Abstract

This chapter sketches out the journey Spinoza makes from formal being to the concept of infinite machine understood as the inexhaustible source of a post-foundational fostering power in the world. I show the genetic link between the mind as fosterer of affects, and the city of such minds as the fosterer of multitudes. Spinoza feels that the methodology appropriate to multitudes must begin from the perspective of power. I claim that Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus, deploys such a methodology in which the multitude forms a particular moment of the political process. I advance an alternative methodology, still focused through the lens of power, which discloses the possibility of the super-multitude.