"To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside."-Gilles Deleuze
My research explores the history and political valence of the rhetorical subject. The idea of “the subject” has a long history in philosophy, and has frequently been used to describe the supposedly self-contained identities or essences of individual creatures. It has also been used to indicate various ways those creatures are subjected to different power structures that provide them certain features (owning property, for example, or having certain kinds of choice) while also foreclosing other features, to the point of denying certain kinds of subject life or viable existence. As such, the subject is a core concept (and, I think, a useful one) for thinking about questions of political agency, ethics, and the relationship of individual lives to collectivities and communities. I see rhetoric (the study of how individuals and communities are directed toward particular actions, and how certain things are made to matter over others) as a useful tradition for studying the ways that various philosophical ideas about subjectivity interact with the practices of speaking, writing, institutional inscription, coercive force and violence that lead particular versions of subjectivity to be instantiated in different times and places.
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The combination of these two perspectives intersects in my work with a third: the rhetoric and politics of social change. I seek to understand how subjects are made and unmade by power structures, and in attempts by groups interested in fighting against oppression to create new forms of subjectivity and, hence new forms of collective agency within the world. Parallel to this, I am concerned with the place of intellectuals in movements for social change, and with the ways that apparently abstract philosophical concepts are translated into strategies for creating or maintaining, altering or destroying particular ways of being in the world and relating to others. So far, I have used these questions as a springboard for engaging the formation of US drug policy, the history of Marxism and communism, and the interaction between human and nonhuman forms of life.