Description: Maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the proper continuation of the line of thought from Spinoza to Marx.
Brief description: A. Kiarina Kordela is Professor of German and Director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College and currently holds an honorary position with the Writing and Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan (also published by SUNY Press), and the coeditor (with Dimitris Vardoulakis) of Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka's Cages.
Review Quotes:
"Kordela masterfully shows how Spinoza's thought jibes with the insights of psychoanalysis, especially concerning the original cause and the final cause. This book has actually forced me to reevaluate my own thinking about Spinoza and to realize that I have wrongly been associating Spinoza with the misguided neo-Spinozist reading of him." -- Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan
"From the very beginning, this book is of such intellectual power that it is capable of severe criticism of some of the most potent thinkers in the field--Zðizûek and Badiou, for example--while at the same time showing what is productive in them. Kordela has learned from them; they too have much to learn from her." -- Thomas Pepper, author of Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century