Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy: Speculative Materialism

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The book begins from the insight that very few seventeenth-century philosophers have received more antithetical interpretations than Baruch de Spinoza. He has been regarded as an atheist and a rationalist, as a pantheist and a vitalist, as a Jewish critic of religion and a great thinker in the Marrano tradition. In the twentieth century, however, Spinoza was conceived as a materialist who was strikingly ahead of his time, providing Marxism with concepts of overdetermined dialectics, plural temporality and nonteleological praxis.

Beginning with Althusser's interest in the concept of immanent causality, the book reconstructs post-Marxist readings of Spinoza from Negri to Balibar, Matheron to Tosel, and Gueroult to Deleuze. It examines how these authors adapt Spinoza's unconventional doctrines of the differentiality of being, the self-forming capacity of matter, the excess of the positive affects, and the multitude's power of self-government. The book fundamentally revises continental philosophy's portrayals of the relationships between matter, affect, thought, and the multitude.

Author Bio

Katja Diefenbach is Professor of Cultural Philosophy at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt, Germany. She is a member of the scientific committee of Sive Natura: International Center for Spinozan Studies, Bologna, and the German Spinoza Society. She won Geisteswissenschaften International's special award in 2021 and is a co-initiator of the research project Perception, Jurisdiction, and Valorization in Colonial Modernity as well as a member of the editorial board of the Berlin publishing house collective b_books. Katja has published widely in German and also in English. She is co-editor of Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013) and she has contributed to Radical Philosophy. This is her first book to appear in English. Gerrit Jackson studied literature and philosophy and works as a translator on a regular basis for a number of museums; longstanding clients include the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Lenbachhaus, Munich. His published translation projects include Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology (Fordham University Press, 2012), Karl Schlgel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics (Bard Graduate Center, 2016), Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland (London: Reaktion, 2018) and Peter Geimer, Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions (University of Chicago Press, 2018).