Royal Holloway, University of London

Graduate Student, Politics and International Relations

Co-editor of the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies

Thesis Title: The Event in Marxist Philosophy: metaphysics, mathematics, authority

About

My research in political theory is positioned at the intersection of history, philosophy and theology, and its unifying theme concerns the relationship between metaphysics and political ideology. The nature of this work has necessitated that I draw on a wide range of sources, including Ancient Greek philosophy, Christian and Islamic theology, modern European political thought, and speculative European philosophy, modern and contemporary.

What makes my research unique is its capacity to elucidate the direct role of metaphysical ideas in the work of influential political thinkers. So whereas most engagements with ontology and metaphysics in political theory are usually pursued in relation to questions within the discourse of political ontology – difference vs. universalism, immanence vs. transcendence, etc. – my approach rather seeks to understand the role of metaphysics in the actual ideological thought of political actors, historical and present. What I seek is a theoretical unmasking of the most fundamental thought systems simmering away beneath the surface of political ideological constructs.

My recent publication in the Journal of Political Ideologies, ‘The Political Theology of Red Toryism’, demonstrates how some contemporary ideas within the British Conservative Party are influenced by a Catholic theological school called radical orthodoxy. In a similar way, the second chapter of my PhD thesis unpacks Lenin’s reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic and demonstrates how the metaphysics of ‘Leaps!’ Lenin found in the text directly influenced his political thought in the 1917 work State and Revolution. This approach marks a continuity stretching back to my Masters thesis, where I examined the writings of two influential ideologues of the Iranian Revolution, Ali Shari’ati and Morteza Motahhari, to show how their differing views of how to interpret Sh’ia Islam led to divergent conceptions of the meaning of Islamic revolution of consequence for Iranian politics after 1979. An expanded draft of this Masters thesis was published on the International Journal of Žižek Studies, and republished on a creative commons license at a number of other outlets such as MrZine. A shorter piece on Ali Shari’ati’s metaphysical-ideological writings was translated into Hungarian and published in the journal Eszmélet.

The relationship between metaphysics and political ideology also comprises a central thematic of my PhD thesis, which is currently being completed. Entitled ‘The Event: A Critical Genealogy’, it seeks to fill a gap in the literature pertaining to the ambiguity of the category of the event given its increasing centrality within philosophical and political discourse regarding the thinking of contingency, change and revolution. Taking a critical, genealogical approach, it presents the pre-history of this contemporary philosophical category that exposes the metaphysical commitments it entails: namely, to some extent an endorsement of ex-nihilo genesis and of the actual infinite. After first examining the development of ex-nihilo from classical authors to modern thinkers like David Hume, the thesis proceeds to show the role of Hegel’s theory of change, based on the mathematical infinite, and its influence upon Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. Finally, it demonstrates the convergence of these ideas through a sequence of contemporary French philosophers, from Louis Althusser to Alain Badiou to Quentin Meillassoux. En route, the thesis interweaves political history, ideology and engagements with branches of mathematics such as infinite analysis and set theory.

My overall goal in my research is to combine rigorous philosophical and ontological enquiry with interventions on more straightforwardly political registers. I have pursued the latter in a forthcoming monograph, The British Ideology, which continues the focus on ideology from my JPI article. Playing on the title of Karl Marx’s famous text, my book maintains that the thesis that politics should move ‘beyond left and right’ is a quite uniquely British ideology and traces it back to the work of Anthony Giddens through a number of popular British political writers in the decades since. It argues that all these ideologies rest on a conspicuous erasure of any structural analysis of capitalism as a social-economic system, ignoring in particular how this system has been rendered all the more untenable in light of the global economic crisis from 2008. And it challenges their use of sources to support this thesis, including, amongst many others, Hobbes, Mill and Marx.

The indisciplinarity of my research has carried across to the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, of which I was a founding co-editor and the editor-in-chief for the first two issues. Under the remit of critically approaching global issues, the journal includes contributions ranging across international relations, political theory, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy. The journal has recently published its fourth issue on the theme of ‘Crisis’, and has succeeded from the start in punching above its weight by attracting contributions from leading academics.

In terms of future research avenues I intend to apply for an AHRC research funding grant to conduct an intellectual history of romantic Conservative communitarianism from the 19th to the 20th century in order to place the ‘Big Society’ idea in an historical context. This work can been seen as a continuation and deepening of the research on ‘Red Toryism’ published in the Journal of Political Ideologies.

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