1 Conatus as Imitation and the Ambition for Domination

When we imagine the joy or sadness of those like us, the succession of images of their affections (induced by Habit) in (and through) our body is immediately ‘our’ joy or sadness, by virtue of the vitalising or depleting movement of active power (puissance) it provokes in us. Imitation is a real identification through which we immediately feel what we perceive in a quasi-osmotic way:

We participate naturally (according to a true law of nature) in the feelings of others like us. Our body, by attuning to the nature of the thing it imagines, is spontaneously in unison with all its affective fluctuations, and thus becomes one and the same body with what it imagines. At this collective level of the constitution of humankind as a body, imitation plays a role in connecting affections that is equivalent to the role of Habit for the individual body.

The immediacy of imitation is, however, only apparent. There is always necessarily a difference (even if minimal) between the model and its imitation. The body of the imitator (which Spinoza also calls the emulator) could not do any particular thing if it did not have the mnesic trace of the model from which the action can be determined. The body is memory. It is by virtue of Habit that the body's ability to be affected forms the connection of affections-images, their particular contents ‘[modes that actually exist…] that involve the nature of the external body’. To imitate is to remember, even if this memory, like the resulting imitation, is not recognised as such (as memories and imitations). For Spinoza, the dynamic of imitation is, short of being a representation, an activity of conatus-Habit, certainly, but one that is prior to any memory (understood as reflected consciousness of time) as well as to any object recognition. The dynamic of imitation can, however, be understood within the logic of the spontaneous strategy of the conatus, in that it is organisational in its consequences.