos. The Posthuman has 4 substantive chapters, addressing life beyond the self, species, death and theory. Braidotti’s theoretical, historical and practical foil throughout is the Enlightenment tradition, and its understanding of ‘man’, the rational, independent, able-bodied-and-always-clear-minded European, universal humanistic subject. He is sometimes social or sometimes natural, or always natural or always social, but never both at once. He is the measure of all things; all values are his. But he can be and is being replaced.

‘Life beyond the Self’ charts the history of humanism – understood broadly from the ancient and Enlightenment models of man, to transcendental phenomenology and liberal humanism – and announces the coming of the posthuman condition.⁴ ‘Coming’ should not be taken in the sense of ‘arrival’, but rather ‘be-coming’; we were never fully human, because of its exclusionary nature. In this way, Braidotti’s story is at once a genealogy of sub-humanistic undercurrents and displacements, a rallying cry for those others man has left behind. Tracing these undercurrents allows Braidotti to sketch an alternative ontology of the subject. That niche is not a predefined territory, but a ‘monistic plane of becomings’, where ‘intelligent and self-organizing matter’ is continually shaped by relational processes of difference (Braidotti, 2013: 35).

I define the critical posthuman subject with a critical eco-philosophy of multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable. Posthuman subjectivity expresses an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of relationality, and hence community building. (Braidotti, 2013: 49)

Past a mere history of humanism and its discontents, Braidotti provides an alternate ontology and epistemology to replace the once-dominant, but never truly universal humanism, intent on a life beyond.

In ‘Life beyond the Species’ Braidotti reframes ‘life’ according to her monistic ontological base set out above. It becomes zoe, surpassing the tired ‘Nature’ category, encompassing all forms of self-organizing and intelligent matter. This is her ‘vitalist materialism’ (2013: 55). Combined with her nomadic subjectivity, it allows Braidotti to reimagine our relationship to both of man’s others, othered species and the earth. This relationship is commodified through and through. Human or animal, human-and-animal: each is an expression of the one substance, the modalities of zoe, at once unified and then stratified by the globally dominant capitalist assemblage.

Braidotti’s approach in chapter two is ‘more clinical than critical’, since it provides a new modality of subjectivity, grounded in relationality and difference, on which to build solutions to the species and environmental crises before us. In the past, neo-humanist approaches to animal rights or environmentalism have been misguided, since they never really sought to disrupt man’s estate.⁵ Their goal is a revolution without a revolution: the humanist subject remains both intact and in charge. By reframing both crises as one, as human-animal-capitalism-environment problems, we might exact change without reaffirming the hubristic humanist subject, whose short-sighted mastery over nature got us here in the first place.

An ethology of forces based on Spinozist ethics emerges as the main point of reference for changing human–animal interaction. It traces a new political frame, which I see as an affirmative project in response to the commodification of life in all its forms, that is the opportunistic logic of advanced capitalism. (Braidotti, 2013: 70)

Many readers (and I include myself in this many) will be dissatisfied with Braidotti’s penchant for theoretical abstraction over practical solutions, or at least some concrete ethical imperatives past ‘difference’ or ‘relationality’. But she is nonetheless on the mark when arguing that no comprehensive solutions to global problems – environmental, human, animal or otherwise – can take place without a critical eye to the commodity form dominating, well, everything.

‘Life beyond Death’ charts an affirmative, posthuman theory of death. Neither biopolitics nor forensic social theory gives critical theory an adequate grounding in the political economy of zoe facing the posthuman condition. Braidotti’s focus, rather, is on the ‘multiple modes of relation to death and dying’:

My argument is that a focus on the vital and self-organizing powers of Life/zoe undoes any clear distinction between living and dying. It composes the notion of zoe as a posthuman yet affirmative life-force. This vitalist materialism rests solidly on a neo-Spinozist political ontology of monism and radical immanence, engendering a transversal relational ethics to counteract the inhumane aspects of the posthuman predicament. (Braidotti, 2013: 115)

Contrary to the ‘metaphysics of finitude’, as embraced by the Heideggerian tradition,⁶ Braidotti argues that her monistic posthuman becoming subject embraces death as an affirmative life-force, a space for collective self-assembly and reattachment. ‘The bio-political and the necro-political combine to relocate embodied subjectivity in a posthuman continuum that calls for new ethical coding’ (Braidotti, 2013: 141). In a post-anthropocentric age, death is a ‘concept caught in contradiction’ (ibid.: 128). We have devised new ways of extending life, yet far more novel modes of ending it. Critical theory, Braidotti argues, is stuck in a modern world-view, where life as bios ends in demise. Death is not the end of the posthuman subject, but a space for its affirmative genesis. ‘I want to stress instead the productive nature of zoe, which means the productive aspects of the life–death continuum. It does not deny the reality of horrors, but rather…re-works it so as to assert the vital powers of healing and compassion’ (ibid.: 132).

‘Posthuman Humanities: Life after Theory’ reframes the humanities through the nomadic subjectivity developed throughout the book. Braidotti rejects man as the measure of the humanities, letting his successor reframe the arts and letters of the future. ‘Posthuman subjectivity reshapes the identity of humanistic practices, by stressing heteronomy and multi-faceted relationality, instead of autonomy and self-referential disciplinary purity’ (2013: 145). After man, the humanities need a new mascot:

[If] the proper study of mankind used to be Man and the proper study of humanity was the human, it seems to follow that the proper study of the posthuman condition is the posthuman itself. This new knowing subject is a complex assemblage of human and non-human, planetary and cosmic, given and manufactured, which requires major readjustments in our way of thinking. (Braidotti, 2013: 159)

This vision for the post-humanities is contrasted to those of Grosz and Nussbaum. Grosz’s grounding in sexual difference is too biologically oriented for the nomad subject; Nussbaum’s emphasis on a seemingly Kantian ‘autonomy and rational judgment’ is ‘outdated to say the least’ (2013: 149), complicated by her overly American (non-EU), private university focus.⁷ Simply put, these models leave man intact.

The post-humanities, Braidotti argues, should reflect the difference, relationality and vitalist matter-realism on which the posthuman subject takes shape. This means replacing disciplinary divisions with transdisciplinary collaborations across the nature/culture divide and engaging social problems with compassion for zoe, in all forms. Disability studies are a case in point. ‘Ever mindful that we do not know yet what a body can do, disability studies combine the critique of normative bodily models with the advocacy of new, creative models of embodiment.’⁸ Throughout the academy, within the humanities and without, Braidotti charts a profound transition. If man ever did represent us, if studying his habits and his ethics was ever fruitful and worthwhile, this supremacy is waning. Disability studies, postcolonial theory, environmental studies, animal rights activism, feminist theory and practice (and the list goes on) – these projects show that simply accounting for man’s others with a uniform drive for inclusion and sameness denies the problem. The posthuman at once represents the crisis of man, and points the way to redemption.

Comparison

We have two extremely different philosophies before us. Via Deleuze, Spinoza’s is a rationalist account of the immutable order linking man, God and Nature, forever one, and the passions that distort our place and practices therein. The aim is a rational science of the affects. The path to joy is to accept, love and explore that order, to overcome passion through knowledge. The Posthuman is an open, experimental work, an affirmative politics of difference. It is intent on dismantling the oppressive shackles of humanism, and putting democratic ways of knowing and being in their place. This section has two goals. First, I want to show exactly where Spinoza and Braidotti’s Spinozist legacy part company. My second goal is to outline why this comparative philosophy matters for disability studies and combating disablement. That will require exploring the posthuman philosophy of disability.

My goal is to explore the differences between Deleuze’s expressive reading of Spinoza and Braidotti’s posthuman one. While similar, they differ greatly on the role of ‘the subject’. Braidotti suggests that her work follows in the ‘Spinozist legacy’. ‘It consists’, she writes,

…in a very active concept of monism, [one that defines] matter as vital and self-organizing, thereby producing the staggering combination of ‘vitalist materialism’. Because this approach rejects all forms of transcendentalism, it is also known as ‘radical immanence’…In my view, there is a direct connection between monism, the unity of all living matter and post-anthropocentrism as a general frame for contemporary subjectivity. (2013: 56)

This reading is greatly influenced by Deleuze, as a philosophical interpreter of Spinoza. Not only does the work of Deleuze, alone and with Guattari, offer a philosophical basis for post-anthropocentric philosophy; it also provides Braidotti with access to a wealth of Deleuze-inspired or at least Deleuze-friendly work in critical theory, interpreted widely.⁹ This work informs her nomadic subject, which is both the object of and inspiration for the Humanities reborn.

It should be patently clear now, if not before, that we cannot get an accurate depiction of Braidotti’s Spinoza without looking to Deleuze. This is emphatically repeated throughout The Posthuman. Deleuze’s Spinoza is a philosopher of joy, pursued through three questions: ‘How does one achieve a maximum of joyful passions?’, ‘How does one manage to form adequate ideas?’ and ‘How does one become conscious of oneself, of God, and of things?’ (Deleuze, 2001: 78). Without denying Spinoza’s philosophical rigour, he thus asks us to read between the lines – or, more accurately, between the propositions:

The Ethics is a book written twice simultaneously: once in the continuous stream of definitions, propositions, demonstrations, and corollaries, which develop the great speculative themes with all the rigours of the mind; another time in the broken chain of scholia, a discontinuous volcanic line, a second version underneath the first, expressing all the angers of the heart and setting forth the practical theses of denunciation and liberation. (2001: 78–9)

This second, hidden Spinoza is clearly the reading to which Braidotti subscribes. She translates Spinoza’s radical monism to her vitalist materialism. Since everything is a modality of the one substance, and each mode of substance attains its various properties through its relation to others (via the affects), Spinoza can be read as a monistic philosopher of difference – differing expressions of the one substance, first via the attributes, and again via the modes. This presents a very different account of his thought than the rationalist, expressive reading that I have presented here.¹⁰ Here the focus is not so much on substance monism, more so the implication and explication of substance in the finite modes.

Braidotti’s Spinoza and Braidotti’s Deleuze share a conceptual link, in subjectivity. ‘Posthuman subjectivity’ is the conceptual spine pervading The Posthuman. Braidotti’s reading of Deleuze shares this emphasis, as seen in her philosophical memorial to the French philosopher’s legacy for feminist thought:

Deleuze is motivated by the belief that our historicity makes it urgent for us to elaborate new schemes and modes of thinking. We need to learn how to think differently, especially about our own notion of the subject; this is one of the points where the Deleuzean project intersects with feminist theory. Both mainstream and feminist philosophies of difference enact a programme of full-scale deconstruction of classical humanism, both as a vision of the subject, as a system of values, and as an ideal. (Braidotti, 1996: 308)

Regardless of how we define Deleuze, as an anti-humanist or posthumanist, to Braidotti he is a philosopher of the subject. This is contentious: many, myself included, read both Deleuze and Spinoza as anti-subjective thinkers.

I read Spinoza as a rationalist philosopher without a rational subject. Others present a similar reading. Caroline Williams (2010) argues that Spinoza presents a politics exceeding the subject, whereby both the conatus and the imagination are not located in the subject, but exceed it to the space of the political, and the bodily encounters therein:

It is through the dispersal and circulation of affects (which simultaneously produces identity and unravels, or withdraws from its completion) that subjectivity is retroactively produced. In other words, there is no subject of the affect, because affect drives the subject towards identity and performance. (Williams, 2010: 257)

Williams reads Spinoza as rationalist, using that method to comprehend the immutable order of ideas and things, but without a rational subject – or an underpinning subject at all; hence the title ‘Affective Processes without a Subject’. This is so because ‘subjects’ are just particular modes of the one substance, contoured by affects, and driven by and through the conatus like everything else. Call this what you like, ‘nomad’, ‘subject’, or both, but it is nothing special.

Braidotti would likely refuse this challenge. She would argue that her nomad subject – relational, vitalist, material, intersectional, self-organizing and the stuff of difference – is not the autonomous rational epistemological subject that both Williams and Spinoza reject. They agree on a common enemy, the Cartesian subject. Following Foucault, she would argue that subjects are the result of governing dispositifs (Foucault, 1978; Rose, 2007), defined widely, and not simply the disembodied epistemological subject which The Posthuman seeks to reject. That exclusive model, for example, differentiates humans from animals by way of a categorical distinction between the rational and the animal, bios and zoe. This is precisely the distinction which her nomad becoming-subject aims to overcome, in a life ‘beyond the species’.

Braidotti is no Cartesian. But stating her incompatibility with that way of thinking does not sufficiently address the issue at hand, her relation to Spinoza. It is extremely difficult to read Spinoza as a philosopher of subjectivity. Spinoza’s radical immanence, his naturalism, his refusal to treat man in nature as a ‘dominion within a dominion’, his consideration ‘of human actions and appetites just as if they were a question of lines, planes and bodies’ – each of these conceptual pieces is central to Spinoza’s philosophy, and each denies a place to the subject (E3, Preface). ‘The subject’ is only a hubristic misreading of the powers of the body and mind, in truth both driven and shaped by Nature. Nor is there any space for experimentation or a radical politics of becoming-nomadic-subject in Spinoza’s philosophy. Nothing is contingent. Things cannot be otherwise. We can accept the order of things or we can deny it – but the show must go on. Braidotti’s philosophy is a great many things, but few of them are found in the Ethics.

Disability studies after the human

My goal in this article is not only to question the place of Spinoza’s Ethics in posthuman philosophy. I also want to show why this matters for the philosophy of disability, after the human or otherwise. As I wrote earlier, because Braidotti makes only passing reference to disability studies in her book, we must look elsewhere. In ‘Nomadology and Subjectivity’, cited in The Posthuman, Roets and Braidotti present a reading of the nomadic subject to be applied in disability studies.¹¹ Mirroring the theoretical moves made in The Posthuman, they argue that Deleuze and Guattari, when read alongside contemporary interpreters, provide the following: a vitalist materialist model, containing both an ontology and an epistemology; a corresponding model of nomadic subjectivity; and, finally, a new method through which to do disability studies: a cartography of nomadic lives, becoming in myriad ways. I need not review each pillar in detail – we are in familiar territory.

Roets and Braidotti (2012) take Roets’ experience working with persons diagnosed with intellectual disabilities (their term) to make sense of this threefold theory-and-method package. Robert, one such client, takes center stage. He is not one, but multiple: three personae that take shape in diverse aspects of his life. On the shop floor, he is a ‘grey mouse’, timid and reserved, resisting oppressive and unrewarding disability work schemes to which he is subject. In his home, Robert is a ‘big dreamer’: ‘[M]y home is my place to think things over. There is my world of thoughts, my kingdom’ (Roets and Braidotti, 2012: 172). These dreams are realized. Robert is the president of a self-advocacy network. He writes. He travels to Ghent, on network business. He is Mr President. On returning home, and to work, he regains his old personae. Robert is a shifting set of becoming-possibilities:

…manifest in his socially created realities as grey mouse, big dreamer and Mr. President are the ways in which Robert radically deconstructs and reconfigures the essentialist master narrative of ‘intellectual disabilities’. He clearly resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior. (2012: 174)

Robert is the nomad subject – one and many, seeking smooth and traversable spaces versus the striated spaces of institutional life. What disability studies needs, then, is a method that can chart Robert’s multiple becomings, a method beyond the human.

Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick Cole (2014) assess the benefits of post-anthropocentrism for analysing and challenging disablement writ large. Their register is far wider than a single nomadic subject, extending to the subject of disability studies, as a whole.

Quite simply, disability complicates the myopic perspective and non-representative nature offered by humanism. Our sitpoint is that disability is the quintessential posthuman condition: because it calls for new ontologies, ways of relating, living and dying. Posthuman and critical disability studies share an antithetical attitude towards the taken-for-granted, ideological and normative under-girdings of what it means to be a valued citizen of society. (Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick Cole, 2014: 348)

Disability studies and disabled people, then, are not only doing posthumanism by challenging a model of humanity we have never had, but would also benefit from further exploration of the posthuman condition. They explore three productive possibilities: technological challenges and cyborg politics of disablement; the ethics and agencies emerging in human–animal assemblages; and the treatment (medical, cultural and parental) of children with life-limiting and life-threatening impairments.¹² In each case, the frontiers of humanity are up for debate.

The frontiers of human life are debated, rather than left behind, because Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick Cole are still invested in giving access to humanity to those who might want it:

Disability brings something politicised and critical to posthuman theory. Our sense is that disabled people will continue to fight to be recognised as humans (in the humanist sense…) but equally (and simultaneously) are already enacting forms of activism, art and relationality that push us all to think imaginatively and critically about a new epoch that we might term the posthuman. (Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick Cole, 2014: 357–8)

Reading Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick Cole, it might be helpful to make a distinction between the posthuman epoch and the posthuman subject. In one the human is contested, and in the other the human is left behind. Disability studies are not, and have never been, about reducing the numerous kinds of lives that disabled persons can lead. Indeed, the opposite is the case. A life-affirming disability studies, then, can be one that accepts ‘the human’ among the diverse roster of human lives, albeit in democratic, rather than totalitarian and totalizing, ways.

It is on this line of critique, and on an according return to the basis of the posthuman project, that I want to dwell for the remainder of this article. I worry that the theory–methods package proposed by Braidotti, one becoming more and more popular within disability studies, is not as inclusive, nor as revolutionary, as its adherents profess. I write ‘not as inclusive’, because of the many traditions that Braidotti and her fellow travellers attach to the oppressive Enlightenment tradition that they are attempting to overcome. Is the posthuman nomad subject the only acceptable way forward, in an age when the dominance of man is in question?

Consider the case of phenomenology. That tradition receives only brief attention in The Posthuman. Each form is read as pervasively humanist, if it is read at all. The charges: Husserl’s Crisis addresses only European civilization. Its corresponding model of transcendental subjectivity is anathema to Braidotti’s philosophy of radical immanence. Heidegger receives even less attention – particularly disconcerting, given the influence of his Letter on Humanism, on anti-human and posthumanists, felt today (see Rae, 2014). A potential sticking point is thereby avoided: in the Letter, Heidegger links the history of subjectivity itself to the history of humanism. This is not friendly to the idea of a posthuman subject. Nor, finally, do we see any discussion of the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, despite seeing the term ‘embodiment’, one presented in both of the Braidotti pieces explored in this article. That French philosopher does not own the concept – but he is a significant stakeholder, nonetheless.

None of this is to deny that phenomenology has, in the past and presently, contributed to the dominance of exclusive humanism, and that it has enacted ideal forms of human life that do not represent the multiple becomings that Braidotti and the posthumanists want to represent in new and novel ways. Far from it – I agree that the tradition is in need of reform. Reform: we cannot ignore the accomplishments that phenomenology has made, in indicating the limits of exclusive humanism, and in carving spaces for other modes of being and explanation. Like the theory-and-method proposed and applied by Roets and Braidotti, phenomenology has presented an account of Being and a method of accounting for it. It is certainly so that the phenomenological tradition has a way of looking at things different from Deleuze’s, Guattari’s and Spinoza’s. This much is obvious. But what of its life-affirming gains for disability studies as a practical project? Disability studies, and its allied disciplines, have used phenomenology extensively, to account for the first-hand experience of disability and rehabilitation (Toombs, 1995; Martiny, 2015), to critique accommodation practices in the university setting (Titchkosky and Michalko, 2012), and to engage racialization and gendered norms of embodiment (Ahmed, 2007; Marion Young, 1980). This list is not, of course, exhaustive. Regardless, each of these projects is an equally affective, nature-and-culture-based, embodied and meaningful space that been mapped though phenomenological methods. Why abandon these gains by wholly rejecting phenomenology? That high theory might be moving past that lens, humanistic or not, is a secondary problem.

My suggestion that we might unify two philosophical enterprises is not to overlook their differences. In Spinoza contra Phenomenology, Knox Peden (2014) explores the wide range of Spinozisms that took root in France, from 1900 to the late 1960s. Many, like Jean Cavaillès, Louis Althusser, Marcel Gueroult and, to a lesser extent, Gilles Deleuze, used Spinoza’s radical immanence as a means to counter phenomenology as a philosophy beginning and ending in consciousness. Spinoza’s thought became a central thread countering the subjective excesses of phenomenology, especially in the work of Cavaillès and Althusser.

Though there was no single pervasive Spinozism, Williams’ subtitle provides an accurate description: a collection of rationalist philosophies without a subject. Peden spends an entire chapter (six) reading Deleuze’s Spinozism alongside Heidegger’s ontological difference, that between Being and beings (Heidegger, 1996: 193, n.). Heidegger famously critiques Descartes in Being and Time (1996: division I, sec. III, ‘The Worldliness of the World’) for reducing the world to mere modes of extended substance. In Peden’s reading, Deleuze’s minor thesis also eschews Substance as a mere thing for substance as an expressive process. Whether cantankerous Heidegger would share such a reading is not important. What is important is that the philosophical basis of Heidegger’s anti-humanism has been intertwined within the so-called ‘Spinozist legacy’. Looking to disability studies, I believe that thread can and should be pursued further.

Nor is Braidotti’s post-anthropocentric approach wholly unprecedented. There are other political philosophies of becoming to be found in the humanities today. Of particular note is William E. Connolly’s (from whom, it should be noted, Braidotti herself draws). Connolly (2006, 2010, 2013) develops a theory of becoming, inclusive of human and non-human forms, of nature–culture imbrications, self-organizing processes and role differentiation, addressing many of the same pressing political issues that Braidotti does in The Posthuman – neo-liberalism, climate change, the promises of autopoiesis for new ways of doing politics. Like Spinoza, Williams and Braidotti above, he too presents an emergent, affirmative and distributed model of subjectivity, rooted in affect:

Affect consists in relatively mobile energies with powers that flow into conscious, cultural feeling and emotion; yet these affective energies also exceed the formations they help foment. Affect has an element of wildness in it. The human being thus absorbs pressures from the world that both help to compose its subjectivity and exceed it. There is no transcendental subject, but rather an emergent and layered subject. (Connolly, 2010: 151)

Here we are not too far from the nomad subject presented by Braidotti. But not too close: in addition to Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza and the remainder of Braidotti’s supporting cast, Connolly reads Merleau-Ponty and Evan Thompson as theorists of becoming, as phenomenologists and as students of cognitive experience. Phenomenology has a place here too. Going past phenomenology, Connolly draws from thinkers spanning from Heraclitus to the contemporary complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann to make his case, as the interlude to A World of Becoming (2010: 93–6) demonstrates. Connolly presents a philosophy of becoming which is friendlier to the thinkers and traditions that have come before, phenomenology included. Spinoza, too.

A final question: should we do disability studies with Spinoza? Here we must at once be extremely cautious, yet hopeful. Why can we be hopeful? Spinoza’s radical monism, either in the dedicated rationalist reading, or hidden in the scholia, is an extremely powerful tool for exploring how disability is made, is managed and can be remade in the shared world. To put emotion, physical barriers, scientific advances, rehabilitation and collective activist politics on the same plane of immanence – this is liberating, if not overwhelming. This reading, however, projects the optimism and political ambitions of Braidotti and Deleuze into the otherwise stoic, politically quietist and passive reading we find when we look deeper into the Ethics. While Spinoza is indeed a philosopher of affect without a rational subject, his ultimate goal is to order and understand the passions such that they can be replaced with the clear and distinct truth, and acceptance of God. Monistic, naturalistic, or not, his rationalism pervades. There are cultural threads of Spinoza’s rationalist stoicism today. One need not look past the resurgence of mindfulness to see that this is so. As in the Ethics, the goal is to reorganize and tame dangerous passions through rational exploration. This, alongside medication, therapy, strategies or substances of another sort: each is a way of becoming, of dwelling in affect. Disability studies should accept them as such.

Why should we be cautious? Braidotti’s reading of Spinoza may not reflect the Ethics’ overall aims or intentions, but perhaps this is not such a bad thing. While Spinoza provides an intriguing, if extremely unwieldy, ontology and epistemology, his political writings are extremely problematic in part, and perhaps in whole. In the unfinished Political Treatise, Spinoza rejects attempts to establish reasons of state in man’s rationality alone: ‘one should not look for the causes and rational basis of the state in the teaching of reason, but deduce them from the nature and condition of men in general’ (Spinoza, 2000: 31). This is consistent, thematically, with the Ethics. Look to the action, not to the subject’s rationality. We read, in the final section:

Perhaps someone will ask whether it is by nature or by convention that women are subject to the authority of men. For if this has come about simply by convention, there is no reason to exclude women from government. But if we look to experience, we see the situation arises from their weakness. For nowhere is there in the world an instance of men and women’s ruling together…And if, furthermore we consider human emotions, we consider that men love women from mere lust, assessing their ability and their wisdom by their beauty…soon we shall see that rule by men and women on equal terms is bound to involve much damage to peace. But I have said enough. (Spinoza, 2000: 136–7)

Enough, indeed. Can disability studies read Spinoza’s Ethics, when the political writings contain passages blaming an oppressed group for their exclusion? Despite how anti-essentialist Spinoza’s ontology might be, despite how his radical monism allows us to overcome the nature–culture divide, despite his recognition of the power of the affects and despite his anti-Cartesian understanding of world, human life and everything else – despite it all, this is despicable. The very point of disability studies, and any other activist enterprise, is to combat this exact logic.

Braidotti’s posthumanism may not accurately reflect the writings of Spinoza to the word – but this is to our benefit, and to hers. The Ethics and The Posthuman are two very different books. Deleuze, we should recall, reflected on thinkers with whom he had little in common (Hume in particular) to see what good we might be able to do with them. A philosopher is only as good as her or his concepts. If Braidotti’s reading is consistent with this ethic, and if it means that we can take something from philosophical reflection to improve our lives and those of our neighbours, then all the better. This is the true piety sought by Spinoza.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was generously supported by the Killam Trust.

Notes

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