The Language of Generosity: Between Spinoza and Cervantes

In this essay, I flesh out the elements of what I call a literary Spinozism, a thoroughly immanentist metaphysical explanation of the writer’s activity and of the ontological status of the literary text. Based on a conjoined reading of the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise, three concepts will be developed to account for the ontology of the literary work: internal necessity, affective power and self-reflexivity. To examine this Spinozian view of literary production, I develop one case-study, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, with particular focus on the complementarity between the orality of the spoken word and the grandiloquence of Don Quixote. This choice of case-study, as I hope to show, is not arbitrary. Spinoza’s radical immanentist hermeneutics and Cervantes’ revolutionary literary project in the Quixote are two attempts to address one and the same problem which both thinkers inherit from Christian (Erasmian) humanism, namely the problem of generosity. I end by attempting to illustrate the three Spinozian concepts with reference to Jorge Luis Borges’ work on the Quixote.