Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love. - Benedictus de Spinoza

El honor, en fin, constituye un gran impedimento porque para lograrlo es preciso vivir según la manera de ver de la gente, es decir, huir de lo que ella huye y buscar lo que ella busca.

Spinoza did not envision secular Judaism. To be a secular or assimilated Jew is, in his view, nonsense. It is to be a nonsectarian sectarian. For him, Judaism without an observance of its textually and historically defined tenets, laws, and ceremonies would be a masquerade. [...] Of course, Spinoza had great contempt for traditional sectarian religions, and Judaism in particular. And he did argue that Jewish law is no longer binding on contemporary Jews. Perhaps in this sense he unwittingly opened the door for a secular or even Reform Judaism. But he also had a very strict understanding of what was to count as Judaism. Spinoza may have been a religious reformer, but what he envisioned was not reform within Judaism. Rather, what he had in mind was a universal rational religion that eschewed meaningless, superstitious rituals and focused instead on a few simple moral principles, above all, to love one's neighbor as oneself.

...That a Spinozist social science should be of French concoction is no coincidence: from the historical scholarship of Martial Guéroult to Alexandre Matheron's pioneering study of the individual and community in Spinoza; from the centrality of Spinoza's materialism to the Althusserian project to Gilles Deleuze's radical re-working of his philosophy of immanence and the advances of contemporary scholarship, France has an altogether impressive tradition of Spinoza interpretation. At the heart of this retooling of a seventeenth-century metaphysics is the liquidation of the ‘Cartesian’ bourgeois-individual subject which supposedly animated the humanist visions of French phenomenology and existentialism. Althusser, of course, approached Spinoza's work philosophically—as a detour, seeking grounds for a critique of idealism, en route to a properly materialist Marxist philosophy—but also critically, noting for example its lack of a theory of contradiction. Lordon, by contrast, was looking for a conceptual framework through which to rethink social, economic and political life; Spinoza's work is only glancingly contrasted to that of his peers—there is no ‘outside’ to his thinking here. Yet, as with Althusser or Deleuze, Lordon's perspective would remain anchored in the affirmation of Spinoza as the thinker who can emancipate us from the delusions of free will or untrammelled individual choice, allowing us to grasp human struggles for existence in a disabused materialist fashion.