Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

“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.”

“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.”