This article focuses on the relation between language and power from the wider perspective of the problem of the constitution of a shared human life starting from the power of the bodies to produce images, to acquire habits, to build a memory, to stabilize meanings through usage. The Peircian concept of 'interpret', at the centre of this essay, is anticipated by Spinoza: the semiotic relation interpreter-sign-object is thought by Spinoza is thought by Spinoza as the constitutive dynamic of common practices that are the site of passivity and activity, subjection and resistance. The interpreter reveals his ambivalent nature: on the one hand, conceived as theological figure, he is exposed as 'desire of domination and disruption of the common body; on the other, he can affirm himself as the site of an emancipatory modification of the collective power and of a reversibility of the power relation. Therefore, if language is at the same time superior power of affirmation of the body of the multitude and matrix of illusion exploited by the violence of the theologians, the methodos of interpretation of the Scripture proposed by Spinoza can be seen as an attempt to bring back to Scripture its own words, and to restore a language capable of expressing the power of the multitude to organize itself.
