Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop, Althusser and Spinoza: Detours and Returns – trans. Élise Hendrick ed. Dan Taylor, Edinburgh University Press, November 2025

Offers an original analysis of the pivotal relationship between Althusser and Spinoza

• Reappraises in a thematic and chronological way the interactions of both philosophies
• Presents the reader with a new perspective on Spinoza as a materialist philosopher and on materialism itself
• Comprehensively sets out Althusser’s contribution to the contemporary philosophical debate on materialism, aleatory materialism and transindividuality

Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop argues that Spinoza’s influence fundamentally shaped Althusser’s philosophical project, providing key concepts and methods that Althusser used to radically rethink Marxism. The book traces five key ‘detours and returns’ between Althusser and Spinoza, showing how Spinoza’s anti-humanism, theory of reading, immanent causality, politics of the conjuncture, and rejection of determinism were mobilised at critical junctures in Althusser’s development. In the process, Estop uncovers a new ‘Althusserian Spinoza’, a thinker of practice and politics whose revolutionary potential remains to be explored.

Bringing together published works, correspondences, and unpublished writings, this groundbreaking study sheds new light on Althusser’s theoretical trajectory and reveals the hidden Spinozist foundations of one of the 20th century’s most important Marxist thinkers.