Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism

by Francois Zourabichvili, Gil Morejon (Translator)

Overview

François Zourabichvili wrote two major contributions to Spinoza scholarship. While Une physique de la pensée (PUF, 2002) concerns Spinoza’s epistemology and metaphysics of ideas, Spinoza’s Paradoxical Conservatism focuses on his political philosophy.
Zourabichvili’s interpretation of Spinoza’s political philosophy is radically unlike the established tradition. In this book he explores Spinoza’s philosophical theory of change across three different studies. First, within ethical transition, secondly within the image of the infant in Spinoza’s work and third dealing with absolute monarchy which was dominant during Spinoza’s time and provided his polemical writings with a concrete target.
The book’s challenging and carefully-argued claims will be of serious interest to anyone working in political theory, early modern philosophy or contemporary French thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474489058
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2025
Series:	Spinoza Studies
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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 UniversityPress, 2012) and Spinoza: Une physique de la pensée (Presses Universityaires de Paris, 2002)

Gil Morejón teaches at Loyola UniversityChicago. 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 UniversityPress, 2022) and co-edited and co-translated Alexandre Matheron's Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2020)

Table of Contents

Reference Conventions

Notes on Translation and Acknowledgments
Introduction

• Memory and Form: The State and its Ruin
• Amnesia and Formation: The Birth of a State
• The Adult Child and Chimeras

First Study. Involving Another Nature / Involving Nature
Ethical Transition in the Short Treatise

• Proper 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 Intellect

• The Logic of Ethical Transition: Conversion and Dilemma
• The Role of ‘Striving’
• he Concept of Institutum: The Logic of Convergence
• Distraction, Possession: The Shadow of Transformation
• Homo concipiat naturam aliquam humanam sua multo firmiorem

Appendices to the First Study
Second Study. The Rectified Image of Childhood
The Figure of the Infans Adultus

• The Child of Scholasticism, and the Contradictions of the Renaissance
• The Child of Painting and Medicine
• The Child of the Jurists
• The Parable of the First Man
• Cartesian Voluntarism, Spinozist Voluntarism

Childhood and Philosophy

• Infantile Impotence: Neither Privation nor Misery (scholia to Ethics V, 6 and 39)
• Note on Gabriel Metsu’s The Sick Child
• The Childishness of Men
• The Autonomisation of the Body

Childhood and Memory

• The Amnesiac Regime of the Fascinated Infans
• In 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 Childhood
Third Study. The Power of God and the Power of Kings
The Confusion of the Two Powers and the Baroque Drift of Cartesianism

• Refutation of the Power of Abstention
• Refutation of the Power of the Alternative
• Ethics I, 33, its Demonstration, and its Second Scholium
• The Baroque—or its Banishment?
• The Paradoxical Fate of Spinozism: Chimera against Chimera, and How the Relation to Polytheism is Truly Established in Spinoza’s Thought

The Transformist Dream of Absolute Monarchy

• The Divinization of Kings
• Monarchical Absolutism and Metamorphosis
• Royal Absolutism according to Spinoza: a Quintuple Chimera
• First Chimera: Behind the King, the Favorites and the Court
• Second Chimera: The Tyrannical Dream of Transforming Nature
• Third 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 Truth

What is a Free Multitude? War and Civilization

• The 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 Conservatism
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

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.

Etienne Balibar

In his interrogation on ethical transition, Zourabichvili highlights how Spinozism is a philosophy of transformation – and how such a transformation implements, paradoxically, the sense of: "to persevere in one's being". It thus allows us to reflect on the ultimate political question: what is a free multitude?

L’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon Pierre-François Moreau