Political Imagination and Radical Enlightenment：Contemporary Interpretations of Spinozian Ontology

In contemporary political thoughts, the “Spinoza renaissance” is an important intellectual background. There are two indications in this “Spinoza renaissance”, firstly, it rehashes the tension between reason and imagination in the Enlightenment tradition. Spinozian ontology envisages the transition from imagination to reason as a plain ontological itinerary, from epistemology to ontology, which has three aspects: The first aspect is the recognition of the “materiality” of imagination, not a epistemic misunderstanding, imagination reveals the concrete interaction between individualities, in this context Althusser as a harbinger indicated the subversive elements in Spinoza’s metaphysical system. The second aspect is the displace of passive affect with active affect, this radical Enlightenment thesis is not reason’s mastery of imagination, but a body’s positive empowerment and self-government. The third aspect is demonstrated by Gilles Deleuze, who equated the power to affect with the power to be affected. Spinozian ontological turn constructs an important background of contemporary philosophy of immanence. Antonio Negri summarized the immanence thought and applied it to actual political analysis with the extension of plain ontological itinerary to the collective political association, the process from individual to multitude, which is the second indication in this “Spinoza renaissance”. The reflection of Mosaic regime, Machiavelli’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan in Spinoza''s writings provides a political imagination of multitude which challenges paradigms of "constituent power" shared by liberalism and republicanism. The resistance of multitude to Empire is the modern portratal of apostle’s opposition to Mosaic’s prophetic sovereign. The critique of Spinozian Ontology and expression of conatus is the contest against this plain itinerary, Agamben’s “potentiality” and Žižek’s “trauma of transcendence” are different responses to Spinozian ontology.