The Spinozan Strain: Monistic Modernism and the Challenge of Immanence

Abstract

The Spinozan Strain identifies a group of American modernist writers who use elements of Spinoza’s metaphysics, mediated by the writings of the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as the basis for an aestheticized monism that explores what Spinoza’s thought makes possible affectively, socially, and politically, rather than philosophically. These monistic modernists use Spinoza and Emerson to disrupt a host of binary oppositions that were important sites of contest in modernist culture, such as life and death, time and eternity, and interiority and exteriority. They imagine these oppositions as derivative effects of a single, self-differentiating force that they portray alternately as an inorganic vitality, a structure of interlinked causes, or a universal blur. In its anti-binarism, monistic modernism offers a middle path between object-oriented and subject-centric or psychological accounts of the modernist movement. The first chapter of this project examines Djuna Barnes’s and Wallace Stevens’s recasting of life and death in terms of flows of affect, by which they articulate a mode of subjectivity that challenges the distinctions between performance and reality, activity and passivity. The second chapter argues that Thornton Wilder and William Carlos Williams advance a critique of progressive or teleological conceptions of time and history that depends on a vision of eternity as an emergent structure of interwoven temporalities, rather than a timeless transcendent state. The final chapter focuses on modern technology and speed, arguing that Hart Crane and Langston Hughes devise a Spinoza-like understanding of the body as a relation of speeds and slownesses in which the body and its surroundings blur together; this sense of corporeality allows them to examine the ways that speed becomes an ambivalent source of political power in modernity that demands—and makes possible—new strategies of political resistance.