Barack & Baruch

Aside from the 'Kenya and Kansas' singularity of his own background, the genesis of the name 'Barack' is more interesting than that of most: depending on which sources you encounter, the nomination derives either from the Swahili or from the Arabic / Semitic root Baruch (both of which are terms which indicate 'blessedness', to which we return below). Even more interesting then this apparently cross-cultural lingogenesis however, is the extent to which the rhetoric employed by (Barack) Obama in our time and (Baruch) Spinoza in the seventeenth century form a kind of 'resonance machine' with regard to the politics of affect. After the win in Iowa, the former gave a rousing victory speech, in which he discussed the difference between a mode of governance which operates through the dissemination of fear, versus one which relies instead upon the 'audacity of hope'. As he put it (to the undoubtedly goosebumped epidermi of millions of Americans, who had become accustomed to a very different affective governance in the wake of 9/11);

"we are choosing hope over fear. We're choosing unity over division, and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America...for many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it....hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope, hope is what led me here today. With a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America".

According to the other 'Barack', i.e., Spinoza, although it can never be divorced from fear (the fear of non-attainment), hope is an inherently democratizing affect since it derives ultimately from the desire for joy - which, because it is not steeped in the incapacitating emotions of sadness and reaction, increases the power of the multitude to be acted upon by a multiplicity of percepts and affects (which would otherwise just pass them by), and, as a result of this increased capacity for feeling, to therefore act in a manner of equal dynamism. As he put it in Scholium II:13 of the Ethics, "in proportion as a body is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once, or being acted on in many ways at once, so its mind is more capable than others of doing many things at once". Deleuze's rejoinder in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy completes this thought, noting that (as Spinoza says elsewhere also), "in sadness...our power is immobilized and can no longer do anything but react. In joy, on the contrary, our power expands...[and therefore] it can be said that joy augments our power of acting and sadness diminishes it" (101).


For this reason, while I agree with those 'uncompromising' radicals (i.e., socialists, anarchists, greens, etc.) who hold that we should be under no illusions as to the capacity of a head of state, particularly within the frames of a liberal 'democratic' republic, to enact the kinds of fundamental transformations that are really needed in our time, there is in fact a place at which I depart from their company. If we live today in what Agamben has called (with a nod to Debord) a 'post-democratic spectacular society' - that is to say, a society in which governance is less about the sharing of decisions than the large-scale management of sensation (which has everything to do, as we learned above, with our collective capacity to act), then perhaps the manner in which we represent 'ourselves to ourselves' within the limited range of possibilities the Spectacle offers us does actually matter. In particular, especially within such a racially-stratified society as the United States, one might say that the 'face' of a nation, determines to a large extent what the multitude of which it is comprised (which is demonstrably more diverse here than amongst any other national population in the world) is capable of being affected by, and therefore capable of acting upon politically.


Whether one considers this question within the current framework, or with respect to a fundamental rupture with it, what it indicates is essentially the same; that by no means is it 'less radical' to vote for Obama just because someone like Kucinich, whose national healthcare plan is far more socialist, i.e. not market-based, is also running (which might be argued by those who believe that America is a 'democracy'). And neither is it a 'compromise' of one's possibly even 'more radical' politics to vote for him, simply because more fundamental transformations are what are 'really' needed - indeed, there is no reason whatsoever to conceive of the variety of possible political moves one might make through the illogic of a zero-sum game. Rather, what voting for Obama actually indicates is precisely a radical understanding of both the genesis through which electability and executability emerges within a neoliberal capitalist society, as well as the conditions of possibility that must be arrived at culturally for the more fundamental transformations we might like to see occur to actually occur.


Perhaps then, just as Baruch was forced to become a Marrano (i.e., a Jew who pretended to be a Catholic so as to avoid persecution) in his childhood, before, upon reaching maturity, physically moving to other spaces so as to open up other possibilities for self-making, the United States might be said in our time to itself be in such a status collectively, forced to represent 'itself to itself' within the molarities of race (i.e., under the thrall of whiteness), while on the molecular level an entirely other potentiality for collective self-understanding might be lying in wait. If that were the case, the distinction between a purely 'radical' politics and that of a 'liberal' politics would be rendered indistinguishable, so that those forces (which are necessarily comprised of multiply conflicting and converging persuasions) which have always recognized that 'change is the only constant' might then become capable of assembling a political resonance machine upon the plane of immanence - which is to say, within the realm of everyday life, which is necessarily where everything always unfolds anyways.


It is here then, that we might return to the etymology of 'Barack' and 'Baruch', which as we said, derive from the concept of 'blessedness' - which, interestingly enough, is precisely what Spinoza closes the final pages of the Ethics by defining: in his terms, blessedness is a state in which one overcomes the bondage to the 'evil affects' of fear and sadness, allowing hope and, more specifically, joy, to increase one's capacity to be affected, and thereby, ultimately, to act upon the world as such. Freedom is then redefined not merely as the satisfying of lusts as such, many of which are of course, inculcated in subjects as 'useful pleasures', (i.e., useful to power and authority) but rather as becoming the master of one's own affects, so as not to be manipulated by them. Of course, when applied to the multitude as such, the achievement of blessedness is the radicalization of democracy itself; not by way of the 'absolute dominion' of the mind over the evil affects of fear and sadness, as Descartes would have it, but rather by way of 'the order by which the mind can order the affects and connect them to one another' (II: 293), so that the capacitating passions of joy come to prevail over the incapacitating passions of sadness:

"Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we enjoy it because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, because we enjoy it, we are able to restrain them. Blessedness consists in love of God, a love which arises from the third kind of knowledge. So this love must be related to the mind insofar as it acts. Therefore, it is virtue itself. This was the first point. Next, the more the mind enjoys this divine love, or blessedness, the more it understands, that is, the greater the power it has over the affects, and the less it is acted on by evil affects. So because the mind enjoys this divine love or blessedness, it has the power of restraining lusts. And because human power to restrain the affects consists only in the intellect, no one enjoys blessedness because he has restrained the affects. Instead, the power to restrain lusts arises arises from blessedness itself...if the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still it can be found. And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare" (Ethics P42).