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, the domos has existed historically at different scales …

Like : Jacques Lezra

Cher: “So, Okay, like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all “What about the strain on our resources?” But it’s like, when I had this garden party …

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 cannot be contained.  Thinking about this claim led me to wonder why …

Necropolitics : Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” (2003) represents death’s entrance into the conceptual field of political science.1  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.2 Other disciplines, however, had already started to think about death differently . . .

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 to find not only its spiritual but also its ‘corporeal’ reality . . .

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 . . .