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Reading Capital forms the prelude to a wave of Spinoza receptions, in which seventeenth-century metaphysics is shifted far beyond Marxism into the radiant presence of structuralist philosophy. While after Husserl's Paris lectures on the Meditations and Sartre's publication of The Transcendence of the Ego, France experienced a phenomenological Descartes revival, Spinoza research remained, until the mid-1960s, a largely underdeveloped field. In the course of a fulminant boost in reception in 1968 and 1969, in almost a single year, the studies of Martial Gueroult, Alexandre Matheron, Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Rousset were published. Under the influence of Gueroult's structural-genetic reading, they displayed an unprecedented systematic precision to position Spinoza's thought against Descartes – particularly, against the doctrine of two substances, the depotentialization of nature, the use of the medieval concept of contingency and the idea of the incomprehensibility of a God of arbitrary decree implicated in the doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. In comparison Althusser's reading of Spinoza is characterized by an inverse proportion of philosophical precision and the strategic positioning of Spinoza in Marxism. (en) |
