Books by Dan Taylor
Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming Dec. 2020 or early 2021), 2020
Reconceives human freedom in Spinoza as intrinsically social and politically committed
Combining... more Reconceives human freedom in Spinoza as intrinsically social and politically committed
Combining careful historical and textual analysis with comparisons across past and present political theory, this book re-establishes Spinoza as a collectivist philosopher.
Taking as its starting point the formative role of fear in Spinoza’s thought, Dan Taylor argues that Spinoza’s vision of human freedom and power is realised socially and collectively. He offers a new critical study of the collectivist Spinoza, where we can become freer through desire, friendship, the imagination and transforming the social institutions that structure a given community. A freedom for one and all, attuned to the vicissitudes of human life and the capabilities of each one of us to live up to the demands and constraints of our limited autonomy.
This book develops and enriches the continental tradition of Spinozism, drawing on a range of untranslated materials and bringing a fresh perspective to key debates. It repositions Spinoza as the central thinker of desire and freedom and demonstrates how the conflicts within his work inform contemporary theoretical discussions around democracy, the multitude, populism and power.
London: Repeater Books, 2016
Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era presents a conceptual framework for thinking ... more Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era presents a conceptual framework for thinking neoliberalism and financial capitalism as an economic politic that negates the time, space, mental health, political agency and even, via the example of debt, the future itself of young workers. This is negative capitalism, pursued here in an innovative theoretical and evidence-based analysis of neoliberal ideology; the role of debt in financial capitalism; anxiety and depression in the UK and US; CCTV, surveillance and the problem of security in contemporary culture; cynicism and ruinporn; London as decadent paper-bin of former empire; before finally calling for a politics that embraces cunning, mischief and violently real forms of opposition, over symbolic and altruistic concerns of a mistakenly-moralised opposition. Foucault, Ballard, Kafka and de Sade are clashed with The X-Factor, the artwork of Laura Oldfield Ford and The Fall in a broad-ranging theoretical assessment of contemporary power.
Journal Articles/Chapters by Dan Taylor
Angelaki, 2020
This article explores the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille through a close rea... more This article explores the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille through a close reading of their thought on death and dying. An intellectual and personal friendship, both conceived of death as an "impossible" space and "limit-experience" that not only constituted human subjectivity, but could also puncture it, leading to joy through deindividuation. This could only occur indirectly-for Bataille, via the sacrifice, eroticism, drunkenness or laughter-and for Blanchot, via literature. This line of thinking leads to varying formulations of sovereignty at odds with the prosaic world of use-value. Proceeding first through their friendship, this paper then explores this thinking death through the contexts of French Hegelianism, Kojève and Heidegger. While holding much similar, the paper argues that Bataille's transgressive, embodied and deindividuating visions of death present a form of community that was overlooked by Blanchot subsequently, with consequences for theories of community and collective power today.
History of European Ideas, 2019
In his final, incomplete Tractatus Politicus (1677), Spinoza’s account of human power and freedom... more In his final, incomplete Tractatus Politicus (1677), Spinoza’s account of human power and freedom shifts towards a new, teleological interest in the ‘highest good’ of the state in realising the freedom of its subjects. This development reflects, in part, the growing influence of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Dutch republicanism, and the Dutch post-Rampjaar context after 1672, with significant implications for his view of political power and freedom. It also reflects an expansion of his account of natural right to include independence of mind, a model of autonomy that in turn shapes the infamous sui juris exclusions of his unfinished account of democracy. This article focuses specifically on the Tractatus Politicus, a hitherto under-addressed work in Spinoza’s corpus and one too often considered indistinct from his earlier Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). It argues for a reconsideration of its importance to early modern political thought, particularly regarding the role of the state in realising the freedom and harmony of its subjects through reasonable laws.
Pli, 2019
This paper emerges out of an increased attention to the affects in contemporary political thought... more This paper emerges out of an increased attention to the affects in contemporary political thought. Working with Spinoza, a philosopher of fundamental importance to this affective turn (e.g. via Deleuze, Negri, Massumi, Mark Fisher and others), it explores his relatively underassessed political writings on the affects to consider the affective nature of rebellion, particularly via the affect of indignation, and whether Spinoza’s politics allows for a coherent theory of rebellion. Faced with some initial textual problems, the paper instead explores a small number of French Marxist readings of Spinoza’s affects of resistance (Matheron, Bove) to assess the politically constitutive and imitative role of indignation. The paper finds limits with this position, as well as work that presents revolution as a distant ‘horizon’ (Dean, Bosteels, Jameson), or as a matter of merely ethical, vitalistic persistence in an unjust world (Caygill, Critchley). It instead proposes emulation as offering a more lasting, collectively empowering affect of resistance. The paper also develops Mark Fisher’s late, unpublished work on ‘acid communism’ and consciousness-raising to explore the interrelation between the political affects and collective mobilisation, whose fundamental connection has been vaguely understood in recent work. It concludes with an argument for mutual care, solidarity and what Fisher called ‘fellowship’ as decisive in establishing durable and progressive collectives.
in Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.), Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 19... more in Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.), Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956. Vol. II, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
American Realism in a Time of Terror and Crisis: New Essays on the Wire. Ed. Arin Keeble and Ivan Stacy. McFarland, 2015.
Sometimes the gods are uncooperative" Major Howard 'Bunny' Colvin (3.03) In Season Three of the a... more Sometimes the gods are uncooperative" Major Howard 'Bunny' Colvin (3.03) In Season Three of the acclaimed HBO crime drama The Wire, Major Howard 'Bunny' Colvin (Robert Wisdom) experiments with a desperate solution to West Baltimore's irrepressible drugrelated crime: drug legalization in three abandoned and derelict neighborhoods. Dealers and users
Sophie Fuggle and Tom Henri (eds.) Return to the Streets. London: Pavement, 2015.
The Historical Journal 58.3, pp. 877-900
This article analyses the emergence of politically-motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Brita... more This article analyses the emergence of politically-motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article presents a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women’s liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. Through the development, actions, communications, surrounding media discourses, police investigation and criminal trials of ten individuals for involvement in the Angry Brigade as a brief-lived axis of these overlapping points, it relocates their neglected historical significance among the wider political militancy of the late 1960s to early 1970s, and accounts for their lack of popular support and obscurity since.
Other Publications by Dan Taylor
Modern Jewish Studies, 2019
New Statesman, February 2017
Fair Observer, October 2016
This is the Introduction to A brief history of sacrifice in digitised economies: thirteen asserti... more This is the Introduction to A brief history of sacrifice in digitised economies: thirteen assertions by J.D. Taylor, published by Fold Press in 2016.
Review 31, Oct 2013
'Propaganda that looks like propaganda is third rate propaganda': so said Lord Northcliffe, Direc... more 'Propaganda that looks like propaganda is third rate propaganda': so said Lord Northcliffe, Director for Propaganda for the British Ministry of Information in 1918. Northcliffe possessed a unique monopoly on news production in the early 20th century, owning both the Daily Mail and The Times, and his work in producing effective anti-German material during the first World War has been credited as the first modern instance of effective mass propaganda. Whilst today we have our Rupert Murdochs and Richard Desmonds, and the increasingly-centralised ownership of media production to a few multinational giants, analysis of propaganda and its means of propagation still remains somehow lacking. An era of popular scepticism and cynicism about the integrity of politicians, police and bankers has yet to be coupled to a wider rejection of media and information production. Why is this, and what can be done?
Roar Magazine, Mar 2014
In today’s turbo-charged and austerity-ravaged economy, anxiety and insecurity have become the ne... more In today’s turbo-charged and austerity-ravaged economy, anxiety and insecurity have become the new normal. How did this happen — and how do we fight back?
Spinoza in Vlaanderen, Jun 21, 2013
where he is currently exploring the problem of collective desire in contemporary political theory... more where he is currently exploring the problem of collective desire in contemporary political theory analysed in the encounter of Spinoza and Deleuze. His research focuses especially on Spinoza's democratic political theory, and how late 20th century Marxist thinkers have deployed Spinoza's politics to different ends. The overarching goal of his research is to produce a
AntiCapitalist Initiative, May 2013
The problem with the recent, and on the whole excellent, “#Accelerate. Manifesto for an Accelerat... more The problem with the recent, and on the whole excellent, “#Accelerate. Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” (hereafter Accelerationist Manifesto) is that it startlingly universalises and globalises the experience of a minority of western metropolitan academics. This is also true of the preoccupation with cybernetics and posthumanism in the universities, which makes little sense in the dust-trails of central Russia or southern Africa, or the crude scramble for minerals and resources which determines most of the activity of the world’s leading nation-states and the commercial interests they seek to advance. The globalisation of financial capital operates, as it always has done, physical and brutal way, marked in the bodies and landscapes of people and the earth. In this brief critique I want to sketch out some problematic presumptions of the manifesto, and suggest some alternative strategies for new social and political organisations who seek to resist and overcome neoliberal capitalism.
Steve Hanson (ed.), Beginning again in the middle: Nowt Press Anthology 01. , Mar 27, 2013
Uploads
Books by Dan Taylor
Combining careful historical and textual analysis with comparisons across past and present political theory, this book re-establishes Spinoza as a collectivist philosopher.
Taking as its starting point the formative role of fear in Spinoza’s thought, Dan Taylor argues that Spinoza’s vision of human freedom and power is realised socially and collectively. He offers a new critical study of the collectivist Spinoza, where we can become freer through desire, friendship, the imagination and transforming the social institutions that structure a given community. A freedom for one and all, attuned to the vicissitudes of human life and the capabilities of each one of us to live up to the demands and constraints of our limited autonomy.
This book develops and enriches the continental tradition of Spinozism, drawing on a range of untranslated materials and bringing a fresh perspective to key debates. It repositions Spinoza as the central thinker of desire and freedom and demonstrates how the conflicts within his work inform contemporary theoretical discussions around democracy, the multitude, populism and power.
Journal Articles/Chapters by Dan Taylor
Other Publications by Dan Taylor
Combining careful historical and textual analysis with comparisons across past and present political theory, this book re-establishes Spinoza as a collectivist philosopher.
Taking as its starting point the formative role of fear in Spinoza’s thought, Dan Taylor argues that Spinoza’s vision of human freedom and power is realised socially and collectively. He offers a new critical study of the collectivist Spinoza, where we can become freer through desire, friendship, the imagination and transforming the social institutions that structure a given community. A freedom for one and all, attuned to the vicissitudes of human life and the capabilities of each one of us to live up to the demands and constraints of our limited autonomy.
This book develops and enriches the continental tradition of Spinozism, drawing on a range of untranslated materials and bringing a fresh perspective to key debates. It repositions Spinoza as the central thinker of desire and freedom and demonstrates how the conflicts within his work inform contemporary theoretical discussions around democracy, the multitude, populism and power.
- This paper is a précis of points given greater expansion in my forthcoming book "Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom"
This paper explores the extent to which hope or fear can play a positive role in Spinoza’s ethics and politics. An initial question is whether there is a common order of hope and fear among his ethical and political works. In the Ethics, hope and fear are presented as complementary: ‘there is no neither hope without fear, nor fear without hope’ (E3ad13exp). Both are passive, unreliable: hope is ‘an inconstant joy [and fear, sadness], arising from the image of a thing future or past, of whose outcome we are in doubt’ (E3p18s2). Given its inconstancy, hope alone cannot serve human flourishing. A similar account appears in the TTP’s Preface, for whom beliefs in ‘fortune’ emerge out of our inability to live entirely according to reason, through which, in response to adversity, we find refuge in superstitions characterised by fear and hope.
Hope and fear are what lead men to fight for their servitude as if for salvation. They also conduce to security. While laws based on fear are experienced as burdensome, and disobeyed when the authority appears weak or absent (TTP 5.22), laws involving the ‘hope of some good they [the subjects] desire very much’ are most effective, for each ‘will do his duty eagerly’ (5.24). Recently, Justin Steinberg highlights this power of ‘hope-willingness’ and the common people’s ‘devotion’ to the reasonable state. Likewise, the TP identifies the formation of collectives in the ‘common affect’ of hope, fear or the desire for vengeance (1.6). Thus, some forms of hope (and fear) serve an instrumental social good, while ‘self-contentment’ is ‘the highest thing we can hope for’ (E4p52s). Through a discussion of Spinoza’s account of exemplars, and Ethics 5’s account of the reordering of affects and ideas, the paper explores the limited but powerful good of reasonable hopes and imaginings that lead to activity and flourishing.
- The paper gives a kind of précis of points I expand in greater length in my book Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom. Please email me to discuss more if interested.
While embodiment and the affects have become concerns in recent critical theory, and the vitalist heritage of ‘living work’ against ‘dead capital’ echoes in Bifo Berardi’s ‘thanato-politics’, Spinoza’s war-cry, re-constituting subjectivity through the body, has been left hanging. Using Guéry and Deleule as interlocutors, this paper will explore this through the problem of bodies breaking down, wearing out or self-destructing – instances of the productive body in crisis. It explores the extent to which off-work sickness, stress, and anxiety disorders might be considered political (and not just medical, individualised) phenomena. But it also challenges their privileging of a Western, middle class ‘psychology’ and productive capitalism as inattentive to the disciplining of economically marginalised bodies, what Agamben calls ‘bare life’, i.e. the disabled, unemployed, subsistence farmers, black market labourers, and the stateless.
The first part focuses on the Preface to the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP), where Spinoza issues a warning that, in the wrong conditions, the common people can be persuaded to support and even assist tyrants who ultimately keep them enslaved.
‘It may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and utterly essential to it, to keep men deceived, and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance’.
Though influenced by classic critiques of superstition by Quintus Curtius and Lucretius, Spinoza intended to startle the liberal, republican supporters of their state’s government under De Witt, whose very survival now depended on wresting political influence away from the organised Calvinists allied with the monarchical Orangist party.
In presenting this problem, Spinoza reopened a question in political theory introduced a century earlier, in an anti-tyrannical tract proliferated by liberal French Huguenots against the Roman Catholic church, la Boétie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”. Though a tradition of tyrannicidal justification existed since Cicero’s De republica, la Boétie’s originality was in arguing that a people actively acquiesces and consents to its own subjection in its very behaviour; therefore withdrawing consent through mass civil disobedience is sufficient to overthrow tyranny. In asking why men fight for their servitude as if it were their freedom, Spinoza reanimates a disquieting problem of slavery, desire and consent.
There are several conflicting ideas at work when Spinoza raises this problem of voluntary servitude, one that has more recently energised new readings of Spinoza’s politics. For Deleuze and Guattari, voluntary servitude is ‘the fundamental problem of political philosophy’, and one that ‘Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered’, namely, why subjugated members of a society will not merely assent to but actively will tyrannical rule. Yet Spinoza’s discussion is more sophisticated than la Boétie’s claim of self-willed enslavement and mass assent. Domination occurs not merely through submission, but through the mobilisation of popular support, of what Lordon has recently called a process of ‘enlistment’. Spinoza initially presents this with a comparison to the ‘pomp and ceremony’ of the Ottoman Turks, but the TTP’s analysis deals with the devices of prophetic revelation and religious customs to inculcate obedience at the level of the affects and the imagination, providing lasting assessments of theocratic and democratic power in terms of the collective investment of one’s natural right into the institutions of a state.
Althusser hailed Spinoza’s discovery of the ‘materiality’ of ideology in the TTP’s analysis of the Hebrew people, through a shared imaginary world of historical tradition, language, and rituals. Following his Spinozan detour, Balibar and Montag have both claimed Spinoza as a theorist of voluntary servitude, where the Hebrew people were deceived into an imaginary freedom, a kind of ‘somnambulism’ as Montag calls it, where rational self-interest is deceived by the bells and whistles of sad priests and tyrants. Yet in ‘enlisting’ Spinoza into contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist critiques of capitalist ideology, these accounts obscure Spinoza’s more complex and ambivalent position on humanity’s universal affective servitude, one that cannot ever be ‘freed’ from its natural, affective alienation.
Spinoza’s position concerning social relationships was not to consider human nature ‘a dominion within a dominion’, possessing its own characteristic weaknesses, but something to be understood as naturally determined, and so capable of being subject to rational enquiry. Yet Spinoza’s TTP never beckons the return of the towering omniscience of Plato’s philosopher-guardians, neither falling back on a teleological esteem for Aristotle’s politikon zoon nor Cicero’s understanding of all political societies striving towards virtue. The Renaissance and Early Modern rediscovery of classic political theory was accompanied by a series of political crises initiated by the Protestant Reformation and the challenge of mercantile capitalism to feudal landowners. The new political theory that Spinoza drew upon, that of Machiavelli, Bodin, Grotius, the De la Courts, and Hobbes, prioritised not the conditions of justice or virtue, but simply civil security. These works were suffused with a marked pessimism about the capability of the common people to act in the overall interest of their state, its self-preservation. Each sought to develop new models of political obedience using a new lexicon of fortune, divine law and social pacts, and the TTP’s extraordinary gambit is to develop arguments for democratic, liberal republicanism using biblical scripture.
Spinoza takes the affective inconstancy of human nature itself as a property and problem for the polis. One can trace multiple instances of an invective against the capacity of the vulgus, consistent with the political danger posed by agrarian labourers and urban artisans protesting against De Witt’s embattled government. Yet this lack of capacity is indeed natural, and therefore subject to ‘natural prejudices’ that are then exploited by monarchical forces using superstition to reinforce their own power. Spinoza seeks to divest religion of all its sources of superstition, using the ‘natural light of reason’ to analyse Scripture and extrapolate universal principles of justice, charity and obedience. The TTP therefore develops a liberal argument for the freedom to think, and to speak, being not only compatible with a state’s security, but essential to its civil flourishing. Underlying this is the sophisticated and original argument that a state is strengthened by a multilateral investment of interest by its members, the subject of the conclusion.
The paper then reflects on the proximity and distance of left-wing political violence from this period. Angry Brigade members have publicly expressed regret over the bombings and drawn attention instead to their trial, but these frames of ‘memory’ and ‘success’ still remain undefined. Drawing on a Spinozan concept of ‘collective desire’ and Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”, it theorises the law-making and law-destroying aspects of the Angry Brigade’s campaign and Stoke Newington Eight trial within its wider political context. Against popular memories of ’68 as a watershed of utopian dreaming, this paper restores attention to a problematic emergence of revolutionary violence in an internationalist, future-facing milieu of student activism and countercultural experimentation.
* Essay submitted for the conference won the British Society for the History of Philosophy Essay Prize for graduate students.
Whilst most obviously a pessimistic critique of mass consumerism, Ballard's careful attention to Brooklands' suburbia and the Metro-Centre makes a landmark discovery of working-class culture, desire, and urban spaces, pertinent in an era of increased suburbanisation of working-class and 'underclass' people into outer lower-rent districts. Part of the novel's ambivalence appears in its blurring of two perspectives: the consumer millenarianism of the suburbs' unfulfilled dreams of violence, and an imprecise handling of working-class culture that waivers from contempt of the casual violence of sport, and racism, to sympathy over the failure of consumerism to provide for real desires.
Kingdom Come is neither merely a critique of consumer capitalism nor a Swiftian psychosafari through bland suburbia, but a sincerely political exploration of collective desire and the urban spaces that attempt to reflect it, and the breakdown on a collective scale when they do not. Though Ballard wrote presciently of the intensification of new internal/domestic spaces, fruitfully comparable to the growth of online communities and entertainment (“The Intensive Care Unit”), his continued attention to the psychosocial power of physical locations remains significant to grasping the 'place-ness' of these sites in contemporary culture, and their use by similar terrorist attacks since.
Mark Fisher (Zero Books)
Tariq Goddard (Zero Books)
Alex Niven (Zero Books)
Rhian Jones (Zero Books)
Dan Taylor (Zero Books)
Through identifying and exploring this aporia, this paper follows a well-trodden Marxist 'detour' through the politics of Spinoza, locating in the failure by Althusser, Matheron, Deleuze, Negri and Balibar to take Spinoza's constitutional politics on its own terms has contributed to critical theory's failure after 1968 to contribute to mobilising a common, popular working-class movement. These thinkers in the Marxist 'Spinozan Turn' from 1965 onwards saw in Spinoza's metaphysics a materialist predecessor to Marx. Spinoza's political theory has been confused as a politics of the multitude, an error which stems from mis-translations of his original Latin into French and English, as well as a more fundamental reading-over of his ambivalence regarding the common people and his arguments for optimum political institutions, rather than optimum political subjects. Spinoza's definitions of freedom and desire in terms of activity and power, and his final, unfinished programme of a rational, unanimous constitutional state where all its constituent elements act as if one mind and body, all pose untimely questions. Without a modern political theory of the state, optimum institutions, constitutional rights and collective desire, these 'post-political' theorists may be guilty of seeing today's dispersed, depressed and over-worked populations 'not as they are, but as they would like them to be'."
This can be understood with reference to what Spinoza calls our 'human bondage' to the passions, or passive emotions, outlined in Part IV of the Ethics. Here the individual and their passions are located within a power-network of lesser and greater forces, and where security can only be established through knowledge of the causes of our emotions and actions, and through pursuing what is naturally to our own advantage, that is, our self-mastery – reason, joy, self-discipline, and living harmoniously with others – which in turn increases our freedom and power. Hence though Spinoza most often describes the multitude in pessimistic terms, e.g. 'fickle and inconstant' (EIVp58s), through the Ethics, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and final Tractatus Politicus he seeks their collective improvement using the same method as for the individual. The fickle inconstancy of persuasive dogmas, vanity or greed that frequently besets his multitude can be understood like the passive emotions that assail the individual (outlined from EIVp40-p61), alleviated only through striving towards reason and self-knowledge. This accords with Spinoza's monistic definition of substance, modes and attributes, wherein a living entity is just a finite mode of substance, acting equivalently in individual or collectively-aggregated terms.
Hence Spinoza uses collective political structures to alleviate the superstition and ignorance of the multitude. The individual's striving to reason is akin to the collective's striving to a secular democratic republic (see TTPxvi, and Letter 50). This first requires a social contract in TTP, later dispensed in the TP in favour of a popular constitution of power and sovereignty based on collective desire, acting as 'one mind' and a 'citizen-body' in democracies. Finally, this paper argues that the 'Spinozan Turn' reflects a need to provide a new materialist democratic horizon for socialism, but falters into the passions of 'indignation' and 'discord' if it cannot first theorise the role of the democratic state – that is, reason on a collective scale, and the best vehicle for collective desire – and the importance of striving, self-knowledge and self-mastery in constituting collective desire, rather than its inverse.
Amsterdam is also birth-place of Spinoza, 17th century philosopher and political theorist. Spinoza believed that what preceded civil society was a universal 'state of nature', without any moral laws, justice or rights. Like Spinoza, Colvin assumes that drug-users, like all living beings, are dominated by their addictive 'passions' to inevitably seek their own gain. Rather than vainly attempt to prevent this, the lesser of two evils is chosen, concealing their usage within the street-drinker's geographical 'paper bag'. Whilst The Wire depicts the failure of America's 'War on Drugs', total legalisation without attending to its social causes also results in disaster. As Spinoza would explain, the 'social contract' can only manage, without improving, the collective lot of humanity. Only through understanding the social causes of our actions, and attempting to re-direct them by education, toleration and building peaceful communities, can societies move beyond hiding problems to overcoming them. Like Colvin's Hamsterdam, this first requires facing our problems in the first place, however politically unpalatable.""
Contemporary political theorists of power, particularly those within Post-Marxism, have increasingly turned to Spinoza to expound new, optimistic and revolutionary theorisations of constituent power and desire as defining political subjectivities (Negri, Balibar, Deleuze, and less explicitly Badiou). The post-Althusserian 'Spinozan Turn' reflects a crisis of Marxism and Anarchism to provide a new materialist democratic horizon for socialism, yet such a turn falters into 'indignation' and 'discord' if it cannot first theorise the role of the democratic state in constituting and managing mass desire, rather than its inverse. This paper uses Spinoza's conception of the state to introduce an aporia for critical theory: the problem of shaping mass desire, and its relation to the state, either as counter-power or constituent power. This is pertinent in an era of destabilising politico-economic systems, ecological collapse, rising religious fundamentalisms, and a deterritorialised global political dissent which has yet to mount a sustained challenge to neoliberalism.