(This is the text of a presentation given at Wyrd Patchworks 5, a digitally mediated lecture series and round-table based in Prague, Czech Republic on November 28, 2020. #WyrdPatchwork is an ongoing series of events organized and moderated by Diffractions Collective. Thanks to Dustin Breitling for the invitation. The same text is also hosted on… Continue Reading Existentially weighted time decay: speculative fragmentation and political immunology
Tag: political theory
Occupy Kant: remarks on racism and liberalism
(On Tuesday, September 1, 2020, Lucy Allais of University of California, San Diego and University of Witwatersrand gave a virtual talk, “Racism in the History of Philosophy: Read Kant’s Political Theory” as part of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory‘s Modern Critical Theory lecture series. The remarks below first appeared in Kritik.) The recurrent… Continue Reading Occupy Kant: remarks on racism and liberalism
Notes on ecopessimism (2): morbid opportunism
(A slightly different version of this post was presented at the 2019 Western Political Science Association conference “The Politics of Climate Change,” on the panel “The Status of Nature in the Anthropocene.”) My central claim has two parts. First: ecopessimism is being misunderstood, even by the still relatively few thinkers and writers who we could… Continue Reading Notes on ecopessimism (2): morbid opportunism
Notes on Althusser’s Machiavelli (1)
At the end of the first chapter of Machiavelli and Us (“Theory and Political Practice”), Althusser gives his take on a classic question that structures much Machiavelli scholarship: “whom, then, does this work serve?” (29) Answers to this question are legion, ranging from “the devil” (as the early “anti-Machiavels” were wont to accuse) to the… Continue Reading Notes on Althusser’s Machiavelli (1)
Analytic notes on Roberto Esposito (Esposito 1)
There are three major substantive claims in Esposito, and they’re reciprocally intertwined. They concern his core terms – communitas, immunitas, and the munus. It may seem like I’m going backward here. However, although Esposito begins Communitas by discussing the munus, the trajectory I trace follows a necessary logic of emergence and justification. Claim 1 (communitas):… Continue Reading Analytic notes on Roberto Esposito (Esposito 1)
From extinction: nine strategies for a left-hand exit
This piece has been partially reproduced at the DePaul University Institute for Nature and Culture‘s website, Environmental Critique. Thanks to Dr. Christine Skolnik for the invitation to contribute.