Spinoza's Critique of Religion and Its Heirs: Marx, Benjamin, Adorno by Idit Dobbs-Weinstein (review)

Idit Dobbs-Weinstein's book is not, as the title may initially suggest, a contribution to the history of Spinoza's reception. It is, rather, "intended as an intervention" that is "strictly situated in the project of Critical Theory" (2). This intervention assumes the double form of an exposure and a retrieval of an other, occluded Judaeo-Arabic Aristotelian materialist tradition, whose pre-eminent modern expression can be found in Spinoza's radical critique of religion. Dobbs-Weinstein argues that it is this occluded materialist tradition that—via Spinoza—decisively informs the ways in which Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno shape their materialist critiques of (the philosophy of) history. This line of Judaeo-Arabic materialist thought has not come into view yet, Dobbs-Weinstein argues, because it has been and continues to be suppressed by an antimaterialist (and more or less overt antisemitic) Christo-Platonic tradition, which emerged with Augustine and found its most significant culmination in Hegel. Dobbs-Weinstein's ambitious materialist reordering of the politico-philosophical panorama from Aristotle and Spinoza to Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno is accomplished in five chapters.The first chapter ("Theologico-Political Construction of the Philosophical Tradition") works out the differences between the two traditions, that is, between the materialist, Judaeo-Arabic Aristotelian tradition and the antimaterialist, Christo-Platonic tradition by carefully examining the respective pre-Modern and Modern sources. This differentiation brings to light both the way in which Judaeo-Arabic Aristotelian materialism was originally conceived and how it has been appropriated, deformed, and occluded by the Christo-Platonic tradition. Dobbs-Weinstein proceeds by claiming that Spinoza was aware of this usurpation and indeed reacted to it in the Judaeo-Arabic materialist manner: "Spinoza's criticisms arise from the radical difference between his ethos and that of his late Scholastic predecessors and modern contemporaries. […] Spinoza's idiom involves a devaluation and revaluation of values from the beginning, by deploying all 'conventional' terms against the grain" (34f.). After exposing Spinoza's materialist position, Dobbs-Weinstein turns to Kant and Hegel, for both are the "main philosophical interlocutors" of Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno and thus the two "giant obstacles" to uncovering the Judaeo-Arabic materialist tradition (40). With both antimaterialism and antisemitism informing their political philosophy and their philosophy of history, both Kant and Hegel deserve to be included alongside the Christo-Platonic tradition. To illustrate the philosophical distance between Kant, Hegel, and, by extension, the Christo-Platonic tradition, on the on hand, and the Judaeo-Arabic Aristotelian materialist tradition, on the other, Dobbs-Weinstein eventually turns "to a consideration of negative dialectics as a species of negative theology materially and historically understood" that situates "the difference between the two traditions […] in the precise terms of the erasure of the Jewish by the Judaeo-Christian" and "of ethics/politics by ontotheology" (40). This contrast points to the possibility of uncovering an other, thoroughly political, dialectical materialist history, which resists the "appropriation into a Christian apophatic discourse" and whose heirs are Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno (51). In the second chapter ("The Paradox of a Perfect Democracy: From Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise to Marx"), Dobbs-Weinstein focuses on Spinoza's occluded influence on Marx's political philosophy. The examination begins with a critical reflection on the politics of Marx scholarship, namely, the conspicuous way in which Marx's Spinoza Theologische-Politiche Traktat von Karl Heinrich Marx. Berlin 1841 is so often ignored. Dobbs-Weinstein challenges the marginalized role of Marx's TTP and argues that Marx's engagement with Spinoza's TTP is indeed the very source of his radical critique of Hegel and the left Hegelians. Among some of the conceptual similarities that Dobbs-Weinstein carefully traces in Marx' notebooks, it is especially the manner in which both Marx and Spinoza assess and criticize the role of religion in the commonwealth that reveals their common materialist heritage. For instance, neither thinker usually makes a distinction between metaphysics and theology...