Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory

This book offers a detailed account of Spinoza's influence on various schools of present-day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable writings of a thinker like Giles Deleuze. The author combines a close exegesis of Spinoza's texts with a series of chapters that trace the evolution of literary theory from its period of high scientific rigour in the mid-1960s to its latest "postmodern", neopragmatist or anti-theoretical phase. He examines the thought of Althusser, Macherey and Deleuze as well as others (including the new historicists) who have registered the impact of his pioneering work without any overt acknowledgement. On the one hand, theorists like Althusser and Macherey could celebrate Spinoza as the first philosopher before Marx to understand the need for a riorous distinction between science (or "theoretical practice") and ideology (or the realm of lived experience subject to various forms of imaginary error of misrecognition). On the other, Deleuze makes Spinoza the hero of his crusade against theories of whatever kind - Kantian, Marxist, Freudian, post structuralist - which always end up by imposing some abstract order of concepts and categories on the libidinal flux of "desiring production", or the "body-without-organs" of anarchic instinctual drives. "This book offers the first detailed account of Spinoza's influence -- direct or oblique -- on various schools of present-day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, New Historicism, and the unclassifiable writings of a thinker like Gilles Deleuze." "What Norris sets out to explain is the curious fact that such a diverse range of critical approaches -- often deeply at odds with each other on numerous points of principle and practice -- should nonetheless share a common point of origin in Spinoza's writings on metaphysics, ethics, and politics. On the one hand, theorists like Althusser and Macherey could celebrate Spinoza as the first philosopher before Marx to understand the need for a rigorous distinction between science and ideology. On the other, Deleuze makes Spinoza the hero of his crusade against theories, truth-claims or explanatory systems of whatever kind." "Norris's book is the first to take account of this remarkably diverse reception-history. It is also a strikingly original contribution to the current dialogue between philosophers, intellectual historians and literary theorists. Book jacket."--Jacket Contents ......Page 5 Preface ......Page 6 Introduction ......Page 8 Author’s Preface ......Page 18 A Note on Texts ......Page 25 1 Spinoza versus Hegel: the Althusserian Moment ......Page 27 2 Of Truth and Error in a Spinozist Sense: Deleuze, Derrida, de Man ......Page 60 3 Language, Truth and Historical Understanding ......Page 107 4 The Claim of Reason: Spinoza as a Left-Cartesian ......Page 147 5 From Scriptural Hermeneutics to Secular Critique ......Page 181 6 Fiction, Philosophy and the Way of Ideas ......Page 220 7 Why Spinoza Now? The Critique of Revelation Revisited ......Page 254 Notes ......Page 278 Christopher Norris: A Selected Bibliography, 1974-1989 ......Page 305 Index ......Page 321