Het
feit dat deze maand tien jaar geleden dit boek verscheen, lijkt mij voldoende
reden voor een blog erover.
Moira
Gatens (Ed.), Feminist Interpretations of
Benedict Spinoza. Pennsylvania State University Press [series: Re-Reading
the Canon], May 14, 2009 - xiv, 239 pp
[Het boek zit niet in de geselecteerde boeken uit de serie, waarvoor tot 14 mei 50–60% korting kan worden verkregen. 'Daarom' hier de link naar het PDF op BookSC]
Contents
Preface
/ Nancy Tirana – viiAcknowledgments xi
List of Abbreviations and Notes on Translations xiii
Introduction: Through Spinoza’s “Looking Glass” / Moira Gatens – 1
1 Dominance and Difference: A Spinozistic Alternative to the Distinction Between “Sex” and “Gender” / Genevieve Lloyd – 29
2 Autonomy and the Relational Individual: Spinoza-and Feminism / Aurelia Armstrong – 43
3 Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love and the Hilarity of True Love / Amelie Rorty – 65
4 Spinoza and Sexuality / Alexandre Matheron - 87
5 Reason, Sexuality, and the Self in Spinoza / David West - 107
6 What Spinoza Can Teach Us About Embodying and Naturalizing Ethics / Heidi Morrison Ravven – 125
7 Adam and the Serpent: Everyman and the Imagination / Paola Grassi – 145
8 The Envelope: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, “Of God” / Luce Irigaray – 155
9 Re-reading Irigaray’s Spinoza / Sarah Donovan – 165
10 The Politics of the Imagination / Moira Gate – 189
11 Law and Sovereignty in Spinoza’s Politics / Susan James - 211
Further Reading 229
List of Contributors 231
Index 233
Cf. het blog van 08-01-2017: "Moira Gatens’ knappe samenvatting van waar het Spinoza om ging"
Om
een indruk van het boek te krijgen neem ik hier het review over van Willi
Goetschel in AJS Review, The Journal of
the Association for Jewish Studies, Vol. 35, #1, April, 2011, pp 197-200 [PDF te
vinden op BookSC]
Moira Gatens, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, xiv, 239 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009411000250
This is an eye-opening reader that demonstrates that a
sophisticated feminist approach brings not only new and critically important
questions to the table but also allows us to understand the significance of
Spinoza’s thought in a richer, more complex, and more challenging context.
Superbly edited by one of the outstanding experts on Spinoza, this volume’s
essays are not only of interest to readers of Spinoza whom they reposition as a
crucial interlocutor for rethinking the body, identity, and the question of
what is “man” (i.e., human nature). As a consequence, the essays also address
questions such as how to understand Spinoza’s reformulating of the project of
philosophy as whole. In the context of Jewish studies, this volume deserves
particular attention because it resituates Spinoza as a critical thinker of the
body, identity, and human nature, whose critical significance for rethinking
Jewishness, individuality, and difference is yet to be fully understood in its
full ramifications. As a result, those vocal but marginalized voices —so long
ignored—who for centuries have welcomed Spinoza for the philosophical strength
of his approach in addressing identity and tradition as plastic forms of work-in-progress
with self-empowering potential are given unexpected but strikingjustification
by this volume’s contributions.
Feminist Interpretations
of Benedict Spinoza perceptively highlights
Spinoza’s philosophical framework as one that is particularly helpful in
addressing today’s pressing needs of moving beyond the binaries of the
Cartesian mind/body split and its attendant implications. The essays
demonstrate that the liberating potential of Spinoza, when applied in a
sophisticated way to the questions of gender and identity, assumes critical
importance to related debates in Jewish studies. But in addition, this volume
also allows us to revisit the complicated and conflicted debate concerning
Spinoza’s place in the context of Jewish studies. The contributions to this
volume suggest that as Spinoza aligns with strands of Jewish philosophical
traditions, a fresh look at his thought no longer allows critics to simply excommunicate
him from the historiography of Jewish history. While the title’s use of “Benedict”
might alienate some Jewish readers —or just as ironically have them nod—it is
very much the aspect of “Baruch” that is most interesting to readers in Jewish
studies. “Baruch,” is the short form for those critical moments in Spinoza’s
thought that for too long have remained cordoned off under the hegemonic name “Benedict.”
But it is in fact the Spinoza who critically engages with the hegemonic
tradition of philosophy that in his time had become defined by its Christian or
a Christian secular context; he challenges, undermines, and rethinks philosophy’s
claims anew and offers critical points of entry for rethinking the philosophic
project and opening the scope of its agenda for contemporary engagement.
In her essay “Dominance and Difference: A Spinozistic
Alternative to the Distinction Between ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender,’” Genevieve Lloyd
shows how Spinoza allows for a distinction of sex and gender that resists
simple reduction but, instead, understands the constructive moment of gender
constructions. As Lloyd eloquently concludes, a Spinozistic approach offers the
possibility of understanding that “with regard to sexual difference, there are
no facts of the matter other than those produced through the shifting play of
the powers and pleasures of socialized, embodied, sexed human beings” (41).
Lloyd’s essay carefully explains how Spinoza’s take on the deep interrelation
of mind and body provides the theoretical framework to arrive at this insight.
Aurelia Armstrong’s essay, “Autonomy and the Relational Individual: Spinoza and
Feminism,” offers an illuminating analysis of the “profoundly relational way” in
which Spinoza theorizes individuality. This has crucial consequences for the
way Spinoza understands freedom, autonomy, and self-determination. It helps,
for example, to understand how Spinoza theorizes “autonomy and relationality as
interconnected rather than opposed” (51). As receptivity and openness are
understood as themselves a “power that increases our power of acting” rather
than the opposite, Spinoza offers a suggestive approach to rethinking the “complementarity
of receptivity and spontaneity” (54). Similarly, the concepts of interiority
and exteriority are relationally reconfigured. The larger context in which
Spinoza’s philosophy “refigures the relations between parts and wholes as
reciprocally determined rather than opposed” (61) is of crucial significance
for feminist thought, and as a consequence, for critical thought in general.
Amélie Rorty’s essay, “Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love
and the Hilarity of True Love,” examines how Spinoza’s notion of love is
embedded in a psychodynamic view of the emotions that allows for conceiving
love in terms of activity and self-empowerment rather than reducing it to
passivity. Viewed this way, love emerges in Spinoza as a creative force with
emancipatory implications and thus is outside the traditional scheme of
historically questionable forms of gendering. Alexandre Matheron’s essay on “Spinoza
and Sexuality” shows that Spinoza’s approach offers a possibly unique position
among classical philosophers in its understanding of nongenital sexuality—an “infinite
diversity of sexual behaviors conceivable and therefore included in the order
of nature” (94). Matheron’s subtly argued essay provides a crucial stepping
stone for a better understanding of the significance of Spinoza’s thought for
modern feminist thought. Taking the cue from Matheron, David West’s essay, “Reason,
Sexuality, and the Self in Spinoza,” shows how Spinoza comprehends “sexual
desire and love … as mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive
alternatives” (120). Reconnecting to the Epicurean as well as Jewish tradition,
Spinoza’s thought makes it possible to understand sexuality as a positive and
potentially selfempowering force rather than as the sinful liability that
philosophy traditionally likes to conceive it. In other words, sexuality is no
longer philosophically excised but is recognized as a legitimate part of the
self.
In her contribution, “What Spinoza Can Teach Us about Embodying
and Naturalizing Ethics,” Heidi Morrison Ravven argues that Spinoza’s critical
advantage rests on his reliance on what she calls the “Judeo-Islamic” tradition
whose “Judeo-Arab Aristotelian naturalism” was condemned by the church in 1277 under
the rallying cry of free will (129). As a consequence, Spinoza came under systematic
attack and his rejection, Ravven notes, became “central to the selfdefinition of
the entire tradition and practice of philosophical ethics” (134). Although “in
order to maintain the myth of its own universalism, philosophical ethics has
suppressed and continues to suppress its Christian presumptions and origins,” Ravven
suggests that “Muslim and Jewish, along with feminist, philosophers could work
together to rethink ethics from the shared medieval philosophical tradition
and, in the case of feminist philosophers, from our feminist concerns” (135).
Paola Grassi’s essay, “Adam and the Serpent: Everyman and the Imagination,” discusses
the constitutive importance Spinoza saw in the power of imagination as that
which would not only drive the passions but affectivity as a whole and therefore,
as a result, also the process of cognition.
Luce Irigaray is represented with a section of her An Ethics of Sexual Difference, a
discussion that Sarah Donovan demonstrates in her “Re-reading Irigaray’s Spinoza”
is a missed opportunity of what could have become a more engaging exploration
of the concerns Irigaray and Spinoza ultimately would share. Donovan’s carefully
attentive rereading illustrates what sophisticated and constructive feminist
critique can achieve. In “The Politics of the Imagination,” Moira Gatens fleshes
out the critical significance of Spinoza’s contribution to rethinking power from
the bottom up, through his radical rethinking of the body and the constitutive meaning
of knowledge as embodied knowledge. The concluding essay by Susan James, on “Law
and Sovereignty in Spinoza’s Politics,” examines the fundamental function of
imagination for the constitution of power, law, and sovereignty, which Spinoza
theorizes in close proximity but critical difference to Hobbes. As for Spinoza
law is conceived as made by human beings and relies, in turn, also on interpretation
by human beings, Spinoza secures politics as devoid of any divine lawmaker as
he “continues to haunt the pages of Hobbes’s philosophy” (224). As a result,
Spinoza creates a level playing field for instituting laws and the claim to
interpretation that not only men but women as well can be the beneficiaries. As
the sovereign constitutes itself in an entirely human society devoid of any
recourse to the divine, the rules of engagement are radically changed.
Sovereigntyis no longer a state of exception but one that rests on
consolidation from the bottom, from imagination, and rather—to permit a pun—the
state of “acception” by its citizens. With Spinoza, the notion of the
all-powerful sovereign is replaced by that of an all-responsible sovereign
contingent on the consensus on which legitimation ultimately rests.
As Ravven, Grassi, West, James, and the others show, Spinoza’s
Jewish background would lead him to the formulation of a philosophical position
markedly different from the views developed by his non-Jewish contemporaries.
It is precisely this difference that makes him attractive as a critical
interlocutor for contemporary feminist philosophy. But the most remarkable
achievement of this volume is that Spinoza emerges here as a philosopher of the
future precisely because contemporary feminists dare to openly address him as a
Jewish philosopher. Those in Jewish studies can learn from these feminist
philosophers who recognize that the specificity of Spinoza’s Jewish context is
no longer to be considered as a liability but, to the contrary, a unique chance
for critical engagement with philosophy’s traditional claims to universalism.
Willi Goetschel
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada
De Duitse Spinoza Bibliografie geeft het review niet - ook geen andere besprekingen die er wel waren. Cf. b.v. het review van Deborah
Boyle in Philosophy in Review, XXX
(2010), no. 5 [academia.edu]
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