Spinoza in French Philosophy Today

Abstract

Es gibt Kein andere Philosophie, als die Philosophie des Spinoza. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Every philosopher has two philosophies: his own and Spinoza's. Henri Bergson In last few decades, philosophers have been particularly interested in Spinoza's thought, to point that it is possible to speak today of emergence of a French Spinozism, and even of a French Spinozist school that has accompanied philosophical and political debates of last thirty years.1 This which is in no way official and does not pretend to be such, nevertheless has its founding fathers, its institutions, and an increasing output of publications. In large part thanks to this school, Spinoza is finally finding his place among different rationalist systems of early modern philosophy (Descartes, Malebranche, Hobbes, Leibniz), and as his is a singular place, we have not yet finished evaluating his importance. Long relegated to margins of university philosophy programs and banned from official thought, history of Spinozism was at first that of an imposed silence, then that of an unclassifiable system of thought. The history of reception of Spinoza's works bears witness to this. Pierre Bayle thought of a Spinozism before Spinoza, whose traits he found in Greek pagan thought and in Orient; Hegel made Spinoza the Oriental into very condition for philosophy; Bergson believed in existence of a Spinozism without Spinoza as eternal possibility of thought; Deleuze thought most often with Spinoza; and Negri finally brought together Spinoza's untimeliness with that of other bad-boy thinkers like Marx, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche. All of these authors considered Spinozism as a contemporary form of thought, seeing in it less a philosophy of past than a thought that never quite managed to go away. If we were to parody Bergson's way putting it, we could say that Spinoza gave rise to at least two histories of philosophy - one in which he belongs to past and is ranked among Cartesians with his attention turned toward ancient theologies, one in which he is a member of avant-garde, rebellious and subversive, polemicizing against instituted order, resolutely turned towards a thought yet to be constructed. What is undeniable is that by making us better understand Spinoza in his own time, Spinozism of last few years has also contributed to inserting him into our own time. It is almost as if his thought, taking on image of an essentially posthumous work, has lost nothing of its a-topical and anachronistic dimension, which makes it be constantly out of step with his own time, so that it can finally deliver its message less to an already existing era than to possibilities of a future yet to be defined.2 Now, after announced deaths of God and man, after proclaimed end of grand foundational narratives of what we now habitually call modernity, after end of metaphysics, of history, of art, of book, a few philosophers (Lyotard and Derrida in France, Danto and Searle in United States, Vattimo in Italy) has tried to piggy-back on Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger in order to be able to think meaning of these closures in era of globalization and of global village. Consequently, there is nothing astonishing about Spinozism's radical anti-finalism finding a voice in margins of post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-Freudianism, or postMarxism, all of which characterize themselves (sometimes in prophetic tones) as modes of thought of end and of after-the-end. In one sense, then, there is nothing new under Spinoza's sun: contemporary Spinozism only confirms and extends a history made of cyclical rebirths and eternal returns, which have announced and animated some of great seasons of modern thought.3 The forceful return of Spinozism in France in last fifty years nonetheless has its specific characteristics and its own reasons. …