Spinoza and the Sign

An outstanding, original, and meticulous study of Spinoza’s semiology, this work by eminent Spinoza scholar, Lorenzo Vinciguerra, will draw much attention and applause. – Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Johns Hopkins UniversityLorenzo Vinciguerra’s Spinoza and the Sign; the Logic of Imagination is one of the most important books on Spinoza to appear in the twenty-first century. It is both extraordinarily erudite, drawing on an immense and diverse body of scholarship, even as Vinciguerra’s project is in many respects without precedent. As the book’s title suggests, he sets out to explain Spinoza’s theory of imagination by examining the often overlooked role of the sign (signum) in Spinoza’s oeuvre. Spinoza’s sign is not exclusive to language; according to Vinciguerra, signs are perpetually produced and interpreted by bodies that affect and are in turn affected by other bodies in a process that is not restricted to the human world but envelops all that exists. Spinoza and the Sign is a profoundly Spinozist study of Spinoza, an attempt to think with rather than about Spinoza and as such invites us to think in new ways. – Warren Montag, Occidental College

Lorenzo Vinciguerra is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Bologna, Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Amiens and director of Sive Natura. International Center for Spinozan Studies (ICSS). He has written several books on Spinoza which have been published and translated into different languages: Spinoza (Carocci, Rome 2015; La semiotica di Spinoza (ETS, Pisa 2012), Qu l’avenir pour Spinoza? Enquêtes sur les spinozismes à venir (Kimé, Paris 2001) and with Pierre-François Moreau he edited Spinoza et les arts (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2020). His interests move through the history of Spinozism, pragmatism, ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

Alexander Reynolds is a translator and independent scholar. He recently translated Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson by Benedetta Zavatta, Vincenzo de Risi: Francesco Patrizi’s Conceptions of Space and Geometry, in Boundaries, Extents and Circulations: Space and Spatiality in Early Modern Natural Philosophy (eds. Vermeer and Regier) and Davide Crippa, The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century.

Helen Glanville, Lauréate Académie de France 2022, is a translator and independent scholar.