This is a preface to introduce the contributions gathered in this special issue on Spinoza.
Those articles are the outcome of a call for papers that attempted to identify the specific influence in
philosophy of the so called “Spinoza renaissance”. A period during which, besides a renovated and
for many reasons unexpected interest in the study of Spinoza’s concepts, there also was the strong
necessity of rethinking Marxism through a thought grounded on immanence. In fact, Spinoza started
to become a prism to read how philosophy could avoid, on the one hand, political immobility and,
on the other hand, the vacuum panlogism of a depleted dialectic. This text stresses the specificity of
every single author’s point of view in this fundamental step in the construction of Contemporary
French Philosophy.
