Professor Susan James: 'Spinoza and Poetry'

In the last few years a lot of work has been done on the place of art within Spinoza’s philosophy.  As a writer so deeply concerned with the psychological and political effects of imagining, how does he view the arts?  In this talk I focus on his attitude to poetry and suggest that early-modern poetics enters deeply into his thought. First, Spinoza’s analysis of imagination is continuous with a conception of poetry as part of rhetoric.  Secondly, his analysis of the historical relation between religion and philosophy contains what is in effect a genealogy of poetry. In the last section of the talk I ask what  Spinoza thinks this genealogy implies for the philosophical significance of poetry in his own era.  His answer, I’ll suggest, makes space for poetry within the practice of philosophical understanding.