January 30

Jason M. Yonover (JHU)

Nietzsche and Spinoza on Right and Power

Abstract: Scholarship on Nietzsche’s relation to Spinoza has made important progress in recent years, and new work has helped to clarify aspects not only of Nietzsche’s thought but also Spinoza’s. Yet both this and prior literature has largely overlooked apparent references to Spinoza in plans for a “[e]in tractatus politicus […] von Friedrich Nietzsche” within late notebooks. In this paper, I account for Nietzsche’s gestures here and beyond by clarifying the political realism—understood as the view according to which right and power are one—that I argue guides Nietzsche’s as well as Spinoza’s political thought. To this end, I also consider which sources concerning the latter Nietzsche would have known, and emphasize where the two part ways on politics.

Jason M. Yonover is the incoming Desai Family Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University and Dual PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University. He works primarily in the history of philosophy and German studies, with a focus on German philosophy and political thought in particular. He is co-editor of Spinoza in Germany: Political and Religious Thought across the Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming with OUP) and the author of articles or chapters in the European Journal of Philosophy, the Oxford Handbook of 19th-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition, and the Blackwell Companion to Spinoza.

Click here to learn more about his work.

A recording of the session will be made available on the “Downloads” page for some time following the event.

(The “Downloads” page is password-protected, and the password is available to all members of the Spinoza and EMP Workshop email list.)