Writing

Power and the Limits of Critique: Engaging Cronin on Foucault and Bourdieu

Ciaran Cronin argues that Bourdieu offers a more actionable account of power than Foucault, but his critique demands a normative framework neither thinker claims to provide and misreads Foucault as foreclosing resistance; the two are better combined than opposed.

Critical theory

Iranian Neo-Monarchism and the Politics of Diasporic Longing

Royalist nostalgia in the Iranian diaspora and hawkish U.S. Iran policy operate as mutually reinforcing formations, each lending the other moral warrant and institutional durability; a genealogical reading exposes the contingency and silences that sustain this co-produced longing.

Diaspora politics

Temporal Multiplicity in E. P. Thompson and Reinhart Koselleck

Thompson and Koselleck offer mirror-image narratives of temporal modernity: Thompson traces a compression of plural premodern rhythms into disciplinary clock time, Koselleck a proliferation of horizons as eschatology dissolves. The divergence is methodological.

Historiography

Recent Work on Colonial Violence in French Algeria

Surveying four monographs on colonial violence in French Algeria (Brower, Sessions, Surkis, Cole), this essay shows how each abandons the colonizer/colonized binary for a view of violence as plural in logic, and treats metropole and colony as a single analytic field.

Historiography

Exteriorizing Subjectivity: Snapchat and Pharmacopornographic Biocapitalism

Reading Snapchat through Preciado’s pharmacopornographic regime and Steyerl’s critique of linear perspective, this essay argues that the app’s ephemeral, haptic architecture works as a biopolitical dispositif, exteriorizing subjectivity and folding self-produced erotic imagery into biocapital.

Critical theory