$urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, by A. Kiarina Kordela. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007

Abstract

In this review I trace Kordela's original and brilliantly argued claim that the Spinozian-Marxian line of thought finds its proper articulation in contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysis. I illuminate the linkages and logic underpinning her analysis, including her unique and complex reading of Spinoza's monism, which yields critical insights into paradoxes of belief, truth, and causality; her meticulous counterarguments to Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Gilles Deleuze, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, among others; her extension of Kojin Karatani's work on set theory in Marx by way of Lacan's concepts of the gaze and feminine ethics; and her critique of Immanuel Kant's antinomies as they relate to global capitalism. Ultimately, I highlight where Kordela's claims lead, both in terms of philosophy (the obsolescence of Platonism) and in terms of a new pathway for a revisionist conception of Marxism as a theory of language, being, and ethics.