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"Kautzer, Chad"
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Political Violence and Race: A Critique of Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt's On Violence (1970) is a seminal work in the study of political violence. It famously draws a distinction between power and violence and argues that the latter must be excluded from the political sphere. Although this may make Arendt's text an appealing resource for critiques of rising political violence today, I argue that we should resist this temptation. In this article, I identify how the divisions and exclusions within her theory enable her to explicitly disavow violence on one level, while implicitly relying on a constitutive and racialized form of violence on another. In particular, Arendt leaves legal and state violence presumed, but untheorized, focusing her critique instead on dissident action, especially that of the Black Power movement. Any analysis that incorporates Arendt's conceptual distinctions is therefore susceptible to reproducing a political theory that neglects state violence in the service of White rule, yet charges those who resist it with breaching the peace.
Journal Article
Educating the Educators
The notion of ‘educating the educator’ appeared as part of Marx’s posthumously published Theses on Feuerbach(1845), which criticizes the materialism of fellow Left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach for being merely “contemplative [anschauend]” and one-sided. The latter accounts for the sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit) of the world of our experience and its impact on our consciousness, Marx argues, but fails to address the way our praxis constitutes this world. Feuerbach thus misses the fact that we are encounteringourselves, the outcome of our labor, when we encounter the world, which Georg Lukács will later describe as a condition ofreification. Moreover, Marx continues, any materialism that overlooks the transformative role of our praxis—the negativity Hegel located at the core of subjectivity (Hegel 1977, 117) – prevents us from grasping not only the truth of experience, but the significance of revolutionary praxis as well. We are thus limited to what Jacques Rancière calls “impotent contemplation” (Rancière 2003, 132) and Lukács describes as a “fatalistic stance” (Lukács 1971, 38), allowing us to do little more than interpret the world, when, as Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach proclaims, the task is to change it.
Journal Article
Good Guys with Guns: From Popular Sovereignty to Self-Defensive Subjectivity
Beliefs once limited to the extremes of the North American gun culture have become mainstream, while the US Supreme Court’s ruling in
District of Columbia v. Heller
(
2008
) and a spate of right-to-carry laws have contributed to the proliferation of guns in public life. These changes in political discourses, legislative agendas, and social practices are indicative of an emergent and pernicious form of subjectivity, which is here defined as self-defensive. Such subjectivity is characterized by a pathological identification with the right of self-defense, which undermines the social conditions of individual freedom and renders subjects unable to comprehend the function of abstract rights within an informal normative order. Practically speaking, this raced and gendered subjectivity relies on extra-legal relations of domination for its reproduction. The rapid expansion of gun rights and the recent loosening of restrictions on self-defensive violence are argued to be responses to a perceived threat to these identity-constituting relations, rather than to the threat of violent crime, which has long been on the decline.
Journal Article
Right and Subjectivity: From Freedom and Agency to Pathology and Madness—Introduction
Issue Title: Special Issue: Right and Subjectivity
Journal Article
Marx’s Influence on the Early Frankfurt School
This chapter traces Marx’s influence on the development of the early Frankfurt School, making explicit the Marxist dimensions of its cultural critique, its dialectical, historical, and materialist methods, as well as the role of praxis and class in its critical social theory. The author outlines the general characteristics of Western Marxism and then contrasts them with the deterministic doctrines of the Second International and Soviet Marxism. He then examines the Marxist heritage of the Institute of Social Research’s influential and programmatic texts of the 1930s, beginning with Horkheimer’s inaugural address of 1931. Although the chapter briefly discusses the work of Institute members such as Henryk Grossmann, Leo Löwenthal, and Erich Fromm, its primary focus is on the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.
Book Chapter
