Katja Diefenbach, Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy: Speculative Materialism – trans. Gerrit Jackson, Edinburgh University Press, November 2025

Expensive, and e-book is currently listed for the same price, unfortunately.

Revises continental philosophy’s portrayals of the relationships between matter, affect, thought and the power of the multitude

• Provides a comprehensive overview and detailed analysis of central concepts and controversies in French post-Marxist and poststructuralist Spinoza scholarship
• Introduces, and intervenes in, the post-Marxist and poststructuralist controversies over Spinoza’s concepts of immanent causality, conatus, and power of the multitude as tools to rethink politics in contemporary radical thought
• Incorporates historical context with an extensive discussion of Dutch colonial capitalism
• Provides conceptual and contextual groundwork for further research in Spinoza studies, early modern political philosophy, post-Marxism, poststructuralism, and French intellectual history
• Widens access to the intellectual wealth of authors not yet widely translated into English, such as Ferdinand Alquié and Martial Gueroult

The book begins from the insight that very few seventeenth-century philosophers have received more antithetical interpretations than Baruch de Spinoza. He has been regarded as an atheist and a rationalist, as a pantheist and a vitalist, as a Jewish critic of religion and a great thinker in the Marrano tradition. In the twentieth century, however, Spinoza was conceived as a materialist who was strikingly ahead of his time, providing Marxism with concepts of overdetermined dialectics, plural temporality and nonteleological praxis.

Beginning with Althusser’s interest in the concept of immanent causality, the book reconstructs post-Marxist readings of Spinoza from Negri to Balibar, Matheron to Tosel, and Gueroult to Deleuze. It examines how these authors adapt Spinoza’s unconventional doctrines of the differentiality of being, the self-forming capacity of matter, the excess of the positive affects, and the multitude’s power of self-government. The book fundamentally revises continental philosophy’s portrayals of the relationships between matter, affect, thought, and the multitude.