To mean something is to show how little one appreciate other peoples’ freedom.
Horace Engdahl.
Abstract
This paper adopts Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s expressionism and pure semiotics to argue that Spinoza’s Ethics offers an alternative notion of freedom of speech that is based on the potentia of the individual. Its aim is to show how freedom of thought is connected to the problem of individuation that connects our mode of being with our power to speak and think. Rather than treating freedom of speech as an enlightened idea that is in opposition to, for example, religious authority, or the suppression of human rights, this paper argues that freedom of speech should be understood by what Spinoza calls ‘an adequate idea’: an idea that explains the cause of its own production. What is to be considered is: who wants this freedom, in what situation, why, what is at stake? No freedom in itself is ever given. This paper argues for speech as an assembled body that is always in connection with other bodies. It is argued that to understand the power and value of the freedom of speech, we should study the praxis of the utterance as an assembled body, its causal dimensions, and its affective immanent relations with other bodies, and other modes of speaking.
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Notes
For a more interesting notion of combining Spinoza and Jurisprudence: see Gustaffson [12].
In Latin affectio refers to one body affecting another body; “I love this woman” and affectus refers to the passage from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of the affecting bodies. “Love” could here be the pure affect that does not point toward X, but is itself a variation. This affect can only become larger or smaller marking out the changing capacities of reality attached to a body. The bodily dimension is constituent for living forms of thought, yet without there being any hierarchy between body and spirit (mind) jf Deus sive natura (Spinoza 1996, II, P. 2, 33).
Spinoza: Ethics. Part 1. Def. 6:”By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence. Spinoza: Ethics. Pinguin Books. 1996. p. 1. According to Spinoza Gud is one, indivisible, and he consists of infinite attributes, hence we are confronted with a kind of thinking in which there is no hierarchy. When everything is in God, everything that exists has the same ontological status. The point is that no substance is prior to its attributes. It has neither logical nor chronological priority. Rather, substance is the same as its attributes. The essence of things would cease to exist without the qualities and properties that belong to its nature. This reading of Spinoza became part of Deleuze’s breakthrough in which he lays the foundation for the so-called ‘new Spinoza.’ (See Montag & Stoltz anthology: The New Spinoza 1999). Deleuze puts great emphasis on the fact that all attributes have equal value. There are no ranking of qualities. The attribute ‘thinking’, for example, can therefore not be more important than another attribute such as the attribute ‘extension’. In the universe of Spinoza the mode of thought can neither be superior nor subordinate its mode of extension. This is what leads Deleuze to his theory of expressionism: When the attribute or the substance expresses what is created, it cannot be separated from that which is created; rather it is included within it. In other words, there is no other force behind the expression. God is nothing beyond his effects.
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I am grateful to my friend Richard Edwards for helping me with important linguistic details.
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Carnera, A. Freedom of Speech as an Expressive Mode of Existence. Int J Semiot Law 25, 57–69 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9212-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9212-7