September 5, 2021:
Why Spinoza?
Anti-teleology, decentered totality. Very well and good. But, so what? If it's necessary to ransack the history of philosophy in a Romantic search for origins, Pascal is more important, while, transparently, Bachelard and Lacan and Cavaillès are vastly more immediate.
There's a contradiction in the lineage. Granted Spinoza's parallels with the Stoics, and the Stoics' rivalry and hostility toward the Epicurians, evoking both Spinoza and Epicurus as ancestors seems garbled at best.
In reality all of these lineages are distractions. The real issue is to complete the unfinished theoretical work which would offer directions forward.