Books by Dan Taylor
Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom
Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming Dec. 2020 or early 2021), 2020
Reconceives human freedom in Spinoza as intrinsically social and politically committed
Combining... more Reconceives human freedom in Spinoza as intrinsically social and politically committed
Combining careful historical and textual analysis with comparisons across past and present political theory, this book re-establishes Spinoza as a collectivist philosopher.
Taking as its starting point the formative role of fear in Spinoza’s thought, Dan Taylor argues that Spinoza’s vision of human freedom and power is realised socially and collectively. He offers a new critical study of the collectivist Spinoza, where we can become freer through desire, friendship, the imagination and transforming the social institutions that structure a given community. A freedom for one and all, attuned to the vicissitudes of human life and the capabilities of each one of us to live up to the demands and constraints of our limited autonomy.
This book develops and enriches the continental tradition of Spinozism, drawing on a range of untranslated materials and bringing a fresh perspective to key debates. It repositions Spinoza as the central thinker of desire and freedom and demonstrates how the conflicts within his work inform contemporary theoretical discussions around democracy, the multitude, populism and power.
Island Story
London: Repeater Books, 2016
Negative Capitalism
Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era presents a conceptual framework for thinking ... more Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era presents a conceptual framework for thinking neoliberalism and financial capitalism as an economic politic that negates the time, space, mental health, political agency and even, via the example of debt, the future itself of young workers. This is negative capitalism, pursued here in an innovative theoretical and evidence-based analysis of neoliberal ideology; the role of debt in financial capitalism; anxiety and depression in the UK and US; CCTV, surveillance and the problem of security in contemporary culture; cynicism and ruinporn; London as decadent paper-bin of former empire; before finally calling for a politics that embraces cunning, mischief and violently real forms of opposition, over symbolic and altruistic concerns of a mistakenly-moralised opposition. Foucault, Ballard, Kafka and de Sade are clashed with The X-Factor, the artwork of Laura Oldfield Ford and The Fall in a broad-ranging theoretical assessment of contemporary power.
Journal Articles/Chapters by Dan Taylor
Angelaki, 2020
This article explores the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille through a close rea... more This article explores the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille through a close reading of their thought on death and dying. An intellectual and personal friendship, both conceived of death as an "impossible" space and "limit-experience" that not only constituted human subjectivity, but could also puncture it, leading to joy through deindividuation. This could only occur indirectly-for Bataille, via the sacrifice, eroticism, drunkenness or laughter-and for Blanchot, via literature. This line of thinking leads to varying formulations of sovereignty at odds with the prosaic world of use-value. Proceeding first through their friendship, this paper then explores this thinking death through the contexts of French Hegelianism, Kojève and Heidegger. While holding much similar, the paper argues that Bataille's transgressive, embodied and deindividuating visions of death present a form of community that was overlooked by Blanchot subsequently, with consequences for theories of community and collective power today.
History of European Ideas, 2019
In his final, incomplete Tractatus Politicus (1677), Spinoza’s account of human power and freedom... more In his final, incomplete Tractatus Politicus (1677), Spinoza’s account of human power and freedom shifts towards a new, teleological interest in the ‘highest good’ of the state in realising the freedom of its subjects. This development reflects, in part, the growing influence of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Dutch republicanism, and the Dutch post-Rampjaar context after 1672, with significant implications for his view of political power and freedom. It also reflects an expansion of his account of natural right to include independence of mind, a model of autonomy that in turn shapes the infamous sui juris exclusions of his unfinished account of democracy. This article focuses specifically on the Tractatus Politicus, a hitherto under-addressed work in Spinoza’s corpus and one too often considered indistinct from his earlier Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). It argues for a reconsideration of its importance to early modern political thought, particularly regarding the role of the state in realising the freedom and harmony of its subjects through reasonable laws.
Pli, 2019
This paper emerges out of an increased attention to the affects in contemporary political thought... more This paper emerges out of an increased attention to the affects in contemporary political thought. Working with Spinoza, a philosopher of fundamental importance to this affective turn (e.g. via Deleuze, Negri, Massumi, Mark Fisher and others), it explores his relatively underassessed political writings on the affects to consider the affective nature of rebellion, particularly via the affect of indignation, and whether Spinoza’s politics allows for a coherent theory of rebellion. Faced with some initial textual problems, the paper instead explores a small number of French Marxist readings of Spinoza’s affects of resistance (Matheron, Bove) to assess the politically constitutive and imitative role of indignation. The paper finds limits with this position, as well as work that presents revolution as a distant ‘horizon’ (Dean, Bosteels, Jameson), or as a matter of merely ethical, vitalistic persistence in an unjust world (Caygill, Critchley). It instead proposes emulation as offering a more lasting, collectively empowering affect of resistance. The paper also develops Mark Fisher’s late, unpublished work on ‘acid communism’ and consciousness-raising to explore the interrelation between the political affects and collective mobilisation, whose fundamental connection has been vaguely understood in recent work. It concludes with an argument for mutual care, solidarity and what Fisher called ‘fellowship’ as decisive in establishing durable and progressive collectives.
in Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.), Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 19... more in Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.), Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956. Vol. II, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
American Realism in a Time of Terror and Crisis: New Essays on the Wire. Ed. Arin Keeble and Ivan Stacy. McFarland, 2015.
Sometimes the gods are uncooperative" Major Howard 'Bunny' Colvin (3.03) In Season Three of the a... more Sometimes the gods are uncooperative" Major Howard 'Bunny' Colvin (3.03) In Season Three of the acclaimed HBO crime drama The Wire, Major Howard 'Bunny' Colvin (Robert Wisdom) experiments with a desperate solution to West Baltimore's irrepressible drugrelated crime: drug legalization in three abandoned and derelict neighborhoods. Dealers and users
Sophie Fuggle and Tom Henri (eds.) Return to the Streets. London: Pavement, 2015.
The Historical Journal 58.3, pp. 877-900
This article analyses the emergence of politically-motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Brita... more This article analyses the emergence of politically-motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article presents a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women’s liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. Through the development, actions, communications, surrounding media discourses, police investigation and criminal trials of ten individuals for involvement in the Angry Brigade as a brief-lived axis of these overlapping points, it relocates their neglected historical significance among the wider political militancy of the late 1960s to early 1970s, and accounts for their lack of popular support and obscurity since.
Other Publications by Dan Taylor
Modern Jewish Studies, 2019
"The working class revolts"
New Statesman, February 2017
"Cycling across Britain in search of answers to Brexit"
Fair Observer, October 2016
This is the Introduction to A brief history of sacrifice in digitised economies: thirteen asserti... more This is the Introduction to A brief history of sacrifice in digitised economies: thirteen assertions by J.D. Taylor, published by Fold Press in 2016.
"A Return to Politics": Review of Simon Hardy, Destruction of Meaning
Review 31, Oct 2013
'Propaganda that looks like propaganda is third rate propaganda': so said Lord Northcliffe, Direc... more 'Propaganda that looks like propaganda is third rate propaganda': so said Lord Northcliffe, Director for Propaganda for the British Ministry of Information in 1918. Northcliffe possessed a unique monopoly on news production in the early 20th century, owning both the Daily Mail and The Times, and his work in producing effective anti-German material during the first World War has been credited as the first modern instance of effective mass propaganda. Whilst today we have our Rupert Murdochs and Richard Desmonds, and the increasingly-centralised ownership of media production to a few multinational giants, analysis of propaganda and its means of propagation still remains somehow lacking. An era of popular scepticism and cynicism about the integrity of politicians, police and bankers has yet to be coupled to a wider rejection of media and information production. Why is this, and what can be done?
Spent? Capitalism’s growing problem with anxiety
Roar Magazine, Mar 2014
In today’s turbo-charged and austerity-ravaged economy, anxiety and insecurity have become the ne... more In today’s turbo-charged and austerity-ravaged economy, anxiety and insecurity have become the new normal. How did this happen — and how do we fight back?
Spinoza in Vlaanderen, Jun 21, 2013
where he is currently exploring the problem of collective desire in contemporary political theory... more where he is currently exploring the problem of collective desire in contemporary political theory analysed in the encounter of Spinoza and Deleuze. His research focuses especially on Spinoza's democratic political theory, and how late 20th century Marxist thinkers have deployed Spinoza's politics to different ends. The overarching goal of his research is to produce a
Nowhere fast? A brief critique of the Accelerationist Manifesto
AntiCapitalist Initiative, May 2013
The problem with the recent, and on the whole excellent, “#Accelerate. Manifesto for an Accelerat... more The problem with the recent, and on the whole excellent, “#Accelerate. Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” (hereafter Accelerationist Manifesto) is that it startlingly universalises and globalises the experience of a minority of western metropolitan academics. This is also true of the preoccupation with cybernetics and posthumanism in the universities, which makes little sense in the dust-trails of central Russia or southern Africa, or the crude scramble for minerals and resources which determines most of the activity of the world’s leading nation-states and the commercial interests they seek to advance. The globalisation of financial capital operates, as it always has done, physical and brutal way, marked in the bodies and landscapes of people and the earth. In this brief critique I want to sketch out some problematic presumptions of the manifesto, and suggest some alternative strategies for new social and political organisations who seek to resist and overcome neoliberal capitalism.
Steve Hanson (ed.), Beginning again in the middle: Nowt Press Anthology 01. , Mar 27, 2013
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Books by Dan Taylor
Combining careful historical and textual analysis with comparisons across past and present political theory, this book re-establishes Spinoza as a collectivist philosopher.
Taking as its starting point the formative role of fear in Spinoza’s thought, Dan Taylor argues that Spinoza’s vision of human freedom and power is realised socially and collectively. He offers a new critical study of the collectivist Spinoza, where we can become freer through desire, friendship, the imagination and transforming the social institutions that structure a given community. A freedom for one and all, attuned to the vicissitudes of human life and the capabilities of each one of us to live up to the demands and constraints of our limited autonomy.
This book develops and enriches the continental tradition of Spinozism, drawing on a range of untranslated materials and bringing a fresh perspective to key debates. It repositions Spinoza as the central thinker of desire and freedom and demonstrates how the conflicts within his work inform contemporary theoretical discussions around democracy, the multitude, populism and power.
Journal Articles/Chapters by Dan Taylor
Other Publications by Dan Taylor