A. Kiarina Kordela is Professor of German and Director of the Critical Theory Program, at Macalester College, and honorary adjunct professor at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.
Dimitris Vardoulakis is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Spinoza's political thought has been subject to a significant revival of interest in recent years. As a response to difficult times, students and scholars have returned to this founding figure of modern philosophy as a means to help reinterpret and rethink the political present. Spinoza's Authority Volume I: Resistance and Power in Ethics makes a significant contribution to this ongoing reception and utilization of Spinoza's political thought by focusing on his posthumously published Ethics. By taking the concept of authority as an original framework, this books asks: How is authority related to ethics, ontology, and epistemology? What are the social, historical and representational processes that produce authority and resistance? And what are the conditions of effective resistance?

Spinoza's Authority features a roster of internationally established theorists of Spinoza's work, and covers key elements of Spinoza's political philosophy, including: questions of authority, the resistance to authority, sovereign power, democratic control, and the role of Spinoza's "multitudes".

Reference Guide and List of Abbreviations

Preface
A. Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis

Chapter 1: Equality and Power: Spinoza's Reformulation of the Aristotelian Tradition of Egalitarianism
Dimitris Vardoulakis

Chapter 2: Spinoza's Ethics and Politics of Freedom: Active and Passive Power
Aurelia Armstrong

Chapter 3: Grammars of Conatus: or, On the Primacy of Resistance in Spinoza, Foucault, and Deleuze
Cesare Casarino

Chapter 4: Beyond Legitimacy: The State as an Imaginary Entity in Spinoza's Political Ontology
Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop

Chapter 5: The Cold Quietness of the Stars: Proof, Rhetoric, and the Authority of Reason in the Ethics
Joseph Hughes

Chapter 6: Spinoza: A Different Power to Act
Antonio Negri

Chapter 7: Commanding the Body: The Language of Subjection in Ethics III, P2S
Warren Montag

Chapter 8: Interrupting the System: Spinoza and Maroon Thought
James Edward Ford III

Chapter 9: Spinoza's Biopolitics: Commodification of Substance, and Secular Immortality
A. Kiarina Kordela

Bibliography
Index