Recent work on Spinoza

A few years ago I made a decisive turn to Spinoza, to writing and thinking about Spinoza, an obscure thinker in a discipline obscure to these islands, philosophy. I did so because I felt that many commonly-held assumptions about history, politics, psychology, self-interest, the emotions and in what our power consists were fundamentally confused. They often relied on a hotchpotch of Hegel, coca-cola and magical thinking. They relied a great deal on fantasy and habit, and they were often the effect of having one’s life, choices and thinking (what one inhabits, as much as a habit) driven and dominated by pre-existing social orders, which provide a hollow illusion of free will and autonomy. So I turned a thinker who claimed to address and explain these fundamentals. And it’s been a riveting, wild journey.

It’s a relief to pass on that a significant body of my Spinoza work is now being published. This includes a long article and chapter, alongside a book collection of chapters that I edited and wrote an introduction for. Here it all is – with open access links or downloadable files:

This includes:

1. “Interwoven Threads: Sympathetic Knowledge in George Eliot and Spinoza” (open access article in the Journal of Spinoza Studies)
2. New Perspectives on Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise: Power, Politics and the Imagination – which I have co-edited with Marie Wuth, and is out in February. It currently has a steep hardback price – a paperback will follow in a couple of years – but if it interests you and you’re connected to a university, you could ask your library to place an order.
3. Within that collection: “Pestilence”, an introduction I’m really proud of, which sets out the drama and context – file download via Dropbox
4. Also within that collection: “Kissing the ring: Power, domination and ingenium”, a chapter I wrote about Spinoza, the Ottoman empire, obedience, domination and voluntary servitude. I think it’s good, though the ending surprised me too. – file download
5. And lastly in the collection, though with less input, a roundtable I co-authored on democracy and the public use of reason, with Mogens Laerke and Martin Saar.

In addition, I’m in the final stages of editing and helping publish a translation of Juan Domingo Sanchez Estop’s Spinoza and Althusser: Detours and Returns. Publication date, unsure, probably early 2026, with Edinburgh University Press. This is an important book which presents a new reading of Althusser and Spinoza through a philosophy of the conjuncture and of its effects. Jason Read, who has written the preface, offers a good overview here.

This nearly marks the end of several years’ work following my last book on bringing the most useful insights of Spinoza to social and political problems today or in recent past. To put it in Althusser’s terms, it’s been a detour, and a very productive one. It is the station from which I’ve detoured, again, to the unlikely community research and manuscripts I’m now working on. There is one more article left to finish, if it is accepted for publication. This work includes these essays, already published:

• “Militant conversion in a prison of the mind: Malcolm X and Spinoza on domination and freedom”, Contemporary Political Theory (2023) – article link – file download
• “Do we still not know what a body can do? Spinoza, Arendt and The Productive Body”, in The Body Productive, ed. Blayney, Hornsby and Whaley (Bloomsbury, 2022) – book link – file download
• “Climate anxiety, fatalism and the capacity to act”, in New Interdisciplinary Perspectives On and Beyond Autonomy, ed. Watkin and Davis (2022) – open access link
• “On damaged and regenerating life: Spinoza and mentalities of climate catastrophe”, Crisis and Critique (2021) – open access link
• “Affects of Resistance: Indignation, Emulation, Fellowship”, in Pli journal 30 (2019) – open access link

There is one more article still to come, and then I will stop. There is enough here for an edited collection – all work that takes Spinoza outwards, into social and political questions, rather than inwards into esoteric debates of interpretation. There’s an implausibly wide range of topics and thinkers here – anger, sympathy, climate change, friendship, the body; Malcolm X, George Eliot, Hannah Arendt, Mark Fisher, Theodor Adorno, Joseph Conrad and Immanuel Kant.

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But a short note on why. Why commit so much time and trouble to understanding and then setting out the salient philosophical and political points of a 17^th century Dutchman who remains largely obscure and disregarded, as no more than a specialist pursuit; a thinker defined by arcane terminology and esoteric concerns?

Those are fair questions. Firstly, I think it matters that one can explain from the ground up, as it were. That’s what metaphysics is about, not merely what is beyond (meta) the physical but which underpins it. Through Spinoza and through very few others, what we have is a cogent and comprehensive explanation of the fundamental relationships between ourselves and others, between our thoughts, desires and our feelings, between ourselves and what some call God, others nature. Its only flaw, in my view, is its reliance on the ontological argument.

Not only that, Spinoza sets out an ethics, a politics and a psychology of human power, defined by self-understanding, knowledge of others and of the natural world, a knowledge that involves a commitment to democracy and to what some would call ‘fellowship’. It is shaped by the Stoics as much as the new science that, in England, would take shape with the Royal Society (nullius in verba, take no-one’s word for it).

In other words, Spinoza is one of the greatest teachers we have. And he teaches in his writing, of how we can understand ourselves and others, and how we can face and make sense of adversity and prejudice, and live on, find others, find spaces of solidarity, connection and friendship. Antonio Negri was right to recognise in him a precursor and central figure to a subterranean line of thinking about human liberation and revolutionary freedom, one that connects the ancients to the now (I recently came across this excellent obituary by Katja Diefenbach, which most web browsers will translate).

But I would also note the opportunities to find meaning in ourselves, in moments of quietness, solitude, in epiphanies when we see with lucidity and possibly truly understand what is before our eyes, that ‘intuitive science’ he talked about in the Ethics. It’s not a cosy or fuzzily warm worldview, often; there is also a coldness in Spinoza, an anti-humanism, one that sets out to understand human emotions ‘as if they were lines, planes or bodies’, nothing more and nothing less. One that says more about fear than about hope, more about tyranny than about democracy.

So, if you want to go further, where to begin?

Well, start with Spinoza himself, or start at least with a good guide. Read about his fascinating and short life. Read a couple of online guides or watch some videos about him (I have some on YouTube). Start with the Ethics, but read the Appendix to Part One first, this is the best place to begin. Allow yourself to feel confused at first; read slowly and in bursts of concentration, it becomes clearer as the journey continues, I promise. And it is a journey, a path, one that never seems to end. What matters is not the destination, but the way you walk it; the meaning behind this cryptic utterance becomes clear too.

And, should you wish, you can take a look at my own guide to Spinoza, out now in paperback, Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom.