Luce deLire

Spinoza scholarship is riddled with questions about distinctions. Recent scholarship suggests that Spinoza might be using a particular kind of distinction whose exact understanding is a (if not the) key to many of the tantalizing but obscure claims that Spinoza seems to hold. Let’s call this distinction “Spinoza’s special distinction.” I argue that Spinoza uses not one but three kinds of special distinctions because he understands attributes as cognitions without idea. I first discuss the Scotistic and Suárezian models of Spinoza’s distinctions presented in recent years. I then argue that the attributes derive from an activity of substance and not from an activity of an intellect. They are therefore cognitions without idea. Attributes are the same as substance, but in relation to an intellect—not unlike to Spinoza, the idea of the circle is the circle (E2p7s, PUF 46/26–27) in relation to an intellect. The perception of the attributes in fact is divine action, seen from the receptive end, which is why it is receptive and not passive. Spinoza’s special distinctions, then, are necessitated by substance itself. The attribute/attribute distinction fits Spinoza’s definition of real distinctions, which I call real perceptions. The substance/attribute distinction cannot count as a real distinction—I call it a real perception. Furthermore, Spinozistic versions of the distinctions of reasoned reason are really distinctions as adequate conceptions. I conclude that Spinoza uses distinctions of reasoned reason, perceptual distinctions and real perceptions, each with a particularly Spinozistic flavour.

In this article, I argue that Rawls is not actually an ideal theorist (as it is commonly understood), that his political theory remains unconvincing nevertheless, and that we should understand justice as failure in order to unlearn our adherence to dysfunctional ideals. I demonstrate that Rawlsian ideals are not removed from actuality, as both ideal theorists and their critics seem to think. Instead, they are already actualized as something to aspire to in a given culture. They are actual ideals. Non-ideal theorists, such as Charles Mills, who claim that instead of starting from ideals we should start from actual conditions thus miss the target. I then present an argument against theories of actual ideals: the original position requires optimal epistemological conditions in order to source actual ideals from public discourse. I offer Aamer Rahman’s “Reverse Racism” joke as a test for whether these conditions apply. I argue that in our world, they do not. Finally, I suggest justice as failure as a critical practice that may help us to unlearn our inherited dysfunctional actual ideals.

The importance of infinity for Spinoza's philosophy can hardly be overstated. Understanding Spinoza means understanding (Spinoza's take on) infinity. In this paper, I present a deflationary account of Spinoza's infinity: Infinities across ontological states (modes, attributes, substance) follow the same general trajectory: From an indeterminate essence, infinitely many things follow. And as a consequence, Spinoza's universe is infinite all the way down. Some think that to Spinoza, infinity is indeterminacy (acosmism). Others say that infinity in substance follows from the essence of substance, while infinity in modes does not. I argue that both views are false. Instead, infinity in modes and infinity in substance emerges from the numerical indeterminacy of essences. I show that this view can be traced back to Descartes' famous wax example and that it is manufactured to avoid a particular contradiction. In order to specify my point, I demonstrate that both ‘absolute infinity’ (God) and ‘in suo genere infinity’ (attributes) must be read through the deflationary account of infinity. I also argue that we do not need an additional qualitative indeterminacy and that causation and conception are not always parallel (such as in reductio proofs).

Can the Transsexual speak? I investigate this question through the case of Ella Nik Bayan who self-immolated in Berlin (Germany) on September 14, 2021. I first argue that this self-immolation is unreadable within the current frameworks of Western democracies. The case, however, paradigmatically demonstrates that emancipation within the confines of neoliberal capitalism can only be read under the pretense of a toxic protection. I then move on to claim that Ella Nik Bayan’s self-immolation calls for a completely different political order from the one we currently inhabit, which, with Namita Goswami, I call “ heterogeneous.” I argue that heterogeneous politics is a politics of radical hospitality that opposes institutions of private property in particular. Unlearning private property means to pre-enact a world without the kind of racist, transmisogynist, and antisemitic violence that killed Ella Nik Bayan. Anti-capitalist hospitality sets out to create the social and cultural resources that enable a world beyond (such) violence.