Abstract: This article argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran's codified and institutionalized gender apartheid created a unique form of militarized women's domestic role from which grief and mourning became protected, even expected, forms of expression for maternal subjects. Bringing Iran's unique historical and political context to bear on an analysis of bereaved mothers' affective resistance during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" (WLF) uprising, it demonstrates how mothers' expressions of "shared grief" constitute a life-affirming form of affective resistance that not only challenges sovereign erasure but also subverts traditional motherhood to perform a feminist politics of lamentation that enacts equality—revealing a maternal politics that threatens the performative undoing of Iran's essentialist gender apartheid and exposes the fragility of its theocratic rule.
Abstract: In On Populist Reason , Ernesto Laclau takes Freud as his point of departure to argue that populism is not a pathological form of democracy, but its intrinsic rationality and possibility, and already embedded in democratic practices, ideals, and struggles. I delineate three of Laclau's Freudian premises and identify limitations or flaws in his appropriation. In distinguishing between a primary populism and a secondary populism, I argue that both Laclau's conception of symbolic representation and his presentation of the leader's role in group psychology fall prey to a version of sovereign loyalty that undermines independent agency and judgment.
Abstract: Self-defense cases evince a primal scene of political life because they reveal the vulnerability to violence citizens may feel and highlight the power of discretionary judgment by jurors about which killings are excusable and which carry the liability of punishment by the state. This paper includes an account of a self-defense trial in La Plata, Argentina, which the author attended in May of 2024 and an interpretation of the factors, including the framework of "justifiable homicide," public distrust in the police, and empathy for the defendant, that led to the surprise acquittal.
Abstract: Perhaps the most disorienting feature of the long socioecological disaster that makes ever-sprawling environmental disasters amplify the effects of ongoing and uneven conditions of poverty, violence, and dispossession, is not its urgency, but its permanence: that there is no foreseeable future in which redemption would prevail. What might it take to refuse the cruel hope for a redemptive future without seeking consolation in the despair that such forlorn hope precipitates? At a time when everyone is exhorted to save the world or be damned, this article explores the irreverent pessimism of what, after Camus, one might call a planetary “life without appeal.” Refusing to be content with what is now deemed proper to the damned of the earth, irreverent pessimism affirms the insubordinate disposition of a life lived in the most radical immanence of a freedom born not of hope, but of the ongoing improvisation of a revolt without future.
