Marx or Spinoza

Volume 25, No. 2 Winter 2011

Editors' Note

Contributors

The Indignant Multitude: Spinozist Marxism after Empire by Sean Grattan

The Spinoza invoked by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their work together seems quite distinct from the one encountered in Spinoza’s thought. Sean Grattan asks if a truncated Spinoza can be useful for a liberatory politics.

Commonism by Peter Hitchcock

The injunction to choose — Spinoza or Marx — is a kind of blackmail. To conjoin them — Spinoza and Marx — is easier said than done. How can the friction between them be made productive? Peter Hitchock asks: How can commonism, the Spinozist horizon, be made a precondition of communism, the Marxist one?

Crowds and Spinoza's Concept of the Political by Justin Rogers-Cooper

Spinoza’s multitude is less a universal subject than a localized, contingent phenomenon: a crowd. Justin Rogers-Cooper draws the consequences.

Materialism, Ecology, Aesthetics by Rachel Greenwald Smith

Nature writing might seem among the furthest thing possible from questions of Marxist praxis. Rachel Greenwald Smith argues for their connection.

Sex Love and Sensuous Activity in the Work of Historical Materialism by James Arnett

In recent decades, Marxists have tended to want to preserve the specificity of Marx’s materialism by distinguishing it from competing “new materialisms,” including the materialism of the body. James Arnett, closely reading Marx and Spinoza along with Engels and Samuel Delany, reminds us that things are not nearly so simple.

Hegel or Spinoza (or Hegel); Spinoza and Marx by Phillip E. Wegner

Marx and Spinoza, economics and politics, socialism and communism, utopian program and utopian impulse: what are we to do with these binaries if not to choose? Phillip Wegner plots a dialectical path through the possibilities.

Book Reviews

The Jameson Variable by Peter Hitchcock

How does Fredric Jameson’s Marxism extend his Hegel, and how does his Hegelianism inflect his Marx? Peter Hitchcock reviews The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Spinoza As Imperative by Sean Grattan

Contemporary theory encounters two Spinozas. Sean Grattan reviews Spinoza Now.