My research concerns the relationship between metaphysics and modern politics, specifically modern political violence and ideology. In my dissertation, Bloody Rationality: The Dialectic of Modern Reason and Sacrifice in Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer, I argued that Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer developed theories of modern political sacrifice as a real-world manifestation of the abstract bivalent logic of modern reason. They argue that Enlightenment philosophy’s focus on the logical subordination of empirical particulars in pursuit of universal conceptual truth—characteristic of Kantian-ethical and Baconian-natural scientific thought, for instance—enabled modern subjects to reduce living people to mere representatives of abstract categories. In the Holocaust and Reign of Terror respectively, these thinkers identified this abstraction of individuality as the psychological means through which diverse groups of individuals were ‘irrationally’ recast as necessary casualties and sacrificed in pursuit of supposedly ‘rational’ universal ideals like progress and freedom. I recently developed two dissertation chapters into articles; the first is forthcoming in Chiasma in December 2024, and the second is under review at Political Concepts. I am currently writing a chapter on sacrifice in Hegel and Beauvoir for an edited volume, an article on Nagarjuna and Adorno’s contradictory metaphysics as critiques of hypostatization, and an Indigenous-Ecofeminist critique of the “Girlboss” and “Tradwife.” In the next two years, I will develop a book on the historical and philosophical influences of Hegelian Marxism on Adorno, Beauvoir, and Fanon’s critical-theoretical, feminist, and decolonial works written between the 1930s-1960s, as informed by their engagements with politics and political movements in California, France, and Algeria respectively.
I am also the co-founder of an ongoing interdisciplinary research group called the California Ideology Project.
You can find my published research on PhilPeople and Academia.edu.

publications

Journal Articles

  • “Modern Abstract Sacrifice in  Robespierre’s Terror and Hitler’s Holocaust.” Chiasma: A Site for Thought (forthcoming December 2024)

Chapters in Edited Volumes

Book Reviews

  • “Ulrike Kistner and Philippe Van Haute: Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2020, 168 pp., ISBN 978-1-77,614-623-9, ISBN 978-1-77,614-627-7.” Continental Philosophy Review 55, 133–136 (2022). https://doi-org.libproxy.unm.edu/10.1007/s11007-021-09560-x

current research

Journal Articles

  • “Cunning,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (under review)

Chapters in Edited Volumes

  • “Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Rational Sacrifice,” The Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir. (accepted) 

In progress

  • “Taking Nagarjuna at His Word: Nihilism, Ineffability, and Negative Dialectics” (draft version available)

  • “Los Angeles Physiognomics: Hegel, Adorno, and Storybook Architecture” (draft version available)

  • “Girlbosses and Tradwives: An Indigenous and Ecofeminist Critique’”

Future Research

  • “The Scythe of Equality: Spectres of Hegel & Marx in 20th-ce. Continental Political Thought” (book manuscript)

  • “Anything But Simple: Egalitarian Divinity in Quaker and Spinozist Philosophy”

Art criticism

  • “No Wave or Not, ESG's Legacy is Alive and Well,” Thrdcoast. Sept 2nd 2016. Thrdcoast.com

  • “TEEN: Love Yes,” Caesura Magazine. August 10th 2016. Caesuramag.org

  • “Review: Anri Sala at the New Museum,” Neon Signs . March 10th 2016. Neonsignsmag.com