Abstract

Why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their own deliverance? How can compliant subject be created? Spinoza's "Theologico-Political Treatise" provide a clear answer to the question: superstition, technically understood as an art of discipline of the body and of the mind through imagination. While Spinoza explores the way in which the Hebrews rituals disciplined the bodies (and thus desires) through a sort of hydraulics system comparable to the functioning of a siphon, we further argue that the neoliberal regime of desires works in a similar way: in both cases it is by the artificial introduction of a lack, that desires are drained, siphoned off.