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stevenlight, August 18, 2006

"Conversation with Spinoza" is an imaginary conversation using Spinoza's work as a way into his scantily documented life. The great rational philosopher meets his interlocutor whom, it seems, he essentially missed his whole life.
Prizing ideas above all else, Spinoza left little behind in the way of personal facts and furnishings.
Through the conversation with Spinoza, there are two constant and parallel streams ? two voices, two characters of the same person; Spinoza narrates his life twice through the eyes of his two portraits with a 20-year distance, separate as two worlds in one soul.
The space between the two parallel stories, the same as the one between two parallel lines, stays unmarked, with the absence of touch or a real encounter.
Spinoza tells his life story: the early death of his mother, his rejection of all romance, the books he wrote and the ideas he cultivated ? it's a life free from emotion or desire, lived according to his ideals.
Coming to life at the end of the novel, being dead at the beginning, Spinoza is being born in as many ways as there are different worlds of the readers who, talking to him, knitted the threads of the spider-web, which is included in the game of philosophy and the game in philosophy ? a game in which the stakes are nothing less than life itself.

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