In this article I will concentrate on the most obscure aspect of Spinoza’s theory of recognition, exploring the double bond that Spinoza establishes between self-love and the search for admiration, and between self-love and the need to escape from contempt. In the first part of my work I study the role played by admiration and its derivative forms in the creation, at one and the same time, of non-democratic powers and of the subjectivities that tend to challenge them. I then take into consideration the passages of the Ethics where the anthropological presuppositions of the social and political dynamics described in the former work are made explicit. Having shown the affective mechanism through which self-love tends to connect the admiration of the Self and to the contempt of the Other, and the inter-subjective repercussions of this celebration of the Self, I conclude by analyzing the role taken by equality and its negation in the struggle for recognition derived from the search for admiration.
