(forthcoming Autumn 2024)

For over a decade, Reiner Schürmann considered his phenomenology of symbolic action to be the centerpiece of his philosophical project. After 1980, however, it drops out entirely. This article argues that a central tension surrounding this theory lies in its complex reliance on categories sourced from 19th and 20th century theorists of mythology. In his theory of “symbolic difference,” Schürmann attempts to extract from the experience of mythic epiphany and ritual the groundwork for a philosophy of collective action liberated from any reference to ulterior origins. This effort to return to myth in search of the post-metaphysical generates a tension that will come to a head in the late 1970s, when Schürmann attempts to purge the mythic content from his symbolism, with only partial success. The eventual failure of this demythologization, it is here argued, casts new light on the category of “natality” in Broken Hegemonies.

Editorial Afterword, co-authored with Nicolas Schneider, to Reiner Schürmann’s The Place of the Symbolic (Diaphanes 2024).

From the intro:
“The essays and interviews collected in this volume span two decades of Reiner Schürmann’s thought, from the early 1970s into the final stages of his life. The first five selections were published between 1972 and 1979, and point forward toward his philosophy of ontological anarchy familiar to readers of Le Principe d’anarchie, while the remaining three belong to the period leading up to the final major work, Des Hégémonies brisées, with its emphasis on the exposure of the “tragic double bind” through a “phenomenology of ultimates.” The material gathered here is wide-ranging, and includes a nuanced philosophical theory of symbols, a post-metaphysical reading of poetic language, illuminating polemics with figures such as Heidegger, Hölderlin, Kant and Arendt, as well as focused studies on the problem of evil, the nature of political transformation—including the place of violence and terrorism therein—as well as rare reflections on aesthetics. In what follows, we wish to underscore and situate a few of the major lines of inquiry from among these various threads, in order to draw out their importance for Schürmann’s thought as a whole.”

(published version)

Abstract: In dialogue with Kristin Ross and Fred Moten, as well as recent theorizations of destituent power, this article aims to trace the practical logic that governs place-based politics in our anarchic epoch, including the construction of collective formations that defend them.

(published version)

Abstract: Drawing on Furio Jesi’s 1979 Cultura di destra [Right Wing Culture], this article sketches a preliminary genealogy of fascist accelerationism, a distinct current of white supremacist militancy responsible for a considerable number of North American mass murder events over the span of four decades. After positioning Jesi’s theory of fascist violence within the broader methodological turn of his late period work, the article proceeds to outline three key features of right-wing thought: a language of wordless ideas, a funerary religion of exemplary deaths, and a repertoire of militant yet militarily “useless” tasks. Resisting the tendency either to over- or under-politicize these deadly events, Jesi’s analysis instead allows us recognize the operation of a mythological machine that animates white supremacist mass murders over the past half century. The aim of this article is to trace the genesis and mutation of this machine, with particular emphasis on the period from 1975 to the present.

(published version)

Abstract: This article traces a logical and political thread leading from the theory of revolt in Furio Jesi’s 1969 Spartakus to his later work on festivity and the “mythological machine model.” It opens by arguing that the humanist model that frames Jesi's early efforts to disarm the allure of insurgent violence, sacrificial mythology, and Manichaean politics generates insoluble aporias that spur the development of a radically different approach to the study of myth and human nature. Next, it shows how Jesi’s studies on festivity from the 1970s redound upon and transform the theory of revolt in Spartakus, bringing this theory more in line with current epochal conditions. In doing so, they presage and lay the groundwork for the theory of destituent power developed in recent decades by Giorgio Agamben.

(published version)

Editorial introduction to a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on the subject of “destituent power.” Co-authored with Idris Robinson

(published version)

Afterword to Reiner Schürmann’s Modern Philosophies of the Will. Co-authored with Francesco Guercio.

(published version; Italian translation)

Abstract: This article offers an account of the basic movement of Giorgio Agamben’s ethical philosophy. The ethical gesture is stretched between two forms of messianism, a “paralysed messianism” associated with life under permanent state of exception, and the “perfected” nihilism of messianic fulfilment, which Agamben associates with the movement of revocation or “destitution”. I argue that Agamben’s concept of destitution cannot be accurately treated as a synonym for negation or destruction, as it envelops irreducibly creative elements. At the same time, the creation at issue here is of a peculiar sort, since it is modelled not on the act of production but rather on the restoration of a creative potential within sensibility. Special emphasis is here placed on Agamben’s retrieval of the work of a relatively obscure French linguist, Gustav Guillaume, whose theory of “operative time” allows his messianism to subvert the extrinsic opposition between the suspended time of revolt’s divine violence and the historical time of everyday life.

(published version)

Introduction to a special Symposium on the work of Italian philosopher and mythologist Furio Jesi in Theory & Event.

(published version; Italian translation)

Abstract: This article evaluates Furio Jesi's conception of mythic violence, focusing in particular on his theory of revolt as a mode of collective experience qualitatively distinct from that of revolution. Jesi offers both a descriptive phenomenology of how uprisings alter the human experience of time and action, as well as a critique of the "autonomy" these moments afford their participants. In spite of their immense transformative power to interrupt historical time and generate alternate forms of collective subjectivation, the event-like structure of revolt also harbors within it a unique set of dangers. Such creative mutations risk trapping political actors within a relational logic of the exception, a "ban" structure that, although distinct from the atomization that governs normal time, ultimately works to reinforce it in the long run. The article concludes by suggesting that Jesi's late concept of the "cruel festival" offers a troubling premonition of our current era, in which revolts proliferate in the absence of any ideological horizon of revolution.

(published version)

Abstract: This article provides a thematic overview of the work of contemporary French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou. It suggests that the notion of violent capture serves as a guiding theme linking Chamayou's work, linking it to his early study of experimental medicine, his genealogy of manhunting and predatory power, as well as his recent study of contemporary predatory or "cynegetic" warfare use of drones.

(published version)

Introduction to the English edition of François Zourabichvili’s Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event.

(penultimate version)

An article on utopia and biopolitics in Season 3 of David Simon’s celebrated television series,The Wire.

(publisher website)

The Place of the Symbolic brings together Reiner Schürmann’s essays on the nexus between art and politics. In keeping with his translation of the destruction of metaphysics into an an-archic philosophy of practice, Schürmann here develops a radically immanent theory of the place of symbols, irreducible to both Idealist theories and structuralist accounts of the symbolic such as Jacques Lacan’s. Symbols, Schürmann argues in some of his earliest texts, may provide a bridge between ontological difference and politics. They resist being grasped metaphysically, in terms of representation. Instead their understanding requires a specific way of existence: attending to the coming-to-presence of phenomena. As such, the understanding of symbols discloses a form of praxis that abandons ultimate grounds and opens onto the manifold.

Alongside Schürmann’s theory of symbols, the collection includes essays on the interaction of metaphysics, tragedy and technology, on the “there is” in poetry, as well as reflections on judgment. Throughout these characteristically lucid interventions, Schürmann’s most urgent concern remains a consideration of singular and finite practices that enact a release from universal principles. Art and politics appear here as the unworking of ultimate grounds; that is, as practices attuned to a truly groundless form of life.

(published version | roundtable discussion)

Includes articles by Kieran Aarons, Giorgio Agamben, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Philippe Blouin, Luhuna Carvalho, Rodrigo Karmy, Sam Law, Katherine Nelson, Idris Robinson, and Stephanie Wakefield. Co-edited with Idris Robinson.

(publisher website)

Through the lenses of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, this edited volume traces the development of the relation between the will and the law as self-given. “Modern Philosophies of the Will” explores a variety of topics including: the ontological turn in philosophy of the will; the will’s playful character and the problem of teleology; the will as principle of morality as discussed by Kant, of life­forms as discussed by Nietzsche, and of technology as discussed by Heidegger; the formal identity of legislation; and transgression of the law. This volume traces three strategies in the development of the philosophy of will from Kant to Heidegger, through rationality and irrationality of the will, the ontological turn, and law.

(journal website)

The first edited collection in English engaging with the work of Italian critical theorist and philosopher Furio Jesi. Edited and introduced by Kieran Aarons. Includes articles by Kieran Aarons, Giorgio Agamben, Andrea Cavalletti, Enrico Manera, Ricardo Noronha, and Alberto Toscano.