French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Pessel, In Spinoza's Ethics
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

In Ethics of Spinoza

André Pessel

Publication date: 10/03/2018
Publisher: Klincksieck
Series: Critique de la politique
ISBN: 978-2-252-04122-2
EAN: 9782252041222
No. of pages: 146 p.

A systematic atheist, a virtuous atheist, Spinoza has disappeared beneath Spinozism, which is itself reduced to a form of atheism. The author sought to raise the question of this resistance to the *Ethics* and to rediscover Spinoza beneath Spinozism. To do so, it was necessary to be within the *Ethics*, within a book whose *more geometrico* writing conceals an unprecedented displacement. Among Spinoza's opponents, resistance to the text shows that Spinoza establishes a new and unprecedented way of positioning the reader.

Upon reading the *Ethics*, one understands what it means for the subject to be an effect of the text: the reader is constructed by their reading, configuring an absolutely new theory of the subject. It was necessary to start from the refutations of Spinoza to measure, against the prestige of the Cartesian cogito and its method, what the subjection of the self to an order of which it is the effect, and not the principle, might be.

And 'order' is understood in two senses. The order of the actual infinite into which the subject's power is integrated; yet, by leveling accusations of Spinozism, Spinoza's opponents privileged a theory of substance without working on a theory of power. The order of a book that uses geometry as rhetoric and proceeds back and forth. To place oneself within the *Ethics* in order to read it is to accept this determination of the reader, who is constituted through these repeated displacements.

The order of reading is infinite and corresponds to the actual infinite of which it is the effect.

André Pessel has worked in particular on Mersenne, Descartes, and the resistance to Cartesianism. He has published several studies on the Précieuses, Charron, Jean-Pierre Camus, La Mothe Le Vayer, and Gabriel Naudé. He has dedicated numerous seminars to reading Spinoza's *Ethics*.

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An article on this work can be read on laviedesidees.fr:

"The Work of the Text", by M. Blancher.

"How is the reader constituted and constructed by the philosophical text? This is the question André Pessel addresses to Spinoza's work, which strives to integrate its reader not only into its thought, but more fundamentally into God, that is to say, Nature."

Published by Klincksieck in the Critique de la politique series, this volume reflects André Pessel's extensive scholarly engagement with seventeenth-century philosophy, Cartesianism, and the history of reading. The author examines how Baruch Spinoza's masterwork employs a rigorous geometric method not merely as a formal exposition, but as a rhetorical device that actively displaces and reconstitutes the thinking subject. By analyzing historical refutations and the persistent resistance to Spinozism, the study uncovers the subtle ways in which a philosophical text positions its audience within an infinite order of thought and nature.

This book offers valuable insights for students and scholars of early modern philosophy, literary theory, and the history of ideas who seek to understand the relationship between textual structure and subjectivity. It addresses fundamental questions concerning how a reader is shaped by a philosophical system that subordinates the self to an actual infinite rather than a Cartesian center. Rooted in close textual analysis and a deep knowledge of the seventeenth-century intellectual landscape, Pessel's work serves as an indispensable guide for anyone wishing to navigate the complexities of Spinoza's monumental treatise.