"Spinoza teaches us thus to make a distinction in the ethical world. The world is ethical only to the extent that, and because, we ourselves live it. At this level of development of human reality, the ethical alternative regains its highest significance: an alternative between life and death, between constructing and destroying. When ethical power articulates itself in the absolute contingency of being, this movement is not indeterminate. There is a criterion, a standard: the reasons of life against those of death. 'A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death' (E IV P67). The ethical act will thus be an act of composition, of construction - from the heart of being, in the tension between the singular and the collective. The possibility of a total violation of the world does not lead us to qualify action indifferently. The negation of every form of dualism and every mediation does not suppress the ethical alternative: it displaces it, resituates it on the extreme limit of being, where the alternative is between living and being destroyed. The radicality of the alternative highlights its drama, its intensity and irreversibility. And it is precisely, and justifiably, in this intensity and drama of the choice that ethics becomes political: the productive imagination of a world that is opposed to the world of death. 'For a free people is led more by hope than by fear, while a subjugated people is led more by fear than by hope; the former seek to engage in living, the latter simply to avoid death (TP V, 6)"
Toni Negri, en "Subversive Spinoza", acá.
