Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan

A. Kiarina Kordela

feb 2012 · State University of New York Press

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Opposing both popular "neo-Spinozisms" (Deleuze, Negri, Hardt, Israel) and their Lacanian critiques (Zðizûek and Badiou), Surplus maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the proper continuation of the Spinozian-Marxian line of thought. Author A. Kiarina Kordela argues that both sides ignore the inherent contradictions in Spinoza's work, and that Lacan's reading of Spinoza—as well as of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Wittgenstein—offers a much subtler balance of knowing when to take the philosopher at face value and when to read him against himself. Moving between abstract theory and tangible political, ethical, and literary examples, Kordela traces the emergence of "enjoyment" and "the gaze" out of Spinoza's theories of God, truth, and causality, Kant's critique of pure reason, and Marx's pathbreaking application of set theory to economy. Kordela's thought unfolds an epistemology and an ontology proper to secular capitalist modernity that call for a revision of the Spinoza-Marx-Lacan line as the sole alternative to the (anti-)Platonist tradition.

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A. Kiarina Kordela is Associate Professor of German Studies at Macalester College.