Theoria

Category Archives: Dissertation

Approved!

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Pending a footnote on savages and barbarians in the Scottish Enlightenment and a few minor editorial changes, my dissertation proposal has been approved. (That approval is, of course, subject to formal rubber-stamping at the Faculty level; I’ve never heard of the Faculty refusing a proposal, however.)

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Dissertation Proposal

Sunday, January 21, 2007

One title page, two epigraphs (Walter Benjamin and Constantine Cavafy), five sections, seventeen footnotes, fourteen pages of prose, seven pages of bibliography itself divided into three sections… pending approval by committee (hopefully by email rather than meeting), my revised proposal is complete. New title: Savages, Barbarians and Citizen-Subjects. Forthcoming in late 2008 or early 2009. [...]

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Bibliographies

Saturday, January 13, 2007

I enjoy reading bibliographies, but I hate writing them. Although I have a copy of EndNote, I’ve never really gotten into that program: I guess I didn’t like it in some way. I still make my bibliographies the old way: keeping note of what I cite or otherwise refer to. It’s time consuming; especially when [...]

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Regarding American Sociology

Monday, October 23, 2006

Despite calling myself a “sociologist” in the sense that “I could very well be wrong: I’m not a philosopher, after all, but a sociologist” or somesuch, I came to sociology rather late (my honours year was the first sociology class I took – “Contemporary Sociological Theory” – taught by a historical sociologist/post-structuralist) and didn’t “become” [...]

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Reflections on Political Theology

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Used in a rather imprecise – and, indeed, uninteresting – sense, society has two possible “origins” or “sources;” the “theological/mythical” and the “political.” That is, a transcendent or an immanent “source.” Analytically, these appear as two different “sources,” but, in actuality they are one: what we might call the “theologico-political” or the “politico-theological.” (Are these [...]

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Proposal (draft)

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

For those who care about such things – and I believe they are few and far between – a draft of my dissertation proposal is available here (in PDF). Standard disclaimers apply: don’t cite it and don’t present it as your own, but, otherwise, do whatever you like with it.

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Cataloguing

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Among the contributions to political theory and practice that one can inscribe to the French aristocracy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the discoveries of the social, the political, and the political function of history. That is, they discovered that history was not simply the retelling of the great deeds of kings; [...]

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Naming

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

I’ve adopted the term “aristocratic political theory” to describe eighteenth century French thought that opposed itself to both the king and the bourgeoisie. Montesquieu, of course, is the most famous example, but there are a number of other people we’d want to include in this list: Fenelon, Saint-Simon, Boulainvilliers, and Mably, at the very least, [...]

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Racism and the Norm

Sunday, September 3, 2006

A final chunk from Foucault’s ‘Society Must be Defended,’ where he, perhaps unwittingly, provides the question to which the “War on Terror” is the answer – that is, how does one exit the problem created by the Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction?

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Savages, Barbarians and Society

Saturday, September 2, 2006

Another excerpt from Foucault’s ‘Society Must be Defended’ lectures.