Hasana Sharp's <i>Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization</i>: A Response

Abstract

Hasana Sharp's Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization revitalizes the power of Spinoza's naturalism by bringing it into close proximity to strands of contemporary theory with which it bears strong affinities. In the process, Sharp generates a new concept, the "politics of renaturalization," which, like the finite modes of Spinoza's ontology, acquires its form and force partly in agonistic relation to rival concepts—such as Judith Butler's post-Hegelian politics of recognition—that threaten to diminish its potency. Key categories in Spinoza's system (affect, idea, reason) combine with Elisabeth Grosz's "renaturalization," Gilles Deleuze's "ethology," Gilbert Simondon's "transindividuality," among others, to accentuate the strengths of cutting- edge theorizing and abate the dominative effects of new humanisms. Sharp's book thus endeavors not only to explicate but also to enact a project of renaturalization, understood as a "strategy to attenuate the antipathy that plagues our psyches and our life in common" (5). Stated more fully, what Sharp finds in Spinoza's naturalism is an effort "to engender self- love in humanity by eroding those models of man that animate hatred, albeit indirectly, by suggesting that we are, at one extreme, defective Gods or, at the other, corrupt animals who need to be restored to our natural condition" (5). She discerns the contemporary legacies of such super- and sub-natural paradigms in modes of thought ranging from social constructivism to so- called normative political theory to deep ecology. That's not to say these bodies of work are to