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Work in Progress Seminar Series | Winter 2023

鈥淎n Underground Current in the Theory of Desire鈥�

Thomas Minguy
Friday, January 20, 2023
3:30-5:30 PM
Leacock Building, Room 927

Abstract:
In this paper, I frame Benedict Spinoza鈥檚 notion of desire in terms of a pleasure-principle. The philosopher famously defined human essence as desire, and so to analyse how this essence is organized, how it navigates the world according to what one could call, with Laurent Bove, a set of existential strategies, establishes a firm ground on which we can approach the remainder of Spinoza鈥檚 thought. But the concept of desire has quite a track record in philosophy, and so to distinguish the Spinozian version from others is far from being simple.
The interpretation I offer here has two main implications.
On the one hand, I answer the following: how is desire organized in Spinoza鈥檚 philosophy? My argument relies on the pivotal role of pleasure in the move from desire as a form of inertia and desire as an expansive movement. Most of the argument here relies on a close reading of a few propositions in the Ethics, accompanied by a discussion of the readings of Yirmiyahu Yovel and Eugene Garver that also discusses this shift in Spinoza鈥檚 description of what Mich猫le Bertrand called 鈥渁ffective economy鈥�.
On the other hand, I confront Spinoza鈥檚 conceptualization of desire with a contemporary contender, namely, the Freudian understanding of psychic life as cashed-out in terms of desire, also ruled by a pleasure-principle. Freud, I suggest, remains within a teleological understanding of desire. This gives to Spinoza鈥檚 theory a subversive dimension.
Together, these two moments show that a reading of Spinoza鈥檚 philosophy grounded in the conception of desire I propose helps us to reframe Spinozian thought as a peculiar form of libertine philosophy.