Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory

by Christopher Norris

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.

Genres: Philosophy

331 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

As of 2007 he is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at Cardiff University. He completed his PhD in English at University College London in 1975, while Sir Frank Kermode served as the Lord Northcliffe Professor of modern English literature there.

Until 1991 Norris taught in the Cardiff English Department. He has also held fellowships and visiting appointments at a number of institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, the City University of New York and Dartmouth College.

He is one of the world's leading scholars on deconstruction, particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida. He has written numerous books and papers on literary theory and continental philosophy. Norris is now considered a philosopher in his own right: 2003's Life After Theory reference required featured an interview with Norris, placing him alongside Derrida as a significant contemporary.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very competent book. Very evenly balanced, and not as devoid of warmth and humor and the author's very supercilious photo on the back would indicate. Shows how the major issues in contemporary theory do not arise out of a void but from specific historical precedents, and also reveals the enormous range of uses to which a single historical text can be put.

Falls, however, into disarray by chapter three. The cause: attempting way too much.