About circles and limits

MARIANA DE GAINZA

Conferencia; A Conference for Pierre Macherey's 'Hegel or Spinoza'; 2022

Counterdisciplinary Spinoza Studies, UC Berkeley; Labor, Philosophy and Change, UC Berkeley; Décalages: an Althusser Studies Journal.

An ordinary way of reading Spinoza asserts: starting from God, Spinoza arrives to God. Marilena Chaui identifies this circular reading with a traditional interpretation of Spinoza which, inspired by a certain pantheistic conception, installs the idea of a compact, monolithic, self-centered divine reality, ignoring the internal movement of Spinozian geometrical logic, that procedes from the absolutely infinite to the finite modes. Besides that circular reading, I would like to remember here that the very image of the circle itself has been associated with Spinoza: the circle, as a metaphor of a timeless being and an eternal knowledge. It was Hegel who used that association to celebrate Spinoza's conception of infinite in act, when he interpreted the famous geometrical illustration of Letter 12 in the terms of that connection between true infinite and circularity. The main ambiguity of this Hegelian reading of Spinoza lies in the way of understanding the crucial problem of determination, one of the central points of Macherey's reading of the encounter and disagreement between Hegel a Spinoza. Following, with my own emphasis, Macherey’s approach, I will question this reading, using the Spinozian example of the two nonconcentric circles to thematize the singular Spinozian conception of determination and limite.