Originally published in Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford, eds, Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex:Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chapter 7. Full paper.

There is the appearance of something paradoxical in Firestone’s dedication of The Dialectic of Sex to Simone de Beauvoir. Where de Beauvoir argued that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,” relegating biology to the section of The Second Sex on the “myth” of destiny, Firestone opens The Dialectic of Sex by calling the oppression of women “a fundamental biological condition.” Where de Beauvoir is one of the founders of a social constructionist view of gender, Firestone seems to regress to a naïve biological reductionism in which gender follows immediately from the biological fact of sex. As Judith Butler has pointed out, however, this distinction between social constructionist and biological reductionist accounts of sex and gender is not as clear as it seems to be.  I will argue that Firestone is aware of some of this complexity, and so appeals to biology not as a fixed substance to which women’s oppression can be reduced, but rather as one element within a theorization of feminist revolution which would conclude by dissolving the specificity of the biological. The dialectic in The Dialectic of Sex, that is, is based on the mutually constitutive and mutually contradictory relationship between the social construction of gender and the biological facticity of sex.

Presented at Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural Through Politics, Northwestern University, February 2007. Full paper.

If we still, again, face a crisis of Marxism, it is tempting to quote still, again, Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” But are those of us wrestling with this crisis coming to the recognition that the crisis is the rule, or are we in the melancholy position of the angel of history, seeing crisis pile on crisis with no hope of turning our heads towards the future? The necessity of asking this question can be seen in the fact that contemporary responses to a perceived crisis in Marxism center around attempts to conceptualize differently the locations in which we might uncover a cache of revolutionary potential; the turn to Spinoza is, perhaps the clearest indication. I want to investigate this quest for potential in terms of two sets of concepts: on the one hand, creativity, life, and the organic, and on the other, communication, death, and the inorganic. The relation between the concepts in the first group is, I hope, reasonably self-evident, and their connection to the larger question likewise. Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the Multitude in terms of living flesh draws on an organic and vitalist vocabulary, in which the potential of the Multitude results from their expansive fecundity. But Hardt and Negri also call this flesh “an artificial life,” and it is in this artificiality that my second set of three terms are linked. I will, I hope, make the precise connection between the three terms clear later, through a discussion of Benjamin’s own search for revolutionary potential. The point is to show that severing the link between a transformative potential and a vitalist organicism gives us another way to think through this “crisis of Marxism.”

Full paper

Quentin Skinner is often held to have advocated the study of intellectual history in opposition to what has traditionally been practiced as political theory. His criticism (along with other members of the “Cambridge School,” notably Dunn and Pocock) of what he saw as widespread anachronism in the study of political theory when he began his work in the late 1960s emphasizes the importance of history to his work. It would be a mistake, however, to regard Skinner as advocating a discipline of intellectual history separate from political theory, leaving the political theorists perhaps free to continue in their anachronism. On the contrary, Skinner’s interest in historically accurate readings of past texts in political theory is due to a belief that historical accuracy is important for political theory, a rejection of the distinction between an ahistorical political theory and an apolitical intellectual history. But there is perhaps something puzzling about this. One of Skinner’s central claims is that we cannot reasonably interpret historical authors as discussing issues of contemporary relevance, but must instead attempt to understand their work as a response to their own, historically specific, concerns. How, then, could this practice of intellectual history function as a form of political theory which would have any relevance to the present? This is the question I will attempt to answer in this paper. By looking in detail at Skinner’s methodological writings, I will suggest that it is precisely the historical specificity of past works of theory which, by providing us with unfamiliar concepts, makes them useful in reflecting on the conceptual organization of contemporary politics.

Originally published in Critical Sense: A Journal of Political and Cultural Theory, 12 (2004). Full paper.

Carl Schmitt was the great theorist of the state of exception, of the constitutive role extra-legal power played in the theory and practice of politics. But the idea of extra-legality that Schmitt discusses is not a timeless one, as his most famous aphorism makes clear: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The state of exception founds sovereign power and, as Schmitt’s contrast with Roman law in Die Diktatur makes clear, he recognizes that modern sovereignty is a historically specific political arrangement. Furthermore, it is an arrangement which may be nearing the end of its history. Although nation states show no sign of disappearing, processes of economic and political globalization are redistributing the powers traditionally held by states and altering the way in which they rule. So we might expect to see Schmitt rendered irrelevant, the state of exception consigned to history. Instead, the opposite is true; contemporary global politics is characterized by continual appeals to exceptionality. This is most starkly true of politics after 9/11, but it would be a mistake to think that the terrorist attacks caused this appeal to the exception. The opposition of exception to law was visible in, for example, humanitarian intervention in Kosovo or economic intervention in response to Latin American debt crises. So, as the state of exception was integral to Schmitt’s analysis of the sovereign state, new forms of exceptionality may help us understand changing post-state forms of politics.

Giorgio Agamben puts forward an alternative account of the state of exception, based on Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that a state of emergency functions in a kind of suspended time. This idea of a new state of exception arising with globalization, and supporting a different ontology than that of the sovereign state, is similar to the concept of empire put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. They argue that states with particular locations and a particular temporal justification are being replaced by an empire that is unconstrained in time or space. In what follows, I will largely work within the schema of Hardt and Negri, attempting to show how alternative theoretical perspectives (concentrating on the state of exception) and historical analogies (drawing on the early-modern Spanish, rather than the ancient Roman, empire) can clarify some of their ideas and emphasize their practical relevance to contemporary politics.