Abstract

Despite Spinoza’s prominence in Joyce’s Ulysses, almost nothing in the Joyce Industry’s hundred years has been written about him. My first section reviews three exceptions to this trend, which view the character Leopold Bloom as modeled on Spinoza’s (1) life, (2) redefinition of prophecy, and (3) the “attribute” of thought thinking thought. My second section follows a fourth Joycean to the Marxist Antonio Negri’s essay on Spinozist freedom and Joyce, from which I derive a fourth figure of Bloom as (4) a liberating prosthesis for infinite democracy. And my final section applies my previous interpretation of Spinoza’s “intuition” as poetry to Ulysses, interpreted as an epic prose poem where Joyce as a Spinozist God poly-conjugationally persecutes a poly-subjugated Bloom, including with pervasive antisemitism, thus making Ulysses more satirical Inferno than happy Divine Comedy. However, strategically channeling Spinoza and his philosophy more powerfully into Bloom renders him an ethically-politically Stoic hero, defiantly prophesizing a democratization of Joycean conjugation, from persecuting poly-subjugated Others to joyful self-conjugating in search of radical democracy and just peace.