Spinoza's City: Donkeys, Deligny, and the Joy of the Streets

Abstract

“Spinoza’s City” asks a fundamental question about how Spinoza’s metaphysics might help us to learn the arts of living the streets of our cities with a greater joy. The donkey and the spiderweb —accompanied by Deleuze, Deligny, and a host of other ancestors— are the essential conceptual personae accompanying the Dutch philosopher in the articulation of responses to this question. Pivotal concepts include “common notions,” “composition,” “immanence,” the “unexpected,” “experiments,” and “transversal empiricism.” The very specific particularities of the street, dependent on differentials of texture and thought, become slowly aligned with the possibility of the consistent joy of street-life.