In this reply I focus on three issues related to the reading of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality : that of the pure state of nature, that of the relationship between self-love and pity, and that of the history of ethical and political corruption. Furthermore, I draw attention to the role that the Social Contract, in continuity with the Discourse, attributes to revolution.

In this article I will concentrate on the most obscure aspect of Spinoza’s theory of recognition, exploring the double bond that Spinoza establishes between self-love and the search for admiration, and between self-love and the need to escape from contempt. In the first part of my work I study the role played by admiration and its derivative forms in the creation, at one and the same time, of non-democratic powers and of the subjectivities that tend to challenge them. I then take into consideration the passages of the Ethics where the anthropological presuppositions of the social and political dynamics described in the former work are made explicit. Having shown the affective mechanism through which self-love tends to connect the admiration of the Self and to the contempt of the Other, and the inter-subjective repercussions of this celebration of the Self, I conclude by analyzing the role taken by equality and its negation in the struggle for recognition derived from the search for admiration.

This article discusses Roberto Finelli’s latest book ("An accomplished patricide. Marx's fi-nal confrontation with Hegel") by focusing in particular on the theme of individuality. First-ly, it reconstructs the different role played by this theme in the thought of Hegel and Feu-erbach as well as in Marx's early and late writings. Secondly, it highlights an important theoretical tension that, in relation to the question of individuality, potentially jeopardizes Finelli's discourse and its coherence. Is individuality independent from social relation or is it established by the relationship itself? In the former case, how can the abstraction of capi-tal be considered "real"? And in the latter, how is it possible to think the individual's re-sistance to this abstraction?