THE ARTS OF SPINOZA +PACIFIC SPINOZA

In the course of working on this issue of Interstices and the Auckland conference that preceded it, I came up against a number of hesitancies, or even skepticisms and resistances, in dealing with a scholarly endeavour in Aotearoa New Zealand involving a long-ago philosopher from the faraway Europe of old—Spinoza (1632-1677)—as purportedly put into conjunction with themes of art, architecture, urbanism, and environment. These were the aesthetically-minded hesitancy (why Spinoza on art? isn’t Spinoza’s philosophy devoid of aesthetics?), the architecturally-minded hesitancy (why Spinoza in an architecture journal? can’t Spinoza be reduced to the triviality that everything is affective, including architecture, and can’t we just read Deleuze instead?), the ecological hesitancy (can Spinoza even be said to be an ecological thinker? isn’t he a trivial thinker even when read ecologically?), the postcolonial hesitancy (isn’t it a recolonizing imposition to impose Spinoza, a European thinker, upon a non-European colonial settler society, i.e. New Zealand?), and the historical hesitancy (Spinoza was so long ago, his painful lucubrations seem dry as dust, one may as well attempt to re-read the Rosetta Stone). Many of the contributors’ essays in this volume go some way towards answering these questions.