Spinoza, secret life

Abstract

In the saga that Pascal Quignard calls “Dernier royaume”, Spinoza’s name is scattered in a profusion of incidental mentions, and also intervenes in some fundamental passages. Quignard’s Spinoza is a solitary man, a “reader”, untimely, who conceived the good life as a “secret life” oriented by caution, in opposition to the political and theoretical Spinoza of the democratic materialism of the multitude that occupies the center of much of the current criticism. More than products of society, the Spinozistic “rarities” that motivate the Quignardian reading are based on solitude, friendship and the life of thought.