Review of Plural Temporality: Transindividuality and the Aleatory between Spinoza and Althusser by Vittorio Morfino

ABSTRACT

This review analyzes the six related essays that comprise Vittorio Morfino’s book Plural Temporality: Transindividuality and the Aleatory between Spinoza and Althusser, each of which involve key points of intervention and related philosophical debates regarding the references to Spinoza that comprised Althusser’s constant labor in Marxist theory. Reconstructing some of the crucial arguments and their implications, I show that Morfino synthesizes these elements scattered throughout Althusser in a productive and rigorous historical recapitulation that results in new insights for an ontology of relations and the theory of temporality which must be constructed out of its demands. While the points of departure often revolve around Athusserian philosophy, Morfino’s endeavor constitutes its own extensive intervention into the current theoretical conjuncture, and stands up as an important touchstone for contemporary work in Althusserian philosophy, Spinoza’s Marxism, and Marxist theory more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Materialism
• Spinoza
• Althusser
• transindividuality
• philosophy of history

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Dave Mesing is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Villanova University, where he is writing a dissertation on strategy in politics and philosophy. He is the author of the entry for “Guy Debord” in Adam Kotsko and Carlo Salzani eds., Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and is completing a translation of Vittorio Morfino’s Il tempo e l’occasione: l’incontro Spinoza-Machiavelli (The Spinoza-Machiavelli Encounter: Time and Occasion) for Edinburgh University Press. He is part of the editorial collective at Viewpoint Magazine.