research

Carl Schmitt: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

July 22, 2011

Together with Jens Meierhenrich (senior lecturer at London School of Economics and Political Science), I am planning a collection of essays on Carl Schmitt. Notwithstanding the recent spate of publications devoted to Schmitt in law, the social sciences, and the humanities, the existing literatures do not speak to one another. Only an interdisciplinary approach, we believe, promises to provide the perspective necessary for truly penetrating the convoluted world of this frequently invoked thinker.

The Ends of the 18th Century

July 22, 2011

Initiated by Walter Benjamin’s seminal study on the German mourning play - in which Benjamin describes the Baroque prince as a melancholic, who is, deprived of his power to act, paralyzed by a new kind of “infinity” that ultimately also effects the final scenes of the mourning plays – this book will examine how textual endings have changed throughout the 18th century. In case studies on tragedies and Bildungsromanen around 1800, I will show how literary (and literal) endings correspond with other discourses and philosophies of that time period.

Inversions, Folds, Anamorphosis: A Spatial History of Poststructuralism

July 22, 2011

In recent years, a series of high-quality books have been published on the so-called spatial turn. These works notwithstanding, lacunae remain in scholarship that interprets the role of spatial metaphors historically and against the backdrop of the history of science. In my own analyses, I contextualize the spatial metaphors in Foucault, Deleuze, and Lacan by tracing three different traditions of spatial thoughts.