Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies as we celebrate the recent publication of faculty member and Hazel D. Cole Fellow Gilah Kletenik’s new book, “Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality.”

In it, Kletenik takes a dazzlingly fresh reading of Spinoza’s “Ethics,” thinking with Spinoza to present an alternative to dominant “Western” theories about the nature of reality, the promise of reason, and the status of humans.

Kletenik will be joined by Stroum Center Director Noam Pianko to discuss the book, share how Jewish philosophy can be applied in this moment, and answer questions. Light refreshments will be provided before the talk and the book will be available for purchase.

Register to attend >

“It is rare to find a thorough and compelling reading of a great philosophical classic, Spinoza’s ‘Ethics,’ that upends some of the central presumptions about sovereignty that have populated standard readings for many years. Kletenik shows that sovereign rule functions neither as a political form nor as a model of conceptual mastery in that work. The implications of this thesis include the critique of anthropocentrism, and the socially idealized human form upon which it depends. The book offers a way to expose and criticize social inequalities in light of a political theology that prompts us all to question what we thought we know about what is and what ought to be.”
—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

About the speaker

Gilah Kletenik is Hazel D. Cole Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.