In the Greek tradition, the relationship between time and eternity takes the form of a mysterious passage from the world of perfect and immutable being to its pale copy, the world of becoming in perpetual change. The moving image of eternity for Plato, a consequence of the processual movement of the One for Plotinus, time is often the result of a degradation of the chain of beings that is exhausted in being unfurled. Even though duration is in league with the existence of modes and constitutes the property (propre) of beings that are not self-caused, it does not appear as the indication of an ontological impoverishment in Spinoza. Modes are not the beneficiaries of necessary existence, but they do enjoy a necessity of existing. All things, when conceived sub specie aeternitatis, include, through God's essence, existence – at least if we follow the demonstration of proposition 30 from Ethics V. The eternity of modes is well and truly a reality that is reducible neither to a participation nor to an imperfect imitation. At the same time, through a curious reversal in perspective, it is not the mind's eternity that constitutes a real conundrum, but the appearance and existence of duration. This looks a bit like the mysterious, contingent residue of history of which Hegel speaks, a residue that does not shake the necessity of the process but remains rebellious to it. It is nonetheless clear, to Spinoza's eyes, that the feeling of contingency is the deceptive fruit of a confused understanding and that the existence of duration itself answers to a necessity. Given this situation, it is important to determine why and how eternal modes can endure.

To this end, we must, before anything else, clear away the obstacles that prevent us from understanding the relationship between duration and eternity and that thereby lead to confusion. The first is tied to an apparent difficulty of Spinozist thought which seems to temporalise the intemporal. The second concerns a reworking of the concepts of duration and time in relation to the scholastic tradition. So long as the details of the problem go unclarified, the existence of duration will lead to vain speculations improperly based on the idea of a genesis or a passage from the eternal to the temporal.

We now turn to the philosophical consequences of the pages devoted to the Hebrew theocracy in the TTP. In these pages, Spinoza develops the following:

First, he elaborates the idea of an individuality proper to the collective body in the form of the ‘nation’. If Spinoza generally identifies the nation with the State, under certain conditions the nation can precede and outlast the constitution of State. The same concept (ingenium) is also used to define the particular ‘complexion’ of human individuals and of nations. National complexions are not only the abstract arithmetical sum of individuals but express their singularity through ‘differences of language, laws and accepted customs’.

Second, we learn that a nation's individuality has similar requirements for its effort to persevere in its being to those of human individuals (including the essential requirement of representation-signification, which is needed to attain its own imaginary reality).

Third, he shows that collective individuality affirms itself in and through its power (puissance) to pose problems and identify solutions adequate to its own perseverance.

Fourth, we find that collective individuality is formed according to the same principles as human individuality. The politico-social (laws), cultural (language, customs) and historical nature of the nation, just like human nature, establishes and remains in its own identity according to the laws of Habit, the joy principle, memory and recognitive imagination.

And fifth, this isomorphism suggests a strategy for the collective body as such, a strategy of the multitudinis potentia (as per Spinoza's expression in the Political Treatise). Spinoza proposes, correlatively, that we understand any strategy of the conatus on the political model of posing and resolving problems.

1 From Habit (the Productive Activity of the Nation's Actual Existence) to the Self-Organisation of the multitudinis ingenium as the Practical Political Subject

In Chapter XVII – along with many other passages of the TTP – Spinoza attributes the main ‘strength’ of the Hebrew people to the power of habituation (habit), whose value depends on ‘opinion’ alone. Opinions, however, are formed by ‘acquired habit’. It is by virtue of these habits and opinions that the Hebrews were led to their first covenant with God.

To translate without betrayal, it is necessary to first determine whether eternity is a category, a genus divisible into species, a form capable of assuming several appearances (aspects), or that ‘je ne sais quoi’ which differentiates between the finite and the infinite. An elucidation of its nature must serve as a prolegomenon to any interpretation of the phrase sub specie aeternitatis and entails, above all, the definition of its place in Spinozist ontology – an ontology that allows for only three well-known divisions between substance, attributes and modes. Should we then consider eternity at the level of a substance, an attribute or a mode? A slightly informed reader will immediately rule out the first hypothesis since there is only one unique substance, called God; such a reader will be equally tempted to immediately push back on the second by arguing that we are only familiar with, by Spinoza's own admission, two attributes – namely, thought and extension. If eternity figured among the infinity of attributes, Spinoza would have in all likelihood taken care to emphasise such a point. The author of the Ethics mentions nothing of the sort and limits himself to alluding to other attributes without providing any further details. Metaphysical Thoughts, however, causes such an immediate certainty to waver, for the first chapter of Part II opens with a disconcerting claim according to which ‘the chief attribute, which deserves consideration before all others, is God's Eternity …’. Is this an ambiguity in vocabulary? A terminological mutation? A development in Spinoza's thought? Such are among many questions that only a careful examination can permit us to resolve.

The third hypothesis seems to better accommodate us in the lodge of evidence, but when it comes down to it, its accommodations are hardly comfortable. If eternity is a mode, is it so in the same way as singular finite things, as the divine intellect or the facies totius universi? As real as eternity is, it is obvious that it does not express substance in the same way as does Peter, Paul or Simon. In what sense can eternity be a mode? Eternity, like duration, cannot be reduced to a mere mode of thought, and is thereby distinguished from time, to which Spinoza confers this ontological status.

Over the past two decades, Ricardo Darín has become the most famous actor in Argentina, and yet his star persona remains unexplored in both Hispanic and Anglophone academia. His name is synonymous with commercial success within the national film industry, so much so that he plays himself in Delirium (Kaimakamian 2014), a film which focuses – in a self-reflexive and parodical way – on two amateur filmmakers who are convinced that Darín's presence in their first feature film will guarantee its resounding triumph and make them rich. In that same comic vein, in 2015 a Brazilian film blog invented the news that the Argentine Minister of Culture was considering sponsoring a film without Darín as part of the cast (Cacofonias 2015). Even though these two examples exaggerate Darín's role in the dynamics of the local film industry, it cannot be denied that he has become a regular presence in most mainstream Argentine productions and a key economic factor in the definition and shaping of popular conceptions of national identity and film culture.

Although his success has been mainly circumscribed to Spanish-speaking countries, his name has been associated with the renewal of Argentine cinema in international film circuits. Darín gained worldwide recognition through Fabián Bielinsky's Nueve reinas [Nine Queens] (2000) and Juan José Campanella's El hijo de la novia [The Son of the Bride] (2001). In 2010, the film El secreto de sus ojos [The Secret in their Eyes] (Campanella 2009), starring Darín, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of that year. Some Hollywood offers followed these successes – which he rejected, claiming that he does not have the intention of falling into stereotypical ‘Latino’ roles. Thanks to the release of the film Relatos salvajes [Wild Tales] (Szifrón 2014), he also gained significant attention in UK media. When reviewing this film for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw (2015) recognised that: ‘Ricardo Darín is the film's big star name’, in spite of the cast being populated with some of the most internationally renowned Argentine film performers of the past decades, such as Leonardo Sbaraglia, Darío Grandinetti and Óscar Martínez.

Darín's international stardom is in many respects a contested construction. The question that persists in Star Studies is whether star consecration necessarily involves Hollywood's recognition or not. Leah Kemp, whilst insisting that Darín cannot be compared to Gael García Bernal in international reach, begins her analysis of stardom in Spanish America with the assumption that Darín is a star, and by trying to demonstrate that ‘the perception of Hollywood as a sort of finish-line in the race to stardom’ (2017: 38) for Hispanic American actors needs to be challenged when considering how the global south operates. Albeit a promising start, she eventually concludes (with some nuances) that indeed it is participation in Hollywood films that makes these actors transnational stars (2017: 46). When discussing Darín's transnational recognition, Nahuel Ribke and Jerome Bourdon arrive at a similar conclusion, privileging the use of the term ‘peripheral stardom’ when talking about stars outside the Hollywood system who transcend their own cultural specificity. They further explain that ‘peripheral stardom cannot have the global or international reach of Hollywood stardom and is dependent on specific reception processes in various geopolitical areas, while simultaneously influencing the self-image of the nation of origin’ (2017: 713).

Contrasting these assumptions, Darín has eluded working in the giant of the north and yet, as discussed in the previous chapter, it cannot be denied that his star status goes beyond his country of origin. Therefore, instead of looking at Darín as a ‘peripheral star’, or as having appeal only to Spanish-speaking audiences, this chapter aims to explore his international and transnational reach by considering that other centres exist within the Western world and that it is possible to talk about ‘stars’ beyond a Hollywood-centric and even Eurocentric perspective.

There are conceptual blurrings between the terms ‘global’, ‘transnational’ and ‘international’ which ought to be considered when exploring Darín's transnational mobility and cross-cultural exchanges. Nataša Durovicová has marked a distinction between ‘global’ – a category that implies totality – ‘international’, whose prefix implies a sort of parity between nations, and ‘transnational’, which acknowledges the agency of the state but where the prefix implies both unevenness and mobility (2010: ix–x).

The writers in this study envisage themselves in an expanding world of others. This is a world that requires turning towards and away, pushing beyond, decentering, delimiting, and traversing boundaries. A poetics of orientation traces this expansion through the construction of the Romantic lyric subject and its global coordinates of race, place, and culture. Returning to Omar F. Miranda, he considers the concept of the “global lyric” in the Romantic era, noting Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” and Sir William Jones's “Hymn to Surya” as variations of the global lyric form. Miranda finds Wheatley's “On Being Brought from Africa to America” as an important precursor to variations of the global lyric, a form which has “multidirectional pathways and diverse cultural and temporal orientations” (323, 310). Multidirectional, diverse, world-facing—Wheatley's orientations embrace ambiguity, paradox, experimentation, and unfixity. These orientations imagine a world that affirms a Black woman's subjectivity, a world that turns away from the “scornful eye” of the white gaze (6).

This chapter turns to William Blake's genre-crossing works that visualize queer forms and offer new frameworks for the world and its hemispheric divisions. As Katie Trumpener notes, Romantic writers, in situating themselves in a globalized idea of Britain, create “mental cartographies” of “conceptual, emotional, and perceptual frameworks of place and world making” (223). William Blake's mental and psychological realms of place and world-making are fundamentally different from the other authors in this book. His idea of East/West relations is not the hegemonic Orientalism of clear division and conquest. James Watt describes Blake's Orientalism as “plebeian” (146), and this sense of common people turns away from centering the poet as aesthetic center. Blake's Orient is concerned with freedom and creation unbarred from cultural norms. He departs from the scholarly Orientalism of Sir William Jones, the universalizing idealism of Percy Bysshe Shelley's shapes, the cosmopolitan raconteur of Byron's tales, and Hemans's poetics of affection.

The Revolución Libertadora [Liberating Revolution]'s 1955 coup d’état put an end to Perón's government and its Peronist star system. Many of the iconic artists from the period, such as Hugo del Carril, Tita Merello and Zully Moreno, were persecuted and had to live in exile (Mazzaferro 2018: 120). After years of lack of investment in new equipment, new talents and foreign distribution, the industry suffered another crisis (Maranghello 2005: 114). The production of low-cost films for general entertainment which moved away from a rich cinematographic local tradition resulted in Argentine cinema losing its influence in Latin American markets and, therefore, many studios had to close their doors (Maranghello 2005: 114). This closure was also the outcome of the annulment of the Peronist Film Law, which up until this point had supported the industry by granting a screen quota to national productions and by offering various forms of subsidies to the sector (Kriger 2009: 91).

Even once the witch-hunt of Peronist supporters in the industry diminished, there were some artists who never recovered – such as Fanny Navarro (Posadas 1994: 236). With the disarticulation of the domestic show business came a renewed focus on foreign stars and their systems – mainly from Hollywood and Europe (Mazzaferro 2018: 120). By 1958, when elections were called once more, most of the covers of Antena magazine were dedicated to foreign performers. Local figures such as Mirtha Legrand, Mecha Ortiz, Laura Hidalgo and Lolita Torres had to share their spotlight with Marilyn Monroe, Debbie Reynolds, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Anita Ekberg and Gina Lollobrigida (Mazzaferro 2018: 138). As these names suggest, at an international level the 1950s saw the transformation of film stars into glamorised objects charged with sex appeal. The crisis in Hollywood studios brought with it an exacerbation of the stars’ features more than the restructuring of the stellar model (Mazzaferro 2018: 152). This was particularly the case for female stars, whose bodies became the centre of attention of the industry.

I began this book by proposing the poetics of orientation as a critical mode of reading Romantic poetry and the rise of Orientalism. A poetics of orientation traces the centrality of the poet, relational subjectivities, the dominance of the imagination, the lack of a coherent “Other,” dislocated setting and/or time period, and plurality amidst universalism. The Scottish writer Hugh Blair argues in his 1763 dissertation on Ossian, “What we have been accustomed to call the oriental vein of poetry, because some of the earlier poetical productions have come to us from the East, is probably no more oriental than occidental; it is characteristical of an age rather than a country …” (4). In truth, this book has shown that what was often called “oriental” during the Romantic era represented British writers’ attempts to write and envision themselves in a more global world. These writers represented cultural difference via the “Orient,” remaking their own forms and styles in the process. “Characteristical” of their own aesthetics, the styles, subjects, and settings of Orientalism are indissolubly linked to the consolidated white subjectivity of the Romantic poet and an overwhelming imagination delinked from the colonial and imperial reality of British sovereignty.

This book has deployed multiple orientations—cultural, geographical, aesthetic, racial, and gendered— through which to situate Romantic poetics. In doing so, it has focused on the Orientalist sites, subjects, and settings commonly deemed “bad,” unimportant, or marginal to the development of Romantic poetry. No longer marginal, the rise of the “Oriental” subject is essential to understanding the rise of the post-Romantic lyric subject as we understand it today. Starting with William Jones's call to turn to the East for expressive art, this book has surveyed Percy Bysshe Shelley's idiom of shapes, Byron's cosmopolitan “East,” Felicia Hemans's affective poetics, William Blake's queer orientations, and detoured through the poetics of Wheatley, keeping open the possibility of changing directions.

On Thursday 23 May 1895, The New York Sun newspaper carried the above obituary for the journalist, modernist poet and leader of Partido Revolucionario Cubano, José Martí, who had been killed in the Battle of Boca de Dos Rios against Spanish imperial forces on the preceding Sunday. The obituary is interesting both for its subject and for its approach. No other major, mainstream, New York-based, English-language newspaper carried such a sentimental or laudatory account of the controversial writer in the days immediately after his death. Many referred to him solely as ‘the insurgent leader’, focused on the sensational manner of his death or reported the event in relation to ‘the great importance to the Spanish authorities of the papers found upon his body’. Martí died after ordering his men to charge a heavily fortified Spanish position in direct violation of an order from the military leader of the insurrectionists General Máximo Gómez. In fact, Martí's presence in Cuba was controversial in itself. Few of the insurrectionists felt that this scholar-poet and orator could contribute much to the war effort on the ground and would better serve the cause of independence by continuing to agitate and write in the USA.

1 Habit as the Constituting Activity of Actual Existence

In the Timaeus (37 b ff.) Plato places the creation of time at the basis of the world's structure. Let me extend this demiurgic function to the Spinozist conatus, in the organisation of its own world, that is, that of its perseverance. Starting from an evaluation of the constitution of time, Spinoza leads us from his example in Ethics II, 44 Schol. via Ethics II, 18 finally to the discovery of the fundamental importance of the compositional activity proper to the conatus of the body – or to the body itself insofar as it strives to persevere in being. This leads us into the realm of Habit and the associative mecha-nisms that underlie memory and without which, Spinoza notes, the mind would be powerless.

To imagine time is to imagine it simultaneously as outside and independent of us, while, at the same time, we imagine it as present to us, which is consistent with the definition of the mind's imaginative faculty. To imagine time in this way is thus to objectify a mode of thinking that has a necessary reality only in the (relative) confrontation of humans and nature. This exteriority and presence, however, only has meaning in the (imagined) presence of coexisting things. For the reality of time exists only through the relationship that the mind, when it imagines, establishes between bodies in motion: