[...]... thought of in Spinoza as pantheism,” which, as Lacan remarks, “is simply the reduction of the field of God to the universality of the signifier” (1981, 275) Œiºek constructs his polemic against Spinoza basically by taking as his point of departure this statement and strangely seeing in Lacan s affirmation of “this Spinozist ‘universality of the signifier’ ” a general critical distance on the part of Lacan. .. is the standard both of itself and of the false Lacan s work is another such obvious example that comes to mind And my criticism of “Neo-Spinozists” is identical with my criticism of Badiou’s and Œiºek’s readings of Spinoza, insofar as both rely on this “Neo-Spinozist” reading of Spinoza I do not doubt that the reading I propose as the proper reading of Spinoza is a demanding 12 Surplus task, one requiring... contrast, Spinoza himself (i.e., his enunciation and intention) remained blind to the truth of his symptom and thus persisted on the distinction between moral (fictional) and scientific (true) causes As an example of this distinction, Spinoza refers to the primal fall and Adam’s understanding of God’s commandment: “You may freely 8 Surplus eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of. .. of value only insofar as one understands, against Spinoza s intentions, the function of fiction in history (discourse) following from the Spinozian conception of truth as the standard of both itself and fiction On the other hand, however, the value of Spinoza s “universality of the divine attributes”—the “universality of the signifier” without a Master-Signifier grounding it—lies in remaining for Lacan. .. the combination of Marx and Spinoza would not in itself estrange them, many would tend to see the continuation of the Spinozian-Marxian line of thought not in any theory supportive of psychoanalysis, let alone psychoanalysis itself Rather, the more intuitive development of the syndesmosis of Spinoza and Marx would for many be found in any of the twentieth-century Marxist representatives of so-called “Neo-Spinozism,”... from Spinoza According to Œiºek, Lacan would object to Spinoza that he accomplished “a leveling of the signifying chain” that “gets rid of the gap that separates S2, the chain of knowledge, from S1, the signifier of injunction, of prohibition, of NO!,” so that “the Spinozist substance designates universal knowledge as having no need for support in a Master-Signifier” (Œiºek 1993, 216– 17) And Spinoza s... echoing Lacan s words: “There is no metalanguage” insofar as the speaking subject is always already spoken, i.e., insofar as he cannot master the effects of what he is saying: he always says more than he “intended to say,” and this surplus of what is effectively said over the intended meaning puts into words the repressed content—in it, “the repressed returns.” What are symptoms qua “returns of the repressed”... live in an age of a new Spinozism: the ideology of late capitalism is, at least in some of its fundamental features, ‘Spinozist’ ” (1993, 218) Though I would be justifiably classified under the proponents of psychoanalysis, this book is not a critique of “Neo-Spinozism”— or, more accurately, it is this but only insofar as it critiques the assumption shared by both sides of the debate that Spinoza and... transformation of the present Empire into the ideal state in which the multitude’s power will have found its true expression There is no reference to any further transformation required for their ideal state of communism In short, there is no distinction in Hardt and Negri’s “Neo-Spinozist” monism between the full realization of the force of capital and the full realization of the multitude’s power Of course,... falls short of the postulate of its prefix and applies to everything except science Indeed, for Lacan the universality of the signifier (S2) is generally possible only under an exception (S1), the injunction of “the moral law.” It is therefore reasonable to say that Lacan relies, in Œiºek’s words, on the Kantian “primacy of practical over theoretical reason,” particularly as Lacan explicitly states in . Shepherdson, editor $urplus Spinoza, Lacan A. KIARINA KORDELA STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2007 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed. understanding of God’s commandment: “You may freely 8 Surplus eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall. one of its members. Lacan added, or rather gave name to what the above theories tacitly entailed: enjoyment and the gaze. The appearance of the name of Lacan as the continuation of a line of thought