This is an eye-opening reader that demonstrates that a sophisticated feminist approach brings not only new and critically important questions to the table but also allows us to understand the significance of Spinoza's thought in a richer, more complex, and more challenging context. Superbly edited by one of the outstanding experts on Spinoza, this volume's essays are not only of interest to readers of Spinoza whom they reposition as a crucial interlocutor for rethinking the body, identity, and the question of what is “man” (i.e., human nature). As a consequence, the essays also address questions such as how to understand Spinoza's reformulating of the project of philosophy as whole. In the context of Jewish studies, this volume deserves particular attention because it resituates Spinoza as a critical thinker of the body, identity, and human nature, whose critical significance for rethinking Jewishness, individuality, and difference is yet to be fully understood in its full ramifications. As a result, those vocal but marginalized voices—so long ignored—who for centuries have welcomed Spinoza for the philosophical strength of his approach in addressing identity and tradition as plastic forms of work-in-progress with self-empowering potential are given unexpected but striking justification by this volume's contributions.

Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza perceptively highlights Spinoza's philosophical framework as one that is particularly helpful in addressing today's pressing needs of moving beyond the binaries of the Cartesian mind/body split and its attendant implications. The essays demonstrate that the liberating potential of Spinoza, when applied in a sophisticated way to the questions of gender and identity, assumes critical importance to related debates in Jewish studies. But in addition, this volume also allows us to revisit the complicated and conflicted debate concerning Spinoza's place in the context of Jewish studies. The contributions to this volume suggest that as Spinoza aligns with strands of Jewish philosophical traditions, a fresh look at his thought no longer allows critics to simply excommunicate him from the historiography of Jewish history. While the title's use of “Benedict” might alienate some Jewish readers—or just as ironically have them nod—it is very much the aspect of “Baruch” that is most interesting to readers in Jewish studies. “Baruch,” is the short form for those critical moments in Spinoza's thought that for too long have remained cordoned off under the hegemonic name “Benedict.” But it is in fact the Spinoza who critically engages with the hegemonic tradition of philosophy that in his time had become defined by its Christian or a Christian secular context; he challenges, undermines, and rethinks philosophy's claims anew and offers critical points of entry for rethinking the philosophic project and opening the scope of its agenda for contemporary engagement.

In her essay “Dominance and Difference: A Spinozistic Alternative to the Distinction Between ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender,’” Genevieve Lloyd shows how Spinoza allows for a distinction of sex and gender that resists simple reduction but, instead, understands the constructive moment of gender constructions. As Lloyd eloquently concludes, a Spinozistic approach offers the possibility of understanding that “with regard to sexual difference, there are no facts of the matter other than those produced through the shifting play of the powers and pleasures of socialized, embodied, sexed human beings” (41). Lloyd's essay carefully explains how Spinoza's take on the deep interrelation of mind and body provides the theoretical framework to arrive at this insight. Aurelia Armstrong's essay, “Autonomy and the Relational Individual: Spinoza and Feminism,” offers an illuminating analysis of the “profoundly relational way” in which Spinoza theorizes individuality. This has crucial consequences for the way Spinoza understands freedom, autonomy, and self-determination. It helps, for example, to understand how Spinoza theorizes “autonomy and relationality as interconnected rather than opposed” (51). As receptivity and openness are understood as themselves a “power that increases our power of acting” rather than the opposite, Spinoza offers a suggestive approach to rethinking the “complementarity of receptivity and spontaneity” (54). Similarly, the concepts of interiority and exteriority are relationally reconfigured. The larger context in which Spinoza's philosophy “refigures the relations between parts and wholes as reciprocally determined rather than opposed” (61) is of crucial significance for feminist thought, and as a consequence, for critical thought in general.

Amélie Rorty's essay, “Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love and the Hilarity of True Love,” examines how Spinoza's notion of love is embedded in a psychodynamic view of the emotions that allows for conceiving love in terms of activity and self-empowerment rather than reducing it to passivity. Viewed this way, love emerges in Spinoza as a creative force with emancipatory implications and thus is outside the traditional scheme of historically questionable forms of gendering. Alexandre Matheron's essay on “Spinoza and Sexuality” shows that Spinoza's approach offers a possibly unique position among classical philosophers in its understanding of nongenital sexuality—an “infinite diversity of sexual behaviors conceivable and therefore included in the order of nature” (94). Matheron's subtly argued essay provides a crucial stepping stone for a better understanding of the significance of Spinoza's thought for modern feminist thought. Taking the cue from Matheron, David West's essay, “Reason, Sexuality, and the Self in Spinoza,” shows how Spinoza comprehends “sexual desire and love … as mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive alternatives” (120). Reconnecting to the Epicurean as well as Jewish tradition, Spinoza's thought makes it possible to understand sexuality as a positive and potentially self-empowering force rather than as the sinful liability that philosophy traditionally likes to conceive it. In other words, sexuality is no longer philosophically excised but is recognized as a legitimate part of the self.

In her contribution, “What Spinoza Can Teach Us about Embodying and Naturalizing Ethics,” Heidi Morrison Ravven argues that Spinoza's critical advantage rests on his reliance on what she calls the “Judeo-Islamic” tradition whose “Judeo-Arab Aristotelian naturalism” was condemned by the church in 1277 under the rallying cry of free will (129). As a consequence, Spinoza came under systematic attack and his rejection, Ravven notes, became “central to the self-definition of the entire tradition and practice of philosophical ethics” (134). Although “in order to maintain the myth of its own universalism, philosophical ethics has suppressed and continues to suppress its Christian presumptions and origins,” Ravven suggests that “Muslim and Jewish, along with feminist, philosophers could work together to rethink ethics from the shared medieval philosophical tradition and, in the case of feminist philosophers, from our feminist concerns” (135). Paola Grassi's essay, “Adam and the Serpent: Everyman and the Imagination,” discusses the constitutive importance Spinoza saw in the power of imagination as that which would not only drive the passions but affectivity as a whole and therefore, as a result, also the process of cognition.

Luce Irigaray is represented with a section of her An Ethics of Sexual Difference, a discussion that Sarah Donovan demonstrates in her “Re-reading Irigaray's Spinoza” is a missed opportunity of what could have become a more engaging exploration of the concerns Irigaray and Spinoza ultimately would share. Donovan's carefully attentive rereading illustrates what sophisticated and constructive feminist critique can achieve. In “The Politics of the Imagination,” Moira Gatens fleshes out the critical significance of Spinoza's contribution to rethinking power from the bottom up, through his radical rethinking of the body and the constitutive meaning of knowledge as embodied knowledge. The concluding essay by Susan James, on “Law and Sovereignty in Spinoza's Politics,” examines the fundamental function of imagination for the constitution of power, law, and sovereignty, which Spinoza theorizes in close proximity but critical difference to Hobbes. As for Spinoza law is conceived as made by human beings and relies, in turn, also on interpretation by human beings, Spinoza secures politics as devoid of any divine lawmaker as he “continues to haunt the pages of Hobbes's philosophy” (224). As a result, Spinoza creates a level playing field for instituting laws and the claim to interpretation that not only men but women as well can be the beneficiaries. As the sovereign constitutes itself in an entirely human society devoid of any recourse to the divine, the rules of engagement are radically changed. Sovereignty is no longer a state of exception but one that rests on consolidation from the bottom, from imagination, and rather—to permit a pun—the state of “acception” by its citizens. With Spinoza, the notion of the all-powerful sovereign is replaced by that of an all-responsible sovereign contingent on the consensus on which legitimation ultimately rests.

As Ravven, Grassi, West, James, and the others show, Spinoza's Jewish background would lead him to the formulation of a philosophical position markedly different from the views developed by his non-Jewish contemporaries. It is precisely this difference that makes him attractive as a critical interlocutor for contemporary feminist philosophy. But the most remarkable achievement of this volume is that Spinoza emerges here as a philosopher of the future precisely because contemporary feminists dare to openly address him as a Jewish philosopher. Those in Jewish studies can learn from these feminist philosophers who recognize that the specificity of Spinoza's Jewish context is no longer to be considered as a liability but, to the contrary, a unique chance for critical engagement with philosophy's traditional claims to universalism.