This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti-racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of "a politics of imperceptibility." She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.

In his recent article, titled ‘Royaumont Revisited’, Overgaard challenges Dummett's view that one needs to go as far back as the late nineteenth century in order to discover examples of genuine dialogue between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy. Instead, Overgaard argues that in the 1958 Royaumont colloquium, generally judged as a failed attempt at communication between the two camps, one can find some elements which may be utilized towards re-establishing a dialogue between these two sides. Yet, emphasising this image of Royaumont (...) as a kind of battleground between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy obscures the plurality of philosophical approaches involved. Royaumont was the meeting point of more than two philosophical traditions, as can be shown by the divergent interests of its participants. Thus, though the potential for rapprochement between Oxford ‘linguistic philosophy’ and a certain strand of phenomenological thought may indeed be found among the discussions that took place during the colloquium, one should keep in mind that such rapprochement took place in the context of a meeting between, among others: continental ‘analytics’, Anglophone non-‘analytics’, French historians of philosophy, ‘analytic’ opponents of Oxford philosophy, Franciscan phenomenologists, and Oxonians who called their work ‘phenomenology’. (shrink)

: In his Theological Political Treatise Spinoza lays the groundwork for the secular project of separation between religion and public life which will be characteristic of Western politics throughout Modern and Contemporary Ages. This project, however, is marked by a number of tensions which can already be seen in Spinoza’s work. This article tries to delineate the philosopher’s argument, identify and make explicit its main concepts and point to some of the tensions still working within the secular project, tensions which (...) arise from the philosophical reasoning employed by this project since its inception, as can be seen in Spinoza’s work. Keywords: Spinoza; Theological Political Treatise; secularism; freedom; religion; politics. (shrink)

Some authors objected to the practical possibility of achieving happiness as Spinoza conceives it in Part v of Ethics. This article seeks to refute such objections. It shows that they stem essentially from the same image that common sense makes about happiness. After eliminating these objections, the article describes what would be a practical experience of Spinoza’s happiness.

Based on proposition 28 of Part I of Spinoza's Ethics, I argue that the idea of interdetermination set out there is formed by excluding indetermination and finalism. Spinoza conceives reality as an infinite network of singular interdeterminations without hierarchies or outside. From interdetermination itself the problem arises of what it means to be a finite mode of God. This problem, however, is more fully resolved through the notion of 'absolute necessity of relation'. Once we have these conceptual tools, we can (...) understand the way in which finitude and absoluteness merge in singular things, making them cognizable with objectivity. But just because all things are knowable, it does not mean that we can know them all. For the power of our understanding is also limited. Affirming the knowability of all things and the limitation of our capacity to know, Spinoza challenged both irrationalistic scepticism and the mistake of human thought for the infinite understanding of God. (shrink)

Although Deleuze’s work on Spinoza is widely known, it remains poorly understood. In particular, Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza’s immanentism has not been treated sufficient care; that is, with an eye to the context of its elaboration and the way in which it gradually takes on different characteristics. With this paper, I offer a synoptic analysis of Deleuze’s views on immanence in Spinoza and examine how these change over the course of Deleuze’s career. There are three ascending stages here: a first (...) one, where Deleuze’s attention is drawn to more recognizable issues in understanding Spinoza’s views on the deep metaphysical structure of reality; a second, more experimental one, where Deleuze questions what it means to be a reader of Spinoza in light of Spinoza’s theory of the body and affects; and a third, particularly iconoclastic stage, where Deleuze develops the theory of “the plane of immanence” as a way of articulating a meta-philosophical story about the place of non-philosophy at the heart of all philosophy. I trace each of these accounts, tie them together to tell a coherent and comprehensive narrative, and show what may be learned from this Spinoza that Deleuze portrays as drunk on immanence. (shrink)

Spinoza attributes mentality to all things existing in nature. He claims that each thing has a mind that perceives everything that happens in the body. Against this panpsychist background, it is unclear how consciousness relates to the nature of the mind. This study focuses on Spinoza’s account of the conscious mind and its operations. It builds on the hypothesis that Spinoza’s panpsychism can be interpreted as a self-consistent philosophical position. It aims at providing answers to the following questions: what is (...) consciousness, for Spinoza, and what are the causes that determine its presence in nature? How can human and non-human individuals be distinguished on account of their mentality? How can Spinoza conceive of the human mind as consisting entirely of conscious perceptions? And how, according to Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism, is the content of consciousness determined so that it reflects in thought the order and connection of the actions and passions of the body? To address these questions, I first determine what Spinoza’s notion of “consciousness” is and how he uses it. Then, I investigate whether he has a theory of recognition capable of accounting for specifically human behaviour and mentality. Further, I examine his description of memory and the way in which memory shapes the framework of human conscious thought. Finally, I look for an account of discursive reasoning, capable of explaining the existence of activities of the mind that, by operating on the content provided by memory, preserve themselves through time and change. (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry for the Springer Encyclopedia of EM Phil and the Sciences, ed. D. Jalobeanu and C. T. Wolfe.

This article presents a decades-long conflict in the upper echelons of postwar French academic philosophy between the self-identifying “Cartesian” Ferdinand Alquié, professor at the Sorbonne, and the “Spinozist” Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. Tracking the development of this rivalry serves to illuminate the historical drama that occurred in France as phenomenology was integrated into the Cartesian tradition and resisted by a commitment to rationalism grounded in a specifically French understanding of Spinozism. Over the course of Alquié and Gueroult's (...) polemic, however, we nevertheless witness a shared concern to preserve philosophy from the reductive tendencies of historicism and its possible assimilation to theology. What is more, the ultimate impasse of this conflict continues to inform the most innovative projects in French thought in the wake of structuralism and the “theological turn” of French phenomenology. (shrink)

(2013). Spinoza and the Cosmological Argument According to Letter 12. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 57-77. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.696052.

Laetitia in Spinoza has a twofold meaning: on the one hand is a passion, then is a product of inadecuates ideas and is associated with the first kind of knowledge (Imaginatio); on the other hand is expression of the Conatus and is an active affect (Fortitudo) connected with the third kind of knowledge (Scientia intuitiva). This second meaning confront us to a happines no human, frozen, abyssal which prefigure thinkers as Nietzsche, Bataille or lanchot.