Etienne Balibar, Spinoza, the Transindividual, translated by Mark G. E. Kelly, Edinburgh University Press, September 2020

One of the most important books on Spinoza to appear in the last 30 years, written by one of the foremost living French philosophers

• Includes a rare engagement by Balibar with psychoanalysis and Freud’s social thought
• Offers new readings of Spinoza, a canonical figure in the history of philosophy
• Intervenes in a growing discourse around the notion of transindividuality

Étienne Balibar, one of the foremost living French philosophers, builds on his landmark work Spinoza and Politics with this exploration of Spinoza’s ontology. Balibar situates Spinoza in relation to the major figures of Marx and Freud as a precursor to the more recent French thinker Gilbert Simondon’s concept of the transindividual.
Presenting a crucial development in his thought, Balibar takes the concept of transindividuality beyond Spinoza to show it at work at both the individual and the collective level.

Update: there is a review by Dan Taylor at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books