Having posed the problem of evil in this way allows us to return to Spinoza's conception, which served us as the model for a politics of love. We should start with this typically Spinozian geometrical sequence: at the level of sensations he identifies a striving (conatus) o f and for life; this striving is built upon and directed in desire (cupiditas), which functions through the affects: and desire in turn is strengthened and affirmed i n love (amor), which operates in reason. The movement of this sequence involves not negation— striving is not negated by desire, or desire by love—but rather a progressive accumulation, such that desire and love are increasingly powerful strivings for life. A n d this process is immediately political since the object o f all the terms o f this sequence is the formation of collective social life and, more generally, the constitution of the common. "Since fear of solitude exists in all men," Spinoza writes, "because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself, and procure the necessaries of life, it follows that men naturally aspire to the civil state; nor can it happen that men should ever utterly dissolve it."5 This passage resembles those of other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors who theorize the negation of the state of nature i n the formation of society, but the key difference is that Spinoza poses this as a positive, cumulative progression: the striving toward freedom and the common resides at the most basic level of life; then desire sets i n motion the construction of the common; and finally love consolidates the common institutions that form society. Human nature is not negated but transformed i n this sequence. Spinoza, however, is the ultimate realist. H e recognizes that the social construction of the common through love does not function unimpeded and that humans are the authors of the obstacles. O n the surface his explanation is that humans create these impediments and evil i n general out of ignorance, fear, and superstition. Since to combat evil, then, one must overcome ignorance and fear and destroy superstition, education in the truth of the intellect and the correct exercise of the will are the antidotes to evil. But any Stoic could tell us that! Spinoza's difference resides at a deeper level where the education or training o f the mind and body are grounded i n the movement of love. He does not conceive evil, as does Augustine, for i n stance, as a privation o f being; nor does he pose it as a lack o f love. Evil instead is love gone bad, love corrupted in such a way that it obstructs the functioning of love. Consider ignorance, fear, and superstition, then, not just as the lack o f intelligence but as the power of intelligence turned against itself, and equally the power of the body distorted and blocked. A n d since love is ultimately the power of the creation o f the common, evil is the dissolution o f the common or, really, its corruption. This gives us a Spinozian explanation for why at times people fight for their servitude as i f it were their salvation, why the poor sometimes support dictators, the working classes vote for right-wing parties, and abused spouses and children protect their abusers. Such situations are obviously the result of ignorance, fear, and superstition, but calling it false consciousness provides meager tools for transformation. Providing the oppressed with the truth and instructing them in their interests does little to change things. People fighting for their servitude is understood better as the result of love and community gone bad, failed, and distorted. The first question to ask when confronting evil, then, is, What specific love went bad here? What instance of the common has been corrupted? People are powerfully addicted to love gone bad and corrupt forms of the common. Often, sadly, these are the only instances of love and the common they know! In this context it makes sense that Spinoza thinks of ethics i n a medical framework— curing the ills of the body and mind, but more important, identifying how our intellectual and corporeal powers have been corrupted, turned against themselves, become self-destructive. Maybe this ethical and political therapeutic model explains why Freud was so fascinated by Spinoza. But this is not only a therapeutic model. Ethics and politics come together in an "ontology o f force," which eliminates the separation between love and force that so many metaphysical, transcendental, and religious perspectives try to enforce. From a materialist perspective instead, love is the propositional and constituent key to the relationship between being and force, just as force substantiates love's powers. Marx, for example, speaks o f the "winning smiles" o f matter and its "sensuous, poetic glamour," writing, "In Bacon [and in the Renaissance in general] materialism still holds back within itself in a naive way the germs of a many-sided development."These forms of matter are "forces of being," endowed with "an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension," even a "torment of matter."6 There is something monstrous in the relationship between love and force! But that monstruum, the overflowing force that embodies the relationship between self and others, is the basis of every social institution. We have already seen how Spinoza poses the development of institutions in the movement from the materiality of conatus or striving all the way to rational, divine love, composing isolated singularities in the multitude.We find something similar, albeit from a completely different perspective, in Wittgenstein's meditations on pain, which is incommunicable except though constructing a common linguistic experience and, ultimately, instituting common forms of life. Spinozian solitude and Wittgensteinian pain, which are both signs of a lack o f being, push us toward the common. Force and love construct together weapons against the corruption of being and the misery it brings.7 Love is thus not only an ontological motor, which produces the common and consolidates it i n society, but also an open field of battle. When we think o f the power of love, we need constantly to keep in mind that there are no guarantees; there is nothing automatic about its functioning and results. Love can go bad, blocking and destroying the process.The struggle to combat evil thus involves a training or education i n love. To clarify, then, we should individuate and bring together three operations or fields of activity for the power of love. First, and primarily, the power of love is the constitution of the common and u l timately the formation of society. This does not mean negating the differences of social singularities to form a uniform society, as i f love were to mean merging i n unity, but instead composing them i n social relation and in that way constituting the common. But since the process of love can be diverted toward the production of corrupt forms of the common, since love gone bad creates obstacles that block and destroy the common—in some cases reducing the multiplicity o f the common to identity and unity, i n others imposing h i erarchies within common relations—the power of love must also be, second, a force to combat evil. Love now takes the form of indignation, disobedience, and antagonism. Exodus is one means we identified earlier of combating the corrupt institutions of the common, subtracting from claims o f identity, fleeing from subordination and servitude. These two first guises of the power of love—its powers of association and rebellion, its constitution of the common and its combat against corruption—function together i n the third: making the multitude. This project must bring the process of exodus together with an organizational project aimed at creating institutions of common. A n d all three of these guises are animated by the training or Bildung of the multitude. There is nothing innate or spontaneous about love going well and realizing the common i n lasting social forms. The deployment of love has to be learned and new ///
