Novalis, Spinoza, and the Limits of Romantic Materialism
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
Product details
- ISBN 9798899480379
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Offering an innovative and illuminating new reading of Spinoza and Novalis
This rigorously researched study reframes our understanding of the intellectual currents in Germany around 1800 through a careful reinterpretation of its key thinker, Novalis, in conversation with Spinoza's philosophy. Siarhei Biareishyk presents an alternative to the standard narrative that resolutely links emergent modernity and secularization to philosophical "idealism" by showing how Spinozan materialism informs the scientific experiments, metaphysical inquiries, and political debates of Novalis and his contemporaries. Shifting our focus away from the historical interpretation of Novalis as a mystic and theorist of subjectivity, Biareishyk elaborates on the Spinozan materialist strain in Novalis in three key domains: ontology and the conception of nature, theories of singularity and individuation, and the concept of the political. He brings current romanticist scholarship into conversation with contemporary discussions of Spinoza in continental philosophy, in the Marxist tradition particularly, demonstrating that the Spinoza–Novalis encounter provides a viable alternative—in its articulation of causality, dialectics, and the political—to the dominant conceptual apparatuses of both Kant and Hegel.
Siarhei Biareishyk is a senior lecturer in the Department of Russian and East European Studies, with affiliate appointments in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and in Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania.
