1 The Political Project of Autonomy as Absolute Sovereignty and/or the Collective Body's ‘Absolutely Absolute’ Affirmation

Because it is a power (puissance) of affirmation and resistance in every sphere, virtue is struggle. Like his ethics, Spinoza's political thought is primarily combative. And this struggle has its own (philosophical-political) strategy, adapted to time. This is the explicit approach of the TTP, which expands and accompanies the problems raised in the scholia, prefaces and appendices of the Ethics. The declared opponent is the theologian and, in his wake, the tyrant. Beyond the concepts that Spinoza attacks, the true enemy of the philosopher is the shared universe of meaning and the structures of political domination that these doctrines entail. The universe of meaning separates societies, peoples and individuals from their own political activity and constituting power, the only true guarantors of their freedom.

The Spinozist struggle for autonomy, both political and ethical, develops on the metaphysical basis of a conception of the organisation of reality that is itself conceived as strategic in its singular modal actualisation. The concept of a strategy of the conatus of the collective body, or the multitudinis potentia (the multitude as a specific modality of political reality in its tendency to constitute itself as ‘nation’, ‘people’ or ‘State’) places us at the centre of Spinoza's political thought as we find it in its most innovative form in the TP. We find a perfect analogy in the TP between the individual body and the collective body: their common pursuit of preservation and affirmation follows the logic of causality inherent in singular beings. The analogy has implications that make this unfinished work the most radical theory of the strategy of the conatus. Thus, reading the TP confirms and clarifies the innovative theoretical consequences of the historical study of the TTP.

Spinoza's political thought is first, as we said, struggle. To say that this struggle is a fight for freedom would be correct. However, it is somewhat trivial if we do not add to Spinoza's definition of freedom a dynamic of ‘free necessity’, which, we know, corresponds to the absolute affirmation of an existence, its infinity in act.