I am happy to provide full texts upon request. Just get in touch! Publications are listed starting with the most recent in each category. For in progress writing see Current Research. You can also check out my Academia.edu page, but it is less frequently updated: https://utmn.academia.edu/ZacharyReyna
Monographs
–The Politics of Limits (in progress, more details at Current Research)
–The Matter of Law: Reconsidering the Natural Law Tradition (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2017) Abstract and Table of Contents
Journal Articles
-“Toward a Politics of Limits: Sacher-Masoch and a Radical Democratic Praxis of Intentionality” (under external review June 2020)
Abstract: This article offers an original account of a democratic and anti-nationalist theory of limits. My point of entry is the storytelling practices of the nineteenth-century political theorist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and his sex and bondage classic Venus in Furs. A staunch critic of the Austrian nationalism sweeping his native Galicia during his lifetime and a careful ethnographer of non-state communes (“intentional communities”), Sacher-Masoch was first and foremost a political theorist and the article argues that Venus must be read in this light. The article begins by showing how recent attempts to recuperate a politics of limits for democratic practice—most notably Bruno Latour’s—have remained too mired in a Hobbesian-Schmittian conception of limits as static boundaries or the demarcation of an inside-outside divide. An alternative is found in the storytelling practices and anti-nationalist, tensile concept of limits of Sacher-Masoch. The heart of the article offers a reading of Venus as an impassioned critique of Hobbes’s Leviathan that returns readers to the materialist etymological origins of what it means to contract. The article concludes, again taking its lead from Sacher-Masoch, by arguing both that intentional communities must be seen as key sites in which a democratic theory of limits is being put into practice despite the reluctance of many critical theorists to take such communities seriously, and that more empirical, grounded theory research is needed in this direction.
– “The Animality of I Love Dick: Simone Weil and the Nonhuman Turn” with Margret Grebowicz (under review May 2020)
Abstract: Personhood, language, and voice are heavily culturally overdetermined categories, particularly today, when they appear to the posthumanist critical eye as saturated with anthropocentrism. But the answer is not to avoid or “overcome” them. A politically-meaningful approach to the human-animal relationship is one that stays with the trouble of these much-maligned categories. Our working hypothesis is that, in its insistence on the primacy of the “radically other,” contemporary posthumanist political thought forecloses an important route to one of its own central goals: building paradigms for thinking about shared, multispecies worldings. We argue that the basis for such worldings is to be found in the concept of quotidian affliction, following the work –including the work of both living and dying– of Simone Weil. Our entry point into a nonhuman reading of Weil is Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel, I Love Dick, which here becomes a story at the threshold of the human-animal boundary. First, we outline how and why Kraus understands herself as carrying on Weil’s legacy, focusing on the theme of impersonalism. Second, we explicate the concept of impersonalism in Weil’s philosophy. Third, we show the obstacles the nonhuman turn faces as it rejects personhood and language as legitimate aspects of nonhuman existence, and offer Weil’s framework as a robust alternative.
-“Toward a More Robust New Materialist Politics: how the practice of criminal animal trials can inform contemporary politics” Stasis, No 1 Vol 9, Special Issue: New Materialisms and Politics (July 2020). Link to abstract and access
-“Aquinas’s Ecological Vision: Natural Law and Friendship in Contemporary Environmental Political Thought” New Political Science 40:1 Feb 2018, pp. 15-32. Link to abstract and access
Book Chapters
-“Law’s Stench: The Legal Ecology of Antigone” in SMELL: Law and the Senses, eds. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos et al. (London: University of Westminster Press, 2020) forthcoming Autumn 2020. Link
Book Reviews
–Bruno Latour: The Normativity of Networks by Kyle McGee, Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities 11:1 Feb 2015, 153-155. Link