This exchange took place on 4 February 2004, at a meeting of ‘La philosophie au sens large’, a study group led by Pierre Macherey that met weekly from 2000 to 2010.

Pierre Macherey

Of the two works devoted to Spinoza that François Zourabichvili published simultaneously with PUF in 2002, Spinoza, une physique de la pensée and Spinoza's Paradoxical Conservatism, the latter seems to raise the more delicate and intriguing problems. That is why we have looked at it with a view toward opening up a discussion about Zourabichvili's singular reading of Spinoza, a reading, let us be clear from the start, whose singularity makes it all the more stimulating. This book is subtitled ‘Childhood and Royalty’, which immediately provides a glimpse into the vertiginous rapprochements that take place in it. It is essentially composed of three studies, of which the first, which principally concerns the practice of philosophy, is dedicated to the theme of ethical transition that carries out the passage from ignorance to wisdom and from servitude to freedom; the second is dedicated to the theme of the child and the gaze, at once intimate and distant, stunned and yet comprehending, and at the very least interested, that the philosopher casts over it; and the third is dedicated to absolute monarchy, the form of organisation of power that was tending toward dominance in Europe at the time that Spinoza elaborated his political reflections, and which provided him, polemically, with a concrete target. At first glance, these three objects of reflection are quite removed from one another, and the move to bring them together is not an obvious one; yet it is their confrontation that, as we will see, provides Zourabichvili's work its content; the work exploits them by reflecting them in one another, with a view toward going back over the whole of Spinoza's philosophy, tying its threads together otherwise, in a way that escapes, or at least contorts, the properly doctrinal effects that have primarily been imposed upon it when the work is considered head-on, and which makes it possible to freely reconstruct its necessity by desystematising it.