Every student of Spinoza's philosophy knows the formula of the conatus: the actual essence of each finite thing is its striving to persevere in its being. But few have recognised with quite so much acuity and sensitivity as François Zourabichvili what profound difficulties this basic notion must inevitably produce for a philosophy that precisely calls itself an ethics. The question that serves as the founding insight of this book is disarmingly simple: if all things strive to persevere in their being, how could they ever seek to change in anything other than a superficial way? Could they not merely confirm, and reconfirm each time anew, whatever it is that already pertains to their essential nature? For is not the fundamental feature of any ethics – even one that manages to avoid the traps of a transcendent moralism – that it involves some kind of demand that one change oneself? And is not the task and promise of Spinoza's philosophy to determine how one can leave behind a passive state of ignorance in order to develop the active powers of thinking? Yet the formula seems to block any such transformation in advance: Conatus, quo unaquaeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est praeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam.

This apparent puzzle is the first way to understand the paradoxical in the title of this remarkable book by François Zourabichvili, one of two he published in 2002, and a strong candidate for the most creative and unique work of Spinoza scholarship in many decades. Zourabichvili's rigorous fidelity to the letter of the text across the entirety of Spinoza's oeuvre is matched, perhaps even outmatched, by the frequently surprising nature of the concepts and problems that catch his sustained attention, attested to by the seeming disparity of the themes of the three studies that constitute the book: ethical conversion and the notion of one's element; childhood and growing up; and political form and revolution. Yet the definite unity of the text is organised around this fundamental problem: how can we hold together this metaphysical claim, that finite things are characterised above all by their striving to persevere in their being, with the continual demand that we become somehow other than what we are – whether in an ethical, personal, or political register? This is what I would like to call the problem of transformation in Spinoza's metaphysics.