Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza

Contents

Preface Nancy Tuana

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations and Notes on Translations

1. Introduction: Through Spinoza’s “Looking Glass”

  Moira Gatens

2. Dominance and Difference: A Spinozistic Alternative to the Distinction Between “Sex” and “Gender”

  Genevieve Lloyd

3. Autonomy and the Relational Individual: Spinoza and Feminism

  Aurelia Armstrong

4. Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love and the Hilarity of True Love

  Amelie Rorty

5. Spinoza and Sexuality

  Alexandre Matheron

6. Reason, Sexuality, and the Self in Spinoza

  David West

7. What Spinoza Can Teach Us About Embodying and Naturalizing Ethics

  Heidi Morrison Ravven

8. Adam and the Serpent: Everyman and the Imagination

  Paola Grassi

9. The Envelope: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, “Of God”

  Luce Irigaray

10. Re-reading Irigaray’s Spinoza

  Sarah Donovan

11. The Politics of the Imagination

  Moira Gatens

12. Law and Sovereignty in Spinoza’s Politics

  Susan James

Further Reading

List of Contributors

Index

“This volume is an excellent contribution to Spinoza scholarship. Spinoza scholars will find that this book offers new angles from which to think through questions about Spinoza’s metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Feminist researchers will find it provides additional, perhaps surprising resources for considering a range of issues, such as autonomy, individuality, political organization, ethics, and sexuality and gender.”

—Deborah Boyle, Philosophy in Review