An interview with Frédéric Lordon: on communism, agency, Spinoza, and responsibility

Relatively unknown outside France, the Spinozist philosopher Frédéric Lordon has become one of the most prominent intellectuals on the French radical left. With the social movement against Macron’s pension reforms gaining in strength since January 2023, Lordon does not limit himself to writing opinion pieces at his desk or to making the occasional appearance at marches. Although vocal about not being a member of any party, he frequently speaks at rallies for the Trotskyist political organisation Révolution Permanente—a recent split off from the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste—and moves between picket lines in support of striking rail and refinery workers. Initially leaning towards the right during his early student days at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, he later completed his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Robert Boyer, one of the central figures of the French Regulation School (a structuralist Marxist current in heterodox economics). It is as an economist that his interest in Spinoza first appears in La Politique du capital (2002) and Spinoza’s thought has gone on to shape in a fundamental way his political, social, and economic works. Most notably since the publication of Imperium (2015), Lordon’s works are testament to the radical left’s internal debates, throughout which a back and forth between the Spinozist, the Invisible Committee, and the autonomist left can be carefully traced. Understanding the left in France today, and more widely the country’s current political conjuncture, would be impossible without considering Lordon’s work. So far, two of Lordon’s books have been translated into English: Willing Slaves of Capital (2014) and Imperium (2022). This interview introduces his more recent ideas, in particular his work on communism, his critique of Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, and Rancière, and his upcoming collaboration on psychoanalysis with Sandra Lucbert. Solange Manche discovered Lordon’s work in 2018, when attending his seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Recently, she completed a PhD in French at the University of Cambridge. In her thesis, she rethinks the notion of the financial subject, building upon new ontologies found in the work of Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, and Lordon. She currently teaches as the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and is preparing a project on communism and economic planning in contemporary French philosophy and heterodox economics.