Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud

Description

An original and broad-ranging reassessment of Spinoza's intellectual legacy.

Michael Mack (PhD. Cambridge) is Reader in English Literature and Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. Formerly he has been a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, a Fellow at the University of Sydney, and lecturer and research fellow at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (Continuum, 2010), German Idealism and the Jew (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which was shortlisted for The Koret Jewish Book Award 2004, and Anthropology as Memory (Niemeyer, 2001, Conditio Judaica Series).

The book is intended for those with a working knowledge of Spinoza's writings, but it is so diversified that it will also appeal to readers from many different fields... Mack has achieved a masterly presentation of Spinoza's legacy and his alternative modernity, modelled an elegant method for reading philosophy and history adopted from literary studies, and offered compelling arguments that will provoke readers to question many modern assumptions about the human condition. -- Political Studies Review Vol. 10 Reviewed in Boletin de bibliografia spinozista No. 12. "Stephen Nadler recently remarked that we are in the midst of a Spinoza revival. If Michael Mack is to be believed, based on the strong case presented in this ambitious and valuable book, this revival has been going on since the mid-eighteenth century. [...] The range and depth of Mack's research, across philosophical, literary and theological sources, is extremely impressive, as is his ability to bring this material together to serve his core argument. [...] This book is well worth seeking out. Mack has assured Spinoza's place at the heart of an alternative history of modernity, and assured his own place in the interdisciplinary history of ideas." - British Journal for the History of Philosophy "For anyone like me brought up on the Enlightenment thought of Descartes and Kant, there is usually a vague awareness of an alternative tradition which throws the certainties of Modernity into question. Michael Mack illuminated that tradition through his study of the way Spinoza influenced a series of questioning thinkers such as Herder, Goethe, George Eliot and Freud. It's a fascinating and stimulating read." -- Dr Nicholas Sagovsky, Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey. 'This is an important, original, and worthwhile project... Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity is a compelling text whose core idea is well conceived and researched... This book is well worth seeking out.' -- British Journal for the History of Philosophy "The book begins with two chapters devoted to uncovering this spectre in Spinoza, before considering Herder's thought in detail for four chapters. In Chapter Seven, Rosenzweig and Goethe's paganisms are examined in this context, Eliot's Daniel Deronda in Chapter Eight and Freud in the final chapter. Through following these diverse, if overlapping strands of literature, philosophy, theology, and psychoanalysis through eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe, the reader builds up an increasingly rich understanding of spectral thought experiments in diversity. Like all the best interpretations of the history of thought, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity provokes the reader." -- Journal for Jewish Thought "Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity highlights a number of fertile connections to Spinoza and adumbrates modern thought and culture in new ways. It suggests several avenues for future research and goes some way toward correcting the false portrait of Spinoza as an uncompromising rationalist who has little appreciation of the imaginative fabric of cultural life." -- Symposium (Hasana Sharp) Overall, Mack's book is a significant, well-researched, and broad-ranging contribution to the current renaissance of Spinozian studies. -- 18th and 19th Century Literature and Culture "In Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity Michael Mack traces the genesis of modern interpretations of culture to Spinoza's legacy and to its reception in the Enlightenment, as in the thought of Herder and Goethe, and in later periods. The insightful examination of the roots of universalism provides an original reassessment of the concept of culture which will be of value to all who work in the areas of German literature, Jewish studies, theology and philosophy. I believe that Michael Mack is one of the most promising young scholars of his generation." - Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Professor of Philosophy, Universite de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France "Michael Mack's study of the reception of Spinoza's removal of man from the center of the philosophical universe is extraordinary and important. The recent renaissance of interest in Spinoza has assumed that this major thinker has had little or no impact on the world of modern thought and of culture. From Herder to Freud, from George Eliot to Franz Rosenzweig, Mack illustrates how the reading of Spinoza served as the catalyst to new means of rethinking the centrality of man in nature. In such a world the natural order (or disorder) is not dependent on man; history is shaped by the world and its forces; fiction reflects man dependence on, not dominance of, nature. Mack's book is a vital, new rethinking of Spinoza's impact on modern thought." -- Sander Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Emory University, USA, and Professorial Fellow, Birkbeck College, UK "Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity is a work of central importance, and has the virtue of being genuinely interdisciplinary while being firmly rooted in philosophy and the history of European ideas. This is a measured and confident narrative, fully aware and apprised of contemporary critical debates and concerns about homogeneity and universalism. At the same time, it appeals to a literary tradition which includes such major figures as George Eliot in its focus on and study of Daniel Deronda. This is the work of a genuine scholar." -- David Jasper, Professor in Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow, UK. "Michael Mack's new book is an original and compelling intellectual history of modernity. Mack masterfully reveals the connective tissue linking such varied contributors to modernity as Spinoza, Herder, Goethe, Darwin, and Freud. The result is a distinctive portrait of mind and culture confronting the 21st century." -- Berel Lang, Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Letters, Wesleyan University, USA "Spinoza's metaphysical and political thought has always fascinated his readers. Spinozism has been associated with almost every philosophical tendency from atheism to pantheism, naturalism to materialism, fatalism to determinism. Michael Mack's book joins the growing literature on Spinoza's thought. It takes as its central figure the 18th-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, unpacks the Spinozist roots of his thought and charts the influence of both, in particular on the modern literature of Goethe and T.S. Eliot and Freud's psychoanalytic thought. Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity is a wide-ranging and ambitious work that will be relevant to many interests. The concluding chapter on Freud and his relation to Spinoza will be of particular interest to scholars working in psychology and neuroscience. As Mack reminds us in his introduction, Spinoza's philosophical inquiry 'vibrates in a force field where political, medical, theological, psychological and literary currents criss-cross each other'. Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity is the attempt of a committed scholar to do justice to this force field." - Times Higher Education "Those who are studying 19th- and 20th-century philosophy and intellectual history will welcome this book." -- Choice Mack aptly describes the subject matter of his book as the 'creative inflections' of Spinoza in the past three centuries. He traces, in a pretty fascinating manner, these creative inflections in the works of Herder, Goethe, George Eliott, Freud and Rosenzweig. Some of these creative readings are more interesting than others. It seems that Mack's book itself could be added to this list of modern Spinozist variations. Actually, quite an interesting-as well as creative-Spinoza inflection. -- Yitzhak Y. Melamed * Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University * Mack presents a convincing case for an historical continuation of Spinoza's influence in the thought of Johan Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Weimar Classicism in general, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and the 'new science' of Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic cure. That said, this is no detached scholarly tracing of thematic continuities, but rather a passionate advocacy on behalf of Spinoza's non-hierarchic, non-teleological view of reality. * The Heythrop Journal *