INTRODUCTIONaffect.... This imitation of the affects... is nothing but the desire for a thing which is
generated in us from the fact that we imagine others like us to have the same desire’’
(EthicsIII, Prop. 27 and Scholium).
According to this conception of a comparative ‘‘differential genesis of affects,’’ these
bodies mirror each othernecessarilyorconstitutively, hence their necessary mutual depen-
dency, even sociality. But, just as inevitably, they do soto their own detriment, hence their
strife, antisociality, and perpetual relapse into the state from which they had only just
emerged, with great difficulty—and by the same mechanism—the state of nature, that is
to say, of the war of all against all.^69 Spinoza’s view, we are reminded by several commen-
tators, finds its radical modernity in precisely this relentless exposure of the composition
and decomposition of bodies in the body politic, of subjects and citizens, which breaks
with the traditional Aristotelian-Thomist assumption of an intrinsic possibility of sponta-
neous sociability that enables humans to take leave of nature and to turn—by way of a
pact—to a civil state.
If much of modern philosophy consists in demolishing the foundations of natural
theology, Spinoza adds an extra twist by deconstructing thenatural political theologyupon
which both traditional-hierarchical and modern-contractual theories of natural right
(such as Hobbes’s) remained built. The risk of relapsing into the state of nature—widely
acknowledged by the theoreticians of the social contract—does not depend, in this view,
on specific individuals who are, as it were, ‘‘rotten apples.’’ For Spinoza, on the contrary,
entry into a pact (and a peace) isfrom the outsetcompromised, tainted, indeed, poisoned,
because it is necessarily feigned, that is to say, an act not so much of promise as of
pretense. As Pierre-Franc ̧ois Moreau writes, for Spinoza:
It matters little whether people are good or bad; by the simple game of their everyday
life, by the functioning of their bodies and of the passions of the soul that are their
corollary, they become enemies of the state. Civil war and the destruction of the state
are not arisk, butthe necessary horizonof the appearance of society.... Spinoza is
the only one [of the seventeenth-century theoreticians] who explains why it isneces-
sarythat it not function. He therefore completely inverts the theoretical landscape of
the theoreticians of the pact. For him, the question is not what are the hindrances to
sociability laid down by the pact, but to push anti-Aristotelianism to the point of
saying that not only is there no originary sociability but, moreover, there is no derived
sociability, either. The antipolitical character of individuals exists in their nature be-
fore the pact and persists in their nature after the pact: the reasons that explain why
there was a state of nature remain the same once civil society is instituted.... The
Spinozistic problem, properly speaking, will consist in asking how to set backfires in
the passions [contre-feux passionels] to the apocalypse that perpetually menaces the
state. If the ruin of the state is not the exception but the norm, how does it come to
be that there are states that subsist?^70PAGE 2121.................16224$ INTR 10-13-06 12:33:22 PS