My research concerns the relationship between metaphysics and modern politics, specifically modern political violence and ideology. In the broader discipline of philosophy, the division between “theoretical” metaphysical philosophy and “practical” socio-historical philosophy is taken for granted. As opposed to this, my work identifies the ways that a given society’s specific understanding of the structure of reality affects the possible forms of collective self-organization that are acceptable in or implemented by that society. By drawing from dialectical and non-dualist philosophies that recognize the inherent connection between metaphysics, history, and politics, my research identifies the ways that philosophy and politics are intertwined and underscores philosophy’s relevance to modern life-worlds. In my Ph.D. 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. In 2024, I transformed two dissertation chapters into standalone journal articles; the first, on Hegel and Adorno’s analyses of the Reign of Terror and the Holocaust, was published in Chiasma: A Site For Thought in January 2025; and the second, a philosophical encyclopedia article on the concept of “cunning,” is under review at Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (A condensed version of this project was recently published on the APA blog.)

My current work concerns the relationship between metaphysics and ideology more broadly: I am finishing a chapter for a volume I am co-editing with my interdisciplinary research group, the California Ideology Project, (under review at UC Press) in which I apply Hegel’s critique and Adorno’s mobilization of the pseudo-scientific method of “physiognomics” to Los Angeles’ natural and built environment. I am in the process of writing two articles on Buddhist and Feminist philosophy, including an article on Nagarjuna and Adorno’s contradictory metaphysics as critiques of reification and a critique of the contemporary gendered tropes of “Girlbosses” and “Tradwives” using indigenous and feminist philosophies of nature. I am also developing chapters for edited volumes: the first is an accepted chapter on modern sacrifice in Simone de Beauvoir and Hegel for a volume on Beauvoir’s phenomenology (Palgrave), and the second is an invited chapter on the crossover between Spinozist and Quaker metaphysics and politics for a volume on the metaphor of slavery in the philosophy of emotion (under review). In the next two years, I will develop a book on the influence of Hegel on Fanon, Beauvoir, and Adorno’s decolonial-psychoanalytic, feminist, and critical-theoretical research methods and major works, as informed by their experiences of and responses to repressive and progressive political movements in Algeria, France, and California, respectively. 

You can find my published research on PhilPeople and Academia.edu, and drafts and extended abstracts of the above projects are available upon request.

TLDR below:

publications

Journal Articles

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)

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

  • “Girlbosses, Tradwives, and the Reification of Nature.”

Chapters in Edited Volumes

  • “Anything But Simple: Immanent Freedom & Domination in Quaker and Spinozist Philosophy.” (invited, The Metaphor of Slavery in Philosophy of Emotion)

  • “Beauvoir, Hegel, and the Phenomenology of Rational Sacrifice.” (accepted, volume on Beauvoir and phenomenology) 

  • “Los Angeles Physiognomics: Hegel, Adorno, and Storybook Architecture” (accepted, Crisis & The California Ideology, draft version available)

Book Reviews

  • “Iaan Reynolds, Education for Political Life: Critique, Theory, and Practice in Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2023.” Marx and Philosophy Review of Books. (accepted)

Future Research

  • “The Scythe of Equality: Echoes of Hegel in Adorno, Beauvoir, and Fanon.” (book manuscript)

Art criticism (from a former life)

  • “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