Marjorie Levinson: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

It's about time I posted on perhaps the one key seminal figure in my work: Marjorie Levinson, the incomparable Romanticist, Spinozist and radical materialist.

I knew her work by the time I attended my first MLA conference (usually not the place for an epiphany). But nothing prepared me for the time bomb she laid out in a characteristically dense, lucid and brilliant talk. Flanked by a historicist (“There is no Nature”) and an ecocritic (“There is a Nature”) on what I believe was the very first ecocriticism panel at the MLA, Marjorie talked about Spinoza, and about a materialism without subject or object.

I recall thinking Wow, That Idea...I was into my first spell around the Deleuzian mulberry bush. But you have to realize that where I was at that point these sorts of ideas were far, far out. Everyone was doing deconstruction or nascent postcolonial studies, ecocriticism was bravely burying its head in the sand...If you said "body without organs" only about three people got it.

And there was Marjorie transmitting on an adjacent frequency, loud and clear to me but maybe like a dog whistle to some others in the room.

I realized then that I wanted to study philosophy. It took about fifteen more years to figure out what I wanted to say about ecology, with Marjorie's talk still buzzing in my head like those radio signals at the beginning of Contact.

Required reading: "A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza," Studies in Romanticism 46.2 (Winter, 2007), 367–408. There's so much there it's shocking...

"Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialisms: Modeling Praxis without Subjects and Objects," Cultural Critique 31 (Fall, 1995), 111–120. (This was what I heard in 1992 plus more.)