Abstract

Abstract:

The lack of any explicit engagement with art and aesthetics, coupled with his strong rationalism and naturalism, has led to the claim that Spinoza held a philosophy actively "hostile" to art. My essay, contrary to this claim, brings together certain key principles of Spinozism and a poem by futurist poet Mina Loy. I argue that when viewed under Spinoza's ontology of power and through his relational theory of the individual, works of art and literature emerge as particularly active sites of relation that are both constitutive of, and constituted by, the wider affective field within which they find themselves.

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