In the political as well as in the ethical spheres, the philosophical project of Spinozism is to bring us ever closer to the real movement of the self-production of the Real. As a naturalist philosophy of causa sui, Spinozism is also the philosophy par excellence of the real movement through its radical immanentism: which is to say, it is a philosophy of substance. For ‘substance’ is the self-normative, self-organising, self-constituting movement ‘without principle or end’ that takes place in infinitely many ways in (and according to) an infinity of things. This dynamic reality (in its causal complexity), for both individuals and nations, bodies and ideas, is freedom, because freedom is movement.

Prior to the question of the factual finitude of the human landscape and the systems of order in and through which they are necessarily established and maintained, it is a question of grasping the real movement of the self-production of substance in its substantial infinity; before life, refracted in the theatre of passive affections, becomes a dream. The Spinozist imperative, in ethics as well as in politics, is therefore Machiavellian: it is a ‘return to the principle’. It is certainly not a conservative return to a putative ‘natural order’, or to a life that would organise its materiality prior to modality. Rather, it is a return to the principle as a self-normative, self-organising movement, a law of nature that we find as much in the power (puissance) of ideas as we do in the power of bodies and the power of the multitude. Substance is a model of autonomy for ideas, humans and peoples.

The Ethics ends with a clear contrast between the vera animi acquiescentia of the wise, which exists according to the inner logic of their ‘free necessity’, and the ‘restlessness’ of the ignorant, which is tossed about by external causes. This opposition is neither that of motion and rest, nor that (in some ways closer to the truth) of the productive affluence of desire and its opposite, impotence and unproductivity. The real opposition is between a happy and balanced productivity (in and through ‘the power of God’) of the real movement of the Real in its autonomy (in which the philosopher in her becoming participates, with all her unique causal power in the alignment that has taken place between her essence and her existence) and the heteronomous movements of the ignorant.