A thought beyond dualisms, creationist and evolutionist alike

A common assumption in the contemporary reception of Spinoza is that his philosophy is a celebration of pure life, wherein death plays no role on all of the levels that constitute his philosophy: ontology, ethics and socio-political criticism. In this reading, Spinoza’s monism is sustained only on the ground of an unspoken fundamental dualism between life and death and the exclusion of the latter. Antonio Damasio’s recent interpretation of Spinoza is revealingly symptomatic of this approach, as it unveils that at stake in the underlying opposition between life and death is the psychoanalytic pair of the pleasure principle and the death drive. While Damasio perpetuates the aforementioned dualism by reducing Spinoza’s “substance” to the homeostatic principle of pleasure at the exclusion of the death drive, I argue that Spinoza’s monism consists in the intertwining and inseparability of not only body and mind but also death and life, and that it is only through this intertwining that Spinoza’s ethics can unfurl its potential for social and political criticism.