There’s nothing better than being asked to come and talk about your obsessions.
I’ve given a few talks over the last couple of months about Spinoza and politics – here I will share a few, including
- “What does it mean for a multitude to be free?”
- “Spinoza after politics: the relationality of care”
- “England’s dreaming: repositioning royalty”
- “Political catchwords: where are we going?”
- “The global commons: rights for none and all”
- I also published an article in Contemporary Political Theory on Malcolm X and Spinoza (yes, that’s right).
It’s a bit of a mixed bag of topics but all interweave ideas and political change. Let’s take a look.
The Free Multitude
In April I was invited to the Free University of Brussels to give a lecture on Spinoza and the multitude. The paper was called “What does it mean for a multitude to be free?” and you can download it here:
I decided to take a gamble and produce a paper based around images, rather than text. Unconventional for Spinoza but an experiment to see if a more free-flowing presentation where I’m thinking on my feet – where I’m at my best – would succeed in a formal setting.
I think it did. It was a delightful discussion. My thanks to Sonja Lavaert and Thomas van Binsbergen. I was lucky to meet Juan Domingo Sanchez Estop, author of Althusser et Spinoza: Détours et Retours; I’ve now been invited to edit the English translation of his book.
Spinoza after Politics
In May I was invited by The Philosopher 1923 to talk on an online panel on the topic “Spinoza after politics”, alongside the excellent Gil Morejon and Solange Manche. You can watch that here:
Once more I decided to try and push my thinking somewhere new. I’ve been doing lots of work on unpaid care recently – I’m looking forward to sharing this soon – and I wanted to see how Spinoza’s ideas could speak to some of the attributes of care that I think matter: relationality, reciprocity and solidarity. It’s a bit of a leap – neo-Spinozism, not classic Spinoza – but I think there’s something there. You can read the longer draft of my paper here:
England’s Dreaming
Also in May I was invited to give a talk at Repositioning Royalty, an Open University workshop to explore and reflect on the UK’s fragmented politics during the recent coronation. I decided to return to a rather strange public event which has dropped off the radar in recent years– the One Britain One Nation Day, which for a couple of years was a mandatory public celebration for England’s luckless schoolchildren. It’s a short paper you can read here:
Political Catchwords
In early June I organised a panel for this 2-day workshop at the University of Roehampton with two phenomenally talented writers, Tommy Sissons and Daniel Trilling. Another speaker was unavailable so I stood in on the day and gave a talk about the concept of orientation in my new work Where are we going. I’m not sure how well it landed as I hadn’t slept for a couple of days – writing up my Gateshead Report, I’ll have you know – but it was good to road-test some of the thinking. The images and approach you can see here:
Global Commons
A few weeks ago I was invited to give a panel talk for the Centre for Global Challenges and Social Justice’s research festival. Our panel was on the Global Commons, in light of recent discussions around outer space being a kind of commons. You may be wondering: what’s a commons? So my talk set out where the idea of the commons came from, why it went into decline in early modern England, and how we can use it best today. Once more, I decided to push against the usual story by focusing on power – there is no commons without common power. You can read or see the slides for “Rights for None and All” here.
Militant Conversion in a Prison of the Mind
Lastly, I published a journal article on Malcolm X and Spinoza in Contemporary Political Theory journal. What’s the connection? Well… In this twitter thread I set it out.
TL;DR: Malcolm reads Spinoza while in prison and, in one part of his writing, hails him as a radical predecessor of his own challenge on Western thought. He calls him a “Black Spanish Jew” which always seemed such a strange phrasing.
But it’s much more than that. Both thinkers talk about the psychological, emotional and intellectual conditions of domination; and both talk about how we can overcome domination by cultivating an understanding of what it is that subjugates us. They do it in very different ways, but it’s fruitful to compare both of them as we think about domination today.
That’s about it for now with Spinoza. I’ve got some more publications in the pipeline but they won’t be out for some while. In the meantime, you can get hold of Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom with 30% off through Edinburgh University Press’s website – use the code NEW30 here.
Benjamin Norris has been enjoying my book:
That’s about it for now. I’m really exciting about sharing all the work I’ve been doing on care. It’s a new direction for me and one that’s from the heart. More in due course.
Dan Taylor 
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