One can liberate and recompose one's own body, formerly fragmented and dead in the service of an imaginary and, therefore, slavelike subjectivity, and take from this the means to think liberation freely and strongly, therefore, to think properly with one's body, in one's own body, by one's own body, better: that to live freely within the thought of the conatus of one's own body was simply to think within the freedom and the power of thought-all that dazzled me as the incontestable saying of an unavoidable experience and reality I had lived, which had never become my own.1 The foreclosure of Spinoza seems to me to be significant. Here is a great rationalism that does not rest on the principle of reason (inasmuch as in Leibniz this principle privileges both the final cause and representation). Spinoza's substantialist rationalism is a radical critique of both finalism and the (Cartesian) representative determination of the idea; it is not a metaphysics of the cogito or of absolute subjectivity. The import of this foreclosure is all the greater and more significant in that the epoch of subjectivity determined by Heidegger is also the epoch of the rationality or the techno-scientific rationalism of modern metaphysics.2 My goals in this essay are to highlight the significance of Spinoza's thought as a counter-discourse in the history of modern philosophy and thereby to highlight his significance for contemporary philosophizing. Beginning from the picture of Spinoza and Spinozism in Etienne Balibar's Spinoza and Politics,3 I consider how Spinoza offers resources for thinking not only against, but also outside, the dominant paradigms of Cartesianism. Specifically, I present Spinoza as thinking outside mind-body dualism, transcendence and teleology, and the ideology or myth of the ontologically discrete, radically self-determining and free subject. Most fundamentally, I present Spinoza as a philosopher who endeavors to think naturalistically and phenomenologically; both nominalist and materialist, he is indeed an unusual rationalist. A shorthand for the orientation of the reading presented here is that it is non-Neoplatonic and non-Hegelian to the core. Properly understood as a profoundly non-Cartesian thinker, Spinoza emerges as a vital philosophical forebear in matters of affectivity, freedom, and materialist approaches to history and politics. Balibar's work is significant for its incisive presentation of these elements of Spinoza's philosophy. At the same time, however, he departs from Spinoza toward a normative account of democracy and a distinctly Marxist teleology of history. His interpretation is provocative, is sum, both for its interpretive acuity and for its divergence from Spinoza. Spinoza, Our Contemporary If the claim that texts have afterlives, not lives, is true, Spinoza's afterlife is increasingly robust among continental philosophers. The significance of Spinoza's philosophy for Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and other figures in German Idealism is well known. Nietzsche, too, cites Spinoza as a philosophical forebear and engages his thought. Thinkers as central to contemporary continental conversations as Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and Antonio Negri, have all taken Spinoza as an important interlocutor. The collective work of Althusser and Balibar published as Reading Capital (1968) stands as a primary text in this series; Deleuze's Spinozism extends beyond his Spinoza books, Spinoza et le probleme de l'expression (1968) and Spinoza: Philosophie Pratique (1968, 1981).4 Macherey's Hegel ou Spinoza (1979), Negri's The Savage Anomaly, and Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community are three recent examples.5 Less familiar to Anglophone readers but vitally important is Alexandre Matheron, another Marxist, whose work has focused on anthropology and politics.6 Fascinating, too, is the growing body of work that views Spinoza as anticipating elements of Freudian psychoanalysis. …