This is a recording of an online seminar with philosopher Katja Diefenbach . It forms part of our ongoing series, From Marx to Spinoza: Affect, Ideology, Materiality. This is a more specialist seminar than much of what you will find in this podcast feed, so check out some of the introductory sessions in that series if this material is interesting but new to you.

With respect to contemporary Marxism or Post-Marxism , Spinoza is one philosopher, infinite interpretations: Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze, and Alexandre Matheron all draw from Spinoza, but in fundamentally different ways.

Althusser’s use of Spinoza to develop a theory of ideology as the imaginary representation of the relationship to their real relations is fundamentally different from Negri’s use of Spinoza to construct a theory of the multitude as the political subject, which is in turn different from Deleuze’s examination of the affective dimension of politics.

Up until now no one has really examined these different interpretations in relation to each other, investigating how they emerge from tensions within Spinoza’s work. Katja Diefenbach’s Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy is the first book to appear, at least in English, that examines the different and diverse strands of Spinozist Marxism, examining how they overlap and diverge from each other. 

On this recording, you will also hear the voices of seminar participants John Protevi, Kimberly DeFazio and the hosts Jason Read, Andrew Goffey and Jeremy Gilbert.

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