Towards a Dialectics of the Positive

Abstract

The persistent divide within French philosophy between so-called structuralists and poststructuralists has been recently revived in the writings of Badiou and others. This narration of the history of French philosophy is trapped inevitably in the very way it poses the problem: as a dialectic of the negative. The abstracting of these traditions from all their messiness into a dialectical opposition is itself part of the problem, a misrepresentation, ignoring any points of convergence. Drawing centrally on the work of Pierre Macherey, I suggest this divide can be traced back to Hegel's profound misreading of Spinoza, which became the basis for Hegel's dialectic and Marx's subsequent inversion. I explore crucial points of convergence between Marx and Spinoza, and a resonance between Deleuze and Macherey (who are often stereotyped as emblems of oppositional tendencies within French philosophy). Their work converges on a rejection of negation as the defining quality of essence or multiplicity and, in the case of Deleuze and Macherey, a shared uptake of Spinoza's concept of potentia. Their work gestures towards the development of a dialectics of the positive: a problematic that might enable us to think across our differences to a political ontology that embraces the posthuman, immanent, and affirmative qualities of struggle.