Simon Gros

In the Theological-Political Treatise, Baruch Spinoza elaborates a daring conception of revelation in which God is nothing other than the immanent order of nature, and prophecy is rooted in the imagination rather than in a privileged speculative intellect. Prophets do not receive transparent concepts but vivid images and signs shaped by their temperament, prior beliefs, and historical milieu; their certainty is moral and practical, not mathematical or scientific. Revelation thus appears as a necessary modulation of the power of imagination within a determinate natural and political situation, governed by the same laws as everything else, yet producing a dense symbolic surplus that cannot simply be reduced to doctrine.

Gilles Deleuze reads Spinoza as privileging expression—truth manifesting itself in and as being—over revelation conceived as an appeal to external signs, whereas Emmanuel Lévinas reproaches Spinoza for dissolving revelation into ontological necessity and thereby evacuating its ethical and symbolic charge. Malabou’s lecture returns to the Treatise in order to recalibrate this dispute: if prophecy is imaginative and historically conditioned, and if Scripture speaks in parables, narratives, and anthropomorphic images, does this mean that the symbolic is merely an obstacle to adequate knowledge, or does it instead mark the necessary form in which divine necessity appears to finite minds? Spinoza’s own method of scriptural interpretation—philological, historical, and rigorously contextual—treats the Bible as a text whose meaning emerges from the patient reconstruction of languages, practices, and political conflicts, rather than from a hidden metaphysical code implanted beneath its surface.

From this vantage point, the question “too many signs or too few?” becomes inseparable from Spinoza’s critique of superstition and of the political exploitation of religious imagery. Superstition, sustained by fear and the volatility of the imagination, furnishes rulers with an unrivalled instrument of domination; it teaches people to “fight for their servitude as if for salvation” and to persecute dissent under the guise of piety. Yet Spinoza does not propose to abolish the symbolic altogether. He maintains that things are called sacred when they are used to foster obedience and piety, and that their sacred character depends on the way communities employ them. This makes the symbolic both contingent and necessary: contingent in its historical forms, necessary insofar as finite beings require images, narratives, and rituals to orient themselves ethically. Malabou will explore how this Spinozist account of the imaginative structure of revelation and the contextual status of the sacred opens a space in which reason and imagination, philosophy and theology, can neither simply coincide nor be cleanly separated, and how it underwrites Spinoza’s defence of the freedom to interpret and to philosophize as a condition of democratic life.

Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher renowned for her sustained elaboration of the concept of plasticity—the capacity simultaneously to receive form, to give form, and to explode form—which she first develops in L’Avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique and then extends across contemporary neuroscience, psychoanalysis, political theory, and feminist philosophy. A former student and interlocutor of Jacques Derrida, she engages the legacy of deconstruction while pushing it into new terrains, from cerebral plasticity and trauma to new forms of capitalism, ecological crisis, and anarchic politics. She holds positions at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, the European Graduate School, and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Across this wide field, Malabou’s work persistently interrogates how identities, institutions, and forms of power can be broken and remade, and how subjectivity is reshaped in an era marked by technological, economic, and geopolitical transformations—questions that find a new focal point in her reading of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and its account of symbolic necessity.