research

Currently, I am co-editing two special issues — at Constellations and History of European Ideas — following the conference “Force of Myth: Authority, Illusion, and Critique in Modern Imaginaries.” Next to my book manuscript Towards a Critical Theory of Ignorance: Science, Politics, and Myth in Times of Uncertainty, I also work on one article, co-authored with Tae-Yeoun Keum, about the conditions of imaginative success and the critique of origin myths (Constellations). I am beginning to write about practices of aesthetic unknowing and phenomenological theories of action, perception and judgment and how they might help us rethink dominant ideas of nature.

Book Manuscript: 

My book, tentatively titled Towards a Critical Theory of Ignorance: Science, Politics, and Myth in Times of Uncertainty, discusses how democracies respond to uncertainty. I argue that uncertainty is a problem for two main reasons: First, the conditions of uncertainty have changed, we are no longer primarily dealing with crises that have a beginning and an end, but with complex instabilities with no clear solution. Second, the two default modes with which democracies have usually responded to uncertainty in modern history reveal severe limitations. Following the fact-value distinction typically attributed to Max Weber, I define those two modes the “science” response and the “politics” response. The former controls uncertainty through facts, rational politics, and expert knowledge (e.g., epistocracy, technocracy), while the latter institutionalizes uncertainty in form of citizen science or agonistic politics (e.g., radical, deliberative, epistemic democracy).

The first part of the book investigates the limits of these two responses, especially the growing epistemization of politics in moments of crisis and an increasing double bind of technocracy and populism. The second part develops a critique of the fact-value paradigm in exploring ignorance as a third response to uncertainty — eclipsed or stigmatized by the idealization of facts and the relativization of values. I do so in (1) complicating the legacy of Max Weber with regards to the role of ignorance in his work and (2) turning to the tradition of political myth to develop a more detailed analytic of ignorance. In particular, I argue that we can trace a transition in 20th century myth debates from what I call ‘willful ignorance’ to ‘learned ignorance’. While willful ignorance isolates a position from its limits in order to defend the certainty of a conviction, learned ignorance relies on the ambiguity of belief structures as a way to live and act under conditions of uncertainty.

The third part of the book takes up this analytic of ignorance to develop an alternative to the larger epistemological debate of post-truth politics and its focus on fact-checking and shaming practices. I offer a new framework in environmental theory for conceptualizing the differences between winning an argument and telling a better story. In particular, stories that rely less on a recuperation of certainty – reflected by, for instance, forms of technocratic mastery and dystopian despair – are better able to dissolve the sense of inevitability and powerlessness that surround contemporary conceptions of nature and its rootedness in origin myths.

Article Manuscripts:

  • “Questioning Origin Myths: Prehistory, Nature, and the Conditions of Imaginative Success” (co-authored with Tae-Yeoun Keum), submitted as part of the Special Issue “Myth and Politics” at Constellations (co-edited with Tae-Yeoun Keum)

The literature on myth has long defined myth in terms of its resistance to fact and rational argument. Although scholars working in this tradition have accordingly acknowledged the need to re-think the criteria by which we evaluate and critique myths, few have really endeavored to meet this task. This article seeks to develop such a critical framework by taking up the case of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021), and their explicit identification of prehistory as a myth that demands critique. Drawing inspiration from mythic interpretations of Rousseau’s conjectural history, we argue that myth demands a distinct form of critique that must begin from a position of acknowledging the opacity of its subjects and, as a consequence, requires an aesthetic form. To mitigate the pitfalls of aesthetic modes of critique, however, we contend that it must also cultivate an attendant ethic of learned ignorance – an approach that we conceptualize by investigating Karl Jaspers’s interpretation of Jakob Bachofen and Jean Laplanche’s analysis of mytho-symbolic codes. Finally, we turn to Nastassja Martin’s autobiographical essay In the Eye of the Wild (2021), whose own unconventional approach to the critique of myths can be productively brought in comparison with more rationalist proposals.

Selection of Published Articles:

This article is a reflection on anger as a political emotion as well as the more recent turn towards a positive (re)evaluation of this passion. I distinguish between three attempts to conceptualize anger in contrast to the more dominant idea that anger is counterproductive and revenge-driven: (1) anger as essential knowledge in the struggle against injustice; (2) anger as an apt response to affective injustice; (3) anger as feminist attention that appreciates, rather than knows, injustice. I argue that a closer look at political theology in general and an apophatic hermeneutics in particular is especially helpful in evaluating these three approaches. It allows for a reconceptualization of anger that moves beyond the traditional either/or choices in political theology such as those between friend and enemy, good and bad, or the sacred and the secular.

With the idea of an Axial Age, Karl Jaspers commented on a longer controversy about the role of myth in history and the relation of religion to modernity. This article analyzes the legacy of this idea with a particular focus on Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Jan Assmann. I ask what has motivated the use of the concept and illustrate the ways in which it is situated in the 20th century debate on myth. I then respond to the limitations of the concept’s legacy and turn to two overlooked elements of Jaspers’s initial intervention: In contrast to the dominant discourse, he argued that myth changed its form and was not replaced by logos; he also argued that the Axial Age has failed rather than succeeded.

In this book chapter, I turn to Seyla Benhabib’s book Situating the Self (1992) to uncover a unique understanding of moral psychology which distinguishes between the desire for certainty and the love of the world. Benhabib’s “social critic” emerges from a dialectical struggle with liberal, romantic and postmodern personas who remain bound to the logic of certainty. In contrast to these three traditions, the social critic experiences uncertainty as the fragility and complexity of a world she loves. It becomes the background against which her sense of freedom and agency unfolds. In the second part, I show how this moral psychology presents a vital resource for and corrective of Jürgen Habermas’s latest project, which explores the conditions of possibility for overcoming motivational problems in post-metaphysical societies. In broadening the horizon and integrating the view of the world in its multiplicity, Benhabib forcefully resists Habermas’s diagnosis and cure of a normative deficit in modernity and the privileged role he attributes to religion in response.

This article turns to Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in order to illustrate the difficulties involved in approaching the (formerly) metaphysical concept of evil as a secular phenomenon. It asks how the advocate of plurality, natality and forgiveness could also vouch for the death sentence of Eichmann based on a rhetoric of retribution and revenge. It then shows that Arendt’s surprisingly consistent view of evil is based on a quasi-ontological understanding of the human condition that allowed her to negate Eichmann’s humanity. Rather than simply unmasking a metaphysical account in disguise, however, the article develops an alternative perspective that emerges from the conversation between Arendt and Jaspers. It argues that Jaspers’s interpretation of Kant offers a way to defend the idea of secular evil and judge Eichmann on the basis of his thoughtlessness. 

Max Weber famously diagnosed both an excess and a subordination of meaning in modernity when he coined the term disenchantment next to the fragmentation and irreconcilability of value spheres. Unlike Weber, however, who sought to keep the ideological and the rationalist sides of the modern divide together, his immediate followers capitalized either on his decisionism (i.e. Carl Schmitt) or on his universalism (i.e. Jürgen Habermas). In an attempt to develop a constructive perspective on the question of how we can conceive of irreconcilable values within a larger normative horizon, this article introduces Karl Jaspers’s interpretation and refinement of Weber’s work. Most fundamentally, Jaspers’s existentialist philosophy of communication sought to turn Weber’s warring gods into a source of solidarity rather than divisiveness. I argue that Jaspers did so in rooting human freedom not in the decision or the law but in an experiential uncertainty and the knowledge not to know. The article closes with a discussion of some practical and theoretical implications of Jaspers’s thought for our understanding of diversity in unity in post-truth times. 

Selection of Published Reviews & Essays

Since our ideas of nature are deeply habitual and hard to change, I argue that conceptual shifts require forms of myth critique that move beyond argumentative debates. As we are complicit in reproducing the most foundational yet ultimately self-destructive ideas of human life and nature, the problem might consist less in the right science or politics but rather in the practice of critical theory as visionary thought. Such a practice will have to enable us to “stay with the trouble,” using Haraway’s words. “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto” might express intentions along those lines, but its language draws too heavily on traditional notions of objectivity and political authority to show a stronger potential to translate key ideas into the more aspirational and inspiring idiom of a potential manifesto. Caught between science and politics, the fragmentary and experimental all too easily drowns. 

Peter Gordon and Martin Jay provide a powerful commentary on the normative basis of critique in the early Frankfurt School. They demonstrate how a secret affinity between historical materialism and religious or imaginary sources emerges precisely because immanent critique cannot ground itself in itself. This implies that neither concept nor particular can be considered foundational and critique itself becomes the keeper of the productive tension between the transcendental and the immanent. In the review, I discuss the rich possibilities that both books advance and inquire into their political and ethical implications. While Gordon’s “migrant” and Jay’s “splinter” represent forceful metaphors that can inspire a change in posture, I argue that they cannot entirely resist the lure of conceptuality and return in parts to a traditional form of Kulturkritik.

With the rise of uncertainty, fear and anxiety during the Covid-19 pandemic, we could witness an increasing interest in the existentialist literature. While existential concerns about human mortality and absurdity are transhistorical, the main protagonists of what we call existentialism emerged after the first and second World War in Germany and France. In this essay, I illustrate existentialist responses to the sense of uncertainty and the extent to which they ironically return to criticized forms of certitude. In particular, existentialists struggle to translate the ambiguity of human existence into cultural and institutional reality. Taken together, however, these contradictory responses to conflict and fear are revealing. They constitute a valuable conversation about how we lose and gain control and how political crises relate to crises of human meaning. 

In this review, I analyze Martin Hägglund’s powerful attempt to bring existentialism to bear on the spiritual and political questions of our time. I argue that his interpretation of Heideggerian finitude finds a meaningful supplement in Hegel’s philosophy of freedom, but caution against too quick an identification with emancipatory movements, particularly the political thought of Martin Luther King Jr.  Hägglund’s idea of secular faith privileges commitment over faith and dismisses the problem of value conflicts discussed within political theology and democratic theory. As a result, he faces difficulties not only in connecting his visions to concrete political and institutional realities but in grasping the tragic and ambivalent dimensions of spiritual practices which continue to play a fundamental role in shaping social change.