Ohio State University

Graduate Student, Comparative Studies

About

My PhD research focuses on developing an analytics of resistance. Post-structuralist political theory has been my rejoinder to the ‘choked passages’ of American political philosophy. Recent attempts to intervene in many fields have led to predictable results: disciplinary constraints quickly marginalize or domesticate post-structuralism’s un-recuperable supplement. I experienced this frustration first hand in my lengthy involvement with policy debate. Instead, I seek to engage a minor politics that has avoided capture: the loosely formed and still quite unstable category of “anarcho-autonomism”. This politics moves in-against-and-beyond the political philosophers of post-68 France and Italian autonomist Marxism (both new and old). These intellectual commitments have been tempered and tested in the pragmatics of the ‘newest social movements’ of the mid-90s to mid-2000s, characterized largely by the alter-globalization movement-of-movements, but anarcho-autonomism is now looking to move past limits imposed by these forms. Birthed by the tension between the two historically antagonistic traditions of anarchism and Marxism, the terms of anarcho-autonomism are still highly contested. Post-structuralism works, however, to problematize both fields. Bringing both anarchism and anti-authoritarian communism into communication through continental theory, a creative new politics has begun to emerge. The value-added has been that post-structuralism is able to taking each field’s critiques of the other seriously. Done away with is the base-superstructure model of Marxism as well as the naïve Rousseauian anti-statism of anarchism. Instead, what becomes visible is an immanent politics of co-production and composition within dense but always decomposable organizational forms.