Hasana Sharp. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

Abstract

Spinoza studies revolved almost exclusively around metaphysical issues for centuries. In these last few decades, this situation changed – mainly prompted by French neo-Marxist studies in the 60’s – since there has been recognition of an original political philosophy deeply rooted in Spinoza’s ontology. The TheologicalPolitical Treatise and the later Political Treatise finally began getting the attention they deserved, three hundred years after their original publication. A scholar committed to studying Spinoza’s political philosophy fifty years ago could hardly find supporting literature beyond the usual discussions of the Ethics’ Parts One and Two, whereas today there is a vast available literature, and still growing. In more recent years, however, there seems to have appeared a new literature that neither engages exclusively in metaphysical discussions of the Ethics nor proposes simply to analyse Spinoza’s political tracts. Instead, this growing literature seems mostly concerned with contemporary problems related to radically democratic political theory, but approaches them from the viewpoint of Spinoza’s conceptual groundwork. This can be witnessed in recent work by Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Warren Montag, or Moira Gatens. Hasana Sharp’s latest book can be considered a new contribution to this novel trend. Sharp intends to make Spinoza’s naturalism meet its full consequences with regard to human nature, thus opening up a path toward a sort of political ontology of human relations that might be relevant to contemporary feminist theory, antiracist struggles, ecology, and animal studies. She is especially concerned with reconciling two distinct aspects of Spinoza’s naturalism: his rejection of human exceptionalism in nature, which implies that human agency is entirely natural and subject to the exact same natural laws governing all other parts of nature; and his rejection of primitivism, which means that being natural for humans equals what she calls ‘philanthropy’. Her overall argument is expressed in three different points. The first