Domestic Violence : Barbara N. Nagel

To call “domestic violence” a “political concept” presents a provocation inasmuch as the domos is generally understood to stand apart from the political (or not to really be part of the polis): “domestic violence” suggests a small, domesticated form of violence. And yet . . .

Like : Jacques Lezra

When I say that the word “like” is a political concept, I am taking advantage of the peculiar features of the English language, in which “like” serves a number of different grammatical and conversational functions, stands at the point of convergence of diverse etymologies . . .

Dreadlocked Logics of Impossibility : Janine Jones

“I do not believe that genocide and slavery can be contained.”  Due to ways in which Indigenous and Black peoples’ subjugation has been co-produced through land dispossession, logics of elimination, and the abjection of Black people through Black disvalue, Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement…

Necropolitics : Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” (2003) represents death’s entrance into the conceptual field of political science. Since Socrates defined philosophy as the art of dying in order to qualify the nature of being human in the Phaedo, death had been under philosophy’s conceptual domain in the Western tradition. Other disciplines . . .

Paradise : Iván Hofman

Among the privileged concepts that may belong to a politico-theological lexicon, “Paradise” has been endowed with both the loftiness characteristic of the solemn promise it augurs, as well as with the light-headed, almost ludic, good news (gospel) of the future it sets forth. The history of its concept has been marked by the obsession . . .

Pornography : April Alliston

For political reasons, there has never been consensus around any definition of pornography. The concept remains among the most radically unthought and unquestioned terms in common use. Twentieth-century political battles over its definition were virtually silenced by overwhelming resistance to theorizing the concept . . .