Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism

François Zourabichvili was a director at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris from 1998 to 2004. He is the author of Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and Spinoza: Une physique de la pensée (Presses Universitaires de Paris, 2002) Gil Morejón teaches at Loyola University Chicago. His research focuses on early modern metaphysics and political theory. He is the author of The Unconscious of Thought in Leibniz, Spinoza and Hume (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and co-edited and co-translated Alexandre Matheron's Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

This book, the chef-d’oeuvre of a young philosophical genius, who left us in the prime of his life, offers a systematic interpretation of Spinoza’s ideas on monarchy and infancy, strangely associated, which by contrast reveal the tension between formation and death at the core of his "political ontology". It changed my understanding of Ethics and Theological-Political Treatise.

• Reference ConventionsNotes on Translation and AcknowledgmentsIntroductionMemory and Form: The State and its RuinAmnesia and Formation: The Birth of a StateThe Adult Child and ChimerasFirst Study. Involving Another Nature / Involving NatureEthical Transition in the Short TreatiseProper Element and Foreign Element (KV II, 26)A New Birth (KV II, 22)The Ambivalence of ‘Union’Ethical Transition in the Treatise on the Emendation of the IntellectThe Logic of Ethical Transition: Conversion and DilemmaThe Role of ‘Striving’he Concept of Institutum: The Logic of ConvergenceDistraction, Possession: The Shadow of TransformationHomo concipiat naturam aliquam humanam sua multo firmioremAppendices to the First StudySecond Study. The Rectified Image of ChildhoodThe Figure of the Infans AdultusThe Child of Scholasticism, and the Contradictions of the RenaissanceThe Child of Painting and MedicineThe Child of the JuristsThe Parable of the First ManCartesian Voluntarism, Spinozist VoluntarismChildhood and PhilosophyInfantile Impotence: Neither Privation nor Misery (scholia to Ethics V, 6 and 39)Note on Gabriel Metsu’s The Sick ChildThe Childishness of MenThe Autonomisation of the BodyChildhood and MemoryThe Amnesiac Regime of the Fascinated InfansIn what sense is the body of the child ‘as it were in a state of equilibrium’?Adolescence: Age of Reason or Final Avatar of the Infans Adultus?What is a Spinozist Pedagogy?Concluding Remarks on the Relationship to ChildhoodThird Study. The Power of God and the Power of KingsThe Confusion of the Two Powers and the Baroque Drift of CartesianismRefutation of the Power of AbstentionRefutation of the Power of the AlternativeEthics I, 33, its Demonstration, and its Second ScholiumThe Baroque—or its Banishment?The Paradoxical Fate of Spinozism: Chimera against Chimera, and How the Relation to Polytheism is Truly Established in Spinoza’s ThoughtThe Transformist Dream of Absolute MonarchyThe Divinization of KingsMonarchical Absolutism and MetamorphosisRoyal Absolutism according to Spinoza: a Quintuple ChimeraFirst Chimera: Behind the King, the Favorites and the CourtSecond Chimera: The Tyrannical Dream of Transforming NatureThird Chimera: Changing Decrees (and the Theory of the King’s Double Mind)Fourth Chimera: The Death of the King and Succession (TP VII, 25)Fifth Chimera: Return to Apotheosis, and Theocratic TruthWhat is a Free Multitude? War and CivilizationThe People that Does Not Fear Death (Praise for the Ancient Hebrews)Combat and Freedom in the Political Treatise (VII, 22)Pierre Macherey and François Zourabichvili on Spinoza’s Paradoxical ConservatismWorks CitedIndex