In Baruch Spinoza's work, God is without name and without shape. His essence is the very form of the necessity of nature, the infinite regularity, actuality and rationality of what is. And there is no good or bad in this. All representations of God as a legislator, creator or father, endowed with intentions, are merely human projections prompted by an inadequate understanding of what a cause is. A true cause is never separated from its effect but is immanent to it, remaining within it. As cause of himself, that is, of nature, God is nothing but his own effectuation, and, in this sense, he cannot be said to be transcendent – external – to what he produces.

But are the readings of Spinoza that characterise him solely as a thinker of immanence and/or self-regulation entirely fair? Do they do justice to the major issue of the origin of the sacred as developed in the Theological-Political Treatise? What is the fount of sacredness for Spinoza? Can it be reduced to sheer error or illusion, a temporary hole in the tissue of immanence, or does it open a specific space in immanence that remains to be explored? What exactly are the relationships between necessity and faith, between truth and its irreducible symbolic dimension? And what does symbolic mean for an impersonal God? Following Spinoza's scriptural hermeneutics and discussing it along with thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, I develop a new approach to Spinoza's concept of revelation, related to his vision of the sacred as an economy of signs without referent. In so doing, I hope to show that Spinoza's critique of religious dogmatism and fanaticism should not be confused with the dismissal of the sacred; on the contrary, it is propaedeutic to the philosophical delineation of the sacred.

The Space of Revelation

The most famous of all the immanentist readings of Spinoza is undoubtedly that of Gilles Deleuze, who calls Spinoza the ‘prince of immanence’ (Joughin 1990: 11). Early on in Expressionism in Philosophy, Deleuze insists on the difference between immanere and emanare, showing that Spinoza's God has no eminence, does not hold himself above creatures, but is horizontal and stays with what he expresses (Deleuze 1990a: 41).