Publications
From the Body of the King to the Body of the Nation: Sovereignty, Sodomy, & the English Revolution of 1688
Modern Intellectual History (2024) online first.
This article explores how rumors of monarchical sodomy at the turn of the eighteenth century became entangled with newly emerging conceptions of the nation and nationalized space. After the 1688 Revolution in England, accusations of the king's sodomy increasingly mobilize territorial rather than theological understandings of sodomy's danger, transforming sodomy's terror from a satanic threat to the Christian kingdom to a national threat to the English nation. While historical studies on the territorialization of sovereignty often focus on structural transformations to the state, these accounts rarely attend to transformations in political feeling. This article shows how a novel discourse of national sodomy helped unsettle long-standing attachments to the king as the embodiment of sovereign power. Moreover, this article methodologically innovates the study of state sovereignty by attending to conceptual problems of political attachment through the study of an affectively loaded concept such as sodomy.
The Inter-est Between Us: Ontology, Epistemology, and the Failure of Political Representation
Contemporary Political Theory, 22, (2022): 46-69.
In recent decades, theories of representation have undergone a constructivist turn, as many theorists no longer view the represented subject as prior to but rather as an effect of representation. Many democratic theorists have sought to reconceptualize representation and its democratic possibilities by turning away from ontological questions altogether. By focusing instead on how representatives come to know the public interest, theorists now contend that an epistemological account best explains how political representation can foster democratic participation. Yet, theorists of representation have not assessed whether this turn to epistemology has overcome the ontological problems that initially motivated it.
This article tracks epistemological defenses of representation to outline two models of political representation that attempt to tackle the epistemological problem of constituent interest without turning to ontological questions of foundations. I argue that both theoretical tendencies ultimately remain caught in the problems of foundations and undercut their normative aspirations to defend a properly democratic vision of political participation. Turning to Hannah Arendt’s comments on public interest and her writings on council democracy, the article retheorizes the concept of political representation to avoid the ontological problems that beset current accounts.
Communist Guilt, Public Happiness, and the Feelings of Collective Attachment
The Double Binds of Neoliberalism: Theory and Culture After 1968, eds. Guillaume Collett, Krista Giappone, Iain MacKenzie, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), 201-224.
Uprisings in the 21st century rarely display classical political strategies of recruiting militants into political parties. According to Jodi Dean’s recent work Crowds and Party, such leaderless revolts cannot meet the challenge of sustaining the upswell of collective energies beyond the event of rebellion. Against a politics she identifies with May ’68, Dean proposes a novel defense of the party as an affective infrastructure capable of regenerating the feelings of collective unity experienced in the rebellious crowd.
Taking up the challenge to reconsider the party, this chapter argues that central to Dean’s vision of the party is what I call an affective politics of communist guilt, which ultimately fails to rekindle the kinds of co-operative relations necessary for political struggle. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of public happiness, I argue that the experience of political joy provides a more salutary framework for understanding how crowd participants feel themselves as a collectivity in the event of revolt. Accordingly, this chapter analyzes the crowd from the perspective of its non-sovereign participants and contends that the promise of collective attachment is better secured not through communist guilt but rather riotous happiness.
Sovereign Chaos and Riotous Affects, Or, How to Find Joy Behind the Barricades.
Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry
2, 1–2 (2020): 152–172
A commonly deployed signifier to render the political event of a riot intelligible, ‘chaos’ describes an affective condition of disorder and disarray. Recounting the 2018 May Day / May 1st protests in Paris, which both politicians and media declared to be a riot, the paper argues that to consider the riot as chaos is to think and feel like a state.
Critically interrogating the analytical purchase of ‘chaos’ to describe a riotous assembly of bodies, the paper contends that ‘chaos’ is not only a theoretically impoverished concept to understand such political events, but also that sovereignty mobilizes ‘chaos’ as an affective infrastructure of governance to shore up attachment to the security state. Repudiating the sovereign logic of chaos, the paper presents a first-person encounter with a protest-declared-riot in order to explore the various affects that materialize around such events. In so doing, the paper develops an affective approach to theorize relations of political antagonism in the street, arguing that whereas the state weaponizes terror as a form of governance, the rioters weaponize joy as an affective means of resistance.
From Mute Objects to Militant Subjects: The Politics of Rebellious Animals
Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices, eds. Andrei Siclodi and Andreas Oberprantacher, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
Russian translation: “ОТ БЕЗГЛАСНЫХ ОБЪЕКТОВ К ВОИНСТВУЮЩИМ СУБЪЕКТАМ: ПОЛИТИКА БУНТУЮЩИХ ЖИВОТНЫХ1”, in ФОНАРЬ ДИОГЕНА: Человек в многообразии практик [DIOGENES’ LANTERN: The Human Being in Diversity of Practice], 3-4 (2018): 200-227.
Dominant animal rights discourse fails to analyze the boundary of the political community as marked by a historical division between logical animals (humans) and phonic animals (nonhumans). In so doing, this discourse merely enables nonhumans to become mute objects of representation rather than subjects of speech, maintaining the exclusion of animals from the political community of speaking subjects. Eschewing moral approaches to the political problem of exclusion, the paper demonstrates that the work of radical democrats provides a political lens with which to approach nonhuman subjectivity and speech…
Updated and Revised version of: "‘We Support Circus Animals Who Kill Their Captors’: Nonhuman Resistance, Animal Subjectivity, and the Politics of Democracy”
We Support Circus Animals Who Kill Their Captors’: Nonhuman Resistance, Animal Subjectivity, and the Politics of Democracy
Tiere - Texte - Transformationen: Kritische Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies, ed. Andreas Oberprantacher, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015.
Greek translation: Υποστηρίζουμε τα ζώα που σκοτώνουν τους καταπιεστές τους: πολιτική των εξεγερμένων ζώων trans., Kostas Alexiou (Athens: Kynaigei, 2017).
Animal rights activists and advocates attempt to include nonhuman animals in the human community through reasoned philosophical tracts and by direct action. However, dominant animal rights discourse fails to analyze the boundary of the political community as marked by a historical division between logical animals (humans) and phonic animals (nonhumans). In so doing, this discourse merely enables nonhumans to become mute political objects of representation rather than subjects of speech, and thus maintains the exclusion of animals from the political community of speaking subjects.
By turning to the work of radical democrats, I argue for a re-conceptualization of animal subjectivity and speech that promises a new framework for attending to the needs and standpoints of nonhuman animals. Exploring three episodes of nonhuman resistance, I argue that a radical democratic framework illuminates how nonhuman animals actively oppose their exclusion from the political community, thus transforming nonhumans from objects of political deliberation into subjects of politics.
