Spinozism between Superstition and Hyperstition: Imagination from the Epistemological Break to the Onto-Affective Break

Abstract

In the second half of the 20th century, some materialist philosophers turned to Spinoza’s work to redefine paths of radicality. Althusser grounds his theory of the epistemological break between ideology and science in the transition between the first and second kinds of knowledge, namely, imagination and reason. Imagination would, ultimately, be superstition or ideology, and science should break away from it. Deleuze, however, demonstrates how much reason itself depends on imagination, which in turn depends on affectivity, giving fundamental importance to the question of joyful affects. The epistemological break presupposes an ontological break and an affective break: what we call an onto- affective break. Thus, imagination would not be merely superstition, but could also correspond to what accelerationists call hyperstition, that is, active and productive imagination. It is with Negri that we see this dimension being particularly developed, in his theory of constituent imagination, in which imagination constitutes the social fabric of the multitude, upon which it builds the common.