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Spinoza and ArtLiterature and the Art of Living

By Moira Gatens and Anthony Uhlmann

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Published 31 October 2026

About this book

Presents Spinoza’s contribution to understandings of the imagination, art and creativity

  • Highlights Spinoza's insights into the value and nature of artistic practice and thought
  • Reconfigures the relation between Spinoza’s thinking and the role of the affects
  • Analyses Spinoza’s influence on and by literary history, including his precursors
  • Emphasises the role of disposition in Spinoza’s philosophy as key to creating and understanding literature
  • Examines the importance of the exemplar and the logic of affect to literary thinking

Against the mainstream view, Gatens and Uhlmann argue that Spinoza’s philosophy can significantly contribute to understandings of art, creativity and the central place of the imagination in human wellbeing.

This perspective shows how concepts essential to Spinoza’s philosophy, such as ingenium, the exemplar and the theory of the affects illuminate how works of art and literature make essential contributions to human thriving. They consider case studies of major English authors who were negatively or positively influenced by Spinoza, including Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Percy and Mary Shelley, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Reviews

This is a pathbreaking work that demonstrates, with exemplary clarity and expertise, how Spinoza’s unique ars vivendi takes shape directly in relationship to art and fiction. Gatens and Uhlmann deliver a brilliant and original account of the role that imagination, fiction, and the passions play in Spinoza’s philosophy—that is to say, they rethink Spinoza’s rationalism tout court to show how his truly viable approach to art bears on our theory and experience of art and literature, directly or by way of cherished authors like Swift, Defoe, Eliot, and Woolf.
Gatens and Uhlmann offer a compelling, transformative reading of the value of Spinoza for a philosophy of art. This is the best kind of book, increasing our powers of knowing Spinoza as well as our sense of the importance of art, affect, and imagination to a life well lived.
Table of contents

Abbreviations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Imagination, Art and the Fictional Frame

Chapter One: On ‘Aesthetics’ in Spinoza
Figure of Thought 1: The Worm in the Blood

Chapter Two: Affect, Imagination, and Freedom
Figure of Thought 2: The Jubilant Stone

Chapter Three: Disposition and the Ars Vivendi
Figure of Thought 3: Nero’s Ingratitude

Chapter Four: Spinoza, Literary History and Artistic Practice
Figure of Thought 4: Orlando Furioso and the Hippogriff.

Chapter Five: The Complex Question of Spinoza’s Influence: Defoe and Swift
Figure of Thought 5: How to Destroy a Horse

Chapter Six: Percy Shelly, Queen Mab, and The Revolt of Islam
Figure of Thought 6: The Knave at the Gallows.

Chapter Seven: Exemplarity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Figure of Thought 7: Adam’s Mistake

Chapter Eight: George Eliot, Prophecy, and ‘the not false error’
Figure of Thought 8: The Winged Horse

Chapter Nine: Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Desire, and Ethology

Epilogue: Spinoza, Art, and the Ars Vivendi

Works Cited
Index

About the contributors

Moira Gatens

Moira Gatens is Emerita Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney. Her interests include early modern philosophy, philosophy and literature, and feminist theory. She is the author of Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (Routledge, 1996), Spinoza's Hard Path to Freedom (Royal Van Gorcum, 2011) and Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality (Polity Press, 1991). She is co-author of Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza (Penn State University Press, 2009) and Feminist Ethics (Ashgate, 1998). She is co-editor of Institutional Transformations: Imagination, Embodiment and Affect (Routledge, 2021), The Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism (OUP, 1998), and Gender and Institutions: Welfare, Work and Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Anthony Uhlmann

Anthony Uhlmann is Distinguished Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov (Bloomsbury, 2011), J. M. Coetzee, Truth, Meaning, Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020). He was the Managing Editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies (Edinburgh University Press). He has translated a number of essays from French into English, including, The Exhausted by Gilles Deleuze.