Spinoza’s “Black Double”: Marronage, Non-Autonomy, and Political Violence
In the 17th century, Dutch production, transportation, and finance sectors underwent rapid globalisation, making the Netherlands the first world-economy of early modern colonial capitalism. The philosopher Baruch de Spinoza was well aware of these developments, as Amsterdam Sephardic Jews took part...
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| Formato: | Artículo revista |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
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Centro de Estudios Avanzados. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
2025
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| Acceso en línea: | https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/revesint/article/view/50968 |
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| Sumario: | In the 17th century, Dutch production, transportation, and finance sectors underwent rapid globalisation, making the Netherlands the first world-economy of early modern colonial capitalism. The philosopher Baruch de Spinoza was well aware of these developments, as Amsterdam Sephardic Jews took part in the Dutch colonization of Northern Brazil between 1630 and 1654. Nevertheless, Spinoza remained largely silent about Dutch company colonization and never offered a critique of Atlantic slavery, even though he used the concept of servitus as a key organising category of his writings. Referencing the well-known seventeenth letter to Pieter Balling, in which Spinoza, suddenly and in a distinctly xenophobic register, broke his silence on Dutch colonialism by recounting to Balling the dream image of a “Black, scabby Brazilian” that stood before his eyes one morning, the article reads Spinoza against his conservatisms in order to reconstruct, between the lines of his thought, a decolonial theory of the power of the multitude. It explains why it took Spinoza his entire intellectual life to develop concepts that transform the traditional philosophical topos of the fear of the multitude into an affirmation of its power—recognising in insurrection not the violent destruction of society, but rather a mode of its very constitution. Even though Spinoza repeatedly recoiled from this insight, the article suggests identifying the protagonist of his dream not with Henrique Dias, but with the maroons of Palmares, in order to examine the extent to which we can think, through Spinoza, a non-autonomous or fugitive politics. |
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