Itinerari dell'antispinozismo

The research intends to evaluate the incidence and the effects of the appearance in France of Spinoza’s Opera Posthuma (1677-1680), in order to underline historical circumstances, cultural facts and theoretical fields by which the so-called ‘Spinozareception’ has come about – especially in Cartesian or post-Cartesian outlook. Breaking into a cultural ground marked by lively theological and doctrinarian controversies, Spinoza’s thinking seemed to point out those themes and problems of Cartesianism subject to many interpretative pulls, or even put aside, in the developments of Cartesian metaphysics itself. In fact, after the death of Descartes, his followers often turned to emphasize their compatibility with the requirements of Calvinistic or Catholic orthodoxy. The leading thread through the entire work is therefore the convergence of Cartesianism and Spinozism, and in particular the encounter between ‘Cartesianisms’ (theoretical tendencies into a Cartesian ground) and Spinozism. The beginning section is devoted to the analysis of the first Cartesian refutations of Spinoza (by Poiret, Lamy, Jacquelot, and Régis). Then, the ambiguous critical strategy deployed by Pierre Bayle in the famous article «Spinoza» is discussed. In the final part, the work is focused on the oblique confrontation of Fénelon’s Cartesian metaphysics with the theoretical image of spinozisme. If, in a historical view, the most important anti-spinozistic works came out from that articulated and dislocated space which goes under the name of ‘Cartesianism’, in our opinion the study of dynamics of connections of Cartesianism and Spinozism can help to better understand the complex history of early European Spinoza-reception. We find an a posteriori confirmation of it in the pages of the principal French learned journal, Journal de Trévoux, whose chronological extent (1701-1767) actually involved the majority of ‘mediate’ circulation of Spinozism. At the heart of the controversies between supporters and opponents of Descartes, the encounter with Spinoza brought to surface some common trends in both theoretical spaces, and some shared features hard to remove. The latter will orient the peculiar modalities of Cartesian criticism and confutation, through violent and misleading accusations, and with clear omissions of perfectly Cartesian themes, but suspect of heresy (antifinalism, divine omnipotence, free creation of eternal truths, determinism, occasionalism and continuous creation…). If it is true that historically the ‘spinozism’ was a repulsive image, it also had the function to enable different Cartesian positions to ‘elaborate’ their object - and, from this point of view, that object was exactly the denial and the rejection of Spinoza. This Cartesian rejection will pervade all the following history of anti-spinozism, across the journaux, through Bayle’s dissembling sarcasm and Fénelon’s desperate elan, ending up with the eighteenth-century Spinoza-renaissance, which already had almost a century of battles behind him.