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Abstract
This dissertation aims to rethink the politics of expression through an original interpretation of Spinoza. Prevailing liberal theory takes the defining problem of those politics to be the task of adjudicating between legitimate and illegitimate speech. A striking feature of such theory is its consequent neglect of vexing questions pertaining to how expression becomes a politically effective, imperiled, or, in short, meaningful phenomenon. From Spinoza's texts, I reconstruct a theory that is better attuned to expression's various political impasses and plural possibilities. Examining his interconnected accounts of metaphysics, affect, religion, and politics, I argue that expression in Spinoza is at once an ontological and political category of world-making power. Rather than fixate on the familiar juridical question of permissible speech, Spinoza's conception of world-making, or what I call "empowered expression," implies a different guiding question: how does expression (and which sort?) come to serve a particular kind of politics?
The study shows that the politics of expression in Spinoza encompass but are irreducible to the legal measures that he famously prescribes in defense of free speech and thought. These prescriptions need to be understood as part of a broader ontological and political problematic of conflicting power and desire. Spinoza's social ontology envisages collective life as animated by an affective conflict that forms and transforms selves and communities alike. From this unremitting discord, politics of expression emerge as ways of cultivating, in varying degrees, divergent desires for mastery or mutual empowerment. Spinoza's analyses of statecraft and citizen judgment detail distinct modalities of these politics, neither of which is sufficient to itself. His presentation of statecraft as the art of channeling subjects' expression as civic devotion both illuminates the state's indispensable role in moderating violence and calls attention to the domination that even the most well-governed state effects. Statecraft cannot bring about the political agents and circumstances of free or empowered expression. Rather, Spinoza's conception of "the freedom to philosophize" models the non-sovereign politics of empowered expression as a citizen-driven activity of public reason and critique.
