imomus

"It's not simply a question of a peculiar vision of the world, it's again eminently a question of politics. Spinoza's basic idea is very simple, it's that there are two plagues of the human genus and it's in this that Spinoza is Nietzschean and Nietzsche is Spinozist. He says that there are two scourges: hatred and remorse. Nietzsche will say that there are two scourges: man as malady, ressentiment and bad conscience. Ressentiment and bad conscience are literally what Spinoza called hatred and remorse. Here one could find a kind of psychiatric tableau of the affections of hatred and the affections of remorse. But what's interesting in his way of seeing all that is not a psychiatry; what's interesting is obviously politics. Spinoza asks himself: what are those things called powers-that-be [pouvoirs] ? He posed the question of power in a ridiculous enough way: power [pouvoir] is opposed to power [puissance]; power [puissance] is our bit in ourselves, in each one of us, in animals, in things; but power [pouvoir] is something else. He asks how it functions: people take power over others. What does it mean to have power over someone? Having power over someone is being in a position to affect her/him in such and such a way. The powers-that-be are fundamentally institutions built to affect you with sadness, they work like that and can only work like that. Things like hope, reward and security are put on the side of sad affects."

Reward and security is like when the fink gets rewarded with cushy synecures and mad bitches whilst the target gets pushed over the cliff. Totalitarian and vapid, but plush, soft, and cute at the same time.