I was reminded of this excellent article by Jon Beasley-Murray, "Ethics as Post-Political Politics".

Which concludes: "As much as a re-examination of Spinoza means 'abandoning the last vestiges of teleologism' in its refusal of the dialectic (and its emphasis on subjective constitution), we must beware of the re-inscription of faith performed by Negri in the course of his analysis. Although Negri's turn to ethics is a useful dislocation from the ritual of political rhetoric, in Bourdieu we see the continuing presence of unconscious investments in the apparent certainties of belief and the limits beyond which expansionist coalition politics and ethical constitution dare not go: 'like legitimate culture, the counter-culture leaves its principles implicit (which is understandable since it is rooted in the dispositions of an ethos) and so is still able to fulfil functions of distinction by making available to almost everyone the distinctive poses, the distinctive games and other external signs of inner riches previously reserved for intellectuals.' "

[There are many problems with Bourdieu (his nationalism for one), but his accounts of 'distinction' and academic labour, I think written quite early in his career, are very sharp.)

Beasley-Murray refers in that essay to Eugene Holland's essay, "Spinoza and Marx", which takes up the debate between Macheray and Negri over Spinoza, and is also worth reading for thinking about Negri's (and Balibar's) argument that there is a difference between 'early' and 'late' Spinoza. The stakes of which are whether 'absolute democracy' is a particularly radical proposition.

I keep pondering the question of how ostensible critiques of vanguardism (and teleology) can re-inscribe the dynamics of such a politics without a sense of either what's at stake here or what vanguardism might mean beyond its particular (or simply explicit) leninist variants.

And I keep coming back to the specific character of 'cognitive labour'. Plus I keep having to remind myself (or be reminded by others) that it's not a matter of will every time I get amazed (sometimes angry) at the propensity of so many to re-assert a vanguardist politics (often this vanguard looks a lot like, well, an idealised version of themselves). ... If a triangle were to conceive of God, God would be a triangle -- Spinoza was right about some things.

Maybe I should be more thorough in abandoning a notion of the Subject, whose acts and politics are a apparently matter of will, unconditioned. But there are surely limits to this: not simply because I reckon there's such a thing as responsibility (an ability to respond to the call of the Other) -- which is traumatic, but ethics is traumatic or it isn't ethical (Levinas). But also because a critique of subjectivism doesn't licence an objectification, treating people as if they are mere cyphers of social processes and locations. All this would could ever produce is a paternalistic, manipulative (yes, Machiavellian) tone which treats people like they don't understand anything very much and so need to be spoken to as if they are always mired in superstition. An aside: I think this is kind of what Negri does at times, a perfectly proper Spinozian writing strategy, I guess you could say -- though not what it should be possible to take from Spinoza unless you thought philosophy should be confined to, as Spinoza thought, the priestly caste. Whatever else there is to say about Spinoza, he thought the 'multitude' were dangerous, superstitious clods who couldn't understand complex, radical philosophy if they tried.

Or, it would mean a great big cop-out -- no one is responsible, can respond.

An impasse, which seems to me is only broken by specific encounters which shake up the ossified senses of 'I' or 'we' and make ethics (and politics) possible, whether in the case of border struggles or organising around precarious work.

Aside from creating these kinds of encounters, and messing up a sense of 'we', I'm not sure 'activism' -- or publication -- is capable of confronting the kind of politics which reinscribes vanguardism and teleologies as the performative aspects of cognitive labour.