Immaginazione e ontologia della relazione. Note per una ricerca [Imagination and ontology of relation: Notes for a research]

This article studies the question of imagination in Spinoza, starting from a reading of his thought as an ontology of relation. The first part analyses Lorenzo Vinciguerra’s interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of sign, an interpretation premised upon a reading of the body as constitutively relational. The second part examines Laurent Boves’ reading of the history of Jewish people, and the role played in it by the concept of constituent power. The final part of the essay attempts to draw some provisional conclusions about the concept of imagination: Spinoza’s rejection of a cogito understood as an inner space closely related to a personal body forbid to think of imagination as an individual power, and at the same time stresses the limits of a conception that attributes it directly to a collective subject. Only the category of transindividuality allows us to think psychic and collective individuation in their unity, and to correctly understand the complexity of Spinoza’s imagination, its layers and different temporalities