'Wherefore it is certain that those, who cry out the loudest against the misuse of honor and the vanity of the world, are those who most greedily covet it. This is not peculiar to the ambitious, but is common to all who are ill-used by fortune, and who are infirm in spirit. For a poor man also, who is miserly, will talk incessantly of the misuse of wealth and of the vices of the rich; whereby he merely torments himself, and shows the world that he is intolerant, not only of his own poverty, but also of other people's riches' - The Ethics, 260

This quote was given last time, but worth a re-quoting, a re-orientation to the top of this post. On first reading, this seems of a ferocity that would expect from Nietzsche and it seems but a bit out of place in Spinoza. But the power of his critique here cannot be underestimated, especially from where I am writing, and is due further critical attention. What is most praise-worthy, for this extended exercise and here as well, is the manner in which Spinoza comments on the angry, seething and internally violent nature of social interaction. Spinoza, here, in a manner reminscent of psychoanalysis, seems to be suggesting a racism that is underneath, a seething that hates others in engaging with one's own perceived shortcomings.

There are two ways, I think, of reading this passage: one from psychoanalysis, the other in Nietzsche. For the former, one could argue, the subject is always covering in fear of engaging with the Real, or the behaviors that are wrong, which the subject acts itself. The subject hates others who embody that which it embodies, to cover or avoid the Real of the traumatic realization of their own actions. I'm not thoroughly convinced by this reading, but it's a possibility and sheds some intereting views. A Nietzschean reading is interesting to, though it would be a jump (and a huge misreading) to say that Nietzsche and Spinoza are on the page about most things; Nietzsche mocks much of what Spinoza advocates (God, control, measure, a subject, etc.). But Spinoza, in this passage, seems to suggest as to the operative hatred in defining oneself, where the subject is caught in something reminiscent of Slave Morality. The subject loathes that which it perceives close it because it sees others in possession of that which it desires. The subject defines its morality based what benefits it and doesn't benefit it, without ever making an effort to examine its own internal hatred. There's something to be said about these similarities.

One other thing jumped at me in reading this passage, in that it reminded me of a passage from Derrida's book on Heidegger's relation to Nazism, Of Spirit. Derrida writes:

'Because one cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectivity, even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism, etc., and do this in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name of an axomatic - for example, that of democracy or "human rights" - which, directly or not, comes back to the metaphysics of subjectivity' (40).

Read in connection with the Spinoza quote above, one notices that Spinoza renders the problem as caused by 'infirm spirit.' I'll leave that for now.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans: Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Spinoza, Benedict. The Ethics. Trans: R.H.M. Elwes. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1989.