Embodied Experience shows how literature reveals and heals binary structures which debase women and matter. Its ethical materialism affirms that literary belongings matter, and that it matters when characters sensuously connect to these things and to the knowledge they harbor. Delving into literature’s thing-life archaeologically, it finds characters digging deep into things, finding them radiant and baffling – only to begin again: this is the fluid story of belonging with. In quarrying things, the book benefits from Spinoza’s Ethics, especially his idea that there is joy in activity and that, in striving to live, one lives virtuously. Thus, female characters who embrace their bodies and mind as one also claim the right to vitality and ethics without having to sacrifice energy and volition. These archaeological journeys highlight how the authors discussed themselves initiate a theory and praxis of human–nonhuman camaraderie that embodies belonging with, and Embodied Experience suggests that readers should emulate them in discovering these prismatic interrelations.

This essay explores the metaphysical foundations of Spinoza's psychology. A particular focus is Spinoza's conatus principle according to which each thing strives not only to persevere in existence but also to increase its power of acting. This striving is, for Spinoza, the actual essence of each thing, and it forms the basis of the three fundamental affects desire, joy, and sadness--which are central to Spinoza's accounts of weakness of the will, self-deception, the imitation of the affects, egoism, altruism, and teleology. Throughout, the essay emphasizes the ways in which Spinoza's psychology manifests his naturalism, his view that everything –including human beings and their various affects or emotions – is governed by the same laws that are found throughout nature.