•  26
    In this paper, I argue for the existence of pathologies of juridicism. I attempt to show that the Western regime of right tends to colonize our intersubjective relations, resulting in the formation of affective and habitual dispositions that actually hinder participation in social life. Speaking of pathologies of juridicism is to claim that the legal form fundamentally contaminates the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world, resulting in an ethically deformed, distorted…Read more
  •  61
    The Judge’s Two Bodies: The Case of Daniel Paul Schreber
    Law and Critique 26 (2): 117-133. 2015.
    The great work of the psychotic judge Daniel Paul Schreber, namely Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, has received predictable and rather unimaginative interpretations as the discourse of a lunatic. The work has not been studied as a theory of law. Schreber, it is argued here, was an extreme lawyer, a radical melancholegalist, a black letter theorist, a critic avant la lettre, and a radical theorist of an impure jurisprudence
  •  23
    Pragmatic Rights
    Law and Critique 26 (2): 155-171. 2015.
    In this essay I explore competing senses and tensions of the relation between the etymology of ta pragmata and praxis, with specific attention paid to Heidegger’s theorization of modernity. In so doing I question the relation between rights and persons, and whether there might not be a new way of thinking about rights that does not presuppose or privilege the agency of personhood. Pragmatic rights would not assume the liberal values of self-determination that underpin personhood, and would enabl…Read more
  •  7
    Review (review)
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 25 (4): 425-428. 2011.
  •  25
    In this accessible introduction for students, teachers, and activists, Chad Kautzer guides readers through the dynamic field of radical philosophy. Kautzer s innovative approach is to organize the analysis of radical philosophical projects from Marxism, feminism, and queer theory to radical environmental, race, and political theory around their defining methodological commitments and emancipatory goals. Beginning with a discussion of the historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique t…Read more
  •  1593
    Kant, Perpetual Peace, and the Colonial Origins of Modern Subjectivity
    peace studies journal 6 (2): 58-67. 2013.
    There has been a persistent misunderstanding of the nature of cosmopolitanism in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” viewing it as a qualitative break from the bellicose natural law tradition preceding it. This misunderstanding is in part due to Kant’s explicitly critical comments about colonialism as well as his attempt to rhetorically distance his cosmopolitanism from traditional natural law theory. In this paper, I argue that the necessary foundation for Kant’s cosmopolitan subjecti…Read more
  •  18
    Race, Culture, and Black Self‐Determination
    with Tommie Shelby and Eduardo Mendieta
    In Chad Kautzer & Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire, Indiana University Press. 2009.