Spinoza-And-The-Political-Imaginary - Martin Saar PDF

Spinoza and the Political Imaginary
Author(s): Martin Saar, Translated by William Callison and Anne Gräfe

Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2015), pp. 115-133
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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Spinoza and the Political Imaginary
martin saar
Translated by William Callison and Anne Gräfe
For those interested in pursuing the historical and philosophical

origins of the idea of the political imaginary—a key concept in con-
temporary social and cultural theory—Spinoza represents a well-
spring. Even if many seventeenth-century authors reflected on the
imaginary and image-mediated nature of political relationships,
particularly in the connection between politics and religion, few
did so as thoroughly and systematically as Spinoza. Indeed, even
more than for Hobbes, for Spinoza the ability of the human mind
to create images is an anthropological given and an irreducible di-
mension of all human actions and interactions.
But even for those more interested in pursuing theoretical and
methodological resources for a contemporary theory of political
imaginaries, something can be found here. Despite the generality of
Spinoza’s epistemological conception of the imaginatio, it receives
a remarkable sharpness and concreteness in his political writings.
Equipped with a fine sense of the imaginative power of the mind,
Spinoza systematically describes political processes and institutions
as imaginative and imaginary phenomena. From this perspective,
politics as a whole can be read as an area of human life in which
images, projections, misjudgments, and often-involuntary associa-
116 qui parle spring/summer 2015 vol. 23, no. 2
tions between ideas become effective. This effectivity is expressed

not only in the fact that these imaginative processes directly affect
the ability of human subjects to act, namely, by strengthening or
weakening their ability to guide their own actions toward certain
goals. But even more generally for Spinoza, politics is a field of the
immanent movement and confrontation of imaginative forces and
imaginary linkages, many of which are not consciously available to
the political actors.
A robust synthesis cannot be found in Spinoza’s reflections on
this dimension of political life, but some contributions to a full-
fledged theory of the political imaginary are discernible here. To
this end, a double connection between politics and the imagination
manifests itself. The first suggests that politics is made with the
imaginary and through the imaginary, and it can only be made as
such because politics is necessarily mediated by images and asso-
ciations, as its effectivity essentially depends on imaginative mech-
anisms. The second can help us understand how politics or politi-
cal action itself affects and transforms the imaginary, how images
emerge and change in collective praxis, where the imaginary is po-
litically negotiated. With the help of these reflections, a deep, es-
sential connection between politics and the powers of the imagina-
tion becomes discernible. Such a connection offers further insights
into the dependency of political power (or the political more gen-
erally) on imaginative capacities, opening up the possibility of an
active and perhaps even emancipatory politics of the imaginary.1
The essential components of this perspective cannot, however, be
easily dissociated from the systematic whole of Spinoza’s writings;
and unfortunately, an analysis of the specific connection between
image, imagination, and politics cannot be found there at all.2 In
what follows, I will therefore attempt to assemble the constitutive
elements from various contexts and suggest reading them as parts
of a more or less coherent position, one that, I hope, will lend itself
to a form of political theory that engages contemporary concerns.
First, I will provide a sketch of the fundamental role of imagina-
tio in human perception and in all human actions, as developed in
Spinoza’s theory of the mind in the Ethics. Second, through a brief
examination of his political writings, I will show how, for Spinoza,
Saar: Spinoza and the Political Imaginary 117
this idea of a fundamental dependency on images has great bearing

on social relations and political contexts, and thus how the imagi-
nation also becomes a foundational element in the analysis of the
political. Lastly, I will attempt to highlight points of connection
between Spinoza’s arguments and contemporary discussions, and
conclude with a few reflections on the purpose of a political theory
of the imaginary.3
Cognition, Body, Affect
Spinoza’s highly complex theory of mind and affect, which pro-

vides the framework for his concept of imaginatio, is part of a
comprehensive ontological and epistemological program.4 Follow-
ing his doctrine of knowledge, the human ability to know can be
considered multi-leveled. The lowest level is formed by sensory
perception of particular things (or singular entities) and various as-
pects of the “first kind of knowledge,” which involves knowledge
of “signs,” memories, and associations, all of which Spinoza calls
“opinion” or “imagination” (imaginatio).5 The second kind of
knowledge, namely, “reason” (ratio), refers to logical conclusions
derived from general concepts and to the cognition of particular
things by rational means. The third kind of knowledge is “intuitive
knowledge” (scientia intuitiva), at once the rational knowledge of
God and complete knowledge of natural things in their internal
connection with general laws (e, 57).
In this series, only the second and third levels create reliable
knowledge or “true” ideas. The first level is not only a dangerous
source of error or the origin of “inadequate” ideas, but also an
unreliable foundation for every act of knowledge (e, 57). This is
because the relation of the thinking and imagining subject to ob-
jects of knowledge and imagination cannot be anything but medi-
ated by imaginatio: the mind of a human, according to Spinoza,
always creates representations and images of objects in reaction to
the causal impressions that external things leave on the body. The
mere act of perception should be understood less as a truthful rep-
resentation of things themselves in the mind than as an obstinate
albeit creative mode of processing the way the body is affected by
these things: “An imagining [imaginatio] is an idea whereby the

mind regards a thing as present . . . but which indicates the dis-
position of the human body rather than the nature of the external
thing” (e, 160).
The emergence of ideas or objects of thought in the mind is thus
an intensely indirect, mediated, and unreliable process. Influenc-
es from the physical-psychological constitution of the subject of
knowledge, along with the incidental circumstances of the encoun-
ter with particular external things, run through all of the images or
representations of these objects. The idea of “dog” in a particular
mind may, for example, be initially rooted in very specific, perhaps
painful or terrifying experiences with particular dogs in particular
circumstances. The singular affective experience with the external
thing leaves traces in the acts of thinking, which follow upon them
and are inscribed into the image or representation of “dog”—that
is, they remain effective in an idiosyncratic, affective dimension of
images and representations. This experience is therefore an “af-
fect” in a technical sense, since affects are by definition “affections
of the body” and likewise “ideas of these affections” (e, 104).
To be affected thus means to be subjected to a physical, bodily
modification and at the same time to experience (or to be conscious
of) something external within the mind. In this sense, so long as
it is precipitated externally, an affect is a material, bodily event
as well as a mental process, “a confused idea [confusa idea].”6 At
once bodily and mental, human experience creates images, which
are effective inside the mind but which also retain traces of its
bodily, experiential dimension. According to Spinoza’s ambitious
philosophical program, both sides—the bodily (or physical in the
widest sense) and the mental (or intellectual)—should be described
and explained naturalistically, since they are both subjected to law-
like regularities that can be principally formulated in the language
of causal or logical dependency.
There is thus a constitutive and philosophically explainable con-
nection between corporeality, psychological regularities, and men-
tal images. The process of imaginari, of representation or imagi-
nation, is a basic kind of mental process, which follows less the
logic of truthful representation than the order of projection. The
ideas of objects, formed through the mind, as well as the attributes

of affective forces on them, are part of a thoroughly creative and
literally “formative” process in which inner impressions and self-
perception become images and representations that relate to some-
thing purportedly outside. The whole life of the mind is, in a basal
sense, imaginary; this is how the mind relates to external things,
as images or representations are the very fabric of the mind itself.
The rules regulating the emergence of these images are built into
the affective household of the epistemic subject, which not only
allocates (in a quasi-distanced fashion) impressions and possible
objects to their causes but also reacts to these allocations and to
the (dis)advantages such affections have for its own condition. The
subject feels itself affected, whether impaired, threatened, injured,
or perhaps empowered and delighted. In the images or represen-
tations of the object, it feels its own effective capacity for action
increased (e.g., in joyful desire or anticipation) or diminished (e.g.,
in pain or crippling fear). These affective valences are then linked
to the object of affection.
It has proven to be enormously difficult to reconstruct both
the general argumentation and the individual steps of this
epistemological-psychological program for a general theory of the
human mind.7 While many of these steps and arguments are open
to interpretive controversy, it is at least clear how and why the
connection between this kind of affective investment (or Besetzung
in the Freudian sense) and imaginative projection is so central for
Spinoza’s theory of human life, especially since he assumes a rather
simple mechanism. In principle, an individual reacts affectively to
every encounter with an external object, acting according to a pat-
tern that relates back to her own condition and her own attempt at
self-preservation. The subject can be expected to react to injurious
or dangerous encounters in a defensive manner and to beneficial
or affirming encounters in an open and welcoming manner. These
reactions, which occur in the mind, will necessarily relate the mind
to its objects in a specific way. Such attributions are successful pro-
jections of the mind along already established psychological pat-
terns; they work as forms of recognition, imitation, or association
and thus are not completely motivated by the object. Rather, it is
essentially previous experiences that actualize themselves in these

patterns of reaction.
Affective experience is thus always already determined by an
individual history through which one’s own preferences and aver-
sions have been formed in encounters with objects and other in-
dividuals, and which in turn are updated and generalized uncon-
sciously. In this way, involuntary associations between perception
and the object are fixed while continuing to be formative and de-
fining for future interactions. And so not only good or bad experi-
ences (with objects like food, places, tools, or persons) are passed
on, but so are purely contingent connections between “ideas” of
particular things or objects, namely, the accidents of contempora-
neous appearances in particular situations.
According to Spinoza, all mental and affective events are thus
characterized by a seemingly paradoxical yet effective combination
of irrationality and quasi-rationality. The emotional or affective
reactions are irrational and misunderstood because they are almost
automatic actualizations of already existing dispositions; they are
conjunctions between perceived objects and performed evaluations
that relate back to their own condition or the objective of self-
preservation, that is, the conatus. There is an immediate reaction
to the painful contact, the distasteful dish or the disdained neigh-
bor, but also to beautiful forms, to friends, or to situations that
boost self-confidence—even if the associative linkages between ob-
ject and effect that lie behind these reactions can be false or, as it
were, merely imaginary. In a rather minimal sense, however, these
emotional or affective reactions are rational in that they trace back
to things that have already been experienced and evaluated, and
thus are accumulated and stored as useful prior judgments. And it
is only on the basis of such initial linkages that one can later make
meaningful and examined generalizations at all. Even the higher-
level forms of knowledge—which come into play with logical
rules, methodological procedures, and self-reflexive examinations
of one’s own knowledge, belonging to the more robustly reason-
generated second and third levels of knowledge—can only operate
on the basis of a mind that knows objects and has ideas; these all
derive, however, from the most essential parts of the imaginatio.8
Imagination and affectivity are thus two constitutive albeit al-

ways potentially deficient features of human nature. Both are
indispensable functions that contribute to the survival and self-
preservation of individuals, helping them deal with external con-
tact and stimuli, while also carrying with them a degree of con-
tingency, fuzziness, and distortion. No human being lives without
affects and imagination, and many of the problems of human co-
existence arise from the dynamics of affective and imaginative pro-
cesses, which take place between human beings and their environ-
ment of things and situations. These dynamics shape interhuman
encounters, and thus also the social and the political most gener-
ally, in significant and profound ways.
Affective Authority and Imaginary Community
Spinoza’s philosophical examination of affects and of the imagi-

nation constitutes a fundamental component of his theory of the
human. The life of the human mind, the reactions of the soul, and
the drives of the body can, in his view, only truly be understood
through recourse to a theory of affective patterns and of the imagi-
native elements of knowledge. For Spinoza, a philosophical exami-
nation of the human is unthinkable without a particular form of
philosophical psychology that has at its center an insight into the
imaginary logic of the associative connections between ideas.9
These inner-mental and individual relationships are then directly
transferred onto the phenomena that concern the human as a so-
cial or political being, since encounters of different human bodies
in space necessarily imply the reciprocal influence of bodies that
feel affected and in whose minds an image of these others emerges.
Sociality or intersubjectivity is thus essentially imaginary. Individu-
als enter society with conceptions and images of themselves and
of others, though often enough these are distorted, fortuitous, and
misleading. For these images are products of a process composed
of a complex of the psycho-physical constitution of a particular
subject, their previous experiences, and their limited ability to ra-
tionally adjust to already existing linkages between impressions
and experiences.
Spinoza’s perspective on politics and his take on the possibilities

for the active organization of human coexistence appear against
the background of these ontological or anthropological assump-
tions. Since if political subjects are constituted in the way depicted
by his philosophical psychology, then the constitution and gover-
nance of a political community cannot simply be a matter of find-
ing the most reasonable rules and the most pragmatic solutions for
communal life. The constitution of the community forms a politi-
cal space that is always populated by subjects who—in Spinoza’s
more skeptical than pessimistic estimation—do not simply follow
reason. From this follows a basic level of social irrationality which
should not be downplayed by any political-theoretical program
and which must be reckoned with in both a practical and political
manner; this is Spinoza’s anthropological or political realism.10
This view of affective and imaginative collective processes can
be further illustrated through two pertinent topics from Spinoza’s
political writings. These are, in a sense, political lessons concern-
ing the inescapability of the imagination, which show that an
imagination-centered perspective on the political arrives at dif-
ferent results and proposals than a theory that focuses on pure
reason, sheer law abidance, or bare self-interest as the actual de-
terminants of interhuman arrangements. The first case reveals the
exploitability of imaginative and affective mechanisms through po-
litical authority. Within the framework of the critique of religion
and superstition in his early Theological-Political Treatise, which
is guided by a demasking critique of supposed interpretive authori-
ties, Spinoza arrives at a connection between epistemic mistakes
and affective needs. According to this analysis, “superstition” (su-
perstitio) arises because of existential insecurity. Whoever is be-
fallen by misfortune looks for consolation or at least for meaning
in images and notions that are able to make the misfortune explica-
ble. The subject is in principle “quite ready to believe anything.”11
“Superstition” as such is nothing other than the mistake of taking
these vague images or projections of fear for reliable knowledge,
such as notions of avenging fate or magical predestination or sim-
ply a consoling faith in an otherworldly justice.
These considerations have enormous bearing on political ques-
tions, as it is precisely these features of the human, such as fearful-

ness and the will to believe, that make one susceptible and vulner-
able to a form of political power that capitalizes on this existential
structure of uncertainty. The political-theological problematic of
religion consists in the fact that religion qua factual social author-
ity participates in the interpretation and orientation of the fears of
religious subjects. Religion gives individual suffering a name and
a meaning (e.g., in the doctrine of sin); it justifies and rationalizes
(in a pejorative sense) entirely undefined expectations, effectively
creating hope upon an uncertain and unstable epistemic basis.12
Official religion is mostly successful in this because, on the one
hand, it effectively brings affective images and possible sources of
identification into circulation, and on the other, it creates an effi-
cient system of interpretive elites, associated rituals, and social de-
pendencies. In so doing, it psychologically and socially wins power
over the souls of its believers. Spinoza even attests to how specific
forms of monarchical-theological authority would like “to keep
men deceived, and to disguise the fear that sways them with the
specious name of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude
as if they were fighting for their own deliverance” (tpt, 6). Political
authority can thus, in the most extreme cases, not only exploit the
affects of the subjects it governs but also functionalize the system
of convictions and social practices. This happens in such a way
that authority itself becomes an affectively invested second nature,
an illusionary form of self-interest.
The second case of the political effectiveness of images and af-
fects is the positive counterpart to the first problematic case of
imaginary authority. In the Theological-Political Treatise, and es-
pecially in the middle chapters, Spinoza develops a series of sys-
tematic reflections on forms of shared affective life, which directly
connect to his critique of official, superstitious religion. With the
Old Testament example of the fate of the Jewish people, who new-
ly constituted themselves as a political community after their exo-
dus from Egypt, Spinoza illustrates the community-forming force
of images and rituals, as cleverly deployed by Moses in his consti-
tution of state and religion: “Moses, with his virtue and by divine
command, introduced religion into the commonwealth, so that the
people would do its duty more from devotion [devotio] than from
fear” (tpt, 74). Here the (in no way unproblematic) fusion of a
state and a new religion stands in the service of stabilizing the com-
munal body that can only succeed through a re-founding of a liv-
ing, embodied civil identity, which itself needs new images, identi-
fications, and symbols.13
It can be deduced from these numerous suggestions that Spinoza
proceeds from this religious example to a more general necessity
of such affectively charged forms, which structure everyday life.
He thus argues for the additional possibility of non-religious, civil
forms of devotio.14 Surprisingly, these considerations are not taken
up explicitly in his later and more skeptical second book on poli-
tics, the Tractatus politicus, where the role of religion is pushed to
the margins. But the central theme nonetheless remains—namely,
the idea of an affective and imaginative dynamic of political iden-
tification. In Spinoza’s radical-democratic construction, where the
crowd of people, the multitudo, is the foundation for legitimacy
and stability of the state as such, the communal body requires not
only obedience to the laws but also affective and imaginative ties.15
The state lives in and through its citizens; it is not, like in
Hobbes, an artificial person with a central organ at the top, but
an affective body with legal structures: “For rights are the soul of
a government. Where they are maintained the state is necessarily
maintained. But rights cannot have an invincible strength unless
defended by the reason and the general affection of men [cum ra-
tione et communi hominum affectu convenire]; otherwise if they
lean for support merely on reason, they are weak and easily over-
come.”16 Only if the laws “are consonant to reason, as well as to
the general affections and passions of mankind” can they be “eter-
nal [aeterna]” (tp, 111).
Beyond a basic degree of rationality, stable political institutions
thus need an affective and imaginative field of resonance in order to
be viable. The basic norms of a society have to be comprehensible,
yet in order to be possible objects for their affective reference, they
must also fit the emotional balance of the citizens and map onto
their interests and needs. The positive investment of the body poli-
tic, which runs through the power of the people, is the imaginative
and affective political condition of state legitimacy. This is, as it

were, the positive counterpart to the monarchal-authoritarian ide-
ological authority Spinoza criticized so sharply in his earlier work.
In this new perspective, effective secular governance amounts to
the clever and productive management of the affects. But only de-
mocracy or a free society has the potential for an affective and
imaginative integration of all members, as democracy can function
without some avoidable forms of exclusion and can be organized
under conditions of more extensive transparency and publicity.17
This second, more affirmative element of Spinoza’s political the-
ory of the imaginary and the emotions, which could be understood
as a kind of affective republicanism, cannot be seen in isolation
from the first. The continuous threat posed by collective processes
that run through individual and societal irrationality remains; cru-
cially, nothing could exclude in advance the power-stabilizing func-
tionalization of emotions or imaginary projections by elites and
powerful groups. But the remedy for affective and imaginary heter-
onomy lies not in a complete rationalization of politics but rather
in an active and activating inclusion and extension of those affec-
tive investments. The latter process serves the power and freedom
of body politic and its members. These affective forces make the
members of such democratic communities more vital and viable,
more capable of action. What is established here is a novel per-
spective on political communities as affective and imaginary collec-
tives, which are more than their mere—cold—institutional forms.
They are rather passionate, sensible and embodied—hot—forms of
collective existence.18
A Political Theory of the Imaginary
With these elucidations of the connection between politics and

imagination within the framework of Spinoza’s general ontological
theory, the question still remains whether this perspective can be
actualized and, relatedly, whether it can be defended against sys-
tematic objections in light of the standards of contemporary social
theory. At stake here is obviously the transfer of individual psycho-
logical mechanisms to the collective level, and the psychologiza-
tion of the social inherent to the very notion of a social or political

imaginary. It is indeed difficult to assess whether Spinoza’s early
modern theory of mind already contains enough resources to jus-
tify such operations, whether his political psychology is ultimate-
ly laid out individualistically, or whether the transition from the
inner-psychic to the social level remains metaphorical (as it does in
many theories).
But even beyond these difficult methodological problems, the
sense of direction offered by his proposals remains useful. If one
considers his specific contribution to political theory less as an
overall program than as a heuristic or a style of thought—as a
particular way of thinking politics that could be carried out un-
der contemporary conditions—following him is less a matter of
remaining with him to the letter in his systematic aims than of
taking some cues from his focus and insistence on the role of af-
fects for politics. This would lead us to follow him in considering
affects and imaginations as constitutive and dynamic factors of all
political processes and to approach the problems of the political
from this angle (and not from the angle of law, normativity, or or-
der). I will thus briefly sketch out two issues in political theorizing
that should motivate contemporary theorists to take the power and
meaning of the imaginary as a point of departure—or, more pre-
cisely, to place it within a neo-Spinozan conception of the political.
This first issue asks in what sense images and affects contribute
to the government (in the most extensive sense) of subjects and
to the political exercise of power, and how instruments of analy-
sis and critique can be developed to confront this imaginary and
affect-mediated power. The second involves the attempt to deter-
mine the relationship of self and politics in the affective nature of
the subject itself and thus to achieve a realistic picture of emotional
investments in social and political orders; it can indeed be difficult
to break out of problematic and damaging political relations. Both
points are central and urgent tasks of a contemporary political the-
ory of the imaginary, and turning to Spinoza might help us find a
theoretical language as well as concrete conceptualizations of how
such phenomena might come into view.
Following Spinoza’s project in broad strokes, this first implies
a shift of focus and a modification of what appears as the most

primary field of objects for political philosophy or theory. For if
the emphasis on the contingent affective investments of objects or
ideas has something right about it, then it becomes all the more
urgent to describe how one could approach and name the politics
of images (in the literal sense of the word), namely, a politics that
can be made with objects of the imagination. Political theorizing
would then need to develop a theoretical language for the fact that
politics is always already connected to affects and to the making of
emotionally invested images and objects such that every politics is,
at a certain level, a politics of visibility.
If Spinoza’s rather speculative psychological reflections do claim
some plausibility—that the idea of every external object in the mind
is furnished with an imaginary connection to other ideas of external
objects, with a relation to conatus and an evaluative and affective
index—then all political ideas and objects are at once associative
and affectively charged. Thus, in the field of politics, no image,
no representation, no object is neutral. Politics, collective action,
and institutional regulations thus exist, succeed, or fail against the
backdrop of already existing affective-imaginative investments and
their effects on individuals. For citizens do not passionlessly face the
state, social institutions, or fellow citizens. Rather, they operate with
all of these objects through already existing, more or less intense
emotional and imaginary relations; their interactions with them are
fundamentally shaped by aversions, aspirations, preferences, or fan-
tasies. These are released—for the citizen, with her dispositions and
her affective history—precisely because of what these objects stand
for, what they embody, and what they symbolize.
Political relationships therefore invoke deep layers of previous
affective processes, which run through and disrupt contemporary
political interactions. This applies to representational and symbol-
ic politics in the widest sense: they communicate signs of the state,
representations of collective history, national narratives, rituals of
memory, monuments, memorials, uniforms, flags, as well as the
official appearances of state leaders, border markers, currencies,
and much more. In such a perspective, this apparent and incidental
field of politics, this field of visual and symbolic political culture,
becomes a significant and highly effective stage of political connec-

tions and conflicts. For it is in this field of shared signs or images
of the common—or in this official symbolization of community—
where the affective conditions of individuals, whose lives and wel-
fare depend on belonging to this collective, become affectively
“tuned.”19 The symbolic politics of belonging is just as much a
politics of sense (Sinnpolitik) as it is a sensual and sensitive form of
politics (sinnliche Politik).
The symbolic and visual culture of a community can then be
considered as a space of determination and negotiation of social
sense and sensibility—determining, for instance, where its borders
take shape, where norms of belonging receive their emotional re-
ality and embodiment, not only in the signs and representations
of official, institutionalized politics but also in everyday culture.
For it is at this level where social and political relations of force
are translated into perceptible manifestations, signs, or images of
power. Here it becomes manifest what is acceptable, what is vis-
ible, and what is experienceable—who belongs in the proper realm
of perception and experience. If it is to be assumed that this battle
of images is a central stage of political power, then a “viable theory
of ways of governing the visual” would be necessary in order to
assess the force and power of images on the emotional household
of political subjects.20 Since affects and images are the motivational
stuff of politics, and since the political imaginary is the arsenal
and medium of these exercises of power, it is necessary to assess,
analyze, and possibly criticize all of the imaginative-imaginary re-
lations that have until now nurtured, guided, and governed politi-
cal life. Spinoza might be the most prominent source to turn to for
guidance in this respect, not in theoretical details, but in the broad-
est sense of direction.
Against this theoretical background there arises a second im-
perative to take more seriously the imaginary dimensions of pro-
cesses of political subject-constitution. If one would like to know
who can participate in communal life or where and when political
action can take place, then one should be able to describe pro-
cesses of the production of belonging and identification, which are
the preconditions of political participation. This raises the question
of how political subjects imagine themselves in their relations to

political structures. For Spinoza, as Althusser repeatedly pointed
out, affective and imaginary beliefs are epistemically deficient but
are no mere mistake; they do not consist of a “pure error.”21 The
subject feeling or believing something, even in the grip of mislead-
ing conceptions and fantasies, is not wrong. For the affects and
the imaginatio are effective sources for functional convictions; they
lead to meaningful states of opinion and feeling, which are con-
nected to the subject’s will to survive. They are ideas in the service
of the desire for self-preservation, ideas in which the state of the
subject itself is expressed.
Interesting and intuitively insightful here is the idea of a psy-
chodynamics or a psychical economy in which subjects manage
and overcome difficult situations: a self reacts creatively to dan-
gers, threats, and adverse effects by forming strategies of surviv-
al at the imaginative and affective level. An especially important
part of this is the positive affective investment of others and of
institutions, insofar as they are useful or essential for survival and
provide a defense against possible sources of injury. The positive
affective investments of collective life or of the factual normative
order are functionally useful and self-preserving, for whoever can
understand herself as a good member of the community can also
then live and act more productively with other members.22 This
existential dependency on the other translates itself into imaginary
affirmations or desires. This can even extend to those things (or
persons, relationships, or norms) that might be damaging to the
individual who still remains attached to them, because the promise
attached to them only works for the majority. But the subject in
question here fears the cost of social exclusion and therefore wills
its own adaption to the hegemonic objects of desire. But if this has
happened, social and political authority has successfully inscribed
itself into the affective structure of those living under it.23
The desire for recognition can thus bind the subject to orders
that injure her. In these drastic cases, one wants or affirms one’s
own subjugation, since one needs and desires an order that affords
a certain social and political status, security, and ability to act—
even if this order itself proves to be harmful to this very subject.
These complex and ambivalent cases of an inherently destructive

albeit maintained relationship between self and power, which we
might call cases of intensified power, should certainly be within the
reach of any contemporary critique of power worthy of its name.
To this end, an appropriate theoretical approach to the imaginary
and ideology would require a conception of the force and power of
images, self-images, and hegemonic images of the desirable, which
could capture such inner-psychical dynamics. Here the psychic
costs of belonging are negotiated in the medium of self-images and
self-relations, which the subject has of herself in her imagination of
identity and belonging. But these apparently private or individual
processes are framed and interwoven with socially available, hege-
monic images of the good community and a successful personality,
which circulate and are politically instituted in the social sphere.
Spinoza’s rather parenthetical descriptions of the imaginary me-
diation of politics as well as the affective, imaginary, and always
image-producing constitution of the subject allow us to better un-
derstand the interferences between subjectivity, power, and social-
ity in the medium of images. They thus point us to the particu-
larly “deep” forms of the ideological, which not only shape and
deform the subject’s convictions and self-relations but also inscribe
themselves in habitus and lived practice. They are embodied and
realized both in the body and in affectively invested modes of au-
thority. Trying to understand these extreme and vexing cases is a
challenge for critical thinking today, and the non-dogmatic (re)turn
to Spinoza on these matters provides a point of departure for start-
ing to theorize them.
In contemporary social theory, the concept of the political imag-
inary has only achieved its full resonance in the context of the the-
oretical contributions of Nietzsche, Freud, Kantorowicz, Lacan, or
Castoriadis, from whom most current theorizing gains its inspira-
tion. I have argued that the work of Spinoza, despite the absence
of the term “political imaginary,” already contains an intriguing
and coherent account of the interrelation between politics and the
imagination. It would now be a promising and ambitious task to
compare the strengths and weaknesses of Spinoza’s conception
with more advanced and systematically developed post-Freudian
or materialist accounts.24 The attractiveness of Spinoza’s mod-

el surely lies in its general character: some basic ontological and
anthropological assumptions are all that is needed to derive far-
reaching conclusions about the imaginary nature of human rela-
tions and politics. The political imaginary can thus be placed right
at the center of political theorizing, indispensable and unavoidable
for every political theory that refuses to close its eyes to the power
of images and the imagination.
Notes
1. Similar perspectives have been admirably explored by Susan James,

“Freedom and the Imaginary,” in Visible Women: Essays on Feminist
Legal Theory and Political Philosophy, ed. Susan James and Stepha-
nie Palmer (Oxford: Hart, 2002), 175–95; and most recently by Chi-
ara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Beyond Imagination and the Imagi-
nary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), hereafter cited
as ip.
2. See Piet Steenbakkers, “Imagination,” in Continuum Companion to
Spinoza, ed. Wiep Van Bunge, Henri Krop, Piet Steenbakkers, and
Jeroen van de Ven (London: Continuum, 2011), 231–33.
3. The following remarks condense and modify various themes and for-
mulations from chapter 6 of Martin Saar, Die Immanenz der Macht:
Politische Theorie nach Spinoza (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2013), 275–328.
Hereafter cited as im.
4. Systematic introductions into this vast topic can be found in Michèle
Bertrand, Spinoza et l’imaginaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1983), hereafter cited as si; and Cornelis de Deugd, The Sig-
nificance of Spinoza’s First Kind of Knowledge (Assen: Van Gorcum,
1996).
5. Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics and Selected Letters, ed. Seymour
Feldman, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), Part
II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2, 51. Hereafter cited as e.
6. See Part III in e; the claim of Spinoza’s theoretical philosophy is col-
orfully illustrated by Ursula Renz, Die Erklärbarkeit von Erfahrung:
Realismus und Subjektivität in Spinozas Theorie des menschlichen
Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2010), 260–303.
7. An overview of the controversial issues is provided by Michael Della
Rocca, Spinoza (London: Routledge 2008); for a much-debated at-
tempt to read Spinoza in the light of contemporary neuroscience, see

Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feel-
ing Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003).
8. The constitutive role of imaginatio is discussed extensively by Susan
James, “Narrative as the Means to Freedom: Spinoza on the Uses of
Imagination,” in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise: A Critical
Guide, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Michael Rosenthal (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250–67.
9. This dimension of Spinoza’s thought, extremely close to later cri-
tiques of ideology, is explored by Moira Gatens and Geneviece Loyd,
Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Rout-
ledge, 1999), 35. Hereafter cited as ci.
10. The question of irrationality and the affective control of the people is
treated masterfully by Pierre-François Moreau, “Affects et politique:
Une difficulté de spinozisme,” in Spinoza et les affects, ed. Fabienne
Brugère and Pierre-François Moreau (Paris: Presses de l’université de
Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), 55–62.
11. Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise [1670], ed. Jona-
than Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3. Here-
after cited as tpt.
12. For a more extensive treatment of Spinoza’s critique of religion, see
im, 17–27.
13. More historical context for these issues is provided by Michael
A. Rosenthal, “Why Spinoza Chose the Hebrews: The Exemplary
Function of Prophecy in the Theological-Political Treatise,” in Jew-
ish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, ed. Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn
Goodman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002),
225–60.
14. The idea of an enlightened piety is examined by Susan James, Spi-
noza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political
Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), in particular 121–
23, 201.
15. I discuss Spinoza’s conception of democracy more thoroughly in
The Immanence of Power: From Spinoza to “Radical Democracy”
(Voorschooten: Uitgeverij Spinozahuis, 2014).
16. Benedict de Spinoza, chapter 10 in Treatise on Politics [1677], ed.
Wolfgang Bartuschat (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004), 111. Hereafter cited
as tp.
17. The relationship between inclusion and exclusion (of women, ser-
vants, and foreigners) in the Tractatus politicus is helpfully discussed
by Negri in “The Political Treatise, or, The Foundation of Modern

Democracy,” chapter 2 of Antonio Negri, Subversive Spinoza: (Un)
contemporary Variations, ed. Timothy S. Murphy (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2004), 9–27. See also Genevieve Lloyd,
“Dominance and Difference: A Spinozistic Alternative to the Dis-
tinction Between ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender,’” in Feminist Interpretations of
Benedict Spinoza, ed. Moira Gatens (University Park: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 29–42.
18. The process of the constituting an imaginative community out of
shared imaginations is convincingly explained in ci, 124.
19. This is a metaphor frequently used by Brian Massumi, Parables for
the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002).
20. Tom Holert, Regieren im Bildraum (Berlin: b_books, 2008), 16.
21. Louis Althusser, “Sur Spinoza,” in Éléments d’autocritique (Paris:
Hachette, 1974), 65–83.
22. On the question of recognition and survival, see Judith Butler, Giving
an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005),
43, 49; and the critical remarks by Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the
Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011), 117–53.
23. A classic and insightful account of such psychodynamics is advanced
by Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” in States of Injury:
Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 52–76. A Neo-Spinozist version of it is power-
fully put forward by Frédéric Lordon, La societé des affects: Pour un
structuralisme des passions (Paris: Seuil, 2013).
24. For discussions see si; ip; and im, 316–27.

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Spinoza and the Political Imaginary

Author(s): Martin Saar, Translated by William Callison and Anne Gräfe

For those interested in pursuing the historical and philosophical

tions between ideas become effective. This effectivity is expressed

this idea of a fundamental dependency on images has great bearing

Cognition, Body, Affect

Spinoza’s highly complex theory of mind and affect, which pro-

these things: “An imagining [imaginatio] is an idea whereby the

ideas of objects, formed through the mind, as well as the attributes

essentially previous experiences that actualize themselves in these

Imagination and affectivity are thus two constitutive albeit al-

Affective Authority and Imaginary Community

Spinoza’s philosophical examination of affects and of the imagi-

Spinoza’s perspective on politics and his take on the possibilities

tions, as it is precisely these features of the human, such as fearful-

and affective political condition of state legitimacy. This is, as it

A Political Theory of the Imaginary

With these elucidations of the connection between politics and

tion of the social inherent to the very notion of a social or political

a shift of focus and a modification of what appears as the most

becomes a significant and highly effective stage of political connec-

of how political subjects imagine themselves in their relations to

These complex and ambivalent cases of an inherently destructive

or materialist accounts.24 The attractiveness of Spinoza’s mod-

1. Similar perspectives have been admirably explored by Susan James,

tempt to read Spinoza in the light of contemporary neuroscience, see

by Negri in “The Political Treatise, or, The Foundation of Modern

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