Moira Gatens is Emerita Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney. Her interests include early modern philosophy, philosophy and literature, and feminist theory. She is the author of Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (Routledge, 1996), Spinoza's Hard Path to Freedom (Royal Van Gorcum, 2011) and Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality (Polity Press, 1991). She is co-author of Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza (Penn State University Press, 2009) and Feminist Ethics (Ashgate, 1998). She is co-editor of Institutional Transformations: Imagination, Embodiment and Affect (Routledge, 2021), The Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism (OUP, 1998), and Gender and Institutions: Welfare, Work and Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Anthony Uhlmann is Distinguished Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov (Bloomsbury, 2011), J. M. Coetzee, Truth, Meaning, Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020). He was the Managing Editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies (Edinburgh University Press). He has translated a number of essays from French into English, including, The Exhausted by Gilles Deleuze.

This is a pathbreaking work that demonstrates, with exemplary clarity and expertise, how Spinoza’s unique ars vivendi takes shape directly in relationship to art and fiction. Gatens and Uhlmann deliver a brilliant and original account of the role that imagination, fiction, and the passions play in Spinoza’s philosophy—that is to say, they rethink Spinoza’s rationalism tout court to show how his truly viable approach to art bears on our theory and experience of art and literature, directly or by way of cherished authors like Swift, Defoe, Eliot, and Woolf.

• AbbreviationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Imagination, Art and the Fictional FrameChapter One: On ‘Aesthetics’ in SpinozaFigure of Thought 1: The Worm in the BloodChapter Two: Affect, Imagination, and FreedomFigure of Thought 2: The Jubilant StoneChapter Three: Disposition and the Ars VivendiFigure of Thought 3: Nero’s IngratitudeChapter Four: Spinoza, Literary History and Artistic PracticeFigure of Thought 4: Orlando Furioso and the Hippogriff.Chapter Five: The Complex Question of Spinoza’s Influence: Defoe and SwiftFigure of Thought 5: How to Destroy a HorseChapter Six: Percy Shelly, Queen Mab, and The Revolt of IslamFigure of Thought 6: The Knave at the Gallows.Chapter Seven: Exemplarity in Mary Shelley’s FrankensteinFigure of Thought 7: Adam’s MistakeChapter Eight: George Eliot, Prophecy, and ‘the not false error’Figure of Thought 8: The Winged HorseChapter Nine: Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Desire, and EthologyEpilogue: Spinoza, Art, and the Ars VivendiWorks CitedIndex