Overview

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.

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Author:   Katja Diefenbach (Professor of Cultural Philosophy, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt, Germany.) ,  Gerrit Jackson
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399537490

ISBN 10:   1399537490
Pages:   552
Publication Date:   30 November 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Language:   German

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Reference Conventions A Note on the Translation Introduction: Althusser’s Overture Which Spinoza? Spinoza Between Structuralism and Post-Marxism The Concept of Immanent Causality in Althusser ‘[…] A Knowledge, in That Which Permits Us to Think Against Hegel, of That Which Remains Hegelian’ Immanence Immanent to Itself: From Althusser to Deleuze Post-Marxist Spinoza Studies Between the Poles of Negri and Balibar I. Of the Agency of the Multitude: Negri’s Interpretation of the Conatus Doctrine 1. Philosophy of Joy The Excess of the Positive Passions Natural Right without State of Nature As Much Right as Power The Dethematisation of the Sad Passions Labour Power and Conatus The Real-Imaginary Constitution of Society in Balibar 2. The Pantheistic Undercurrent of Materialism The Conatus of Metaphysics Cassirer’s Spinoza Negri’s Deleuze: The Birth of Materialism from Pantheism 3. The Controversy over the Doctrine of Attributes Transcendent Attributes The First Propositions of the Ethics and the Enigma of Their Meaning Ontologically One, Formally Different: The Doctrine of Attributes in Gueroult and Deleuze Negri’s Re-Idealisation of Spinoza 4. Of the Conatus Principle Conatus Doctrine and Anti-Finalist Anthropology Spinoza with Hobbes: Egalitarianism of Ability Last-Ditch Teleological Defences in Fénelon Communism of Conatus From the Physics of Bodies to the Doctrine of Essences: The Anarchy of the Conatus Principle Consubstantiality of Affect and Reason: The Three Kinds of Life and Knowledge From Knowledge of Effects to Common Notions and Essential Ideas: Excess of Joy and Becoming-Cause Inversion of the Mind-Body Parallelism Materialism of Thinking and Exaltation of Being 5. Spinoza contra Hobbes: Possessive Transindividualism ‘The first anti-Hobbes that the history of Western political thought presents’ Passions and Interests Being Able to Kill: Hobbes’s Anthropology of Fear The Sacrifice of Society in Leviathan 6. Which Eternity, Whose Blessedness? A Vitalism That Incorporates Nihilism Neither Master nor Servant: Matheron’s Conception of Ego-Altruism The Socialisation of the Affects through Processes of Imitation The Annulment of Affective Ambivalence Becoming-Eternal and the Genesis of the Third Kind of Knowledge Politics of the Third Kind II. History and Ontology: Holland’s Historical Untimeliness 1. The Savage Anomaly of the United Provinces Huizinga’s Moderation, Negri’s Incongruity The Dutch Model of Accumulation ‘County without a Count’: The Republic of the Regents Spinoza, a Heretic among Heretics Heterodoxies in the Amsterdam Jewish Community Marrano Power Derrida contra Negri: Creation, Crypt 2. Of Spinoza’s Fear of His Own Thinking Balibar on Spinoza’s Fear Between Sects and Regents On the Power of the Political-Theological State Apparatus: Spinoza’s Critique of Liberalism The Religion of Obedience and the Controversy over Grace within Protestantism The Exclusion of the Multitudo from Democracy 3. Colonial Hallucinations: Marronage and Political Violence Spinoza and Caliban: The Lepers of This Earth Atlantic Diaspora: Amsterdam Sephardim in Pernambuco Henrique Dias, Maroon Commander Racism and Anti-Semitism in the Dutch-Portuguese Atlantic The Immanent Transformation of Political Violence III. Of the Physics of the Political: Balibar and the Paradoxes of Spinozist Philosophy 1. Ambivalences of the Political Theory of the State Proposition 37 of Part IV of the Ethics The Complexity of Real-Imaginary Socialisation The Transindividuation of Multitude and State Theory between Government and Revolution 2. Wherein Lies the Power of the ‘Multitude Led as If by One Mind’? Potentia Multitudinis, Quae Una Veluti Mente Ducitur Matheron with Foucault: The Birth of Democracy from the Lynch Mob Politics and Mass Imagination The Theory of National Ingenia in the Theological-Political Treatise From Rule of Law to Power State From Monos to Demos: The Production of Mass Intellectuality Wherein Does the Power of the ‘Multitude Led as If by One Mind’ Lie? 3. Active Matter: Spinoza’s Speculative Materialism Balibar on the Relation between Physics and Metaphysics Things Bring Themselves into Existence Is There a Quiet Rule of the Essences? 4. The Birth of a Non-Cartesian Epistemology The Differentiality of the Simple Physics of the Transindividual, Primacy of Relations: The Interpretation of the Corpora Simplicissima in Deleuze and Gueroult The Infinite Modulation of Nature From Analysis to Synthesis Bachelard’s Quiet Spinozism Homonymy of Concepts of Order Spinoza contra Descartes: From the Finalism of Nature to the Voluntarism of Mind IV. Spinoza or Descartes: Immanent or Impossible Cause 1. Heterodox Readings of Descartes in Structuralism and Phenomenology Gueroult and Alquié between Descartes and Spinoza Alquié’s Descartes: The Trauma of the Thinking Thing Gueroult’s Objection: Descartes according to the Order of Reasons Sum Cogitans, Sum Ambulans: Wherein Lies the Ego Sum’s Primacy? The In/Comprehensibility of God: Alquié and Gueroult Trade Accusations of Theology Structuralism and Phenomenology: Crossed Readings Cavaillès’s Anti-Phenomenological Rallying Cry: Against the ‘Philosophy of Consciousness’ Derrida contra Foucault: ‘Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum.’ Différance and Cartesian Causality Foucault contra Derrida: Let Us Not Forget – History 2. Lacan’s Detour through Descartes: Negative Potentiality of Being The Cogito as Subject of the Unconscious Cogito without Sum Causality through Object Being without Thinking The Two Walls of the Impossible The Excess of the Drive The Impossibility of Repetition The Potentiality of the Negative, or The Myth of the Lamella From Mēden to Den: ‘Less Than Nothing’ Excrement and Expropriation Certeau’s Lacan: Between Mysticism and Torture 3. The Cogito as Subject of the Revolution: Žižek Reading Lenin Politics of the Death Drive Philosophical Fictionalisation of Lenin Anti-Evolutionist Materialism Sacrifice and Administration Guattari’s Lenin: The Megalomania of the Subjugated Group Politics of Violence, Government of Things Exacerbating the Class Struggle from the Height of the Party 4. Deleuze and Badiou between Descartes and Spinoza Althusser with Deleuze The Event in Badiou and Deleuze: Disjunction or Turn? Badiou’s Minimal Marxism The Causa Errans of the Void The Grace of the Event Deleuze contra Badiou: Beyond One and Many Deleuze’s Rewriting of Transcendental Philosophy Spinoza with Duns Scotus Transcendental Empiricism and Difference of Intensity ‘Is There Such a Thing as a Deleuzian Politics?’ Politics of Potentiality Conclusion: Thinking, Differing Bibliography

Reviews

Exegetically rigorous and boldly argued, this book is one of the finest contributions to recent German-language Spinoza scholarship and a notable essay in contemporary Spinozist Marxism. It has had a substantial influence on the German academic discussion, and its translation is certain to captivate a discerning international readership.--Martin Saar, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Exegetically rigorous and boldly argued, this book is one of the finest contributions to recent German-language Spinoza scholarship and a notable essay in contemporary Spinozist Marxism. It has had a substantial influence on the German academic discussion, and its translation is certain to captivate a discerning international readership. -- Martin Saar, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main While there have been multiple books published on Spinozist Marxism, Diefenbach’s is the first to consider the entirety of the different interpretations, encompassing Althusser, Negri, and others. In doing so she demonstrates how much Spinoza is a provocative and productive point of reference for contemporary philosophy and politics. -- Jason Read, University of Southern Maine None other than Hegel famously proclaimed: ‘You have to be a Spinozist or you are not a philosopher.’ Coming from Hegel, Spinoza’s harsh critic, the admission testifies to the towering status of Spinoza’s thought, to the point that in the subsequent history it presented a formidable alternative to the legacy of Hegelian dialectic. Katja Diefenbach’s book meticulously researches the impact of Spinozist thought in the twentieth century, particularly its political implications, discussing all its major proponents from Althusser to Negri, from Gueroult to Balibar, from Derrida to Deleuze above all, and many more. But this is not merely a scholarly work, notwithstanding its thorough and awe-inspiring scholarship, this is a passionate plea for Spinoza as a source for a reinvention of politics for our times. -- Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana

Author Information

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 Schlögel, 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).

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