Abstract
This review concerns A. Kiarina Kordela’s impressive new book, Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure. In a series of provocative philosophical encounters organized around a Spinozist reading of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Kordela proposes a new form of epistemology, epistemontology, that would challenge the kinds of dualist philosophy that have dominated Western thought “from Kant to deconstruction.” In her words, “Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is a reformulation of the principle of monism, with which Spinoza overcame the dualism between representation and external reality.” Deploying this central thesis in critical engagements with a host of theoretical interlocutors, Kordela offers the reader a unique philosophical perspective that is rooted in her revelatory rereading of Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan and attuned to face the vagaries of our particular moment of late capitalist modernity.