Een
enkele keer kom je een werk tegen dat studie maakt van hoe Spinoza voorkomt in
literatuur. Ik wijs op dit boek, waarvan de paperback vorige maand verscheen
Patrick
McGee, Political Monsters and Democratic
Imagination: Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2016 - 272 pagina's – books.google
– vorige maand, 22-03-2018, verscheen de paperback [cf. de site van de auteur]
Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores
the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William
Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate:
a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation;
a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one
another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power
of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates
between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth,
something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural
situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings,
whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel,
Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or
among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom
are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond
categories and social hierarchies.
