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Spinoza’s Dream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2016

Willi Goetschel
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Abstract

In 1664, in a letter to a friend, Spinoza shares a dream he had of a “black, scabby Brazilian.” At the historical moment of a fierce race among Europe’s colonial powers, when the Amsterdam Jewish community’s vested interests in the Dutch colonial enterprise have reached a formidable status, Spinoza’s dream reflects an early awareness of the postcolonial predicament. The dream figures this awareness as the moment of the awakening—inseparable from the imagining—of the modern subject. Although the dream has been discussed with regard to its significance for understanding the role of the imagination for Spinoza as well as the issues of freedom, slavery, and question of race, the paper addresses the specifically postcolonial juncture that Spinoza’s dream and the letter marks. Spinoza’s dream figures the philosopher’s awakening to the precarious status of the postcolonial subject position as recognition of the constitutive significance of the postcolonial constellation for the formation of modern awareness.

Keywords

SpinozaHenrique Diasmodern philosophyplagueDutch coloniespostcolonial
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 3 , Issue 1: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism , January 2016 , pp. 39 - 54
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 For the pivotal role of Spinoza in the debate on what is “Jewish Philosophy” and what defines modern Jewish identity see Goetschel, Willi, The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (New York: Fordham, 2013)Google Scholar.

2 For readings of the letter, see Feuer, Lewis S., The American Imago (14) 1957: 225–242Google Scholar; Bertrand, Michèle, Spinoza et l’imaginaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 5–36Google Scholar; Sanchez-Estop, Juan Dominguez, “Des Presages à l’entendement: Notes sur les presages, l’imagination et l’amour dans la letter à P. Balling,” in Studia Spinozana 4 (1988): Spinoza’s early writings, 57–74Google Scholar; Laux, Henri, Imagination et religion chez Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 141–145Google Scholar; Gatens, Moira and Lloyd, Genevieve, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999), 19–23Google Scholar; Montag, Warren, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 87–89Google Scholar; Klein, Julie R., “Dreaming with Open Eyes: Cartesian Dreams, Spinozan Analyses,” Idealistic Studies 33.2–3 (2003): 141–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenthal, Michael A., “‘The Black, Scabby Brazilian’: Some Thoughts on Race and Early Modern Philosophy,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31.2 (2005): 211–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Letter by Spinoza to Balling, The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, Vol. 1. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 353. For the Latin use of Aethiops see Spinoza, Opera Omnia, ed. Carl Gebhardt, Vol. 4. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925), 77.

4 For a detailed discussion of this aspect of Spinoza’s letter to Balling see Bertrand, Gatens and Lloyd, Sanchez-Estop, Laux, and Klein.

5 There may remain some unresolvable tension in the way he discusses the function of dreams compared to his mature theory of the affects, but we should not rush to reduce this to a simple self-contradiction that helped repress one anxiety or another that Spinoza might have experienced. Rather, I suggest addressing the complication Spinoza’s discussion creates as an attempt at working through a problematic dream—or rather a problem or number of problems the dream seeks to address.

6 The reasons for the excommunication were most likely not religiously motivated but driven by concerns about what was considered a direct attempt at infringement of the Jewish community status of self-administration. Spinoza had taken recourse to the Amsterdam judicial court for a business matter against the custom to submit such cases to the self-regulating body of the Jewish community. See Steve Nadler and for a detailed discussion Vlessing, Odette, “The Excommunication of Baruch de Spinoza: A Struggle between Jewish and Civil Law,” Dutch Jewry: Its History and Secular Culture 1500–2000, eds. Jonathan Israel and Reinier Salverda (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 141–170Google Scholar.

7 See Israel, Jonathan, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 621Google Scholar, 625; Nadler, Steve, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.; Harrison, Mark, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (New Haven: Yale, 2012), 26fGoogle Scholar.

8 For a contemporary account of rumors concerning a Mediterranean origin of the plague see Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year (London: Penguin, 2003), 3Google Scholar: “it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey Fleet; others said it was brought form Candia, others from Cyrpus. For the claim that a “plague-stricken ship travelling to Amsterdam from Smyrna” was the origin of the 1663 plague see Panzac, Daniel, “Plague and Seafaring in the Ottoman Mediterranean in the Eighteenth Century,” Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy, eds. Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, and Mohammed-Salah Omri (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 45–68Google Scholar, esp. 48.

9 Israel, , The Dutch Republic, 625Google Scholar.

10 More on Isaac Aboab da Fonseca in the following. For Jewish slave owners during this period, see Natalie Davis, “Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeenth-Century Suriname” in this issue.

11 Haarnack, and Hondius, , “ ‘Swart’ (Black) in the Netherlands,” 92Google Scholar.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 92.

14 For an account of the incidence see Vlessing, “The Excommunication of Baruch de Spinoza,” 163: “Isaac Spinoza, closely related to Michael Spinoza [Spinoza’s father], had once been attacked by a Moor, a negro named Abraham. The assailant carried a stone in one hand and a knife in the other, and hit Isaac on the chest. He was disarmed by bystanders, but returned later with a juvenile gang threatening the Jews, who fled to the synagogue in Joseph Pinto’s house.” For the likely identification of Isaac Spinoza with Bento (Baruch) de Spinoza’s grandfather, who lived in Antwerp but was buried in Amsterdam, see Nadler, Spinoza, 31. For the incidence: Gemeentenarchief Amsterdam, Archief 5075. See also Haarnack and Hondius, “ ‘Swart’ (Black) in the Netherlands,” 92 and 336 note 15.

15 Vlessing, “The Excommunication of Baruch de Spinoza” calls it a family story and suggests that Spinoza’s dream might be linked to this “family story,” 163f. There is, however, no indication that the incidence of 1620 circulated as a “family story” that Spinoza would have been aware of.

16 See Kolfin, Elmer, “Black Models in Dutch Art between 1580 and 1800: Fact and Fiction,” Black Is Beautiful: Rubens to Dumas (Amsterdam: Wanders Publishers Zwolle, 2008), 71–87Google Scholar, and Carl Haarnack and Dienke Hondius with a contribution by Kolfin, Elmer, “ ‘Swart’ (Black) in the Netherlands: Africans and Creoles in the Northern Netherlands from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century” in the same volume, 89–106Google Scholar. For Dürer’s 1521 portrait of Katherina see Haarnack, and Hondius, , “ ‘Swart’ (Black) in the Netherlands,” 90fGoogle Scholar.; for Rubens’s striking 1613–1615 study, see “Four Heads,” 76f. See also Massing, Jean Michel, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition—Europe and the World Beyond, Vol 3.2. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. 213–260Google Scholar.

17 See Elmer Kolfin, “Black Models in Dutch Art.” Besides Dürer and later Rubens (for background: 78) see also Rembrandt (82, 242, 251).

18 Kolfin, , “Black Models,” 83Google Scholar.

19 See Black Is Beautiful, painting 62, 247. Including a black page or servant figure became a trend reflected in numerous paintings of the time. See the countless paintings in this volume and also in Massing, The Image of the Black.

20 Kolfin, “Black Models,” 83.

21 For a striking example, see Ferdinand Bol’s portrait of Pieter de la Court, his second wife Catharina van der Voort, and a black servant (1661, Antwerp, Royal Museum of Fine Arts). For a discussion of the painting see Massing, The Image of the Black, 228f. Pieter de la Court was a prominent figure close to Jan de Witt, one of the prominent political leaders of the Dutch Republic 1654–1672. Catharina van der Voort was related to Jan de Witt. Spinoza owned a copy of De la Court’s Political Discourses and was influenced by his ideas. Cf. Nadler, Spinoza, 258.

22 Feuer, Lewis S., The American Imago 14 (1957): 225–242Google Scholar.

23 Mattos, Hebe, “ ‘Black Troops’ and Hierarchies of Color in the Portuguese Atlantic World: The Case of Henrique Dias and His Black Regiment” Luso-Brazilian Review 45.1 (2008): 6–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 For the original Latin see Spinoza, , Opera Omnia, ed. Carl Gebhardt, Vol. 4. (Winters: Heidelberg, 1925), 76Google Scholar.

25 Feuer, 229–33.

26 For a detailed discussion of the complicated economic and financial situation that led to the herem, or excommunication, as anything but religiously motivated see Vlessing.

27 Spinoza’s Collected Works, 353.

28 See Spinoza’s Ethics, E3P2Schol.

29 Curley, , Spinoza’s Collected Works, 497Google Scholar.

30 As Spinoza notes in the passage quoted earlier, effects of the imagination that don’t proceed from corporeal but from the mind can assume the role of being omens of what will happen because our mind but not our body is able to anticipate things, that is, to represent something as present that is not present (“the effects of the imagination [or the images which have their origin in the constitution of the Mind] can be omens of a future thing”). Whether the later Spinoza would agree with this determination is another question.

31 See Bertrand’s remark in the concluding paragraph of the introductory chapter that makes paradigmatic use of Spinoza’s dream: “La connaissance adéquate ne se substitute pas à l’imaginaire, elle s’y superpose.” Bertrand, Spinoza et l’imaginaire, 36.

32 Balibar, Etienne, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality, Mededelingen vanwege he Spinozahuis 71Google Scholar, 1997.

33 Balibar, Etienne, “What Is ‘Man’ in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy? Subject, Individual, Citizen,” The Individual in Political Theory and Practice, ed. Janet Coleman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 215–241Google Scholar, esp. 230, and the discussion of Balibar’s notion of transindividuality in Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings, 65–69.

34 See for instance Bertrand, Spinoza et l’imaginaire, as well as Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings.

35 Gatens, and Lloyd, , Collective Imaginings, 66Google Scholar.

36 Feuer, Lewis S., “The Dream of Benedict de Spinoza,” 240–241Google Scholar.

37 Israel, , The Dutch Republic, 766Google Scholar.