Materialist Variations around Spinoza. Theoretical Alliances and Political Strategies

MARIANA DE GAINZA

Berlín

Workshop; Materialism and Politics conference; 2019

Centre Marc Bloch / ICI Berlin

If we were to accept the assertions that suppose the incompatibility between critical-dialectical philosophies and Spinozist political ontologies, it would follow that Spinoza?s Ethics can be subject to the Adornian critique of ethics: to live in accordance with one?s own being is a form to compliance with dominant cultural values. To defend that we can approach Adornian and Spinozist criticism, from a certain interpretation of materialism. I elaborate a cartography of contemporary Spinozism, to show than in the tensions that it displays, there is a place to a dialectics, that can be read in dialogue with the Adornian gesture that denounces the purported identity between particular and universal. If Adorno emphasizes the falsehood of that identification, reestablishing the legibility of the contradiction hidden by the idealist operation, Spinoza?s political anti-moralism, that goes with his Machiavellism, can be reconstructed in a similar direction.