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‘Morfino offers a highly original understanding of the interweaving of er e ncounT er natural causality and historical time, finding in the relation between the two philosophers a new germination of political realism and an anti-humanist – concept of eternity. Drawing on his profound understanding of Machiavelli Machia and Spinoza, Morfino not only offers a new historiographic frame for these Time and occasion two fundamental thinkers, but a strong and effective critical approach that brings these new possibilities closer.’ Toni Negri, author of Euronomade

‘A first book, and a masterful strike! This rigorous investigation, based V on careful textual readings and imaginative interpretations, beautifully i l l e demonstrates how the “encounter” reverberates on both sides. , history, ontology of time form the multiple dimensions of a dialogic production of ideas which, for 500 years now, never ceased to question the dominant Vittorio Morfino representations of .’

Etienne Balibar, author of Spinoza and Politics Vittorio Morfino 234mm

An exhaustive account of the Spinoza–Machiavelli relationship and its relevance for contemporary philosophy

This extraordinary book opens up new avenues for understanding both Machiavelli and Spinoza as well as early modern and .

Vittorio Morfino is an associate professor in the history of philosophy at the University of Milan-Bicocca and Director of programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris.

Dave Mesing is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Villanova University.

ISBN 978-1-4744-2124-9

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2mm 2mm 17mm 3mm 156 mm 156mm 3mm 17mm spine 18 mm The Spinoza–Machiavelli Encounter Time and Occasion

Vittorio Morfino Translated by Dave Mesing Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

Il tempo e l’occasione: l’incontro Spinoza Machiavelli © Vittorio Morfino, 2002 Published by LED – Edizioni Universitarie du Lettere Economia Diritto, Milan English translation © Dave Mesing, 2019

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Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund. Contents

Abbreviations vi Translator’s Introduction: Unscripted Space, Devoured Time viii Translator’s Note and Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1 1. Machiavelli in Spinoza’s Library and Texts 8 2. Machiavelli’s Implicit Presence in Spinoza’s Texts 51 3. Causality and Temporality between Machiavelli and Spinoza 118 4. Machiavelli and Spinoza: Theory of the Individual as Anti-philosophy of History 165 Conclusion 213

Bibliography 222 Index 239 vi the spinoza–machiavelli encounter

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used:

Alt. Dem. Alternative Demonstration App. Appendix Ax. Axiom Cor. Corollary DA# Definitions of the Affects Def. Definition Dem. Demonstration Exp. Explanation Lem. Lemma NS From the Curley translation of Spinoza, referring to a posthu- mous edition of 1677, De Nagelate Schriften van B.D.S. Post. Postulate Praef. Preface Schol. Scholium

AT Adam and Tannery’s Œuvres de Descartes (1909) CWS The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, cited by volume and page number KV Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (Korte Verhandeling; e.g. KV II, 2, 2 refers to Part II, Chapter 2, Section 2 TdIE Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione) TP Political Treatise (Tractatus politicus; e.g. TP I, 5 refers to Chapter 1, paragraph 5) abbreviations vii

TTP Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus theologico-politicus; e.g. TTP XVII, 7 refers to Chapter 17, paragraph 7, where the par- agraph number corresponds to the Bruder edition, reproduced in Curley’s Collected Works, Volume II) viii the spinoza–machiavelli encounter

Translator’s Introduction: Unscripted Space, Devoured Time

Vittorio Morfino’s Il tempo e l’occasione: l’incontro Spinoza-Machiavelli con- stitutes a decisive intervention for contemporary studies of Spinoza. Owing in part to Spinoza’s apparent paucity of references to Machiavelli, Spinoza’s relation to him has often implicitly been treated as occasional: perhaps the two share some affinities for realist or anti-utopian political positions, with Spinoza taking up certain Machiavellian or Machiavellian-like insights, but the relation does not go beyond this point. This book challenges such assump- tions by demonstrating a connection between Spinoza and Machiavelli as specific as it is pervasive, arguing that Spinoza’s understanding of causality in the owes much to his study of Machiavelli’s writings on history and politics, a claim with multiple implications for Spinoza’s own views on history and politics as well as temporality. Morfino succinctly treats different approaches to the Spinoza–Machiavelli question in the introduction, and I will not rehearse them here.1 Instead, I will briefly recapitulate the main steps in his overall analysis in order to frame it in terms of the object alluded to in the title of the book – Spinoza’s encounter with Machiavelli. After synthetically summarising different approaches to the Spinoza– Machiavelli question throughout the twentieth century in the introduc- tion, Morfino proceeds to carry out four steps in the remainder of the text. First, in chapter 1, through close examination of Spinoza’s own library, Morfino delivers a clear and thorough framework of the possible means through which Spinoza read Machiavelli. His analysis shows that Spinoza had multiple access points to the Florentine’s work: Machiavelli’s complete works in Italian (which Spinoza seemed capable of understanding, given the presence of an Italian–Spanish dictionary in his library, as well as an Italian-

1 One notable exception to this implicit consensus is Del Lucchese 2009, which had not been published when Morfino wrote this book. translator’s introduction ix language monograph), a translation of The , and discussions of Machiavelli in texts of Bacon, Descartes and others. Morfino is careful to note that these basic facts, of course, do not necessarily mean that Spinoza studied Machiavelli in these ways, or only in these ways, since such informa- tion cannot speak to the practical aspects of reading or other kinds of study. As such, in addition to his detailed account of these possible means, Morfino outlines Spinoza’s general approach to citation, where proper names are rare, and together with impersonal figures (such as the ‘theologians and metaphysicians’ in the appendix to Ethics I), negative, except for a remark about ancient atomists in a letter to Hugo Boxel.2 Morfino then considers Spinoza’s direct citations of the ‘ever shrewd’3 Machiavelli. Both of the latter two elements also contribute to Morfino’s extensive analysis of the Theological-Political Treatise and Political Treatise in chapter 2. He does this through the rubric of ‘Machiavelli’s implicit presence’, by which he does not intend an esoteric reading of Spinoza’s work, show- ing some kind of secret fidelity to an atemporal Machiavellianism. Instead, again undertaking a precise and painstaking labour, Morfino demonstrates substantive links between arguments within Spinoza’s political works and Machiavelli’s texts, above all and The Prince. Some key aspects that Morfino outlines in this chapter, which simultaneously consti- tutes a kind of mini-treatise on Spinoza’s political works, include the deci- siveness of Machiavelli’s conceptual pair ‘’ and ‘fortune’ for Spinoza’s discussion of election in the Theological-Political Treatise, and the deploy- ment of Machiavelli’s remarks on keeping pacts in the framework of natu- ral law theory, especially in contrast to Hobbes. In the unfinished Political Treatise, Morfino outlines Machiavelli’s presence in what he terms the ‘skel- etal structure’ of the text, emphasising the idea that imperium represents a momentary equilibrium of forces, rather than a model of politics where civil society names a stabilised transcendence of the of . Third, Morfino draws out the consequences of his reconstruction of Spinoza’s use of Machiavellian arguments even more fully, in what are undoubtedly some of the most exciting pages in the book. A full reckoning with these details is best left to the text itself, but we can note here that the consequences Morfino uncovers are especially relevant for Spinoza’s con- cepts of causality and eternity, and by extension, for how to think Spinoza’s political works in tandem with the Ethics. The idea at the heart of the chap- ter is that Spinoza’s encounter with Machiavelli’s approach to history and

2 Ep. LVI [to Hugo Boxel]; CWS II, 423–4 3 TP V, 7; CWS II, 531. x the spinoza–machiavelli encounter politics bears its most dazzling traces in the structure of Spinoza’s account of common notions and the third kind of knowledge.4 In a famous passage on teleological prejudice in the appendix to Ethics I, Spinoza lists mathematics as what provides a standard of truth that breaks the circle between human experience and the inscrutability of levels of divine providence and will.5 Morfino both cautions against reading the passage from superstition to sci- ence, or imagination to reason, as a necessary law, and suggests that mathe- matics be understood a singular event among others. In the same passage, Spinoza also remarks that other causes break with teleological prejudice and lead to true knowledge of things, but does not list them. Morfino suggests that these causes are physics and political theory. Based on Spinoza’s remark that the causes are unnecessary to enumerate ‘here’, Morfino further suggests that Spinoza has written or will write about these causes elsewhere. If Spinoza discusses physics in the short treatise of Ethics II, it is less clear that he discusses political theory in the same way, even though many readers have productively utilised material from the Ethics in this sense, especially parts three and four. However, Morfino argues that ‘there are two specific passages where, more strictly than elsewhere, Spinoza traces a line of demarcation between the teleological knowledge of history and politics and the knowledge of the essence and characteristics of the political body – that is, between the imaginary sanctification of history and power, and the knowledge of their dynamics’.6 These passages are TTP III, where Spinoza uses the Machiavellian concepts of virtue and fortune in his conceptual critique of the election of the Hebrew people, and the open- ing of TP I, where Spinoza differentiates himself from theorists of reason of state, emphasising a need for what we could call, with some simplification, political realism. Machiavelli stands out as the point of departure for both of these political critiques of teleological prejudice. On the basis of the hypothesis that phys- ics and political theory also constitute ways of breaking with imagination and superstition, Morfino proceeds to further argue that these ways of know- ing are also helpful for thinking about one of the most difficult problems in Spinoza’s work, the third kind of knowledge or intuitive science. Following

4 I have referred generically to Machiavelli’s ‘approach’ to history and politics, partly in keeping with the broad engagement to Machiavelli’s work that Morfino exhibits. For a useful recent collection of texts on Machiavelli, see Del Lucchese, Frosini and Morfino (eds) 2015. 5 Ethics I, App.; CWS I, 441–2. 6 Page 122 below. translator’s introduction xi

Machiavelli and a number of others including , Morfino emphasises a parallelism between medicine and politics. Intuitive science thus concerns adequate knowledge of a singular physical body or adequate knowledge of a singular social body. These arguments are best considered in their full detail in chapter 3, but two further insights which undergird this section of Morfino’s analysis con- cern causality and eternity. Morfino claims that one of the most fundamental effects of Spinoza’s encounter with Machiavelli is a shift in his conception of causality, from a serial and linear understanding in his early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect to an immanent and structural understanding in the Ethics, as well as implicitly in several passages of the TTP and TP. An important corollary to these arguments is a claim concerning Spinoza’s ‘anti-humanist’ conception of eternity, which treats eternity not as a total- ising concept, but rather as a principle of intelligibility for the connection of durations that make up the temporal fabric of being.7 ‘As such’, Morfino concludes, ‘eternity forbids the conception of history as both a straight line and a cycle, in order to open on to an anti-humanistic conception of eternity as the aleatory interweaving of necessity, an eternity that does not impose any binary as obligatory for history.’8 In this way, the fourth and final step of the overall argument takes on the idea of philosophy of history, in order to examine a possible general way of reading Spinoza and Machiavelli. Morfino thus begins the final chapter by sketching a basic orientation that extends beyond Spinoza’s encounter with Machiavelli, or arguments in the texts of either. Morfino analyses two thinkers who have proposed such readings: Lessing in the case of Spinoza’s TTP, and Vico in the case of a combination of Machiavellian and Spinozist insights. The chapter is organised around a refusal to conceive history as a univocal stream of time, flowing towards the progressive realisation of nec- essary, universal knowledge. The examinations of both Lessing and Vico thus serve as models that further specify the stakes of a general approach to Spinoza and Machiavelli, and Morfino reconstructs their readings in order to highlight the implications of extracting a philosophy of history from them. He concludes that instead of such a picture of history, what the Spinoza– Machiavelli encounter urges is knowledge of the singular connection par- ticular to an object. In the case of a historical object, it is this model that Spinoza’s TTP and Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy exemplify.

7 The material throughout this chapter constitutes some elements of what Morfino will later develop as the theory of plural temporality. See Morfino 2014, especially 132–73. 8 Page 158 below. xii the spinoza–machiavelli encounter

If such a refusal of a general philosophy of history constitutes one of the key implications at the intersection of Spinoza’s and Machiavelli’s philoso- phy, one thing that remains somewhat opaque is the question of exactly in what their encounter consists. While it should not prevent us from wager- ing yet more hypotheses on the basis of careful examination of their work, specificity in this regard is fraught with difficulties. Morfino suggests think- ing their encounter as necessarily plural, involving some of the materials he excavates at the outset of the argument, and perhaps more encounters devoured by time.9 The Spinoza–Machiavelli encounter is also plural if we judge it by the results of the book in your hands: in addition to the histor- ical material that Morfino excavates, he offers an extensive discussion of key arguments across Spinoza’s work, new insights regarding the content of Spinoza’s understanding of causality, and an appreciation for how it is interwoven in key moments of Spinoza’s mature work. As such, a produc- tive response to the material in The Spinoza–Machiavelli Encounter not in searching for the origin of the unscripted space opened up by this book, but rather in the challenges and uses it presents for Spinoza scholarship and contemporary philosophy. One aspect of such a programme might be the dis- placement of the ideological couple ‘origin’ and ‘end’ for the pair ‘encounter’ and ‘relation’. Spinoza’s relation to Machiavelli is thus indeed an occa- sional one, provided we understand an occasion in the same sense as the Florentine secretary. In a history abounding with occasions, the existence of such unscripted space is necessary. What continues to be left to chance is the efficacy of relations between encounters that have taken hold, as so many footholds for finding balance in a history without guarantees.

9 Although it is not explicitly conceptualised in this book, one understanding of the encounter that bears a strong affinity to the suggestions raised by its arguments is Althusser’s unfinished manuscript (2006). See Morfino 2014: 89–112. introduction 1

Introduction

For almost two centuries, the question of the relationship between Machiavelli and Spinoza was only addressed in negative terms, mostly in Catholic and Reformed apologetics. Then for the entire twentieth century it remained at the margins of the imposing philological and critical labour dedicated to Spinoza’s work: here we find far more hints of a path to follow than genuine efforts to follow it. Adolph Menzel was the first to take up the question at the beginning of the twentieth century. While he stressed Machiavelli’s impor- tance for the political theory of Spinoza’s Political Treatise (but not, however, the Theological-Political Treatise),1 Menzel did not go beyond an analysis of the two direct citations,2 emphasising a common anti-utopian method of presentation. The latter would become commonplace in the Italian and German studies between the two world wars, and its fascination would not escape Maggiore,3 Solari,4 Ravà,5 Strauss and Gebhardt. Spinoza’s polemic in

1 ‘No politician has influenced Spinoza’s political doctrine more powerfully than Machiavelli’ (Menzel 1902: 567). ‘In [the TTP], there is no trace of Machiavelli’s influence’ (Menzel 1902: 571). 2 Emilio Villa dedicated an article exclusively to analysing of the first of these citations in 1919. His interpretation primarily lies in demarcating Spinoza’s reading of The Prince from the Republican tradition (Rousseau, Alfieri, Foscolo). Villa claims that The Prince is not a work which feigns teaching to kings in order actually to instruct the people, but rather the theory of the factual conditions of tyranny as well as freedom: ‘Just as determinate causes create tyranny’, Villa writes, ‘so also do others necessarily bring about freedom. Freedom is demonstrated to be possible: here is the highest apol- ogy and glorification that can be made of it, which Machiavelli made with admirable profundity. In this consists the value of Machiavelli and, I dare say, also the true end of his entire work’ (Villa 1919: 195). 3 Maggiore 1927: 207–9. 4 Solari 1927: 317–53; Solari 1974: 195–250. 5 Ravà 1958: 91–113. Ravà offers a fascinating suggestion in this early article, which he 2 the spinoza–machiavelli encounter

TP I, 1 was thus held to be directly inspired by the well-known passages from The Prince on effectual truth. The only noteworthy result of the analysis of this theme was Strauss’s observation in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion that the tones of the two authors’ anti-utopian polemics are different: Machiavelli’s text is lucid and cold, combating utopia exclusively in its practical effects, while Spinoza’s is harsh and sarcastic, combating utopia in the name of phi- losophy with an attitude that is fundamentally non-political.6 This point, however, exhausted the anti-utopian discussion. Other themes examined by these authors were first of all that of virtue: both Maggiore and Ravà7 highlight the influence of Machiavelli’s concept of virtue for Spinoza’s theory of virtus sive potentia.8 Second, these authors also give a date for the Spinoza–Machiavelli encounter. Building on the work of Guzzo, Ravà opposes Menzel’s restriction of Machiavelli’s influence to the TP by locating it instead already in the chapters on Hebrew history in the TTP.9 In his work, Gebhardt takes stock of the results achieved by these stud- ies. In the inventory of the sources of the two works, he proposes the first sparse and largely incomplete list of Spinozian passages inspired by

does not, however, pursue in later analyses: ‘Machiavelli’, he writes, ‘is one of the main sources of Spinoza’s political thought, and not only of his political thought’ (Ravà 1958: 91, my emphasis). 6 Strauss 1965. 7 Ravà proposes a parallelism between Machiavellian virtue and Spinozian potentia by understanding them ‘as a summing up of a person who has succeeded in social con- flicts’ (Ravà 1930: 105). 8 It should be noted that Maggiore’s work has a clearly fascist inspiration: ‘Is there another here that is not implicated in Machiavelli’s concept of virtue? And yet far from Greek virtue, which, when it is not confused with cold wisdom, with sexual pleasure [voluttà] and lethargy, meant the just and temperate equilibrium between the two. For to be virtuous, it is not enough to be wise, resting on good intentions, sitting in the balance between good and evil on the brink of a thinking almost fearful of brim- ming over into action; one needs to fight against luck [], and to dare, grasping at any means in order to reach the end and look evil in the face, instead of hiding one’s face, in order to win and to transform it into good’ (Maggiore 1927: 208). 9 ‘Menzel, who studied the relation between Machiavelli and Spinoza ex professo, claims that Machiavelli’s influence makes itself felt only in the final writings of Spinoza, particularly the TP, while the TTP would not have any trace. And yet to those who seriously know the Discourses on Livy, the entire TTP appears as an attempt to explain the victories of the Hebrew people, and to draw political conclusions from them, with the same spirit of objective inquiry that Machiavelli uses to study the history of the Roman people’ (Ravà 1930: 103). With regard to the history of the Hebrew people in the TTP, Guzzo writes in a 1924 work: ‘Here Spinoza makes a series of extremely sharp and well-chosen observations, which convey an accurate reading of the Latin historians, especially , and our own Machiavelli’ (Guzzo 1924: 403). introduction 3

Machiavelli, without, however, devoting any critical reflection to the problem.10 After a long period punctuated by Carla Gallicet Calvetti’s book, which I will consider below, there was a rebirth of interest in Spinoza’s Machiavellianism within French and Italian Marxism in the second half of the twentieth century. Alexandre Matheron, author of two important studies on Spinoza at the turn of the 1970s, showed how TP I, 2 refers to ‘popular Machiavellianism’11 rather than the true teaching of Machiavelli, which is much more comprehensive.12 He claims that by means of a rad- ical subversion of the position of both philosophy and politics (displayed in the first two paragraphs of TP I), Spinoza moves beyond the political-­ philosophical dilemma, genuinely changing the terrain. Spinoza rejects phi- losophy, inasmuch as it produces a utopia, and as for politics, ‘conforming without doubt to the teaching of the authentic Machiavelli, he reveals the arcane “Machiavellianisms” as derisive pragmatic formulas’.13 Regarding the continuity between Machiavelli and Spinoza, Laurent Bove, who was a student of Matheron, takes into consideration the concepts of , virtue and necessity in the Dutch philosopher. In keeping with the thesis of his book on the theory of in Spinoza, Bove maintains that ‘for Spinoza, reading Machiavelli [confirmed] the identification of actual essence (the conatus) and a logic of being [une logique de l’existant] striving to endure, consisting of a strategic dynamic determined by affirmation and resistance’.14 Pervaded by a sensibility that is more theoretical than historical-­ philosophical, Negri’s and Althusser’s Marxist readings of the Spinoza– Machiavelli relation attempt to identify a materialist and revolutionary tradition of thought, and end up in a perfectly oppositional symmetry. First in The Savage Anomaly and then in Insurgencies, Negri identifies the line of Machiavelli–Spinoza–Marx as a humanistic and revolutionary tradition opposed to the dominant bourgeois tradition of modernity.15 In several

10 Spinoza 1925: 242–3. 11 Matheron 1978: 43. 12 ‘There is no question, of course, of reducing Machiavelli to this broad outline: if these different features are effectively claimed by him, he integrates them, once again, in a much vaster ensemble; Spinoza knows this, which leaves in suspense the question of the true meaning of Machiavelli’s work, including The Prince’ (Matheron 1978: 49). 13 Matheron 1978: 59. 14 Bove 1999: 49. 15 ‘The history of modern thought must be seen as a problematic of the new productive force. The ideologically hegemonic vein of thought is that which functions toward the development of the bourgeoisie. This vein yields to the ideology of the market, in 4 the spinoza–machiavelli encounter

­posthumously published­ writings, Althusser sketches instead an under- ground current of materialism, which he defines as a materialism of the encounter or the aleatory. For Althusser, Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx, as well as other authors, represent an anti-humanist tradition in which reality is thought beyond every teleological and theological order, and, what amounts to the same thing, beyond every legitimisation of existing reality.16 We owe an analysis of one of the ways in which this underground current has been transmitted to Gabriel Albiac, a Spanish student of Althusser and the author of an essential study on the Marrano sources of . Albiac shows that in the texts of Abraham Pereira, who attempted to reconstruct rabbinic orthodoxy after two centuries of Marranism, Machiavelli appears as the sworn enemy who makes religion into a pure functional cover for domination.17 Precisely in becoming detached from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, Spinoza could have appealed to this sworn enemy of all religion by theoretically radicalising him. From this perspective, in fact, ‘the path for a rigorously materialist conception of virtue remains open. After Machiavelli, Spinoza is on the lookout. It is with him that the final decom-

the determinate form imposed by the new mode of production. The problem, as we have amply demonstrated, is the hypostasis of the dualism of the market within the metaphysical system from Hobbes to Rousseau, from Kant to Hegel. This is, then, the central vein of : The mystification of the market becomes a utopia of development. In opposition, there is the Spinozian rupture – but, before it, there is already the one worked by Machiavelli, and after it, the one sanctioned by Marx. The dystopia of the market becomes, in this case, an affirmation of the productive force as a terrain of liberation. We could never insist enough on this immanent and possible alternative in the history of Western thought. It is a sign of dignity, to the same extent that the other is an emblem of infamy’ (Negri 1991: 219). 16 Althusser 2006: 163–207; Althusser 1997. 17 ‘It is above all the will to set up politics as a theoretical discipline in the margins of moralising pretensions or transcendent foundations which appears in Machiavelli as the peril that must be discarded. The reduction of the study of politics to an analytic of the mechanisms of power, according to their strict functionality, insofar as it excludes any presupposition of teleological orientation from historical processes, leaves a diffi- cult situation – we should say rather that it sweeps away, it removes forever from the theoretical horizon the old problem of the ethical dimensions of the act of power: good and evil definitively pack their bags and definitively cede their deteriorated foun- dation to the subtle dynamic of games of force and domination. Virtue here consists in “knowing the times and orderings of things and accommodating oneself to them”, no longer having any connection to the Christian tradition; and, certainly, no longer with any other soteriological tradition. No other option remains, on the terrain of power [potestas], than to annihilate or be annihilated. Virtue means nothing but power [potentia]. All else is only servitude’ (Albiac 1988: 39). introduction 5 position of the Christian prince occurs – and also the subject, which is its shadow.’18 The research of Carla Gallicet Calvetti, a Catholic scholar of Spinoza and author of the only monograph on the Spinoza–Machiavelli relation in the twentieth century, is situated between these two periods. Her study, which has the undisputed merit of widening the points of agreement between the two thinkers in comparison to Gebhardt, starts from a double interpreta- tive presupposition which constitutes perhaps its strongest limitation. First, Gallicet Calvetti argues that Machiavelli’s influence is only detectable at a political level and that the method of effectual truth itself produces a fracture between politics and metaphysics.19 Second, she maintains that the relation is legible only in the terms of fulfilment.20 This marginality of the Spinoza–Machiavelli question within the basic lines of Spinozist research must be explained. It is true that, with the exception of two long citations in the TP, nothing seems to link Machiavelli the politician with Spinoza the metaphysician. But the same proximity in political theory, explicitly signalled by the two long pas- sages in the TP, has long remained incidental within Spinozist criticism when compared to, for example, the attention given to Spinoza’s rela- tionship to Hobbes, as well as to theory more generally.21 This situation mirrors the way that attention has not been given until recently to the only current of ancient thought in which Spinoza openly takes part: .22 Thus, the possibility of demonstrating the existence of a truly philosophical relationship between Machiavelli and Spinoza has only been intimated by some critics, and as such, what we find are

18 Albiac 1988: 52. 19 ‘It seems [. . .] that, if in the metaphysical domain, the human creature, genetically joined to divine substance and therefore bearing the divine stigmata, denounces, however, a special degradation of the divine represented precisely by the “properties” of existing humans, in the political domain such degradation assumes a more precise shape and remains an ethical assessment, not free of Machiavellian “tricks”’ (Gallicet Calvetti 1972: 54). 20 ‘Spinoza’s Machiavellianism [. . .] assumes an original countenance that sometimes represents the singular re-elaboration of the thought of the Italian politician, some- times the overcoming of his position, and sometimes a kind of overturning of the very convictions of Machiavelli according to his own assumptions’ (Gallicet Calvetti 1972: 65). 21 Bertman, De Dijn and Walther 1987; Bostrenghi 1992b; Giancotti 1995; Di Vona 1990; Lazzeri 1998. 22 This lacuna has been in part bridged by the special issue of Archives de Philosophie 1994 and Barbaras 1996. 6 the spinoza–machiavelli encounter merely passing observations, more the fruit of intuition than rigorous research. What explains this lack of interrogation of texts whose very materiality seems to demand it is, I think, the relations of force traversing their inter- pretation. A powerful general interpretation is in fact capable of elimi- nating the possibility of a particular question, reducing material traces on the basis of which it could have been posed to the artefact of a meticulous philology. It is not difficult to identify in the Romantic and in particular Hegelian image of Spinoza the cause of one such exclusion. It was indeed precisely Hegel who in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia established the interpretative lines of Spinozist thought for the future.23 Hegel interprets Spinoza’s thought as a philosophy of the infinite, in which the passage to the finite is nothing but verschwinden, vanishing, and not aufheben, dialec- tical overcoming. For Hegel, Spinozism is a philosophy of eternity without temporality, and therefore without history and without politics; it is a phi- losophy of which Spinoza’s illness, tuberculosis (Schwindsucht, which etymo- logically means the tendency to disappear), is the symbol. For a long time this powerful shadow cast over Spinoza’s philosophy by the all-encompass- ing [alles zermalmende] Hegelian system oriented the research of academic historiography, and it was not until the 1960s that a new perspective in Spinoza studies emerged. In particular, the work of Gueroult, Matheron and Deleuze changed the relations of force composing the field of Spinoza inter- pretations, at first only in France, and then in most of Europe. With regard to my own work, however, by far the most important page in this recent history is the dazzling and obscure one that Althusser devotes to Spinoza in the opening lines of Reading Capital:

The first person ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in conse- quence, of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true. This explains to us

23 Hegel 1976: 382–3. In the Encyclopedia, Hegel synthesises the core of his reading of Spinoza in a few lines: ‘Apart from the fact that Spinoza does not define God as the unity of God and the world, but as the unity of thinking and extension (the material world), this unity does already imply – even when it is taken in that first very clumsy way – that, on the contrary, the world is determined in the Spinozist system as a mere phenomenon without genuine reality [als ein Phänomen, dem nicht wirkliche Realität zukomme], so that this system must rather be seen as acosmism’ (Hegel 1991: 97). introduction 7

why Marx could not have possibly become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science, and why in the last analysis this foundation was consummated in the dissipation of the religious myth of reading.24

This Althusserian detour through Spinoza allows for an entirely new reading of the Spinozist theory of the finite, no longer reducible to the universalised manifestation of Schopenhauerian noluntas. Metaphysics and politics are thought against one another in a theory of history elaborated on the basis of the distinction between the true and the imaginary, itself made possible by an analysis of biblical discourse as meaning rather than truth. From this perspective, the question of the Spinoza–Machiavelli relation becomes cen- tral, if we only consider the fact that here Spinoza takes up the distinction between the imagination of the thing and effectual truth from The Prince XV. Certainly Machiavelli is not a philosopher in the strict sense, but rather a political thinker. However, once again taking up some Althusserian hints in ‘Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?’, I have searched in Machiavelli’s politics for his philosophy, finding in this way, in a virtuous or vicious circle, Spinoza’s philosophy, or at least a new shade of Spinoza’s philosophy, that is, a new way of confronting the materiality of his texts. Properly understood, such research does not pretend to be the objective confrontation of two thinkers given as a conclusive totality. It is by means of the continual passage from one to the other, each taken into consideration in the materiality of every fragment, that I have tried to answer the questions I have posed. These questions are not purely historiographical: in the space between [Zwischen], which at once separates and binds Machiavelli and Spinoza, I have sought the means to think history independently from every philosophy of history, but also from the tired song of its absence, intoned by nihilism.

24 Althusser et al. 2015: 14–15.