The title alone betrays the compactness of A. Kiarina Kordela’s Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure (Routledge 2018). This is a critique of modern thought and politics, including metaphysics, political economy, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, and of the ideological wrapping that enfolds them within separate domains of interest and insight.
Kordela deployes a Spinozian monism throughout, considering Baruch Spinoza’s dissolution of the dualism especially between immanence and transcendence, nature and God, time and eternity, across contemporary critical theory’s many differences in order to reveal what unifies these otherwise disparate dimensions of inquiry.
This is not an easy book, though not in a discouraging sense. For all its intellectual depth, scholarly expertise, and comprehensiveness, the book’s list of key references is relatively compact. Students of Marxism really need be familiar only with the first chapter of Karl Marx’s Capital, particularly the final section on commodity fetishism. The whole book may be considered a close, exacting, reiterative reading of these few essential pages in conversation with the panoply of other theorists Kordela places in their orbit. Her wager is that with commodity fetishism one can understand Jacques Lacan or Sigmund Freud or Spinoza, and can recognise their importance to any diagnosis of our late capitalist predicament.
There are certain reasons for this. Reading commodity fetishism as a social-historical form of the inseparability of subject and object, and of their dual structural homology with representation, Kordela leans substantially on Étienne Balibar’s work especially in The Philosophy of Marx. Kordela writes of Balibar: ‘Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism amounts to the philosophical thesis that the object, whose part and counterpart is the subject, is both thing and signifier’ (21). This is no speculation; it is an ‘objective fact’ and ‘objective necessity’ of the particular episteme Kordela generally designates ‘secular capitalist modernity’ (26–7). Thinking of this necessity, then, demands not only a theory of knowledge, nor a conception of the being or substance upon which such knowledge would be built, nor still a new way of representing this unity of knowledge and substance that would be epiphenomenal to the situation thus represented. Where objects are inseparable from the ways of knowing that produce and are produced by them; where signs are instances of objective value and objects are valued only according to what they signify; and where even subjects are defined by, precisely, their subjection to this logic of objectification – all this requires a theory that can capture how this seriality of thought, object, and representation comprises one and the same structure. This is what Kordela calls epistemontology.
The book makes three moves concerning the definition, development, and application of this neologism. The first is to demonstrate how Marx’s exposition of value in the context of commodity fetishism – and, by extension, this value’s pervasiveness throughout the totality of secular capitalist modernity, where ‘being appears exclusively as value’ (27) – recapitulates Spinoza’s monist triumph over the dualism between (subjective) representation and (objective or external) reality. As with the rest of her argument, this is a structural(ist) manoeuvre – it must be, since Kordela’s principle position throughout is that value under the rubric of capitalism is otherwise unthinkable. On her reading, ideas and things for Spinoza are obviously not identical, but they do ‘share the same structures’ and, fundamentally ‘express the same substance or being’ (1). Put differently, ideas and things are different expressions of the same potentiality of being, effects of ‘the sheer power or potentiality of self-actualization’ (64; emphasis in original). Readers of Louis Althusser or Fredric Jameson will recognise this potentiality as a variation on the notion of immanent causality: potentiality is not a transcendental or prime mover, nor is it a philosophical predicate or condition; after Spinoza, it exists only in and as its own effects. Potentiality is there in the self-actualisation of its powers.
This first move, toward a Spinozian Marxism, is redoubled by the following chapter, ‘Materialist Epistemontology,’ a novel reading of Spinoza and psychoanalysis through the lens of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Marx. In the domain of Marxist-Lacanian political theory and cultural critique, we can recall Slavoj Žižek’s invocation of Sohn-Rethel in the first chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology. While she does not address Žižek there, Kordela similarly emphasises Sohn-Rethel’s insight that the Kantian categories of pure reason, the quintessence of modern metaphysics, are in fact a consequence of the rupture in the sort history that late Marx would identify as the logic of exchange. This inversion, placing Marx in a sense before Kant, is meant to show how modern thought – even in a most abstract sense, even where it is conceived as entirely distinct from empirical experience, and immanence and transcendence are utterly unbridgeable – is an effect of the commodity form’s irruption into history.
Applying the classical (Saussurian) structuralist linguistic paradigm ex post facto to Marx’s anatomy of the commodity form, Kordela underlines how value is determined situationally, differentially, and contextually, within an indeterminate network of exchange. Like commodities, it is a mistake to believe that linguistic signs (words) are bound to real things in the world; commodities are valuable only in relation to other commodities just as signs refer only to other signs. For both, their value is found in their associations and their abstract circulation. This reduction of being to indeterminate and abstract value ‘is inaccessible to the consciousness of the very persons whose acts bring it about,’ and thereby constitutes ‘our collective unconscious … which provides the blueprint of the categories of abstract thought’ (56–7, emphasis in original). While this seems to invite the total derealisation of reality, Kordela maintains a contrary materialism by reading Sohn-Rethel somewhat against himself, putting pressure on the priority he affords exchange over production. The previous chapter has prepared us to avoid such a misstep. To prioritize either side of the production/exchange binary would be to revive the dualistic framework and consequently the hierarchy that Kordela’s Spinozian Marxism has taught us to avoid. Yes, under the dominion of the commodity, exchange displaces production, the real is made abstract, but this is not a relation of cause to effect. Exchange-value does not act upon use-value and thereby transform it. Production is inseparable from exchange just as objects and subjects are inextricable from representation. The logic of exchange is materialised in and as the field of production, the actual labour practices that generate objects of exchange. Without this entwinement, we are stuck with a purely philosophical idealism or we are back in the realm of a strictly materialist epistemology that fails to recognise how ideas and objects, words and things, are co-constitutive (69).
All this raises the stakes of the structuralist wager, whether in its original linguistic iteration or its later anthropological, psychoanalytic, or philosophical revisions. Making her second argumentative move, it is to the last of these, particularly Gilles Deleuze’s radical articulation of what we might call the structure of structuralism, to which Kordela turns in the following chapter on ‘Psychoanalysis and Structuralism.’ As ever, Spinoza is the foundation, motor, and mediator among a panoply of seemingly distinct thinkers; his monistic conception of substance, which we now know is synonymous with structurality, potentiality, and being, ‘will always already have laid the ground of structuralist thought,’ whatever this thought’s manifestations (74). Tracking his subtle or obvious appropriations of key Spinozian concepts, Kordela unpacks a series of cycles of repetition through which Deleuze separates –in order to demonstrate the inseparability of– logical and historical time. These syntheses of temporality allow her to compellingly enlist Freud, through Lacan, as well as Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, in the service of the epistemontological cause. Fo the always-singular subject – the subject of the unconscious – the field of experience in which subject, object, and representation are incurably interwoven is what Freud called fantasy. After Lacan, fantasy is not so much a scene as it is a logic of desire that emerges with the subject’s forced entry into language and separates the desiring subject from the fantasised object for good. The subject’s splitting, the specific structure of which will characterise the (fantasmatic) being of both halves of the division, constitutes their being. The fantasised object does not precede its severance from the subject, and the subject exists only through this same separation. According to the logic of fantasy, the subject does not exist until it no longer exists.
Kordela’s novel incorporation of Deleuze and Spinoza into this otherwise axiomatic, if seemingly paradoxical, Lacanian formulation helps resolve a stale impasse in psychoanalytic thinking between the history of the subject, with all its contingency and uniqueness, and the eternal structure of the subject which, in secular capitalist modernity, must endure within, not beyond or before, its historicity. How are we to understand eternity within temporality without reviving an essentially monotheistic metaphysics? Kordela’s answer is that by orienting desire, pushing the subject beyond the possible and the given, framing the subject’s singular reality, and forever forestalling the subject’s satisfaction, fantasy is potentiality – which, recall, is also substance, being, and so on. Once more, Spinozian monism carves the path through an oppositional dialectic that will inevitably subordinate one half of the opposition – between substance and structure, or being and time, or fantasy and reality, or finally subject and object – to its other.
To bear this out, Kordela takes on the essence of dialectical thinking in the next chapter – not directly through Hegel or Hegelian teleology, but through Fredric Jameson’s postmodern reinvention of Hegel in Valences of the Dialectic. Whereas Jameson’s book attempts to collapse every difference between structuralism and dialectics, Kordela’s appreciative reading of Jameson concludes, well, differently. She does not reassert a stubborn opposition between dialectics and structuralism (that would be an exercise in self-sabotage), nor does she synthesise them or subsume one under its other (that would merely repeat the dialectical gesture); rather, she parses an essential distinction that reserves, for both modes of thinking, their separate and vital functions. It is not that structuralism is true and dialectics is false, or that structure is real and dialectics is illusion. What Jameson lacks, Kordela argues, and what her Deleuzian structuralism provides, is a third element that is neither true nor false and defies the stubborn myth that truth and falsity are mutually exclusive. Deleuze’s word for this third element is nonsense, because it circulates among and is yet indigestible within the logic of sense; it constitutes the very condition for the construction of sense, including especially the sense that may emerge from the opposition between the true and the false. With an instructive reading of Kafka’s parable ‘Prometheus,’ Kordela shows why this sense of nonsense is necessary to push us beyond dialectics, and beyond Hegel, without, however, imagining that we can thereby transcend or escape him.
These intervallic chapters on Deleuze and Jameson, which I read together as Kiarina’s second argumentative move, each complicate and apply the fundamental features of epistemontology as they have been presented in the first chapters on Marx and Sohn-Rethel. The crux of this theory, that is, the collapse of being, thought, and representation into the question of value, emphatically resurges in the remaining three chapters. Together comprising her third and final move, each of these chapters raises the question of the political efficacy of Kordela’s critique.
Indeed, the first of these more obviously political chapters is titled ‘Value.’ Here, Kordela demonstrates how, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, aesthetic judgment, formalisation, structuralism, and ‘performative self-referentiality,’ including modern art and the discovery or invention of the unconscious (126), all emerge as variations on the abstraction of value to which Marx has attuned us. Given what we learned in Chapter 2 about Sohn-Rethel’s subversive reading of Kant after Marx (recall that even Kant’s a priori absolute divide between the rational and the empirical is an a posteriori effect of exchange-value in the commodity form), we are prepared to see how all of this, the total history of modernity, recapitulates that same conception of value in exchange and exchange as value. It is, then, precisely where we imagine ourselves to be most free from external determination, in the realms of self-reference, that we are most subject to the forces of abstraction holding us in thrall to the quasi-religion of secular capitalist modernity.
The next chapter, on ‘Marx and Psychoanalysis,’ begins by anticipating an objection to this latest conclusion, at least as far as concerns psychoanalysis. We are tempted, as was the case with early efforts to reconcile Marx and Freud, to see the unconscious and neurosis as symptoms of capitalism, or at best to see in psychoanalysis another angle of escape from false consciousness on the way to revolution. The unconscious thus would designate a dimension of subjective interiority distinct from the objective exteriority which concerns a properly scientific and historical materialism. To evade this temptation and reinvent the relation between Marxism and psychoanalysis, Kordela uncovers ‘a fundamental epistemological affinity between Marx and Freud’ (153) that, unsurprisingly at this point, pivots upon ‘a central Spinozian aspect in Marx’s and Freuds approach’ (154). Both Marxism and Psychoanalysis defy and subvert the distinction between interiority and exteriority, subject and object, by operating at the ‘frontier’ between them (155). For Freud, this frontier is called the drive, which is neither pure instinct nor purified of instinct. For Marx, the frontier is the uncertain limit between the natural and the social.
Kordela further develops this affinity through an analogy between auto-eroticism in Freud and capitalism in Marx; in both cases, the living being is separated from (organic) need and installed instead in the properly human field of a desire destined to remain unsatisfied, structured by the perpetuation of dissatisfaction. This sets up her account of ‘the drive of capital’: its bottomless urge to accumulation, infinite exchange without terminal satisfaction, endless prolongation of itself (157). Enjoyment (not pleasure but what Lacan terms jouissance) under such conditions must be recuperated by the system of exchange or else it is an uncountable, therefore invaluable, waste. This effort of recuperation, including the many techniques and technologies for the erasure or disavowal of jouissance, is what Kordela calls biopower (162–63 and 186).
The final chapter, ‘The Other Side of Value,’ takes up this notion of enjoyment as an excess and ‘indestructible potential’ (172) that, while not outside of capitalism and commodity fetishism, is irrecuperable for the capitalist imperative that otherwise presses human potentiality into service for the accumulation of surplus-value. In this, useless enjoyment is biopower’s ‘underside or foundation’ (167), what it is after but can never quite confine, the limit of its urge to absolute totality. To chart this potential, Kordela discovers yet another homology, again mediated by Spinoza, between Marx’s account of labor as surplus-value and what Lacan, in his seminar on The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (to which the title of this chapter is an obvious nod), calls ‘surplus-enjoyment.’ As with Marx and Freud, there is a ‘profound, essential affinity’ here, which ‘owes to the fact that both jouissance and labor are potentiality’ (176; emphasis in original). Implicit in all this is Epistemontology’s core ethical appeal: what is needed today, with the combined insight of Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan, is a shift in perspective through which we may learn to ‘grasp the structure of our singular essence’ beyond the baubles and lures and ruses of ideology that would entrap us and our destinies within the zone of capitalist interest. Doing so, however, we must not retreat into the solipsism of ‘personal problems’ (192). Such a manoeuvre requires another kind of knowledge: a trans-individual, historically situated, theory of the singular subject that recognises and elaborates the difference, however minimal or immense, between the commodifications of our being and our bottomless potential, each of us, to be otherwise. It is in this potential where our very being lies.
All of the above ought to be read as an explication of the dynamic structure of Kordela’s insight, not an exhaustive or authoritative summary. This review is simply no substitute for your reading this dense and ambitious book yourself. But of the many other currents traversing it, one deserves special note. This is the problem of religion, that is, of what Kordela describes as the ‘profoundly religious character’ (11, 43) of contemporary capitalism, as well as the accelerating means of this religious character’s repression. For all its supposed freedom from archaic religious forms, capitalism is in fact a means to their revival and perpetuation. Now, the trouble with the repressed – this is the very heart of the Freudian discovery – is that it inevitably returns, in however distorted and apparently alien a form. This return of the repressed is what psychoanalysis calls the symptom. Unmasking the strange supernaturalism of value-as-exchange, the Marxist demystification of the commodity through precisely the anatomy of its fetishistic (immaterial, transcendental, otherworldly) qualities thus also amounts to a kind of psychoanalytic symptomatology of secularism as such. In other words, capitalist secular modernity is a fundamentally religious enterprise – not because of any codified system of beliefs in, say, the rationality of the marketplace, but because value under the reign of the commodity is the inheritance of the structure of belief in the majesty and eternity of a self-perpetuating God.
With commodity fetishism, we continue to live this inheritance without intention or awareness, even or especially where it feels most unbearable. The symptom, after all, is the specificity of our suffering, individually and world-historically, under the unbearable weight of a structure that can neither satisfy nor sustain us. It is the way in which we kneel, alone and together, each in our own contorted ways, before the alter of that secular God called capitalism whether we know it or not. With a structuralist, psychoanalytic monism that fatally undermines the opposition between temporality and eternity, immanence and transcendence, or thought and being, Kordela’s epistemontology might help us finally lose the faith.
Nathan Gorelick teaches at Barnard College
References
Balibar, Étienne 2017 [1993], The Philosophy of Marx, translated by Chris Turner, New York: Verso.
Jameson, Fredric 2009, Valences of the Dialectic, New York: Verso.
Lacan, Jacques 2007 [1991], The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, New York: Norton.
Marx, Karl 1976 [1867], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, translated by Ben Fawkes, New York: Penguin.
Žižek, Slavoj 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York: Verso.
