Spinoza's Geographical Ethics

Harnessing the enigmatic and radical philosophy of Dutch rationalist Baruch Spinoza, this book examines and animates the occluded geography beating at the heart of his work. Essays attending to matters of space, nature, hope, aesthetics and politics recast the Dutch rationalist in geographical terms, spotlighting Spinoza’s re-thinking and re-writing of earth and world. Advancing a renaissance in Spinozist scholarship, the book argues that Spinoza offers conceptual techniques to better apprehend and negotiate the affects and passions catalysing twenty-first century societal, environmental and political transformation. The stakes of a geographical Spinoza, for ethics, politics, ecology and thought itself, could not be higher.

Author Biography

Joe Gerlach is Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at the University of Bristol. He is a cultural geographer whose research interests are centred conceptually on geophilosophy, micropolitics, posthuman ethics, and Spinoza. He is co-editor of Why Guattari? A Liberation of Politics, Cartographies and Ecologies (Routledge, 2021).