Animalized Others in Spinoza’s “Imagination”

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 10 draws attention to the hegemonic construction of “mankind” in Spinoza’s works, highlighting how they overall do little to undermine the exclusionary assumptions ingrained in the notions of “we” and “us.” As Spinoza safeguards human solidarity against a descent into an animal-like existence, the “us” that he wants to protect and uplift is imagined as male, culturally familiar, not affected by certain cognitive differences and debilities, and so on. Certainly, many of Spinoza’s negative remarks on marginalized groups speak to mechanisms of habitus that make it easier, if not more convenient, to upend some social positions more than others. However, I contend that his derogatory statements about these groups also neatly map onto each other in the way he construes them all as being governed by passions or as lacking agency in general—which evinces that there is a systematicity to what otherwise might be dismissed as offhand remarks.