The History of Reception as a Battlefield: French uses of “Spinoza” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The French reception of Spinoza during the nineteenth and twentieth century shows that what we call the “reception” of a corpus must be understood in a quite different way than the word suggests. The receiver must be disposed to make use of the corpus, and this attitude is determined by the receiver’s position within the structure of the academic or intellectual field. Spinoza was received in France in the early nineteenth century because it played a strategical role in the debate about pantheism as an atheism. But the “Spinoza” that was inherited was a corpus of works, while a certain reading of it had been elaborated in another context for other goals, namely, that of German idealism. Reception is not merely passive: the receivers impose their own structure to what affects them. At first, “Spinoza” was a figure or a label that played a role in a battlefield. This is still true for what we may call (albeit not in an ontological sense) the “materialist” reception in the 1960s. Yet, it was not doomed to give a purely imaginative knowledge of “Spinoza”: a better knowledge of the corpus, international exchanges between scholars of all over the world, and history of reception itself, made a rational knowledge of Spinozism, and even a singular understanding of Spinoza, possible.