This article studies a series of provocative references to Spinoza by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. For both contemporary philosophers, the context is discussions of eating, a subject matter that turns out to involve such central issues as subjectivity, nature, ethics, and teleology. Each situates Spinoza in a counter-history of philosophy and suggests that Spinoza constitutes an important resource for contemporary re\ue001ections. Through an analysis of the three philosophers\u2019 texts about eating, nutrition, and being metabolized, I argue that Spinoza\u2019s nonteleological, nonhumanistic conception of nature remains a radical possibility, even in the face of contemporary attempts to think out- side the canonical discourses of transcendental subjectivity, technological reason, and teleological ethics. Spinoza\u2019s position is, in the end, more uncompromising than that of Derrida or Agamben.

Questions of the human and the animal and their relation are increas- ingly occupying contemporary Continental philosophy. These questions, which often begin from the end of the discourse of transcendental sub- jectivity, in turn open into the broader \ue000eld of the philosophy of nature. In this essay I explore the invocation of Spinoza by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben in connection with inquiries into nature and the ethical community of the living beyond or after the subject. Derrida and Agamben concur in placing Spinoza in a noncanonical, or counter, history of philosophy. For Derrida, Spinoza\u2019s philosophy lies outside the horizons of teleology and representation, and it proceeds without the characteristically modern structures of separation, mastery, and production. For Agamben, Spinoza\u2019s philosophy is a discourse entirely without transcendence, either of the divine or the human, and a way of thinking without an ontological distinction between activity and pas- sivity. Spinozism stands, then, as an invitation to think outside teleol- ogy, outside substance dualism and its accompanying representational epistemology, and beyond the opposition of freedom and necessity,

that is, freedom as a disembodied freedom from, or transcendence beyond, a mute or reductively deterministic nature. As such, Spinoza\u2019s thought puts in question the diVerences and boundaries between human and other beings. Taking up the tantalizing hints oVered by Derrida and Agamben, I consider Spinoza\u2019s account of human beings and nature, then turn to the ethical and political implications of his account. Derrida and Agamben, respectively, converge with and diverge from Spinoza at important junctures, sometimes echoing, sometimes recoil- ing from his thought. To engage these complex relations, I begin from Derrida\u2019s and Agamben\u2019s references to Spinoza in the context of med- itations on eating and nutrition. Spinoza, too, accorded eating a dis- tinctive place in his philosophy, particularly with respect to issues of teleology and individuation. All three thinkers \ue000nd in eating the inter- section of themes in the philosophy of nature, ethics, and politics.

Derrida has more than once underscored Spinoza\u2019s extracanonical status and his importance.1 In the interview with Jean-Luc Nancy pub- lished as \u201c\u2018Eating Well,\u2019 or, The Calculation of the Subject,\u201d Derrida introduces Spinoza as an unthought alternative to the classically modern motifs of representation, \ue000nality, and instrumental rationality. Spinozism is not, we might say a propos of a text on eating, incorporated in the epoch of the subject or the history of metaphysics, and thus stands outside of, or as an other to, Heidegger\u2019sDe st rukt ion of metaphysics. Stressing Heidegger\u2019s avoidance of Spinoza, Derrida comments:

the foreclosure of Spinoza seems to me to be signi\ue000cant. Here is a great rationalism that does not rest on the principle of reason (inasmuch as in Leibniz this principle privileges both the \ue000nal cause and representation). Spinoza\u2019s substantialist rationalism is a radical critique of both \ue000nalism and the (Cartesian) representative determination of the idea; it is not a metaphysics of thec ogi to or of absolute subjectivity. The import of this foreclosure is all the greater and more signi\ue000cant in that the epoch of subjectivity determined by Heidegger is also the epoch of the rationality or the techno-scienti\ue000c rationalism of modern metaphysics. (EW, 265)

Thinking at the end of metaphysics, Derrida argues that we do not yet know how to \u201ccut up\u201d the subject, that is, how to de-privilege it, to ingest, digest, and metabolize it for thinking (EW, 285). Eating thus thematizes questions of what is excluded from the subject, what sus- tains the subject, and what undoes the subject. From this perspective, the inquiry extends beyond issues of linguistic or cultural community and into the heterogeneous multiplicity of living beings. Derrida\u2019s

emphasis on the nonsubjective character of Spinozism highlights an important theme, but his depiction of Spinozism as a \u201csubstantialist rationalism\u201d is inapt. Nature, for Spinoza, is an in\ue000nite, nontotaliz- able, nonteleological \ue001ux of singularities; in this respect, it is neither precisely \u201cone,\u201d nor is it intrinsically ordered to a single end. It is thus not appropriately de\ue000ned as substantialist or rationalist in the seven- teenth century or subsequent senses of these terms. If seventeenth cen- tury mechanism and its reduction off\u00e6siw to mute extension had to be countered by Romanticism, Spinoza stands outside this lineage, and provocatively so. Nevertheless, Derrida\u2019s articulation of diVerence, mul- tiplicity, and heterogeneity manifests a genuine kinship with Spinoza. As will become clear, however, Derrida\u2019s position on teleology is ambiva- lent, and this ambivalence diVerentiates him from Spinoza.

Agamben\u2019s engagement with Spinoza points to a political and eth- ical as well as metaphysical inheritance. In \u201cAbsolute Immanence,\u201d2 Agamben invokes Spinoza as a pivotal \ue000gure in the genealogy of imma- nence as a way of thinking without dualisms, \ue000nality, or transcendence. \u201cAbsolute Immanence\u201d is primarily a re\ue001ection on Deleuze\u2019s late essay \u201cImmanence: une vie . . .,\u201d which theorizes \u201clife\u201d as impersonal, inde\ue000nite, and hence non- or pre-subjective perdurance, and on the later Foucault\u2019s notion of life as errancy, that is, of life as nonteleological occurrence with no grounding in consciousness or truth.3 Deleuze\u2019s transcenden- tal empiricism emerges in Agamben\u2019s reading as a Spinozan articula- tion of nonrepresentational, nonteleological contemplation, a thought without subjects and objects, aims and goals, method and results. Agamben juxtaposes Foucault\u2019s critique of biopower to Deleuze\u2019s evo- cations of the elemental, nonrational, and nonlinguistic beatitude of bodies. As distinct from Deleuzian \u201clife,\u201d Foucault\u2019s \u201clife\u201d reopens the question of body as it is constituted as an object of power, and so proposes to clarify the political genealogy of the ontological erasure of body in favor of rationality. Thought together, Deleuze and Foucault broach a way of thinking life that \u201cdoes not consist only in its con- frontation with death\u201d (AI, 238). \u201cAbsolute Immanence\u201d manifests the same Benjaminian impulse that animatesHomo Sacer.4 Mindful of Benjamin\u2019s caution that the theologico-political history of the \u201csanctity of life\u201d is both recent and obscure,5 Agamben locates the question of life and living in multiple and intersecting discourses. To the extent that \u201clife\u201d is intertwined with the history of power, whether as law or in nonjuridical forms, this intertwining demands a rethinking of the material beyond mere or mute corporeality. The concluding lines of \u201cAbsolute Immanence\u201d emphasize just this shift: