Date of Completion
12-12-2024
Degree Type
Honors Thesis
Discipline
Philosophy (PHIL)
First Advisor
Virgil Martin Nemoianu
Abstract
This paper invites attention to textual facts and other intricacies in the readership of Spinoza’s writing, which bring to the fore his thinking qua thinking under language, a consideration that seems at least underappreciated, if not misappreciated, by the very readership in question. In so doing, the paper reflects on the possibility—and perhaps necessity—of a poetological purview into a philosophical corpus, in terms of its being written under a sense of Latin as well as of other tongues, generated by and for a thinker to be the linguisticity within which he thinks. To put in differently: if Spinoza were to be consistent with his paradigmatically monistic ontology, his thinking and the language-body that expresses it would have to belong to each other as one.
The paper traverses three paths. First, I explicitly thematize and explore an observation from reading experience, which does not purport to be a properly philological insight: there is a corporeal textuality to linguistic production, hence a corporeal textuality to Spinoza’s linguistic production, which produces and sets in motion an activity of meaning that is characteristically Spinozist. Some conventions and issues in the work of reading his writing, which involves also the work of translation, commentary and other practices, in the Anglophone world or elsewhere, are portrayed and questioned accordingly. Last but not least, implications for the appreciation of Spinoza’s philosophy that a consciously inhabited poetics may have are discussed.
Recommended Citation
Pham, Tam, "On the readership of Spinoza’s writing & a poetics for thought" (2024). Honors Thesis. 556.
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/honors-thesis/556
