Pierre Macherey is professor emeritus in the Unité de Formation et de Recherche (UFR) de philosophie, the faculty of philosophy at the Université Charles de Gaulle, Lille III, where he specializes in aesthetics and the history of philosophy. In "Soutenance," the defense of the entire corpus of his scholarship that he presented in 1991 to a jury of his peers (collected in In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays, 1998), Macherey offers this overview of his career: "Three series of questions have . . . preoccupied me. . . . These questions are those of Spinozism, of the relations of literature and philosophy, and of the history of philosophy in France." Macherey's later philosophical explorations, not least his extensive engagement with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza and with the history of philosophy in France, have been all but ignored in the Anglophone world. It can be safely said that for most English-speaking readers, Macherey's philosophical outlook...