ABOUT THIS BOOK
There have been many Spinozas over the centuries: atheist, romantic pantheist, great thinker of the multitude, advocate of the liberated individual, and rigorous rationalist. The common thread connecting all of these clashing perspectives is Spinoza’s naturalism, the idea that humanity is part of nature, not above it.
In this sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza’s iconoclastic philosophy, Hasana Sharp draws on his uncompromising naturalism to rethink human agency, ethics, and political practice. Sharp uses Spinoza to outline a practical wisdom of “renaturalization,” showing how ideas, actions, and institutions are never merely products of human intention or design, but outcomes of the complex relationships among natural forces beyond our control. This lack of a metaphysical or moral division between humanity and the rest of nature, Sharp contends, can provide the basis for an ethical and political practice free from the tendency to view ourselves as either gods or beasts.
Sharp’s groundbreaking argument critically engages with important contemporary thinkers—including deep ecologists, feminists, and race and critical theorists—making Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization vital for a wide range of scholars.
REVIEWS
“Through luminous and erudite readings of the texts, Hasana Sharp shows us how profound and radical is Spinoza’s conception of nature and his claim that humans always remain part of nature, acting solely according to the same rules. She demonstrates the political consequences of adopting this perspective through a provocative intervention in contemporary feminist theory, while along the way opening promising avenues for future work in a variety of other fields, such as animal studies and ecology. This is a challenging and important book.”
— Michael Hardt, coauthor of Empire , Multitude , and Commonwealth
“Hasana Sharp has demonstrated an acute awareness of the need for a new kind of politics and ethics to represent the present. It is ironically Spinoza, whose works have elaborated an enabling nature, who may provide the tools for the creation of this new framework to rethink life, nature, and power. This book presents an incisive reading of Spinoza as the philosopher whose renaturalization of the human opens up new ways of thinking about individuality, collectivity, and power. Spinoza has finally become indispensable for feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist struggles!”
— Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University
“Hasana Sharp is the first to attempt rigorously and comprehensively to examine the theoretical and, even more, the political effects of what she calls Spinoza’s project of renaturalization. To speak of renaturalization, of course, implies that philosophy before and after Spinoza sought, often without any clear awareness of its activity, to denaturalize thought, as if this denaturalization was the very work of philosophy as such. Sharp guides us with great care and precision through the baroque, if not rococo, interiors of Spinoza’s philosophy, demonstrating that his complexity is neither a sign of incoherence nor an elaborate ruse, but the necessary consequence of his attempt to think what was regarded as the unthinkable: the mutual immanence of the human and the natural. The illumination of Spinoza’s renaturalization is possible, as Sharp shows, only through an encounter with the most powerful currents of contemporary thought from Marxism and feminism to ecology. I believe that this book will mark a turning point in our understanding of Spinoza, compelling those who write after it not only to acknowledge it but to take a position in relation to it.”
— Warren Montag, Occidental College
“Sharp demonstrates that Spinoza’s metaphysical account of nature has much to contribute to contemporary debates surrounding theories of oppression….Her discussion touches on topics ranging widely from feminism and identity politics to deep ecology and animal rights.”
— Choice
“Hasana Sharp’s Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization is one the most invigorating books published in philosophy this year. Where Deleuzian and post-Althusserian accounts of Spinoza occasionally take all the affect out of one of the tradition’s most effective writers, Sharp’s book is eminently readable and clear about the stakes of rethinking Spinoza after the linguistic and discursive turns of the last half of the twentieth century.”
— Peter Gratton, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
“Sharp has written a stimulating and thought-provoking book that brings a fresh perspective to many issues that have been occupying center stage in Spinoza’s philosophy. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization is a highly commendable book, which makes one look forward to the author’s next production.”
— Analysis and Metaphysics
“Ecocriticism is in dire need of philosophical support from either new directions or new perspectives on old methods. Hasana Sharp’s Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization provides just such a new vantage on the writings of Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher whose writings have inspired Arne Naess, deep ecology, and much contemporary environmental philosophy. Although not directed toward the study of literature and environment per se, Sharp’s exemplary reading of Spinoza (and Spinozists) accrues ample materials for a fruitful re-appreciation of ecocritical thought.”
— Andrew Husband, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
“In [the] more focused and condensed arguments, Sharp emerges as an important new thinker to watch for anyone interested in Spinoza, posthumanism or affective politics”
— Beth Lord, Radical Philosophy
“Make no mistake. This book is audacious. Many readers will be taken aback by an account of Spinoza that seems deeply at odds with conventional understandings of the character of 17th-century rationalism and of Spinoza as an important proto-liberal. Moreover, throughout the volume Sharp more often and more closely engages with the work of deep ecologists, feminists, critical race theorists, and posthumanists than with other historians of philosophy. However, the historiography and textual analysis are careful, rigorous, and, in the end, highly plausible. Of the recent spate of work on Spinoza’s political philosophy, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization is the most novel, the most ambitious, and quite possibly the most important contribution.”
— Shannon Dea, Philosophy in Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Politics of Renaturalization - Hasana Sharp
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226750750.003.0001
[naturalism, Spinoza, Spinozism, God, existence, creative force]
This book focuses on Spinoza and his many known identities. Although there are many Spinozas, all of them converge at least on one point—his “naturalism.” The two pillars of Spinozism cannot be denied, namely, the identity of God and Nature and the tenet that “man” is but a tiny “part of Nature.” Existence for Spinoza is horizontal; the infinite creative force of nature is not separable from the infinitely many beings that exist. Spinoza’s naturalism denies human exceptionalism in any form. Like any other thing in nature, humans are corporeal and ideal, inevitably immersed in a system of cause and effect, and each comprising a power that is infinitely surpassed by the totality of other beings. (pages 1 - 19)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
A Practical Wisdom of Renaturalization
Impersonal Politics
Ingredients
Part I: Reconfiguring the Human
Lines, Planes, and Bodies: Redefining Human Action - Hasana Sharp
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226750750.003.0002
[affect, methodological individualism, transindividuality, verbal expression, mental decision]
This chapter outlines Spinoza’s understanding of action as affect and its place in his system. It discusses how the perspective of affect displaces methodological individualism. To think in terms of affect is necessarily to think in terms of “transindividuality,” such that forms of individuality are necessarily incomplete and variable in response to other beings. Later sections also examine one major consequence of Spinoza’s revision of human action. It is ascertained here what becomes of verbal expression and mental decision in Spinoza’s thought when action becomes affect. For Aristotle and his followers, including Hobbes, what makes us human is a power to deliberate and use language. Spinoza, on the contrary, treats both decision and speech as completely natural phenomena which do not make humans exceptional. (pages 21 - 54)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Action as Affect
The Transindividuality of Affect: Spinoza and Simondon
The Tongue
Renaturalizing Ideology: Spinoza’s Ecosystem of Ideas - Hasana Sharp
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226750750.003.0003
[ideology, renaturalization, oppressive ideas, denaturalization, human agency, truth effects]
This chapter presents the argument that in Spinoza can be found an alternative “renaturalization” of ideology whereby social critics and political activists can grasp how ideas grow, survive, and thrive, or shrink and die, like any other natural being. Rather than uncovering the synthetic basis of ostensibly natural facts, the politics of renaturalization seeks to identify the “ecological” factors that contribute to the vitality of oppressive ideas. “Renaturalization” is not a direct antonym to the critical tradition of denaturalization. It does, however, resist the notion that beneath any idea of nature, we will find only human agency. It is important here to uncover the nature of truth claims as “truth effects,” but it should not be thought that humans are the sole authors of such effects. (pages 55 - 84)
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The Matrix
Ideology Critique Today?
The Fly in the Coach
“I am in Ideology,” or The Attribute of Thought
What Is to Be Done?
Man’s Utility to Man: Reason and Its Place in Nature - Hasana Sharp
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226750750.003.0004
[human nature, human association, reason, ethical practice, universal essences, common notions]
This chapter takes on the task of placing some sense into Spinoza’s appeals to “human nature,” his unequivocal valorization of human association and friendship, and his understanding of reason as the foundation of ethical practice. This chapter interprets Spinoza’s appeals to a universal “human nature” as merely rhetorical. Strictly speaking, there is no human essence; there are only singular essences of similar beings that are called “human.” Although it is not an uncontroversial interpretation, several Spinoza scholars deny that he maintains any doctrine of universal essences. It is argued here that reason expresses the power or virtue of situated minds. This has the result that rational ideas, even if grounded in universal properties of bodies called “common notions,” are not necessarily shared by those who reason. (pages 85 - 113)
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The Politics of Human Nature
Reason and the Human Essence
Man’s Utility to Man
Nonhuman Utility
Part II: Beyond the Image of Man
Desire for Recognition? Butler, Hegel, and Spinoza - Hasana Sharp
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226750750.003.0005
[recognition, Hegel, Spinoza, renaturalization, Judith Butler, mainstream liberalism, representation]
This chapter restages the contrast between Hegel and Spinoza to clarify the difference between a humanist program of recognition and the politics of renaturalization. Judith Butler is correct to treat Spinoza and Hegel as vibrant alternatives to mainstream liberalism, which remains guided by Hobbesian understandings of desire and methodological individualism. Although Butler’s juxtaposition of Spinoza and Hegel is fruitful for her own theory, her ultimate reduction of politics to a problematic of recognition and representation detracts from the resilience of Spinoza’s conception of conatus. Her emphasis on vulnerability to death overstates the power of the social, to the detriment of natural determination. The politics of renaturalization begins with the denial of human exceptionalism; as such, the idea that we live only insofar as we are recognized as human is anathema to the politics of renaturalization. (pages 117 - 154)
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Spinoza in Hegel
Desire in Hegel
Conatus and Cupiditas in Spinoza
From Interpersonal Recognition to Impersonal Glory
Judith Butler’s Post-Hegelian Politics of Recognition
The Impersonal Is Political: Spinoza and a Feminist Politics of Imperceptibility - Hasana Sharp
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226750750.003.0006
[recognition, Elizabeth Grosz, imperceptibility, impersonality, humanism, justice, antiracist thought]
This chapter outlines the problems Elizabeth Grosz identifies with a politics of recognition and examines her exhortation to “imperceptibility” and “impersonality.” It proposes that Grosz’s idiom of force, nature, and impersonality grounds her effort to produce a political vocabulary entirely alien to humanism. Humanism in politics is understood here as one that includes any vision of justice derived from a special feature of existence that is not exhibited by nonhuman beings but is held to be universally shared by humans. Grosz, however, is concerned not with political theory but with feminist, queer, and antiracist thought. She is concerned with movements among the oppressed that constitute alternative ways of life, one not defined by their oppressors. (pages 155 - 184)
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The Politics of Recognition
Elizabeth Grosz’s Critique of the Politics of Recognition
Thinking beyond the (Hu)Man
A Politics of Imperceptibility
Nature, Norms, and Beasts - Hasana Sharp
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226750750.003.0007
[man, social distortion, anthropocentrism, renaturalization, humanism, posthumanist politics]
This chapter goes beyond man and presents the argument that man should not be humiliated. If Spinoza is to be linked to the cause of finding in the beast a more natural idea of man stripped of social distortion, one must be wary of the affects driving the critique of anthropocentrism. The politics of renaturalization must avoid enshrining nature as a new idol. A rejection of humanism does not entail an ennoblement of the cosmos or animal instinct. A posthumanist politics sensitizes us to our permeability and involvement with nonhuman powers, without requiring us to subordinate ourselves to them. A liberating framework for thinking about who and what we are cannot emerge from self-hatred and a desire to repent, by virtue of which we are only “twice wretched.” (pages 185 - 220)
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The Beast Within
Animal Affects (and) the First Man
Ethics as Ethology?
Works Cited
Index
