some new publications coming in 2014

A little while ago, at one of those big association conferences that feel like the unholy marriage of a high school reunion and a Men’s Wearhouse commercial, somebody asked me what I was working on these days. I said: “a big book on Arendt’s The Human Condition.” He replied: “oh, you’re still working on that?” I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure he then took off in pursuit of a more exciting prospect across the room; or maybe they’d just refreshed the free cheese on the reception table.

In any case, yes, the book is still in progress. Meanwhile, though, a few of the steps on the ladder toward the book will be seeing the light of day in 2014. “Arendt, Aesthetics, and ‘The Crisis in Culture’,” in which detailed readings of Arendt and of Kant’s third Critique meet the postwar mass-culture critiques of New York intellectuals like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Dwight Macdonald, is slated for publication in late Spring in The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, edited by Nikolas Kompridis (Bloomsbury Academic). Other contributors include Nick Kompridis, Jason Frank, Linda Zerilli, Lewis Gordon, Lia Haro and Rom Coles, Melissa Orlie, Aletta Norval, Davide Panagia, and Jacques Rancière.

This summer, “The Moment Has Passed: Power After Arendt,” in which I try to resist the theoretical fetishization of the transformative “moment” of political action, and to refocus attention on the importance of duration and prolongation in the phenomenology of political power (drawing on The Human Condition as well as on examples ranging from the occupations of Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park to the sit-in movement in the American South in 1960), will appear in Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory, edited by Rom Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman (University Press of Kentucky). Again, the other contributors are an amazing bunch: in addition to the editors, there’s Wendy Brown, Arlene Saxonhouse, PJ Brendese, Stephen White, Laura Grattan, Cristina Beltrán, Melvin Rogers, Roxanne Euben, Peter Euben, Jill Frank, Liz Wingrove, Susan McWilliams, Bonnie Honig, Jason Frank, Melissa Orlie, and Bill Connolly.

My essay-length entry on Hannah Arendt for the new Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by Mike Gibbons, Bill Connolly, Diana Coole, and Lisa Ellis, is also due to appear some time in the first half of the year. I could list the other contributors to that 2992-page volume, but the list might exceed my WordPress server allocation.

Several other things are also in various stages of preparation: pieces on Arendt, Plato, and Heidegger; Arendt and Brecht; Arendt and Faulkner; Arendt’s Denktagebuch… keep checking here and on the CV page for more information, and for links to material I’ve already published that’s related to the book. Of course, if all that runs out before the book is done, there’s always cheese….