I think of political theory in terms of Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s definition: it is “the attempt to define the interface between what must be accepted as necessary and what can be altered through active intervention.” Consequently, my research investigates questions related to (a) why we are failing to navigate emerging security crises (like political decay, spatial revolutions, climate change, or technological breakthroughs) and (b) how conceptual engineering in political theory might help us adapt to such circumstances more effectively. My first book, Noir Materialism: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, is available from Bloomsbury Publishing (recently reviewed in Theory & Event 29:1). Other scholarly work appears in Configurations, Contemporary Political Theory, Critical Horizons, Nature and Culture, Rhizomes, and elsewhere.
My second book (Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Space Power, and the Outside) is under contract with Routledge. It explores my burgeoning interest in astropolitics (the geopolitics of outer space) and the relatively recent emergence of outer space as an economic, political, and warfighting domain. There is currently very little political theory relating to this topic, despite, e.g., Hannah Arendt’s observation in 1958 that the Sputnik launch in 1957 was an event “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom,” and the book addresses fundamental questions about the future of politics on and off planet Earth, as well as delineates ways in which our political, spatial, and strategic imagination is deeply informed by categories and concepts of the exogenous, or what is considered to be outside the scope of the traditionally political. In the book, I engage extensively with the politics of the space community and the United States Space Force, as well as with ongoing theoretical puzzles related to the future of territory and war, space law related to national security and space exploration, the conceptual and cultural history of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and philosophical anthropology at a planetary scale. Related material will appear soon as a chapter in an edited volume from Stanford University Press, and complementary materials have been published in Vault of Culture and Limina.
More generally, my research interests include contemporary political theory; philosophical anthropology (especially via Helmuth Plessner and Hans Blumenberg); political geography and military psychogeography; the philosophy of technology (via Gilbert Simondon); intelligence history and security studies; and film and literary criticism. Longer-term research projects include a philosophical study of CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton and an extended scholarly treatment of vitalist rationalism (via close readings of Plato’s Phaedo, a comparative study of Henri Bergson and Ludwig Klages, and sustained critical engagements with Wilfred Bion, John Boyd, Ray Brassier, William S. Burroughs, Hilda Doolittle, Nick Land, Sylvain Lazarus, Reza Negarestani, and Sabina Spielrein).
In addition to my formal research program, I write on topics that interest me at Gray Sky Thinking and direct Strangeways Idea Lab, an independent research group focused on exploring strange new ways of thinking about technics and technology.