Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between violence
and the domination of speech in Spinoza’s political thought. Spinoza
describes the cost of such violence to the State, to the collective
epistemic resources, and to the members of the polity that domination
aims to script and silence. Spinoza shows how obedience to a dominating
power requires pretense and deception. The pressure to pretend is
the linchpin of an account of how oppression severely degrades the
conditions for meaningful communication, and thus the possibilities for
thinking and acting in common. Because it belongs to human nature to
desire to share our thoughts with others, Spinoza believes that most
people experience efforts to control our communication to be acutely
intolerable. As a result, such unbearable violence threatens the political
order that deploys it. I conclude with some speculative remarks about
why, in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza consistently deploys the
superlative form of the adjective violentus in reference to the domination
of thought and speech rather than to other modes of political violence.