Overview
My work in political theory is devoted to the study, critique, and transformation of the language and concepts through which people make sense of and respond to political phenomena. Since political theory, on this description, is a matter of critical reflection upon our self-understandings as actors, it is no accident that my work has focused on the nature and conditions of political action, and on the relationship of action to other phenomena, including identity, power, rule, and democracy. I have been especially interested in understanding how over-strong conceptions of action -- ones that reduce political agency to the exercise of control over oneself and the world, severing the connection between action and the experiences of exposure and vulnerability -- can become self-defeatingly disempowering, or help sustain injustice and domination. I'm also interested in how we conceive of and represent various kinds of unfreedom, and how these representations affect our understanding of how unfreedom might be resisted and overcome -- for example, via the shadows cast in the democratic imagination by lingering figures of hierarchical authority, such as the master or the parent. Since language and concepts are inheritances, my work on these issues is simultaneously theoretical and historical; and since explicitly conceptual discourse isn't the only form in which we imagine political agency, I also pay attention to the mediation of political experience by everything from literary and cultural representations, to political institutions and social practices, to the physical configuration of cities. Thus, while the questions I pursue have their roots in a specific discipline, they also keep me curious about, and indebted to, many neighboring fields in the social sciences and humanities.
My points of reference in thinking about these issues have included the variety of philosophical and theoretical traditions that trace their roots back to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche; the political thought of Greek and Roman antiquity and its reception in modernity; and several areas of 20th-century and contemporary theory and philosophy that cut across the distinction between “continental” and “Anglo-American,” including feminist and queer theory, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language. In recent years I have become increasingly interested in the histories and legacies of 19th and 20th century radical and Left political thought and praxis, especially but not exclusively in the United States; in modes of criticism of and resistance to imperialism and racial domination; in varieties of anti-capitalist theory and practice; in the history of the intellectual self-understandings of political theorists inside and outside of the discipline of Political Science; and in colleges and universities as social and political institutions.
As an undergraduate, I studied Political science and Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley; I then went to graduate school at Harvard University, and taught at the University of Chicago for nineteen years before coming to Cornell in 2018. My first book, Bound by Recognition, was published by Princeton University Press in 2003. I am currently finishing a book on Hannah Arendt's political thought called "Politics Against Rule: Hannah Arendt and The Human Condition." With Thomas Wild and Ursula Ludz, I am one of the co-editors of the volume devoted to Arendt's The Human Condition and Vita Activa in a new bilingual, print-and-digital Kritische Gesamtausgabe of her writings (to be published in print by Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen, and digitally hosted by the Freie Universität Berlin. My work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Theory & Event, European Journal of Political Theory, Constellations, and other journals. For the most up-to-date listing of my research and teaching activities and publications, please visit my personal website at http://patchenmarkell.wordpress.com.
Research Focus
Society for the Humanities Project
In Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), politics is always a matter of speech, and political speech, at least on the usual reading of the book, is also always predicated on silence—silence about the forms of domination and subordination that structure private as opposed to public life, and the silence of those whose labor is among the supposedly non- or pre-political conditions of authentic political existence. This year, I hope to finish a monograph called Politics Against Rule, which presents a novel account of the genesis, significance, and legacies of Arendt’s book. While HC is usually read as a modern retrieval and celebration of the ancient Greek understanding of free political “action” as something undertaken for its own sake, in an autonomous public realm insulated against the instrumental rationality associated with “work” and the biological necessity embodied in “labor,” I show instead that Arendt’s book represents a sustained and powerful critique of this vision of freedom on the grounds that it reduces politics to a matter of ruling and being ruled—a reduction that Arendt thought reflected the origins of Western politics and political philosophy in the slave society of ancient Athens, and could only be overcome by abandoning the traditional predication of political freedom on the mastery of necessity, and on the defensive insulation of one privileged human activity against all others. The chapters on which I plan to focus in 2024–2025 engage not just with the relation between speech and silence as a theoretical topic in Arendt’s book, but with HC’s own silences about some of the most conspicuous legacies of the idea and ideology of rule in her own time, including the inequality and exploitation that remained characteristic of postwar capitalism even in its so-called “golden age,” and the white supremacy that structured midcentury American society. This will require grappling with the methodological challenges involved in relating a book to historical contexts about which it says nothing, with the question of how to make textual, archival, and interpretive silences meaningful without performing an unjust arrogation of voice, and with the previously unacknowledged material conditions of Arendt’s own intellectual production.