Cristina Ruiz Guiñazú Argentinian / French, b. 1951
According to Spinoza, happiness is as rare as it is difficult to attain. Sorrow, hatred, fear, superstition, and submission distance us from it. Philosophy, politics, and art, on the other hand, are human ways of escaping all that debases life and condemns it to pure and passive sorrow. Trust in the pursuit of earthly happiness is an inner pledge against this destiny of impotence—and the living legacy of Spinoza, our contemporary.
Association de Amis de Spinoza. (Translation)
Literature
Excerpt from Mario Donoso's essay:
The Active Bodies: The Pictorial Spinozism of Cristina Ruiz Guiñazú
In Multitudo, bodies form a heterodox collective: a large variety of people, very different from one another, gathered in a festive-political crowd. The common affect that unites this multitude is pleasure, joy.
Interaction and play are fundamental to this ethics of corporeality. To interact playfully with the world and with God, in a pleasurable game. Knowledge cannot be separated from this bodily regime of pleasures that characterizes a healthy and good life. Ruiz Guiñazú’s work crystallizes what Spinoza affirms in the scholium of proposition 45, part IV:
“Thus it is of the wise person to use things and, as far as possible, to enjoy them (certainly not to excess, for that is not to enjoy them). It is of the wise, I say, to refresh themselves and moderately enjoy pleasant food and drink, and likewise, as each can without harm to others, to enjoy perfumes, the beauty of the woods, ornaments, music, sports, the theater, and other such things. For the human body is composed of many parts of diverse nature, which constantly need new and varied nourishment so the entire body remains equally apt for all that follows from its nature, and therefore, so the mind also remains equally apt to understand many things at once.” (Ethics IV 45)
Copyright (c) 2025 Mario Donoso
