Current Research

Dissertation: Bloody Rationality: Modern Reason & Sacrifice in Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer (Fall 2023)
My dissertation concerned the dialectical relation of modern reason and sacrifice in the work of Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Sacrifice proper (Opfer)—an act of destruction involving an agent, a victim, and a transcendent aim—is under-theorized in contemporary scholarship on Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer. One reason is that these thinkers chiefly reference sacrifice to describe a moment of self-sacrifice (Aufopferung), an immanent self-contained phenomenon that they take to be central to the formation of rational subjectivity. Little more is made of the wider concept in their work. Beyond their analyses of individual self-sacrifice, however, these thinkers share a critique of modern reason—what Hegel refers to as “the Understanding” and Adorno and Horkheimer as “instrumental reason.” For both, modern reason is an intellectual paradigm that abstracts or divides reality into distinct and opposed components—particular and universal, subject and object, etc.— establishing the domination of one term over the other. The language they use to describe modern reason is, moreover, saturated with images of violence and death; both endorse the idea that reason is expressed in the modern era via bloodshed. With close attention to this imagery, I argue in my dissertation that the Hegelian and Frankfurt School critiques of modern reason contain a latent theory of modern sacrifice (Opfer). More precisely, they hold that modern reason is materially expressed through the destruction of individuals in the modern world. To defend this, I outline the Hegelian and Frankfurt School’s critiques of modern reason and establish the relationship between reason and sacrifice. I then show how, for Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer, the literary protagonists Rameau’s nephew and Odysseus function as archetypes of modern subjectivity who employ rational cunning to develop a sense of indifference to nature and to other people that enables the justification of instrumental violence and destruction. Next, I offer close readings of Hegel and the Frankfurt School’s historical case studies of the “material” expression of modern sacrificial reason—Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and Hitler’s Third Reich.

Future Research

Book Chapter: Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Rational Sacrifice (2025)
I am currently developing a book chapter for an edited volume on Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenology (forthcoming 2025) published by Palgrave and edited by Rebecca Harrison. In the chapter, I argue that Beauvoir provides an account of the phenomenology of modern rational sacrifice—a latent descriptive political theory in her texts Pyrrhus and Cinneas and Ethics of Ambiguity, that can be made visible by bringing Beauvoir into dialogue with Hegel, her main intellectual foil in the latter text. The chapter outlines Beauvoir’s theory of rational sacrifice to accomplish two ends: first, to establish the theme of rational sacrifice as an important, though previously unacknowledged, dimension of Beauvoir’s ethical thought; and second, to demonstrate how Beauvoir’s analysis of rational sacrifice recalibrates her relationship to Hegelian political philosophy. In particular, Beauvoir and Hegel share two critical insights regarding modern ethical decision-making, on both interpersonal and individual levels: first, that, in pursuit of universal freedom, the fight for all requires the tragic sacrifice of some; and second, that modern political actors must utilize instrumental rationality in choosing how to act—a process of indifferent calculation that necessarily precludes one’s responsibility to recognize the complex singularity of the other. In these cases, modern sacrifice manifests on intersubjective and phenomenological levels simultaneously: political actors justify the use of teleological destruction as the necessary means to achieve a better world.

Journal Article: The Cunning of Reason in Smith, Hegel, Odysseus, and George Santos (2025)
I am also developing the second chapter of my dissertation into a standalone journal article. I presented a modified version of this chapter at an interdisciplinary conference at the New School dedicated to “Political Concepts,” which enabled me to broaden my research on the concept of cunning beyond my dissertation chapter, which focused primarily on the discursive function of cunning. In this article, I argue that the concept of cunning—understood as a disconnect in the relation between subjective intention and objective effect, and the ambiguation of truth and falsity—is a valuable philosophical concept through which to analyze contemporary speech and action. The example that guides my analysis is Catholic Congressman George Santos’ strategic proclamation that he is “Jew-ish,” a statement that both identifies Santos as someone of the Jewish faith as well as exploits the adverb “-ish,” indicating approximation, like “kind of” or “somewhat.” I argue that “cunning” captures the effect of Santos’ statement more accurately than the concepts of “bullshit” (Frankfurt), truthiness (Colbert), or “fake news”. If statements can meaningfully express both truth and untruth at the same time, these speech acts cannot be effectively refuted by having recourse to positive or simple “matters of fact,” nor can they be understood as independent from their social context. To establish the importance of cunning as a philosophical and political concept, I first trace the genesis of the concept through Adam Smith, Bernard Mandeville, Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer. These various conceptions of cunning highlight the different ontological registers that cunning operates in. Next, I posit that the ability of cunning to function on both “objective” and “subjective” levels is what makes cunning a uniquely valuable concept for understanding the relationship between purposive speech and its objective consequences. Finally, I argue that Santos’ “Jew-ish” proclamation reveals that not only does discourse itself express both the speaker’s meaning as well as meaning independent of the speaker, but more importantly, political discourse always involves self-interest, which brings impersonal or objective “truth” and perspectival “untruth” into dialogue.

Book Manuscript: The Scythe of Equality: Modern Sacrifice in Hegel & its Continental Afterlives
Though my dissertation focused on the centrality of modern sacrifice in the Frankfurt School as inherited from Hegel’s critique of Enlightenment, the relevance of the theme of modern sacrifice reaches beyond early 20th-century Germany into mid-20th-century France, particularly in the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. I plan to expand my dissertation into a book manuscript on the concept of sacrifice in this broader field of 20th-century Continental philosophy.  As I will argue in the book, the Hegelian and subsequently Marxist idea that sacrifice is constitutive of the modern sociopolitical era—the central theme of my dissertation—functions as a point of convergence between Critical Theory and Phenomenology, two traditions that ordinarily seem incompatible, due to their adopting contrary vantage points in the “objective” and “subjective” registers, respectively. Nevertheless, I argue that if we understand Marx’s project as an inversion and historicization of the Hegelian philosophical dialectic and see the Frankfurt School critical theorists’, Beauvoir’s, and Fanon’s political theoretical contributions as motivated and colored by Marxist theory and practice, the relevance of modern sacrifice in these 20th-century Continental thinkers’ works speaks to a philosophical affinity between these traditions. The central argument of the book will turn on the claim that, while Hegel’s theory of modern sacrifice is implicit, and the Frankfurt School’s theory of modern sacrifice is dispersed and oftentimes metaphorical, Marx uses the concept of modern sacrifice in a more literal manner to characterize the compulsory and brutal nature of wage labor as well as the law of capitalist accumulation: famously, Marx quotes Laing’s study on the living conditions in 19th-century England, stating that the poor are sacrificed to the “moloch of avarice” and that if money always emerges with a “congenital blood stain on one cheek,” capital emerges “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Tracing this theme in later French thought, I will then reconstruct how, in the mid-20th century, Frantz Fanon takes up this image of modern sacrifice but seizes it from the capitalist and colonial powers. In Wretched of the Earth, for example, Fanon explains that the liberation of the colonized will result from the violent sacrifice of the colonizer, after which the substitutive act of decolonization takes place, or “the last become[s] the first.” Around the same time, Beauvoir, in Ethics of Ambiguity, discusses the sacrificial dimension of political utilitarianism, in which individuals must be sacrificed for the sake of achieving certain universal political ends: “it is necessary to choose to sacrifice the one who is an enemy of man; but the fact is that one finds himself forced to treat certain men as things in order to win the freedom of all.” Through close readings of the work of both of these thinkers, as well as historical analyses of their political participation—specifically Fanon’s psychoanalytic work in the context of the Algerian revolution and Beauvoir’s participation in the French Resistance—I will show that, while the Frankfurt School mostly engages in immanent or philosophical critiques of the relationship between modern reason and modern politics, which effectively depoliticizes their analyses of modern sacrifice, Fanon and Beauvoir bring the idea of modern sacrifice into practical political discussions. That is, unlike their German counterparts, Fanon and Beauvoir reckon with the concrete fact that, if modern sacrifice is an inalienable feature of the modern lifeworld, it must be utilized against itself.           

Journal Article: Taking Nagarjuna at His Word: Nihilism, Ineffability, and Negative Dialectics
I will develop a comparative philosophical essay into a longer journal article on the relationship between Nagarjuna’s ancient Buddhist two-truths metaphysics and Adorno’s negative dialectics, in which I argue that Nagarjuna and Adorno’s fundamentally “negative” philosophical systems uniquely function as philosophical critiques of hypostatization and reification. In his Mulamadhyamakakarika (MMK), Nagarjuna describes the structure of reality as having both conventional and ultimate truths, which hold that all things are “dependently originated” and “empty.” Nagarjuna’s position is difficult to grasp from the ordinary “substantialist” position: that reality must be either this or that way. In this paper, however, I argue that Nagarjuna’s position is opposed to “substantialist” metaphysics broadly construed, which asserts the existence of fundamental, core, or independent natures. To do this, I recount two substantialist interpretations of Nagarjuna’s use of language—the nihilistic and the ineffable readings—and demonstrate that these theorize beyond what Nagarjuna outlines in concrete—though contradictory—terms. Building on this analysis of Nagarjuna, I then build a case for characterizing Nagarjuna’s metaphysics as “negative-dialectical,” insofar as it maintains the simultaneous existence of two contradicting realities as well as a commitment to the critique of hypostatization. In the longer version of the paper, I aim to show that Theodor Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics as well as his conception of “first” and “second nature” are underutilized lenses through which to read Nagarjuna, as Adorno’s analyses of Enlightenment metaphysics, capitalist subjectivity, and negative dialectics—as a critical method—are intimately connected. Just as it’s incorrect to divorce the social and ethical dimension of Adorno’s thought from his overall philosophical project, it’s also incorrect to read Nagarjuna as exclusively a metaphysician. Both Nagarjuna and Adorno present contradictory negativity as a philosophical scaffold that provides a ground for critiques of ideological “substantialism.”

Journal Article: Anything But “Simple”: Egalitarian Divinity in Quaker and Spinozist Philosophy
Shortly following his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam in the 1650s, Baruch de Spinoza crossed paths with some English Quakers and Collegiant Christians, who took an interest in his philosophy. Subsequently, Spinoza translated several Quaker texts into Hebrew, and the Collegiants & Quakers published “Light on the Candlestick,” a theological text on Quaker principles, which utilized explicitly Spinozist language. In this article, I will argue that this meeting isn’t merely a historical anecdote, but was rather an important and overlooked moment of philosophical exchange, due to the close affinity between Quaker and Spinozist egalitarian ethics and metaphysics. In particular, I argue that the similarities between Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism, in which God/Nature/Substance is identical to and distinct from empirical particularity, and the Quaker idea of the presence of the unifying “light” of God within every discrete individual, are not simply coincidental. Rather, in both of these “heretical” Christian and Jewish theological schemas, the human and divine are of the same “substance.” In a practical sense, then, Spinozist and Quaker notions of divine nature present a fundamentally egalitarian conception of God that also functions as a democratic social critique, rendering the clerical hierarchies of traditional religious traditions arbitrary and unnecessary.