ABSTRACT
With this striking image, Spinoza puts blood at the center of our reflections on the place of bodies in the universe. Blood would be a medium and a comparative term whereby, here at least, Spinoza “altogether relativized the distinction between bodies natural and artificial; the state and its institutions, much as any physical compound,” all of which “are nothing but a balance of forces.”2 Blood, to be sure, is a “physical compound,” one among many, but as such it is a body verging on the distinction between natural and artificial, individual and collective, medical and political. Spinoza’s worm, the sight and perspective it offers, puts us at the center of a flow that irrigates the distinctions constituting our universe, part and whole. It will lead us, at disparate velocities, to the matter of Jewish blood. Spinoza seems at once to take William Harvey’s lead and to depart from it, in order to offer his own version of the motion and circulation of the blood.3
