ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I focus on one part of the philosophies of Adriana Cavarero and of Christine Battersby, separately. My approach will be to consider a different question that raises one central issue in the work of each philosopher and explore the answer using Spinoza’s Ethics. By doing so, common themes between these two feminist philosophers of relational ontology will emerge, along with their own distinctive voices. With regard to Cavarero, I address the following question: “how can we explain the joy that can arise when human beings act together in public in order to bring something new into the world?” I employ Spinoza’s understanding of joy in general and consider his different “types” of joy in the context of Cavarero’s (2021) view of joy in political action. With regard to Battersby’s oeuvre, I ask “what needed to be forgotten to allow Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime to arise?” and consider her answer in relation to Warren Montag’s Spinozist counter-aesthetics, in which Montag also investigates the politics of forgetting in relation to the Kantian sublime.
