Althusser and Spinoza - (Spinoza Studies) by Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop (Hardcover)

About the Book

Offers an original analysis of the pivotal relationship between Althusser and Spinoza.

Book Synopsis

Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop argues that Spinoza's influence fundamentally shaped Althusser's philosophical project, providing key concepts and methods that Althusser used to radically rethink Marxism. The book traces five key 'detours and returns' between Althusser and Spinoza, showing how Spinoza's anti-humanism, theory of reading, immanent causality, politics of the conjuncture, and rejection of determinism were mobilised at critical junctures in Althusser's development. In the process, Estop uncovers a new 'Althusserian Spinoza', a thinker of practice and politics whose revolutionary potential remains to be explored.

Bringing together published works, correspondences, and unpublished writings, this groundbreaking study sheds new light on Althusser's theoretical trajectory and reveals the hidden Spinozist foundations of one of the 20th century's most important Marxist thinkers.

Review Quotes

Althusser and Spinoza: Detours and returns makes us see not a pre-existing object (be it Althusser or Spinoza) which we could have seen but we didn't, but an object which the book itself produced in its operation of knowledge and which did not pre-exist it. This is Sánchez Estop's synchronic/immanent object: a kaleidoscopic Althusser-Spinoza consisting of "the anti-humanist," "the reader," "the structuralist," "the conjuncturist," and "the aleatory."--Kiarina Kordela, Macalester College