Christopher
Skeaff maakte gisteren in een tweet bekend dat zijn boek uit is:
Christopher
Skeaff, Becoming Political: Spinoza’s
Vital Republicanism and the Democratic Power of Judgment. The University of Chicago Press, 2018 [books.google
laat nog slechts heel weinig zien].
In
januari 2018 al twitterde hij over de komst ervan en toonde hij de aparte “cover
design by the immensely talented Jenny Volvovski.” [cf.]
In this pathbreaking work, Christopher Skeaff argues
that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of
Spinoza’s thought. Bridging Continental and Anglo-American scholarship,
critical theory, and Spinoza studies, Becoming Political offers a
historically sensitive, meticulous, and creative interpretation of Spinoza’s
texts that reveals judgment as the communal element by which people generate
power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political
association. If, for Spinoza, judging is the activity which makes a people
powerful, it is because it enables them to contest the project of ruling and
demonstrate the political possibility of being equally free to articulate the
terms of their association. This proposition differs from a predominant
contemporary line of argument that treats the people’s judgment as a vehicle of
sovereignty—a means of defining and refining the common will. By recuperating
in Spinoza’s thought a “vital republicanism,” Skeaff illuminates a line of political
thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and
aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common
affairs. As such, this decoupling raises questions that ordinarily go unasked:
what calls for political judgment, and who is to judge? In Spinoza’s vital
republicanism, the political potential of life and law finds an affirmative
relationship that signals the way toward a new constitutionalism and
jurisprudence of the common.
