A. Kiarina Kordela

In her 2007 book Surplus, Kordela brought together a number of key thinkers - not only Spinoza and Lacan, but also Marx, Saussure, and Kant - to engage in a fascinating and radical rethinking of the consequences of Spinoza's monism. At the core of this was an apparent contradiction: if monism is to be taken seriously, then all notions of telos are done away with, argues Spinoza, and yet human beings continue to need to *imagine* a fictional goal in order to live. This imagined order or goal is the surplus in Kordela's title, a concept of value that brings together economics, language, and any other system that is grounded in a differential system of evaluation.

This background is crucial for reading Being, Time, Bios, for Kordela's main purpose in this book is to look at how one gets from Sartrean phenomenology to her form of Lacanian/Marxist Spinozism. As I understand it, Kordela effectively does away with the notion of nothingness, and instead organizes existence into two modes: finite and infinite. What appears within the field of representation is finite, whereas what does not appear (but is alluded to within the field of finitude) is infinite. In a theistic perspective such as Spinoza's, God is able to oversee both finite and infinite; in today's secular perspective, however, we are limited to the finite while inferring the infinite from its effects (this accords with the Lacanian notion of the real).

Kordela relates this idea to theories of value, such as Saussure (linguistic) and Marx (economic). What is finite can be shown (e.g. a commodity) but the capitalist system then creates a logic of surplus-value that destabilizes representation to the point where an utterance always has a meaning that always points to an infinite surplus-value located beyond itself. Think of clothing, for instance: clothing is always a signifier at some level, but in the capitalist system this value takes on a life of its own, which is why Marx conceives of commodities that are able to communicate between themselves, outside of the subjectivity of the people wearing them.

Kordela also makes some fascinating claims about history and time. She notes is a concurrent move in modernity away from mythological narratives - in which the end ideologically assumes the beginning - toward a synchronic logos, a logic of the system. That doesn't stop the process of modern mythmaking, however - we need only to look at the facile explanations about the origins of capitalism or science to see the diachronic model still at work.

The most interesting part of this analysis for me was Kordela's brilliant analysis of two of Lacan's discourses: the Master and the University discourses (from Seminar XVII). Kordela shows how the Master discourse is rooted in the slave's naive presumption that the master possesses some inherent, surplus quality that openly justifies his superiority, a model of authority that is particularly prevalent in religious models. The repressed secret of the Master's discourse is that he actually doesn't know what he wants, even though he knows where to get it. The University discourse, by contrast, *suppresses* this notion of superiority and instead tries to pretend that knowledge is "objective," thus outwardly abolishing the master/slave distinction and claiming instead that all participants have equal access to knowledge. Of course, this move does not actually do away with inequality: instead, the repressed inequality becomes the unconscious of the university/scientific discourse.

The second half of the book aims to use the revised meta-ontology developed in the first half to reread the topic of biopolitics. As Kordela rightly argues, this area is ripe for a monist approach, since it relies heavily on the Cartesian split between body and mind. At the heart of this critique is a critique of utilitarianism, which is the main philosophical motive for the establishment of a biopolitics. At the core of its contradiction is the fact that utility is unable to provide a rational ground for itself: things should be useful, because, well, they just should be. Utilitarianism is simply assumed to be what human beings want "naturally." Kordela argues that biopolitics is ultimately a kind of reverse Cartesianism, whereby instead of a spirit that can switch between arbitrary bodies, bodies are instead foregrounded as the anchor of the mind/personality.

I don't know if I can do justice to the scope and innovation of Kordela's thought in this quick and oversimplified review of this book's contents. There is so much that I have left out, from necessity, from what is an extremely complex and brilliantly argued critique. If anything, Being, Time, Bios is even more ambitious than the early Surplus, and while this means it is more difficult to read and follow its arguments, it is nonetheless absolutely worth taking the time to unravel its main points.… (mais)

Although the title, as it stands, contains Spinoza and Lacan, it should probably also contain Kant, Marx, and Saussure as well, who are all major figures in Kordela's argument. It wouldn't make for such a snappy title, obviously, but it would be a truer reflection of the book's contents.

The foundation for the modern notion of surplus, for Kordela, is Spinoza. That might seem surprising: isn't Spinoza, after all, a monist? If there is only one substance, how can there be a surplus to it? Kordela explains this apparent paradox by detailing, for instance, the place of fictions and imagination in human decision-making. Spinoza demonstrates that his Nature/God is infinite, and therefore has no ends or goals; nonetheless, at the same time, humanity cannot live, desire, or act in a world without such goals. As such, the human imagination produces a "surplus" in the form of an imagined goal or telos that, while being a complete fiction, nonetheless has real effects in the world in the way it allows humans to think and act with regard to reality.

This brilliant philosophical insight, Kordela shows, will become the first in a line of revolutionary ideas that rely on the notion of surplus. She shows how Kant's ethics, for instance, relies on the generation of surpluses (freedom, God) that he requires yet cannot fully rationalize. Marx shows how capital generates surplus through commodity fetishism. Saussure, in turn, translates economic value into a system of differential linguistic value. Lacan, finally, brings all these things together. What Spinoza has effectively done, shows Kordela, is to turn the entire world into a differential system of values, in which all things function as signifiers of value, but in this representation of value, they also hide the founding principle that makes such evaluation/representation possible.

This main thread of Kordela's book is unfolded in a complex and fascinating manner. Along the way, however, it is interwoven with a series of philosophical beefs she has with what she calls "Neo-Spinozism." As such, there are extended critiques of representatives of this tendency, most notably of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (whose strategy of pushing capitalism to its limit seems a bit too much like collaborating with it), as well as Alain Badiou (whose Platonism is sometimes at odds with Spinoza's monism). Surprisingly, there is no sustained critique of Gilles Deleuze in this respect, even though I would consider him to be the most famous of the Neo-Spinozist crowd.

Kordela's book is not an easy read, but if you can follow the main thread of its argument, it is ultimately very rewarding.… (mais)

Unlike Kordela's earlier works Surplus (2007) and Being, Time, Bios (2013), this book is less of a single project than a series of essays designed to fill in the rich tapestry of her project. As such, the basic framework of what Kordela is doing will be familiar to those who have read those other books, but with new branches and ideas added in strategic areas. The essays can also be read as self-contained pieces, even if the reader is familiar with Kordela's other work. The "epistemontology" in the title, by the way, refers to the melding together of epistemology and ontology that occurs in her work, thanks largely to Spinoza.

The first chapter "Words and things in the era of value, power, and biopower" is largely a restatement of the main thesis of Being, Tim, Bios - namely, that modern philosophy has seen a split between words and things, such that philosophers have tended either to focus on representation and its self-referentiality (the deconstructionists being the most recent example) or trying to return to reality while bypassing representation altogether. In the latter category, Kordela focuses her attention on Heidegger, Badiou, Deleuze, and Meillassoux.

The second chapter is an extended meditation on Alfred Sohn-Rethel, whose work I have not read, and so I cannot comment with any insight on its contents.

Chapter three is titled "Psychoanalysis and structuralism" and focuses, rather surprisingly, on the influence of both of these forms of thought on Deleuze. Kordela makes a convincing case that Deleuze is far more influenced by them than many Deleuzians would care to admit.

Chapter four looks at the tension between structuralism and dialectics in the light of Fredric Jameson's 2009 book Valences of the Dialectic. While admiring Jameson's argument that all modern and postmodern forms of thought are dialectical, Kordela argues that structuralist thought should be seen as different in a number of crucial ways.

Chapter five is an extended look at the interaction between art and value, including such thinkers as Kant, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Benjamin.

Chapter six returns to one of Kordela's central theoretical ideas: that Marx's theory of commodity fetishism is, alongside Spinoza's monism, one of the most crucial philosophical ideas in the formation of secular modernity. In this chapter she looks at how capitalism and psychoanalysis are intertwined, and so how Marx can help us understood who we are as modern subjects.

Chapter seven expands on the territory explored in the second half of Being, Time, Bios, in which Kordela examines the connections between labor, enjoyment, and biopolitics, this time with greater attention to Spinoza's "singular essence" and the "other side" of structure.

I probably would not recommend this book to first-time readers of Kordela, since its theoretical underpinnings are laid out in much greater details in her earlier works. Nonetheless, Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan is an excellent supplement to those books, an affirmation of the importance of her thought.… (mais)