Overview materials:
Links to my published work, and downloadable copies where available, can be found at my academia.edu page.
Here a conversation about my work on Frantz Fanon and the politics of exhaustion on Ordinary Unhappiness, a podcast of psychoanalysis and politics.
Here is a recent profile of my research in German which appeared in the Goethe University UniReport (3.22)
Books
Politics and Exhaustion: the Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique (Book manuscript in preparation)
Peer-Reviewed Writing
“Desiring Politics: Herbert Marcuse, Black Radicalism, and the Political Economies of Exhaustion.” New German Critique. Forthcoming
“Fanon’s Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion.” Polity, 2023.
Another Universalism: The Critical Theory of Seyla Benhabib (eds. Anna Jurkevics, Stefan Eich, Nishin
Nathwani, and Nica Siegel). Columbia University Press New Directions in Critical Theory series, 2023. “The Roots of Crisis: Interrupting Arendt’s Radical Critique.” Theoria: a Journal of Social and Political
Theory. Fall 2015.
“Thinking the Boundaries of Customary Law in South Africa” South African Journal on Human Rights.
September 2015.
Sarat et all. “Scenes of Execution: Spectatorship, Political Responsibility, and State Killing in American Film.” Law & Social Inquiry. 2013.
Re-printed in Punishment in Popular Culture, NYU Press, 2015 Other Writing
Book Review of Contesting the Far Right: a Psychoanalytic and Feminist Theory Approach by Claudia Leeb. Perspectives on Politics. Forthcoming pending editorial approval 2024.
Book Review of The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Theory&Event. 2024, in process.
Book Review of Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing by Nigel C. Gibson. Parapraxis Magazine. 2024.
“Fanon.” Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. (eds. Mortimer Sellers and Stephen Kirste), 2023.
“The Destiny To Be Set Free.” Parapraxis Magazine, 2023
“Fanon the Clinician ft. Nica Siegel” Interview on Ordinary Unhappiness, a podcast of
psychoanalysis and social theory. Summer 2023
Book Review of Bonnie Honig, Public Things. PhiloSOPHIA: a Journal of TransContinental Feminism. 2021.
“The South African National Development Plan and African Commission Jurisprudence.” Legal Resources Centre Working Paper Series. A2/2013. 2013.
Working Projects
“The Jurisprudence of Neglect: Apartheid, Neoliberalism, Race.” This is a nearly completed working paper supported by the Mayibuye Archives at the University of the Western Cape. It uses archival evidence from Bantustan privatization efforts in the 60’s and 70’s to study the forgotten role of neoliberalism as a tool for controlling political crisis under apartheid. The text reframes South African exceptionalism as a question about what it meant to go through an anti-colonial revolution in the wake of the neoliberal counterrevolutions that had emerged in response to earlier waves of struggle, an intervention in periodization with broader stakes for how we conceptualize the relation between neoliberalism and race in the contemporary state, and the ways in which revolt illuminates and challenges these juridical configurations
Trauma Envy and Therapeutic Democracy: This is a prospective second book project which looks to a minor-chord of thinking about democractic, collective subject-formation in the psychoanalytic and psychiatric tradition, particularly in its fruitful attempts to generate an anti-fascist psychiatry. While Freudian psychoanalysis is often accused of leaving the question of group formation open—or else thinking the group only from the perspective of the leader—a substantial set of experimental texts, including those of François Tosquelles, Wilfred Bion, Frantz Fanon, and Cornelius Castoriadis, rethink the project of psychoanalysis with reference to the scandalous possibility, often disallowed, of analysis without the analyst. In particular, they focus on the complex and often transformational effects of participation in leaderless groups, bringing their findings to bear on the relation between democracy, sovereignty and what Freud called the economy of the group psyche in unfamiliar but indispensable ways, speaking back to ever-present debates about the crisis in authority and reanimating new visions of collective agency. On the other hand, critical questions remain about the suitability of such discourses for political analysis, and these are taken up as questions of both the discourse and practices of analysis and clinic-making. The project also resituates psychoanalytic forms of social criticism within both broader trends in political psychology and within (and against) meta-theoretical conversations about method, including a strong disruption and rethinking of the supposed antinomies between ideal, realist, scientific, and historical research in political theory. Finally, it considers the political psychology of organizing in relation to other models of collective subjectivity from the perspective of these debates, with case studies in union organizing, emergent climate change politics, and modes of collective resignation (such as fatigue politics).
Enduring Judgement: Kant, Kafka, and the Work of Reason: This is an early manuscript that rethinks a certain work of reason that is obscured by contemporary debates about judgment and justification. Drawing on Forst and Benhabib, but also Panagia and Zerilli, I contend that debates over the “motivational deficit” of discourse ethics return us to a question at the heart of Kantian thought: what precisely makes reason compelling, and in what sense? Prior to the questions of legitimation that have followed in Kant’s wake, we find in his writings the (sometimes disavowed) subject who struggles with reason—who faces that phenomena which has no framework and must be treated as if comprehension is within his grasp but who experiences the empirical challenges that accompany the frustration of understanding and communication. Following Hannah Arendt, I propose that we might understand political judgment not only from the perspective of Kant’s “reasonable spectator” but also in terms of Franz Kafka’s exhausted tightrope walkers. This returns us to the theoretical core of a Kantian question about the experience of reason, which, following the Third Critique, inaugurates the discourse of phenomenology. Putting this question in conversation with democratic theories of judgment and justification, I rethink the limits of justification and the question of social conflict at the interstices of action and judgment.
“Eventality for Organizers!: Poststructuralism and the Realist Turn Reconsidered”: I also like to write directly about method! In this piece, which is written for a political science audience, I offer a more focused disciplinary iteration of a claim which is also at issue in my dissertation, namely, that the methods of ontological criticism which emerged in the wake of the failures of Marxism in the late 20th century are often framed as melancholic or anti-political, especially with reference to the emergent new “realist” Marxisms of the last decade, which are defined by their refusal of logics of futility. I question this antinomy from two directions, both with reference to the genealogies of evental thought in the experience of political commitment, failure, and attachment through displacement (Althusser, Badiou, Zizek, Wilderson) but also by highlighting the disavowed ontologies of even and especially the most “realist” conceptions of praxis. The point, I argue, is not just to be “for action” but to grapple with the critical forms which emerge out of failure, disappointment, and attachment to lost causes as well as the paths back into action from such a perspective. In this, the article thinks alongside and recovers late 20th century accounts of post-structuralism and the exhaustion of the postcolonial in conversation with thinkers like Stuart Hall and David Scott.