[...] Value and meaning do not reside in things but are produced by the desiring forces that seize them: ‘We neither strive, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.’ This statement certainly exemplifies the unsettling strangeness of Spinozist thought and its power to confound our most solid habits of thought, since, in inverting the connection between desire and value, it ruins any possibility of an objectivism of value. Value is not an intrinsic property of things, to which desire, as mere acknowledgment, must simply conform; conversely, our desire is not a simple effort of orientation in a world of desirables that are objectively already there. [...]