“Truth or true ideas have no superadded power by virtue of their veracity. There is no force proper to truth qua truth. To use Althusser’s interpretive vocabulary, truth is not a “gel.” True ideas do not “take hold of” or exert themselves upon subjectivities any more forcefully than do absurdities. How can this be? How can a rationalist philosopher [Spinoza] claim that truth is impotent? My suggestion is that ideas, no matter how clear and distinct, cannot take root in the mind without a fertile environment. True ideas, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by contrary ideas, need other compatible ideas to sustain them.”

“An expressive understanding of speech has been called into question on many fronts in the past century. To take but one well- known example from feminist theory, Judith Butler treats language, gestures, and corporeal self- stylization as “performative” rather than “expressive.” Speech is not something personal and individual but a “citation” of social practices, constrained by the norms and linguistic structures that it also produces. One can observe generally that Butler insists upon the social character of language, that speech acts are “scripted” in advance by conventions and power relations, and that language itself contains myriad rules to which speaking subjects invariably submit. This model calls our agency into question and views speech as a site of subjection (which may be more or less liberatory). Speech is not merely epiphenomenal with respect to given power relations, since subjects can cite norms subversively and disrupt social scripts, especially once they have become critically aware of them. Nonetheless, subversion is reiterative of the structures it subverts, and there is no room in such a poststructuralist account for something like radically “free expression” absent of all constraint.”

“Not only do we experience speech to be devoid of external constraint, we like to express ourselves. We enjoy making ourselves visible to others, revealing our inner lives. Yet despite being called a philosopher of expression, Spinoza rejects any model of free expression implying that a cause is whole and intact prior to its effect. With his claim that the body’s actions do not spring from the mind’s direction, Spinoza rejects a “technical” view of freedom, according to which intentions order and govern the practices of the body. The practical wisdom of renaturalization critiques the tendency to imagine either God or man on the model of the craftsman, as beings that inform the material world in accordance with their preexisting ideas. The craftsman model governs our views of speaking as much as our notions of making (transforming matter in accordance with the demands of spirit). We believe that we deliberate internally and proceed to externalize our mental process in the form of speech. Speech is treated as an expression, a publication of our interiority. On this artisanal model, ideas precede and govern actions, thoughts precede utterances, and minds command tongues. This is one of the several reasons speech is viewed as an essentially human action, the privileged mode by which we make manifest our rich internal lives.” 

“Speech is one of those activities that are very difficult to renaturalize. Few prejudices are more pervasive than the view that we are masters of our tongues, and yet, for Spinoza, there is nothing over which we have less power. Our clichés indicate that there are all too many loose- lipped people whose imprudent utterances sink ships. Yet it remains difficult to persuade ourselves that we are not exceptions to this rule. The conviction that speech is by its nature free and that we, by virtue of being speaking animals, are free is but a stubborn case of the prejudice according to which men are “firmly persuaded that the body now moves, now is at rest, solely from the mind’s command, and that it does a great many things which depend only on the mind’s will and its art of thinking” (E III p2s).”

[I]t is necessary to come to know both our nature’s power and its lack of power, so that we can determine what reason can do in moderating the affects, and what it cannot do.

"Althusser reminds us, however, that for Spinoza, there is no cogito, nothing to guarantee that a thinker will generate true and adequate ideas.  As I emphasize in chapter 1, the modal nature of human existence entails that we cannot exist in isolation from one another, or from any mode within our vicinity, such that it is never a matter of ego cogito but always and necessarily a matter of homo cogitat (E II ax2): I think if and only if we think. Moreover, the politics of renaturalization insists that homo cogitat only because natura cogitat. Nature, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, has its being in and as thought (I p15). While the human individual is affected most powerfully by those modes most similar to her, her power to think is very much determined, amplified, and constrained by those around her, whatever those proximate beings may be. The transindividual character of knowledge is neither accidental nor optional. It is an ontological fact, belonging to the nature of minds, along with the bodies of which they are ideas."

“Ideas and minds, for Spinoza, belong to any and all existent beings, be they rocks, cars, birds, or chewing gum. The critique of ideology, therefore, entails more than an examination of human regimes of signification. Certainly, Spinoza privileges human relations, and the Ethics comprises a manifesto for human freedom, even as he redefines both humanity and liberation. Yet a premise of the politics of renaturalization is that we cannot understand either our power or lack of power before affirming that each of us is but a tiny part of nature (E IV p4), a nature that is indifferent to human aspiration (I app). Importantly, our ideas are no less natural than our bodies. Being parts of nature, our ideas encounter resistance and assistance to their thriving from nonhuman as well as human sources. […]

“The “illusion of subjectivity” to which Althusser refers is not, as many have feared, the illusion of agency. We act both because and in spite of ideology. Capitalism would not function without the activity of a multitude of workers, but our activity remains overtly and covertly forced in important ways. The illusion of subjectivity is the fantasy that each of us is the exclusive origin of her mode of imagining, that ideas and desires emanate outward form isolable minds and wills. Montag points out how that, with Althusser, ideology ceases to be a question of beliefs and false consciousness. I will go as far as to claim that on a broader reading of Spinoza, ideology ceases to be a question of minds at all. Althusser shows persuasively that ideology must be explained by relations of force, the practical discipline and arrangement of bodies, and the unconscious, affective structure that mediates the appearance of our lived world. Thus, Montag emphasizes that ideology, for Althusser, is not a matter of subjective illusion but a matter of practice, ritual, and gesture.”