The main question guiding my research is how “normativity” constitutes a condition for plastically configuring and giving form to “difference,” and how “unity” can be understood within that context. I generally treat “norm” as a necessary order that individuates in the midst of a particular striving, where the norm remains immanent to (and thus produced by) the peculiar tension between a being-in-formation and its milieu, such that the self-determinative essence of that being can be temporally grounded. Difference is thus a differentiated necessity and the result of normative “plasticity,” a constant unfolding in which the anticipation of a “free” order is identical with its very individuation.
This also leads me to my strong interest in the category of institutions. I ask to what extent the technicity of institutions, irreducible to either matter or mind, is a constitutive element of what we call the “human.” I interpret institution as an artificial construct that adaptively mediates and sublates human life into an objective, externalized form from which further individuation is enabled, preserved, and transmitted intergenerationally. My concern with the tension between norm and difference compels me to engage with multiple disciplines, including political thought, the philosophy of life, ethics, ontology, the philosophy of technology, and ecology. Thinkers who particularly interest me include Machiavelli, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Arendt, Schmitt, Jonas, Foucault, Canguilhem, Deleuze, and Esposito.
I received my BA in Political Science from The George Washington University and my MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago (mainly focusing on political theory and continental thought). My MA thesis addressed how Machiavelli situates “necessity” as an affective sign that can mediate a subject’s way of life toward a genuinely free existence endowed with political ferocity, and how this form of subjectification should and can be reproduced within a democratic-institutional context.
