I am a historian of post-Kantian European philosophy. My current research revolves around critiques of capitalist modernity. In particular, I explore how the concepts of ‘historicity,’ ‘abstraction,’ and ‘agency’ structure critical accounts of capitalist reification and domination. I am interested in how the critical function of these concepts relates to their constitutive role in the formation of distinctly modern forms of reasoning and self-understanding. In thus addressing the critique of capitalist modernity as inextricably entangled with its own object, I interrogate the meaning and boundaries of immanent critique.
History as destruction
Historicization is often considered a critical operation, capable of breaking through the seeming self-evidence of our modern convictions. Historicization distances us from the given, making it appear strange and alternatives conceivable. To reveal the present as a historical result is to open it up to contingency and change.
At the same time, “history” is itself a modern entrapment, an idea that might require distancing. In my research, I trace the connections between instrumental reason and the concept of history as a meaningful process. I investigate the ways in which the idea of historical progress is rooted in colonial violence. And I focus on historical destruction as condition of the modern archive and the modes of knowledge that it enables.
To what extent does or should the modern constitution of the concept of history influence its critical function? What modes of historical thought can address and potentially withstand the violence associated with the modern concept of history? And does the critical power of historicization perhaps derive from its intrinsic connection with destruction?
Agency in the age of ecological breakdown
It is a recurring trope in contemporary ecological thought that Western capitalist modernity entails a “reification of nature.” This reification is seen to be, at least partly, responsible for the breakdown of the earth’s climate- and ecosystems that we are beginning to live through. Consequently, the rejection of reified, mechanistic conceptions of nature, and their replacement with a language of “agency” and “co-productions” has become prevalent.
I explore the ways in which, in placing the emphasis on “agency,” critical ecological thought may inadvertently reproduce the anthropocentric and “productivist” ideologies that it seeks to counter. Does the insufficiency of our responses to the reality of ecological breakdown result from an inattentiveness to non-human agency? Or does our failure to fundamentally alter the socio-economic relations that are constitutive of fossil capitalism point to deficiencies in the concept of agency itself? The paradox that as we change nature, we are incapable of changing history motivates my engagement with traditional conceptions of the history-nature distinction, and with critical discussions concerning social reification and the conditions of historical agency. Can history and nature be made, produced, or co-produced? And is it even desirable that they could?
Abstract domination
The historical specificity of modernity is frequently captured in terms of the emergence of “abstract rationality” – formalistic and quantifying modes of thinking that enable systematic planning and transparent means-end calculations. Yet while modernity promised to liberate human beings from arbitrary forms of personal domination, its abstractions are not innocent. Critical theorists have addressed capitalism as a social system in which abstractions, such as capital, money, or labour (and the forms of rationality that are adequate to them), rule over individuals. From this perspective, it is the hallmark of modernity that its constitutive relations of domination are abstract and impersonal, and for this reason also covert, difficult to recognize as domination.
In my research, I investigate the abstract character of modern forms of domination. Does it makes sense to claim that abstractions rule over individuals? How is abstract domination related to class domination, or more generally, to the domination of some groups of people by others? And does the concern with abstract domination make critical theory itself suspect: does the focus on abstraction occlude the sphere of social relations and practices, reproducing the reified ideologies that make capitalism appear immutable?