My name is Nica Siegel. I am a political theorist and writer working on the psychopolitics of transformation. I am currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College, prior to which I was Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Critical Theory at the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies at Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. I hold a Ph.D in Political Science from Yale University.
My book (in progress), Politics and Exhaustion: The Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique, reconstructs the search for an etiology of exhaustion in its economic, environmental, psychic, medical, and political registers in 19th and 20th century social theory. How does man come to relate to himself, his psyche, his environment, and his community as something that might or has run out? This book takes up this massive and interdisciplinary question—and this contemporary, brutal, and elusive symptom—with a particular focus on the centrality of questions of exhaustion and endurance to debates about the possibilities and limits of social and political transformation. Contesting regnant theories that relate to exhaustion only in the mode of disavowal or overcoming, the book focuses on the contributions of a set of thinkers and the political communities and movements that they encountered, including Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Frank B. Wilderson III., who saw in the claim to and contestation over exhaustion paradoxical conceptual resources for revolution.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in POLITY; Perspectives on Politics; New German Critique; Cambridge Edition on Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Group Analysis; Theory&Event; the South African Journal on Human Rights; Theoria: a Journal of Social and Political Theory; PhiloSOPHIA: a Journal of Transcontinental Feminism; and in NYU Press’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice. I am co-editor of Another Universalism, from Columbia University's New Directions in Critical Theory Series. My research on legal theory and history of political economy sometimes focuses on South African jurisprudence, where I have served as a researcher in Land Reform and Socioeconomic Rights at the Legal Resources Centre, a constitutional litigation NGO in Cape Town. I also work at the intersection of political theory and clinical psychoanalysis including in public-facing work, for example, in parapraxis magazine and on the podcast Ordinary Unhappiness.
