Towards the Future of Spinoza Studies

It is a pleasure to contribute to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Spinoza Studies. I congratulate the founding editors and am grateful for their invitation to reflect on an agenda for the future of Spinoza studies. Any agenda is of course merely an agenda, a set of preliminary speculations about future paths for research and reflection, one reader’s sense of possibilities after peregrinations in the field. The 400th anniversary of Spinoza’s birth and the 350th anniversary of his death approach, and the history of Spinoza reading is long. Modest aspirations are perhaps especially appropriate in view of the vitality and variety of contemporary Spinoza studies. Spinoza’s books and correspondence now attract readers whose efforts range from deciphering his thought to exploring its insights in conjunction with other fields. Pierre Macherey observes that Spinoza’s thought is “actual”—alive and current—in three ways. Two are directly visible: Spinoza’s philosophy as it is “actually read and worked on, that is, studied for itself,” and as it resonates “with the singular preoccupations of each time,” that is, as it is frequently revived and revisited. The third emergesmore indirectly, because Spinoza’s “problems” and “concepts, independently of every explicit citation continue to accompany other forms of thought,” sometimes even in the apparent absence of their author. The paradigmatic case of this third life and current actuality is Spinoza’s “unusual place” in 18-19th century European philosophy, where he is “simultaneously present, perhaps even central, and relatively ignored.”1 In these three ways, Spinoza’s thought can generate critical reflection and creativity.