Deleuze and Negri on the Spinozist Distinction Between Potentia and Potestas: A Brief Outline In Spinoza’s philosophy, potentia refers to the immanent causal power intrinsic to every mode and ultimately grounded in God/Nature itself, whereas potestas denotes the juridical and institutional authority that emerges from the organization of collective power within a political community. Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze, two of Spinoza’s most influential twentieth-century readers

Potestas: Spinoza's Notion of Political Power Spinoza’s concept of political power, or potestas, is developed primarily in the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise. In these works, he examines the nature of dominion, sovereignty, command, and the institutional structures through which political communities are governed. Unlike potentia, which refers to the immanent power of individuals and corresponds to what Spinoza, in the Political Treatise, identifies

Some Remarks on Spinoza's Concept of Potentia Spinoza’s Ethics is, at its core, a philosophy of power or potentia — the ontological and immanent power of being, acting, persevering, and affecting or being affected. Conceptually distinct from the juridical and institutional power (potestas) detailed in the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise, potentia signifies the causal power intrinsic to existence itself. Potentia or being-able-ness Potentia derives f

Itself in Mind for the Future We see the visible world as somehow inevitable, with all its ratios of movement & rest, its manifold shapes & ecstatic forms, not realising that nature is always busy, acting unseen in all its power, without external cause, producing within itself its own effects, differentiating this idea from that idea, bypassing one potential in favour of another, & making actual a particular mode of being (a mutation, a thing, a body, a colour), while keeping

Tool-Use If the hammer is a symbol of the power of the hand, the hand is the product of the need for a hammer.

Is Spinoza’s Pantheistic Ontology a Template for Authoritarianism? OVERVIEW: ● The pantheist ontology of Baruch Spinoza (b.1632 – d.1677) is an attempt to deny the accountability of political evil. ● Spinoza’s instinct for statist control and his distrust of the common man are displayed in Theological-Political Treatise (published 1670). His masterwork, Ethics (published posthumously in 1677), is a bold attempt (in the guise of ontology) to classify minds and bodies as attrib