: 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)

The purpose of this article is to define and restore, in a systematic way, the decisive argumentative axes that allow a degree of internal consistency to the famous expressive interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy made by Gilles Deleuze. Initially, we will examine how the Deleuzian interpretation of Spinoza portrays a peculiar and unique moment of the relations that Deleuze, during at least three decades, has established with the history of philosophy. Then, we will check which conceptual frameworks – built in a (...) non-hierarchical manner, according to Deleuze – would support the thesis of an intrinsic and practical necessity to the ontological constitutive process in Spinoza’s Ethics under the perspective of a philosophy of difference. (shrink)